Jeff Toyne is a composer whose oeuvre includes feature films, many shorts — including two nominated for Academy Awards, composer for “The Two Coreys” on A&E and is renowned for his extensive orchestrations for Hollywood features such as District 9 and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.  He splits his time between Vancouver and the States; back in December of 2008, we met up at his Los Angeles studio to discuss his career and insights into composing music for the moving image.

WOODY: How did you get started in music?

JEFF: I was thinking about music as a career in high school.  What solidified it for me was the summer I spent at Interlochen in Michigan, which is a wonderful music and arts camp.  At school, I did well in most subjects, but music really challenged me.  I wasn’t a prodigy by any stretch of the imagination, but I played the piano well, so I went to university with piano as my instrument.  I started on a music education track, which allowed me to learn the basics of many orchestral instruments, but my secret desire was to switch over to piano performance.  I had a wonderful piano teacher who was actually one of the only students that Horowitz ever admitted to teaching, and he was a great pianist and a really great guy.  Previous teachers had allowed me to develop some bad technical habits that I was always able to overcome, but the only way for me to get to the top level of repertoire would be to stop everything, go back to basics and rebuild my technique from the ground up.  That would take a year or two, but I needed to perform a recital at the end of every semester.  There was just no way to go all the way back again unless I took a year or two off.  So performing fell away as a possibility for me, and at the same time I took more advanced theory and composition courses, for which I showed aptitude.  I became more interested writing music, so I did a Masters in Composition.

WOODY: What were some of the first compositions you worked on?

JEFF: Growing up taking piano lessons, I’d improvise something and my teacher would say “you should write that down.”  One of my first experiences writing was in high school.  I put together an R&B band that had a horn section, but the players didn’t play by ear, so I transcribed and arranged the horn charts for them.  In retrospect, that was a really good exercise to fuel my interest in composing. The last year of my undergrad I did my first film score, which was a feature that I recorded with a 13-piece big band and an eight-piece chamber ensemble.  I had no sequencing software; I wrote it in Finale.  And that’s how I was synching to picture; I was playing back in Finale and pressing play on my VCR.  When I came to USC I was so ready for that course because I had actually scored a film, not knowing how to do it.  So I had all the questions.

WOODY: What made you decide to go into film composing instead of focusing on other types of work?

JEFF: By the time I was in my third or fourth year of undergrad, I saw the music that I wrote and the kinds of composition that I was interested in, had a place in film.  I was interested in aleatoric composition, pandiatonic stuff…  The serial stuff wasn’t really where I wanted to go; even the new tonality was interesting to me, minimalism as well, and all these things had places in film.  I’m not just a “classical music” guy, I had experience in Jazz, Blues and Rock as well.  I struggle now as a film composer to find a hole that people can niche me into, but I came to film because of eclecticism.  I imagined that I could actually make a living – get paid to write music and have orchestras record this music.  This seemed like the way to go.

WOODY: That sounds like a good way to come about a career where you get paid for it, and you work with world-class musicians and sync it to the film, and it becomes an emotional experience for people and their understanding of your music.

JEFF: I really believe that Wagner’s idea of gesamtkunstwerk is alive in film today.  I think films represent his idea of total artworks.  They bring together artists from every field to completely envelop an audience in every sense and involve them in the story.  If I have a score that’s attached to a film, that’s the way to reach the most people.  The Beatles or Madonna may reach more people, but I think a couple of people saw Star Wars!  So I’m really happy to be involved.  One of the reasons that I think directors like to work with well-known performing artists, is because of the idea that you’re bringing in people who are experts from other fields.  If you come in and you’ve already sold a couple of million records, then maybe we should listen to your idea before we tell you how it’s going to be.  They have something they can offer, something they can bring to the film.

WOODY: So you’ve worked with Ed Shearmur on a couple of things.  Tell me a little bit about the collaboration between the two of you and what you did for him and also the value that you’ve taken out of it as a composer.

JEFF: I started working for Ed straight out of school as an assistant.  I was really lucky to be recommended to him.  I’d just graduated USC, and he was looking for a new assistant.  I think they recommended three or four people based on the software he was using and the kind of things he was looking for. So I started off getting tea and making sure lunch happened at 1 o’clock and making sure the couch didn’t go anywhere.  He was really linear about the responsibility that he doled out, but it began very much in the technical arena.  Some of my first tasks were sorting out word clock issues and making sure samples were organized and loaded.  After assisting him for a month or two, my first musical job was cutting together piano takes for K-PAX.  He was really searching for the right piano sound for K-PAX.  Giga piano was new at that time, so he had a pass done with that, and he went to Capital Records and he recorded on Nat King Cole’s piano.  He recorded a Disklavier and he wasn’t completely happy with any one of them.  He wanted to be able to A, B, C any pass at any one time, so he had me go in and slice those performances to match each other.  So that was my first slightly musical job. Then at some point, I think on The Sweetest Thing, I did some music copying.  After a year or so I got a chance to orchestrate a couple of cues on Reign of Fire, which was a big opportunity, and then I started doing more orchestrations for films after that.  I worked for him for about three years full time.

WOODY: What were you able to take from that, now yourself as a composer, having worked with someone like that?

JEFF: One of my USC instructors said that if you’re an assistant, you can see how a composer does his job; how he interacts with the director, producers, engineers, musicians; and you’re right next to the heat, but it’s not your heat.  That’s a really great place to be.  You’re a fly on the wall.  You’re assisting someone who’s working at the highest level for A-list Hollywood films and you can see how they’re doing it and you’re involved.  You’ll inevitably make some mistakes as you’re learning.  But that’s his career that you’re making your mistakes and learning on.  So that’s a really valuable chance to be given – to cut your chops on somebody else’s dime, in a way.  I’m really grateful for that experience.  Ed is an uncannily gifted musician and film composer.  He’s just a force to be reckoned with.  Here’s a guy who has amazing classical chops, concert pianist skills and rock ‘n’ roll credentials to boot.  He brings those two together.  And he’s one of those people that will never ask you to do anything that he couldn’t do himself.  It was quite intimidating to work for someone so talented.  In addition to the musical component, he was adept at understanding the drama and getting inside the structure of the movie and the interaction of the characters.  His ability to get to the heart of what the filmmakers were trying to do dramatically and how the music may affect them — that was really impressive.  It’s one thing to write a beautiful piece of music, but it’s another thing to have that beautiful piece of music be the right tone and start at the right time and be the right emotional variant that makes sense dramatically.  He was very good at that.

WOODY: Tell us about the process of composing a film.  When do you get involved, and how do you start the process with the director?

JEFF: I like to be involved as early as possible, even to the point where I’m reading the script and having conversations with the director before they shoot to discuss themes and what the sonic landscape might be like.  And having that kind of time takes away some of the pressure, especially on a lower budget movie.  As a filmmaker, you can give a composer all of this time in lieu of the fact that you can’t pay them very much, but you still want it to be really good.  I’ve found that if I’m able to be brought in really early it’s nice to have that in the back of your mind somewhere just fermenting and having conversations, thinking about how it might go and maybe even putting down some material that the director can have on set or they can at least be thinking about.  So, I’d like to be brought in as early as possible, but generally the real work starts to happen once they have a cut to look at.  One of the main goalposts in the production schedule is the spotting session, when the filmmakers have an edit and they’re ready to start thinking seriously about the sound.  So they come in, and we watch the film.  Spotting always takes longer than we think it’s going to take, at least eight hours for a feature, sometimes more.  We talk in detail about where each piece of music is going to start and, if there is a temp score, where it is starting and where it should start and what it does and what it’s supposed to do.  These discussions can really become quite protracted and abstract.  It’s an important step of the process.

WOODY: How do you approach the work when a director comes to you with a temp score?

JEFF: I don’t have a problem with temporary score.  I think a temp score is a good way to have both of us point at something and talk about it objectively.  Composers will generally say that they want directors to talk not in musical terms, but in dramatic terms.  They want them to talk about character and emotion and mood and feeling; how they want the audience to react; as opposed to, “Oh, I think this should be an oboe or cello.”  What a temp score can do is it can allow you both to say, “Okay that music there, I don’t know what it is, but it works with this scene at this moment for some reason.”  Or, “Here I don’t like it, there’s something that is not right.”  And at least it allows you to very quickly say, “Yeah, this is a great place for music to come in, this is a great place for music to come out and this mood is kind of what I was going for.”  So in that regard a temp score is a useful tool.  And we can’t deny that they are absolutely necessary when the directors need to show their film to other people and get finishing funds or to submit to festivals or get distribution.  They need to show the film in the best light they possibly can.  There’s going to be a temp score in there whether you as a composer listen to it or not.  Where the problem generally comes in is when they’ve spent a lot of time with the temp score and are having a really hard time getting away from the temp score or are not really interested in trying a new approach.

WOODY: How do you combat that when a director is really attached to a piece in their temp score and they feel that you the composer are not getting what they want?

JEFF: You have to pick your battles.  Depending on the situation, as a last ditch effort, if it seems there’s nothing else that you can possibly do, you can suggest they try to license the piece.  “If I’m not going to replace this, you should really license this.”  The last film I did, I went around a couple of times with the director who was having trouble getting away from the temp.  He had a song at the end of the film that when we first started I could tell he loved, and they were supposed to be able to license it.  So I said, “You know what, if you’re going to license this song, I will take the melodic motive from this song and I will weave this into the rest of the film.”  Music can offer this to a film: unity and diversity.  So we’ll have this little motive that will tie everything together and after we’ve heard these little fragments, then at the end of the film we’ll hear the full song and it’ll feel familiar and satisfying and everything will be great.  And so we did this and a week before they were going to mix the film they said, “You know what, it turns out that we can’t really get this song unless we pay another “x” dollars, can you replace the song?”  And I thought, “Can I replace this song that you’ve been living with in an edit for two years, that you’ve had in your record collection for five years before that, and when you were writing the film were probably listening to this song?  Can I replace this?  Of course I can, no problem.”  I did kind of drag my heels for a few days, saying, “Are you sure,” giving them time to flip-flop back.  Finally he said, “We’re really sure,” so I finally did it and I spent another two or three days on it.  And I thought I had come up with something.  Then a couple days later they said, “you know what, we decided to pay the extra money and get the song.”  So that’s a situation where I can’t say that I won or lost.  The film got made, the filmmaker got what he wanted and the lesson there is that people will always find the time and money to do what they really want to do.  Sometimes the way a song is of its time suggests not only the meanings of the song, but also the meaning of the situation that the filmmaker was in when he first heard it and the things that were going on in the world.  But at the end of the day, I keep in mind that we’re all working towards having a good film that affects audiences.  I basically have a can-do attitude about it.  I’m not super precious about the music.  There’s a push and pull between the needs of the film and our need for artistic integrity.

WOODY: I go through that all the time as a sound designer and mixer because the choices made ultimately are not mine.

JEFF: Exactly.  But that being said, nine times out of ten the filmmakers have really good reasons for the choices that they make.

WOODY: Absolutely.

JEFF: Their ability to see the film from beginning to end in one vista is amazing.  I definitely get myopic sometimes.  In the same way that they have to trust me to deliver their score on time and on budget and do a good job and get what their story’s about, I have to trust them that they’ve been living with this a whole lot longer than I have.

WOODY: Do you set the cue points, the director or both?

JEFF: The last couple of films that I’ve done there’s been a temp score.  Either an editor (ideally a music editor, but usually the picture editor) or the director have already kind of gone through a couple of times, at least for themselves, to see where music might go.  Often, as in Shadow in the Trees, we may come to a couple of points in the film where there isn’t temp music and I think we might try having a cue.  I generally leave it with, “Let me try something and if I think it’s working I’ll show it to you, and if I don’t think it’s working I won’t.”  That gives me options. We have these kinds of conversations about whether or not we think this should be here or there, and if so, why.  And then we’re into it, we’re starting to do show and tells, (what we call the meetings after the spotting session), where usually a director is coming over to my studio, or I am occasionally sending QuickTime movies over the internet or sometimes mp3’s for them to slide into their timeline.

WOODY: And these are sort of sketches or demos even though it may be an orchestrated piece?

JEFF: Nowadays, demos are expected to be pretty detailed.  If it’s a director that I have worked with before, and we both have confidence in their ability to extrapolate from a sketch, then I don’t need to spend as much time on the demos, and can spend more of my time writing.  If they’re really nervous about how it’s going to go, then I’ll make the demo more fleshed out and more “convincing.”

WOODY: What kind of timeframe are we talking about from your spotting session to really having fleshed out cues?

JEFF: Well, a composer is supposed to be able to crank out anywhere from 3-5 minutes a day.  That’s really smokin’.  The big boys do that.  They’ll do fully realized, big orchestral demos like that, 3 minutes a day for sure.  So if you’ve got a schedule where you’re scoring a film and you have six weeks to do it, and there’s 60 minutes of music in the film…it starts to just play out.  You need to be showing the director every couple of days a certain amount of music so that they’ve seen everything and you have time for notes, changes, music prep, recording, mixing and everything like that.  I heard that Danny Elfman usually has two parties when he gets a job.  One’s a going away party, and one’s a welcome back party when he’s done.

WOODY: Let’s talk more about the process for you.  Do you find that you are generally the composer, the performer, the recordist and the mixer?  How do you break that out?

JEFF: Yes, but at every opportunity I will hand off a job to an expert. I’m delighted to have a mixing engineer at least mix my music.  Sometimes it’s just a matter of time, there isn’t enough time to get files over to somebody and back or to have somebody come in.  In terms of performing, to be honest with you, I would really rather have somebody else play.  The piano part I can go in and tweak the midi, but we have a beautiful grand piano out there (in the tracking room of my studio).  I’d rather bring in a pianist with great touch. I remember one time I had a violinist come in and she was trying to play along with the demo and for some reason it just wasn’t happening.  After a couple of takes, I asked her to play with a little more vibrato and a little more portamento.  And she said, “Oh, I was trying to get it to sound exactly like the demo.”  I said, “No, no, I want you to play like a human being.  The reason I brought you in is because the demo sounds like that.  I don’t want it to sound like that!”  When somebody’s interpreting your music, there’s another level of musicality going on there.  I tend to write for instruments in a way that they’ll sound the best.  And I really try to avoid situations where I am trying to do something with samples.  If I know I’m going to be doing a synth score, then it won’t be an orchestral sound.  And if I’m using orchestra stuff, then I’ll try and write in a way that’s idiomatic for the instruments. I really do believe that this is a collaborative art form, and I’m happy to not be here by myself all day.  I’m delighted to have someone come in and music edit, someone come in and do the copying and bring in any performers I possibly can.  But the best experience is to record with an orchestra. That’s the juice for the composers.

WOODY: Have you been thrown for a loop on shows?

JEFF: This is where the spotting session comes in and you kind of have to know your audience, as small as it is.  I’ve worked with Steve McLaughlin and one of his big successes was with Badly Drawn Boy for the score for About a Boy.  He said that a film composer only has an audience of one.  You only have to convince a director that your music is good, sometimes with a producer or a little committee.  But even at best you’re convincing 15 guys or girls that this is good music as opposed to someone who goes out and tours their album and convinces a hundred thousand people that their music is good.

WOODY: Have you found yourself in a situation where you’ve had a spotting session and you thought you were on the same page and you’re presenting cues, yet they’re scratching their head going that’s not really right?  Or has the temp score sort of solved that and you understand what they want?

JEFF: I’ve definitely been in situations where I’ve just missed the mark and there are different reasons that happened.  As a student there was one film that was supposed to have authentic Japanese kabuki theater music. Under time pressure I just fired up the sampler and put anything remotely Asian on there.  The director came back and said, “No that’s Chinese, and that’s a Thai gong, and that’s Korean, that is Japanese, but it’s not kabuki and I really need this to be authentic kabuki theater music.”  So that was a huge miss and a failure to listen carefully to what the director had already said. Film music can occasionally give a composer the opportunity to dive into unfamiliar territory, and explore exotic instruments and musical styles. This is an opportunity and a risk. It helps to be a quick study, but more importantly to hear what your director is telling you.

WOODY: When you’re creating a score what sort of problems arise?

JEFF: There’s occasionally a conversation that kind of goes around when the demos and samples don’t really show the score very well, but you know it will sound great when played by live players.  There’s only so much of that that a director, especially one without a lot of experience, can really take.  So sometimes I have to go back and spend more time that I really wish I didn’t have to spend polishing a demo that’s going to have many elements replaced by recorded live players.  On indie films, it’s a soul-crushing conversation to have to say we don’t have the time to spend this level of detail on every single cue because we’ll just run out of the amount of time and money that is available for this movie. So what happens is directors often on indie films have to wear producer’s hats, and I often have to wear my agent’s hat.  They’re trying to get the best for their film, and I have to somehow be gently realistic saying, “You need to understand that I really want your film to be great, and I want to do a good job for your film, but we don’t have unlimited time and money.”  Unfortunately, especially when they’re doing it for the first time, they’re doing everything at a low-budget level so they don’t really know, necessarily, what things actually cost.  Composers like to be problem solvers.  We like to find creative ways to solve problems and our number one problem is often they don’t have enough time or enough money.

WOODY: Do you have any kind of theory for composing or do you have a way of working in terms of the creation of the music?  Or is it just really inspired by the picture and the story?

JEFF: Every project is different.  I tend to try and find something that I can use as a starting point and often it might be an instrument that makes sense as a voice that relates somehow to the characters in the story.  I’m usually driven by points in the story that we can take and extrapolate out into musical references. Usually films are thematic and they generally fall into either one theme for the whole movie or themes for individual characters and/or ideas.  When they have themes for individual characters and ideas, they start to resemble more classical opera forms.  Most of the films I find myself working on as the orchestrator or the composer, you say, “Oh this guy is on the screen and he’s doing this and there’s his theme.”  It’s a pretty accepted practice.  In film, melody is king and we’re generally writing melodies that have significance that we can attach to dramatic ideas.

WOODY: How do you go about getting work?

JEFF: When I was just starting out as a student at USC, I went down to the film school to put a poster up that said “Composer Available,” next to the poster that said “Composer Wanted.”  I did a lot of student films.  My main kind of networking has been just to stay in touch with the directors that I met when they were students.  I also get a lot of work from friends of mine that are composers.  A lot of work.  My first student film in LA was from a friend that couldn’t do it.  And he said, “Why don’t you get my buddy to do it, he can do a good job.”  My first television show was from a friend who was a composer who couldn’t do that show because they needed specifically a Canadian composer, and he only knew one Canadian composer, so he said, “You should call Jeff, he’s Canadian.”  It’s funny, I remember reading a marketing how-to and it said make to sure that people know what it is that you want to do.  So, just tell your friends and family, “This is what I want to do,” you never know who they’re going to run into that is looking for something like that.

WOODY: On a different note, tell us about your composition “No Fanfare” for the 2010 Winter Olympics.

JEFF: “No Fanfare” was a commission from the Vancouver Symphony.  When Vancouver was successful for the 2010 Winter Olympics bid, the Symphony decided to commission young composers to write short, 3-minute works on Olympic inspired themes.  They specifically said not to write fanfares because there are already so many great ones out there.  And so, the title of my piece is “No Fanfare”.  I thought if I said it’s not a fanfare, if it sounds a little fanfare-like then you can’t blame me, it says right in the title it’s not a fanfare.  But it also made sense with what I was interested in exploring musically.  I was interested in exploring musically some of the emotional landscape of the athletes that compete and don’t really do well by gold, silver and bronze standards.  If you compete and you place 76th, yes you’re proud that you went to the Olympics, but I wondered what that was like. I wanted to have a piece that was exciting for the audience, so I imagined a race where there were people racing at the same time, not against the clock.  If you start the race and freeze-frame somewhere in the middle, then consider all the possibilities that expand forth in separate timelines, nobody has won and nobody has lost yet and everything is still possible.  At that moment everyone is a potential winner and everyone is a potential loser and that’s the most exciting part of the race, when it’s actually happening.  Musically this had nice tie-ins to the Winter Olympics because you’re thinking of freezing things, flash-freezing a moment, and you have reflections in ice and things like this, so that’s kind of how I got into it musically.

WOODY: And that was played when exactly?

JEFF: The Vancouver Symphony performed it a couple of times in 2005, and now they have it in their repertoire.  I haven’t really spent a lot of energy pushing it further into the classical concert world, but that was a very blank page: writing a piece of concert music after being in film for a couple of years.  I have been exploring that side of music further.

WOODY: What advice would give a new or first time director in terms of collaboration with a composer?

JEFF: I think one of the bigger pet peeves is that music comes as an afterthought, that directors start to think about music really late in the process.  Maybe they’re thinking about sound late in the process, but this is half of the experience.  People are taking in the film through their eyes and their ears.  Directors have so much to think about, I know they do, to make a film.  There are so many different parts that go into it, but you can get a lot more out of your composer (or any crew member) if they feel that their job is valued and their contribution is valued because you’re thinking about the music early.  My advice to a director would be to think about the sound and music when they’re writing their script, when they’re doing their prep, when they’re shooting. Begin talking and thinking about music even at that early stage.  There’s nothing more stressful than being out of money and out of time and having to come to somebody and say, “Can you drop everything and do this?”  That’s really, really difficult to do.  And I really don’t want to have to say no to somebody.  Part of my job is to go on a journey and figure out what it is that this movie is supposed to be.  But films don’t get made overnight.  If you have a conversation while you’re in pre-production then you’ve got plenty of time to think about what it might be.

WOODY: How long have you been a music supervisor?

DOMINIQUE: Going on 5 years last month.

WOODY: What was your first project? Was that a film or tv show?

DOMINIQUE: Actually it was a short film, The Spin Cycle which had a pretty good festival run. My wife was the screenwriter and our production company co-produced it with director Chris Ohlson of 824 Pictures..  At the time I was more active in my music publishing. I had this background of music licensing and that kind of activity and music supervision, at that time, wasn’t even on my mind. And then we went through a screening of the 1st cut with the director and the editor. The editor had picked the song “It Must Be Love” by Don Williams. And the song fit perfect but we needed to clear the rights to it. And that right there is the genesis of my music supervision. I went into it with the, “I’m a publisher, I know what to do.” It just was a different side of music licensing and I was so intrigued. I immediately started looking for other films to work on and it grew from there. Publishing faded to the background. Our catalog slowly diminished as the reversion clauses were coming due and everything was reverting back to the songwriters. I just didn’t have the time to deal with the publishing. I was just overwhelmed with films and licensing. That was the moment – in the editing room.

WOODY: So your background was as a music publisher. What did that work entail?

DOMINIQUE: I would get submissions from songwriters and bands looking to get their songs cut by other artists. I would listen to the music that they would send me. I would make the decision whether I would become publisher of their song and pitch to the A&R departments at RCA and Sony and various artists in hopes to get the song cut by one of these big country stars up and coming in the community. That was the gist of my publishing experience at the time. That was a very difficult and competitive venture for me because I was an unknown music producer in the Round Rock Austin area. In the Nashville area publishers were walking right up to the A&R dept at Mercury and Sony and others. It was discouraging. So when music supervision came into my vision it was something positive, something that I could do that didn’t involve someone else’s career and I gravitated to that. The publishing companies are still active; in fact, they are like a sister company to the film production company we have. If we need someone to write specific music to one of our films that we work on then our publishing company will handle the publishing and the administration of the songs, but that is a very tiny part of the business.

WOODY: Are you a composer or musician yourself?

DOMINIQUE: I have been songwriting and playing instruments since I was a child, and when I was in my late 20’s I really wanted to take my songwriting to the next level. I bought a $2000 keyboard and a 4-track recorder and I just started taking years and years of wanting to write music to the forefront of my life. I started writing music and lyrics, and putting them together and, sadly enough [LAUGHS], performing the vocals on [the compositions]. My excuse was, “It was just to get the idea across,” I was not bragging that I was a singer. But I had a couple of songs played on the radio in San Antonio in 1989, so I honestly wanted to be somebody, not as an artist but as a songwriter. I wanted my songs to be recorded by other artists. I would send my songs to publishers just like writers do to me, but this was back in the late 80s and early 90s.

WOODY: So this was prior to you getting into publishing yourself?

DOMINIQUE: Yeah. Well, what happened was I ended up moving to Nashville, back in 1993 and I was there for eight years. I left San Antonio, and went to Germany to visit my brother for four months, and when I came back to the states I didn’t have anywhere to go. I wanted to start somewhere new and I told my self I would either go to New York or Nashville. And in my decision I figured that Nashville would be more my scene, so I moved to Nashville and shortly after that I was working on music row at Mercury Records. There I would just immerse myself in what the A&R folks were doing and try to learn as much as I could, and I learned a lot about how the record industry works from the inside, from the Mercury Records point of view. Shortly after that, across the street was Acuff-Rose Publishing and I ended up getting a job over there working in the copyright department. I was fascinated by the phone calls and faxes that would come in from film production companies wanting to license music from their enormous catalog. That germinated in my head for about four years until finally in about 2002 I moved back to Texas, and that’s when I decided that I wanted to pursue publishing and I started two publishing companies, one affiliated with ASCAP and one affiliated with BMI. And that’s how that launched. But my own music writing kind of fell to the wayside when I was in Nashville. I had a roommate, who was an artist trying to make it and I saw what he was going through and the doors closing on him – and he was leagues ahead of me. I thought, “There is no way I’m gonna make it as a songwriter.” But I still write lyrics to myself right now, when things come to mind I have this box that is just full of lyrics and I’ll jot things down. I figure one day, when I get older [LAUGHS], I’m going to get me another studio just for my own pleasure…

WOODY: The urge to write music doesn’t go away. I started out as a songwriter and musician, and came to Hollywood for all that, too. Twenty-five years later I’m not going to be discovered, but you know, maybe one of my songs will.

DOMINIQUE: Exactly, and that was my whole point there, I didn’t want to be the famous guy, I just wanted someone to record my songs. Back then, Billboard magazine was like my Bible. I would always look at who the songwriters were on the charts, and think to myself, one day my name is going to be up the in the parenthesis – right there as “songwriter”. So, that gleam was in my eye.

WOODY: So let’s talk about what happens once you have been brought on board a feature film. What steps at that point happen for you as a music supervisor?

DOMINIQUE: Well, it really depends on what point I come on board. There’s pre-production, there’s production – when they are actually shooting the film, and post-production. Some directors have no musical vision, and some are very music savvy. So that also plays into what my role will be. If I come in, for example, in pre-production, I’ll get a copy of the script. I love reading the script, and then highlighting certain scenes where I feel that, “a song needs to be here,” or “score here”. Find out, not necessarily what song needs to be where, but just that, “a song needs to be there,” and then I will compile it on my worksheet. When I have a meeting with the director we’ll share notes and we go through that. Then as the film is being edited and the scenes that should have music are actually ready to view, that makes it much easier to make a decision what song will actually fit each clip because you can actually see it. You get a feel for the characters and how the dialog is delivered. So the process just goes on until post-production, and usually the songs, if they are actually picked, go to the editor. The editor then drops songs in on the scenes and then once the editor puts together a rough cut then we can all sit down together and take a look at it. I usually run with that copy and try to make decisions with the director. And usually right off the bat I’ll say, “This song is a great song, but with the music budget you’ve given me, there’s not enough money to license that song, so we are going to have to find a replacement.” Then I go out to all my music resources and say, “This is the song that we have in the scene, this is the scene, I need something that we can afford that is comparable to” – whatever song we had originally chosen. And I get bombarded with submissions and I filter through them and I find two or three that I feel that the director might like. I will cut them into the scene myself, send a Quicktime to the director and editor and then have them take a look at it and if they like it then the editor will get a copy of the song. I am not an editor I just do the best I can to get the musical idea across in the scene. So that is if I come in during pre-production.

WOODY: It must be a difficult process if you come in and they have already temped the music, because I have worked with people and they bring in their film and they are using Blur, and the Rolling Stones and the first thing I say is, “what are you going to do about these music tracks? Because you are going to have to get the rights to these songs?” But they always think that everything is fine, and then they sell their film and they come back and say, “We have to find new music,” and I say “yup.”

DOMINIQUE: Yes, that is the frustrating part for me. Because immediately, what you just said is exactly what goes through my head and what comes out of my mouth, and then I get the look on their face, and I know, “Oh boy, we’re in trouble now.” So there are times when I try to convince them, “You know, this is the prime time now to place the song”, before we get to that point where we are back peddling, struggling, and stressed out. I have even found replacement songs for a film I am doing right now for a song that I think is not going to make it in the final distribution process. I know that they are going to come back to me, and I don’t have time to be stressed out, I have got a ton of other projects. So when I get some free time, I will go through those tons of CD’s I have, and go through Myspace, so that when that time comes I am ahead of the game. The worst situation for me is, I get a call, email, or I meet someone at a networking mixer and they say, “Yeah man, we’ve got like two weeks to get these songs cleared”, and one of my biggest questions is, “Why did you wait?” Then I negotiate my fee, and I get the information from them, and the majority of the time they still don’t make the deadline. Because the publishers are not going to rush for one specific film.

WOODY: For a festival clearance, or something like that?

DOMINIQUE: Right.

WOODY: So ideally you would like to get involved with them with a script in pre-production, would that be right?

DOMINIQUE: For me, that would be the ideal situation. Because I am there at the very beginning, I can make suggestions early on, and especially in the case where they have on camera performances where I have to clear the song before they even shoot the scene. So getting involved early on makes my life easier, it makes my job easier, and it makes things less stressful for the directors and the producers etc., and I like it more from a creative standpoint.

WOODY: Since the movie process takes so long – from script to screen can take an unbelievable amount of time do you have a variable fee schedule for that? Like if you got involved in a project and you were there all the way through versus getting involved in a project a month before they finish?

DOMINIQUE: I have been in both situations. I have film right now, Conflict of Interest, which I think back in March of 2008 I came on, script in hand, started reading the script, and listed out requests for particular tracks that I thought would work. The entire film was shot, and the executive producer wanted the entire film to be complete by the Presidential election, because it was a political thriller. We were in post a month before the election, and it was just, completely, not right. And they decided that they were not going to release it yet, and keep working on it. They went on a three month hiatus, hired another director who re-shot 79 pages of an 84 page script, and we just had a test screening last Thursday. They interweaved the new footage with several scenes of the old footage. I had all the license agreements for the music ready to go out for signatures, but I didn’t send them out because I didn’t know what songs were going to remain in the film. Well, none of the songs that I found remained in the film. So I am pretty much starting over. So to answer your question about my fee structure, sometimes it varies, but I try to do either half up front and half upon completion of my job, or one-third in pre production, one third in production and when I finish it’s the final third. On this film, I was looking at my Quickbooks last night, and the one for Conflict of Interest is going on 294 days from the day I sent out the original invoice. I also did the Overbook Brothers. I met with the director and one of the producers and they said, “We’ve got 30 days to clear all this music” and it was like, “Bam, bam, bam”, every day. We hit the deadline, 30 days and it was done, in and out. And those are good. I like those.

WOODY: I was going to say, that’s probably better.

DOMINIQUE: The director had already picked the songs, but he had put some forethought into it. He didn’t go for the top tier artists, or the top ten songs, he found Indie artists on Myspace. So when I came onboard I saw a couple of them were upper tier indie artists, but I was still able to negotiate. In fact I came in with, I think, $250 dollars to spare on budget. There was a lot of negotiating and working with artist management, and the artists themselves. But it worked out great, everyone was happy. The director was happy because he didn’t have to go out and find more money and he had his songs in the film. One song we couldn’t use, they were hard balling us, and we did find a quick replacement for it and it was a done deal. 30 days.

Conflict Of Interest

WOODY: If someone finds a few tracks for a production are they then the “music supervisor?”

DOMINIQUE: That’s probably one of the biggest misconceptions out there, and it’s getting worse in my opinion. People think that because they find a song that works well in a film that they are a music supervisor. And that is, to me, a music “provider”, someone who has provided music. I have a blog myself, and I wrote about the real role of the music supervisor, and the bottom line is, about 30% of [a music supervisors job] is the song selection, the creative side. The administrative side takes up about 70%, and sometimes more. So a music editor usually has a great ear, and finds a great song, pops it in there, and the director likes it. But they don’t have the relationships with the publishers and the record labels to get in there and do the negotiating, the licensing and the clearing; all of the administrative side to music supervising. The music supervisor brings the whole pie to the table, and anyone else who just finds music is only bringing a slice of the pie to the table.

WOODY: I would like you to go into the 70% a bit more deeply, because in a way I always thing of the music supervisor as a music producer. Not in the sense of a record producer, but a producer in the film sense of a producer. In that context, you are fulfilling all the producing functions for that music, you are finding the music, contracting the music, budgeting the music. People have a misunderstanding about music supervision, they don’t have a firm understanding that a great portion of the job is contracting, and negotiations, and budgeting, and clearance and so on. Can you elaborate on that?

DOMINIQUE: Yeah definitely, and before you even get to that point of negotiating etc., you have to find out who even owns the music. In today’s music world, it has been so diluted that you can’t even go to ASCAP and look up a song and see who actually owns it because it might say, “Bob’s Music Publishing.” Well, Bob’s Music Publishing is administered by Universal Music Publishing Group. So you have to dig down until you get to the company that administers 100% on behalf of all the other music publishers. So just getting to the right person, that can give you the contact information, that you can send your license request form to is a big hunt. And it’s not always right there in plain sight. A lot of people will go on ASCAP and BMI and see that publisher name right there and think that that’s who they have to deal with and a lot of times it’s not. Even sometimes, where the songwriter is from the UK and you have a US production going on, it might say Warner Chapel Music Ltd. and they are in the Performing Rights Society in the UK; plus you still go through Warner Chapel here in America and they do the approval through their sister company in the UK.

So there are a lot of things that you have to know before you start negotiating and get the ball rolling, and once you have identified who is the proper copyright holder for the sync rights and the napster rights, that’s when you do your license request form. That contains the production company information, the composition, composition title, the songwriters, publishers, how are you using the song, if it is going to be background vocal, background instrumental, how much of the song you are going to use– 10 seconds, a minute, the entire length, and what rights you want– America, worldwide, what media– DVD, TV, theatrical, and term also– one year only? So all these things you have to piece together, they all have be gathered up and together on one concise form, sent off, and then the clock is ticking. How long is it going to take for them to get back? You have to follow-ups many times until you get a quote. And if you have got a full $5,000 in your music budget, and you get a quote for one song on the publishing side for $5,000, then you are in negotiation mode. And right there, if you don’t have a relationship with that publisher, chances are slim to none that you are going to get that $5,000 down anywhere near what it needs to be for you to be able to license any of the rest of the songs. So having relationships with the publishers and the labels and the people that you have to deal with is key. If you do get your fee negotiated down to a favorable amount, that will allow you to have money left over for the rest of your songs.

Then if it is a major publisher they will most likely draft a license for that song, if it is an independent they will say, “Can you draft a license for us?” So if you don’t have the proper experience to draft a proper license, it’s not one of the forms you just download off the Internet and fill in the blanks. You have to know what’s in there, because every licensing deal is different. So that’s the next step, and once the licenses are all done, and the tracks are cut for the music the cue sheet comes into play. And putting the proper information in the cue sheet is key because the songwriters and publishers rely on that cue sheet to get performance royalties down the road. So that’s pretty much the process from the song conception to the cue sheet.

WOODY: Could you just detail a little bit the different sorts of rights that people need to acquire for a motion picture?

DOMINIQUE: Sure, you know it really depends on what their plan is from the start. If someone is going to shoot a film, and it is going to go straight to DVD, well, pretty much the only rights that they need to deal with are home video DVD rights. But if they are looking for a broad release I always try to get “all media worldwide in perpetuity”, that way their distribution options are unlimited. However, it does cause the fee to go up. So you have to balance how much money you can afford for licensing these songs and that’s when you have to chisel your rights down unless you get a step deal, which is something completely of a different topic. I usually ask the director or producer or whoever is going to be in charge of the distribution plan, “What are your plans? Are you just going theatrical or are you going to TV?” and once I know that I’ll know how I’ll gear the rights that I request. If they are only planning on having it broadcast in the United States, or North America, then I just request the US only, or if they have an actor who is big in Germany I will ask US only, and Germany. Just to specify the rights according to how the production plans on releasing the film.

WOODY: So if they have some success, and their distribution model changes, then the contracts have to change as well. If this was supposed to be a DVD only release, they get a bite and all of a sudden Universal says, “Hey we’re going to pick it up and run it in sixteen cities,” then you have to go back and renegotiate those rights?

She Pedals Fast

DOMINIQUE: That is correct. Go back to the table, present the new rights, and get a new quote and hope that either the distributor will pick up the additional costs for the music, otherwise the production company has to somehow come up with the extra money. We then revise the license agreements, we cut the new checks and then they’re good to go with the new distribution model.

WOODY: For those that don’t know, can you talk about the synchronization rights and other types of specific rights that have to be enabled for you to be able to use the music track?

DOMINIQUE: The sync rights are basically the publishing rights to the actual composition. If a song is being used in your film, synchronization rights have to be obtained. You don’t have to have the master rights, because you can do a cover song. Basically, you need permission to record that new song from the songwriter, or the artist who recorded it and licensed it to the production, or it was a work for hire and the production company might want master rights. So, the publishing rights, or synchronization rights, are something that you have to have regardless. The master rights usually belong to the record label or whoever owns the specific master recording rights. There can be many master recordings to a single composition, so whichever master recording you are using in your film, you have to find the label or owner of that specific recording. 99% of the time, publishers are your synch rights, or publishing rights holders, and most of the time record labels are the owners to your master rights holders.

WOODY: Do you recommend a certain percentage amount in terms of an overall production budget for the music clearance rights?

DOMINIQUE: I really never recommend a percentage. Usually they will know what they want to put aside for music. Once I see that number it tells me where I can shop for music or tell them what they can and can’t have based on what is in their temp tracks. There are rules of thumb out there that I’ve heard,“10% of your production budget,” and stuff like that but I have yet to see that work. It’s usually the other way around. You just tell yourself, “Ok I can put $10,000 on music. And that’s what you use to go shop for music. Of course “music” is composition, preexisting songs and it’s your composer, your music supervisor and sometimes your music editor. All of that falls under that one line item so you have to factor that in. And then once you pay the crew, how much do you have left over for the music itself?

WOODY: Do you work with first time filmmakers?

DOMINIQUE: Yes. Several times.

WOODY: And have they been surprised when you explain to them how much money it’s going to take for them to secure the rights for the music?

DOMINIQUE: Yes. They’re surprised only in the fact that now it’s reality to them. They have heard the horror stories from other people. A lot of those stories are like the AC/DC songs, the Rolling Stones songs, the ridiculous $100,000, million dollar deals. Because they hear those stories, when the small little artist where everyone knows them but they’ve never had a big song, and still his songs are demanding $5000 or in that ballpark, it is an eye opener. But still the whole world of music clearance is just baffling to most people.

WOODY:I did a picture where the filmmaker got the rights from Beck to use a song for the opening scene of his film for film festivals only. And if it sold then he would have to renegotiate the rights. He did end up selling it and was not able to secure the rights at that point and had to replace it.

DOMINIQUE: Yes, that’s exactly what happened to another film that I worked on, “Yesterday with a Lie”. They locked the film and only had festival rights. And they had the composer as the

Yesterday Was A Lie

music supervisor. It got to the point where they were getting broad rights for 4 songs, on average, it was about $20,000 per song in order for them to get the rights after the festival rights. So I came on board and told them that, “I would try to get it down, but I didn’t think I would.”

All four songs were cover songs, so I only had to deal with the publishers. I couldn’t get them down except on the one key song. But one of the artists did not want a cover version of her song used in the final film that was going out theatrically and she wanted her version in there. And as much as I tried and tried and tried, the use was denied. So they had to open up the film, pull the song out, and have another song recorded. So that is another frequent mistake made by the filmmakers.

WOODY: What advice would you have for a band, a singer/songwriter, or someone who had tracks of their own that they wanted to have placed in films but they didn’t know where to go? How would they find someone like you?

DOMINIQUE: Well, the best way is to get on the Internet and do a search on song placement, music placement. Some people don’t even know the term music supervisor, so just plug in whatever term you know. They have to do a little research and use a little diligence because it is their career in hand, and they should learn as much as they can about licensing music. The more they dig in, the more they will find terms and names and people who do what it is they need done to get their music out there. Then send an email make a phone call and inquire. Say, “I have some music that I feel is very good, and I think it could be used in a movie, what do I do?” I get a lot of emails. I send out a lot. In fact I have an email template, and I get these emails from either a songwriter who wants to get their music placed, or someone that wants to be a music supervisor. I just copy and paste an email and say, “Hey, this is what I have been sending out,” and give them some highlights and pointers to let them know what it is that they need to do to get their songs into films. And one of the important things that I always stress with songwriters is to get the administrative side of their business together. Get registered with ASCAP or BMI or whatever performance rights society is in their area. I’d like for them to get their music copyrighted. Take care of the business side so that when they get the call from me and I say, “Hey I just listened to your song on Myspace and I want to use it in a film, and I need you to clear this today,” we don’t have to go through all the paperwork and other stuff on their end to get their song ready. They should have their splits figured out with their co-writer – all of that side of their work should be done.

WOODY: That is terrific advice. So then they should already have their own music publishing company in place?

DOMINIQUE: They can, and it’s a choice. If they want to handle all of their own publishing and want 100% of their publishing rights they can. If they want someone else to champion their music and jockey it out there to the world and try to get placement and do a 50/50 split publishing deal then it’s their prerogative. The big thing these days is for the artists and songwriters to maintain as much control to their music as they can. But that is another thing. If you’re going to publish yourself you need to get yourself a publishing company. Get it registered with ASCAP or BMI or whoever you want to affiliate yourself with as a writer and just have your business side taken care of so when you get that phone call or that email you can jump right on the bandwagon and go. Because a lot of times, like when I had that 30 days on the Overbrook Brothers, I didn’t have time for someone to say, “Oh, well let me get with my co-writer and see. We don’t even know if we are going to go 50/50 because he did more than I did. So it may be 30/70,” and then it is like, “move on to the next song.” My thing about these new guys is to get your business together, and then get out there and learn how to get yourself played. Learn as much as you can so you can communicate with someone like me. When we start talking about “sync”, and “Napster” and “cue sheet”, you need to know what I’m talking about so we can have a professional conversation.

WOODY: What do you think of these song placement services out there, are they useful for you and the songwriters?

DOMINIQUE: There are places – Barry Coughlin has a company, musicsupervisor.com and I have been there. I know Barry, in fact he invited me to a panel at SXSW back in March, so I have been on their site looking for stuff. They put together some playlists for me to listen to. There are a lot of sites out there like that that are very helpful because I already have established relationships with them. They know me and I know them, and I can send them an email asking for some 1940’s era WWII music and then I can move on. Then I get an email just perfectly tailored to what I need. Then I click through, see if anything sounds good, if it does then I’ll put it in a folder for that particular film, and then I go back to it. There is a convenience there, that I don’t have to go listen to 200 songs, I’ve got some creative people on that end that will do that for me.

WOODY: So you don’t think that it is a waste of money for someone who is looking to have their stuff placed?

DOMINIQUE: Well on that side, I think it’s a good idea because you have someone that can expose your music. But the problem with it is that they have so much music that they can’t give your music the time that it needs. That’s why I would recommend that if you don’t, as an artist, have the time or desire to pitch your own music, I would find a publisher or a small music library that can champion your music and say, “Hey, I’m going to work for this artist this week and see if I can get some placements.” In fact in the FM Pro news group, or list, that was a conversation that they were having, about if anyone had any success using these types of services. Most of the people said no. So for me, I think, take some time and control of your own business and pitch your own music. If you have gigs on Friday and Saturday, let Sunday be your day that you get out there and find films that are in production, find out who their music supervisor is, get in contact, find out what they are looking for, and do it yourself. For me, that is the best route to go.

WOODY: I think you put your finger on it right there – filmmakers have the same problem. They don’t realize the business part of the show, and let that fall by the wayside. They just assume that their movie is going to be found and they are going to be the next Spielberg, or their music is going to be found and they are going to be the next Michael Jackson.

Harmony and Me

I saw a screening of Harmony and Me at the LA Film Festival, and after the screening they had a Q&A, and someone had asked specifically about the music, because the lead character, played by Justin Rice, is a musician himself. There are some live performances throughout the movie. I think some of the music was written by the lead actor, whether it was him performing live within the movie, or whether it was a recorded performance. Can you talk a bit about your involvement in that specific movie and some of the things that you had to deal with?

DOMINIQUE: Sure. First of all, this was another one of those films where I came in after the fact. The music had already been selected, and Bob Byington, the director, was very meticulous about the songs that are in the film. The highlight of everything, for me, was when I came on board I got a copy of the film. I watched it, and immediately I knew there were problems because a song that’s not in the film anymore is Elton John’s song entitled, “Harmony”. It was a perfect song for the film, but it was going to cost $100 per side to license it. Universal ended up denying the use because it was just wasted their time. The budget that we had available would not cover it, so that was the first song to get scrapped. The good thing is that a lot of the music in the film is by Justin Rice, who is the lead actor. You even see him performing, and you see a lot of musical performances in there. He and Bob Schneider did his song “Changing in Mind”.

WOODY: Is that in the wedding scene?

DOMINIQUE: Yeah, the wedding scene where they are at the piano together. Then Bob did the romantic performance to the bride. Bob Schneider has been working with Bob Byington on Bob’s songs. I did a short film, and I liked some of Justin’s music back in 2006. So Justin and I have had somewhat of a relationship prior to Harmony and Me. That is how he and Bob and I built our relationship and it made using all of his compositions, which is a majority of the film, a lot easier to work with. He is very easy going when it comes to licensing his music in these small films, especially the ones that he has a role in. That made it easier, but the bigger songs have been a struggle. The one thing that I preached to them, like I do to all the other directors or producers, is, “I am playing the Devil’s advocate here, I am telling you the truth. I am not going to water it down and tell you that you might get this song. It is your job to take the truth and come back to me with a solution that I can take to the publishers and the record labels and try to make it happen. I am not I charge of your money, and I can only negotiate based upon what you have given me to work with.”

WOODY: Right. Now if someone came up to you and said, “Hey, I want to do what you do, I would love to be a music supervisor.” What advice would you give them?

DOMINIQUE: Study! I would tell them to go on the Internet and Google “music supervisor”. There are books out there that they can read to give them the basics of everything that a music supervisor does from A-Z. There are websites that give a description of what a music supervisor does, on how to clear songs, what’s a sync license is, what a master license is. So if they really want to be a music supervisor then they are going to make the effort to learn as much as they can. Once they get a grip on the entire concept of what a music supervisor does, I would suggest going to a local mixer where people are getting together, talk to some people and find out who is shooting a film at a really low budget to bring you on. They probably don’t have any money to pay you, but you just want the experience, and you go and try to find a local band with the same situation. One with a few gigs every month and they want to get their songs in a film and they don’t care about getting a licensing fee. But, the thing about it is, what you’ll learn, is that you still have to follow procedure. Just because someone says, “Yeah, you can use my song, and I won’t charge you and fee,” you don’t just throw the song in the film and move on. You still have to do the paperwork. You have to do a licensing agreement. You state the in the compensation paragraph what the compensation is, and of course it has to be at least a dollar. Do the paperwork. That’s the only way you’re going to learn it.

WOODY: You go into this in some detail on your own blog.

DOMINIQUE: Yes, I have several postings on my blog. One is specifically named, “So You Want to Be a Music Supervisor,” and in there I go into detail about what you need to do, what you need to learn, and it points to a couple of different references that will help you to get one step closer. There are a lot of things that I have written about in my blog from three angles, from the music supervisor’s point of view, from the filmmaker’s point of view, and from the songwriter/musician’s point of view. Basically, the common thread throughout my blog, is – doing the right thing. Regardless of what side of the licensing deal you are on – just learn about it. Learn how it works so when you are in the midst of a licensing deal you know the language; you know what needs to be done. Then as a filmmaker or a musician/songwriter, if you’re in a deal and you hear something that doesn’t sound right, that knowledge that you‘ve learned will cue you to say, “Hey wait a minute, that’s not how it’s done.” If you don’t do your homework and learn, that will go right past you and you won’t know that something happened that shouldn’t have happened.

WOODY: Let’s talk about the distinction about the music rights that you would cover versus the score, which generally is the composer. He’s been hired for the movie and is adding a dramatic through-line according to the picture edit and you are dealing more with songs that already exist. What sort of relationship do you have with the score composer?

DOMINIQUE: The director has a closer relationship with the composer during the scoring of the film because the director has his vision and knows where he wants the score to be dramatic, orchestral or something more subtle so they create that landscape together. Where I come in is I am the liaison – if the composer has an issue. He may come to me and say, “Hey I’ve been talking to the producer or director about my contract,” or, “I haven’t been paid yet,” or something like that. So on the non-creative side that I am there for the composer. On the creative side I might be looking at the film saying, “Oh that montage. I’ve got a perfect song for that.” And the director has just told the composer he wants that to be a very soft orchestral score to go over that scene. So we have to communicate so we know what I’m going to do versus what they are going to do so there is no overlap.

WOODY: So I would think that the director is the person you spend the most time with. When a director is deciding on the DP for instance they may go over the lighting in photographs or the style of some paintings to see that they are thinking along the same lines. Do you work in a similar fashion when meeting with a director on a project?

Year At Danger

DOMINIQUE: Definitely, particularly if it’s time to do a song replacement. If the director already has all the music that he desires, but we can’t license the songs, basically we’ll talk about alternate bands and he’ll mention someone. I might suggest such and such band; “they are a great band here in Austin very similar to what you have in the movie”. And if he hasn’t heard them before I’ll get him an mp3 and have him listen to them. He’ll tell me some things, I’ll take notes, and I’ll go out on the internet and try to find that band’s music and immediately do a quick clearance check to see who owns the rights to it. I make sure that we are not going into the same problem that we had before. We do sort of paint a picture for each other musically about what her/she feels could be the right song. We listen to some things until we decide which is the best song(s) for that scene and try different songs with the scene to see which one works best.

WOODY: What do you think that filmmakers misunderstand about music supervision?

DOMINIQUE: A lot of things. [LAUGHS] Probably the one thing that really gets me is the fact that they think that the music supervisor’s job is to find music. Especially when I am looking for a job they say, “Oh we’ve already found all of our music.” That’s when I ask them “who’s doing the clearance, who’s negotiating the deals, the licensing, who is making the music cue sheets?” Their eyes light up and they say, “Hmmm, gee, I didn’t think of all that!” So the role of the music supervisor, period, is just misunderstood in the film industry. And of course the biggest misunderstanding is of what it really costs to license a song and all of the work that goes into it. The whole idea of not knowing that we don’t just go finding songs is probably the number one misconception.

WOODY: And probably just the idea that things need to be cleared in the first place!

DOMINIQUE: Documentary filmmakers often don’t understand this. They’ll ask “if I’m just going to use a few seconds of a song do I still have to clear it? Or in a corporate presentation do I have to clear it.” I try to get detailed information out there about all of this.

WOODY: So tell me what you love about what you do.

DOMINIQUE: I love it from A to Z. Even when it gets complicated I see that I can come up with a solution that will make everybody happy on the film side and also on the music side. I will say that the one thing I really enjoy about being a music supervisor is getting the call or email from someone who wants me to be onboard. If they are in early pre-production and they give me a script and I go home, I read the script and my mind is focused on what a good song for the various scenes would be. Then I just take that to the end and then finally I’m sitting there with the rest of the crew and I remember the day that I found that one song. It’s the whole process from beginning to end – and all of the ups and downs to get to the end and how it all works out .

WOODY: What is it that you don’t like about what you do?

DOMINIQUE: Oh, things that frustrate me. This one film comes to mind, I just don’t like it when I have to struggle with the director. I am trying to educate the director, and they want the song no matter what, and I have already exhausted my efforts with the publishers. I don’t want to look unprofessional in the publisher’s eyes, as if I don’t know what music clearance is all about, because often the director wants me to do things that just go beyond the norm. So, the struggle with the directors is probably the least enjoyable part of dealing with what I do.

WOODY: Struggle defined how?

DOMINIQUE: An example of a struggle is when I tell the director that I have already negotiated the song that they want from $10,000 to $5,000 for the rights they are requesting, if they want it to go down anymore we will have to reduce the rights. They say, “No we have to have these rights and this is all the money I have. Go back and try to get the price down more.” And I say, “I have already brought a 50% reduction on it.” I’ll go back, but I am going to let them know that I understand their position but I have the director breathing down my neck and he wants to bring this thing down. “Is there any way we can’t work something out?” And when their reply comes back, “No, this is the lowest we can go, we have already brought it down $5,000.” And the director is still not happy with it.

So it is just stubbornness and an inability to accept the fact that what has been laid on the table is the final offer, a take it or leave it deal. It is beyond my control, and I have already put my expertise and my relationships on the line, and I have to reach a point where I don’t want my relationships to be tarnished because the director wants me to do what is beyond what has already been done. So I have to protect myself because I will be working with these record labels and publishers time and time again and almost every day I am back and forth with them with one project or another. As for the filmmaker, I might never work with them again. So I have to reach a point in my career where is say, “I have done the best I can, I am not going to tarnish my relationships just to make this one deal work, when I have hundreds of deals going on right now.” That is, for me, the most frustrating and difficult part of the job.

The King Of Texas

WOODY: Is there anything that I missed that you still want to cover?

DOMINIQUE: The one thing that I might add is to underline what I said earlier – that the creative side is about 30% and the administrative side is about 70%. I have become interested in Twitter. I like to see what the other music supervisors out there are tweeting about, as far as the bands that they like, and who they are listening to, because I look up to them. They are doing big TV series and the big films and the films that come in on the weekend box office that make $30-40 million. So I like to listen to what they are listening to, and get a feel for their interest in music. And sometimes I’ll watch their shows and see what music they select. That is a learning experience for me, but it’s just interesting to see. A lot of times I will listen to a link that they put up. I will go to a band website that they just listened to and like, and I’ll make my own personal assessment and say, “Wow, if I would have had that song when I was working in that film it would have worked great over certain scenes.” So it’s interesting to see what the other music supervisors are doing. It is kind of refreshing, and I aspire to be in their shoes, and have the experience that they have.

WOODY: Well, this has really been great. Thanks for your time, thoughts and expertise.

WOODY: How did you get into post-production audio?

CHUCK: Music editing.  That was my first and only jump into post-production audio, right into music editing.  My wife was a music editor and my  career as a musician was coming to an end so she suggested becoming a music editor like herself.  She trained me, and once she became too pregnant to music edit anymore, I took over her job at Hanna Barbera.

WOODY: So you are a musician and composer?

CHUCK: Musician and I consider myself -slightly – a composer.  I played guitar, made a living doing that for 10 years.

WOODY: Music as a sole means of financial support?

CHUCK: Yes. Started a solo career in a restaurant playing guitar and singing, and then playing in a band in various bars in the Newport Beach area, then going into touring with Juice Newton in the early 80s.

WOODY: When you got into the Juice Newton thing, were you also a session player?

CHUCK: No…I never learned to read music.  For Juice’s albums, the Producers felt more comfortable using ‘real guys.’  The touring band didn’t really record on any of the albums, although I did get to do a guitar solo because I was used to playing it live all the time.

WOODY: What venues did you play?

CHUCK:  Universal Amphitheater which is now called the Gibson Amphitheater.  A lot of arenas across the country.  We did a tour with Alabama…played at a couple stadiums.

WOODY: Have you worked in other areas of post?  Or just music editing from the start?

Back row, left to right: Jim Harrison, Julia Quinn (office manager), Andy Dorfman, Tanya Hill. Front, left to right: Jeff Carson, Chuck Martin.

CHUCK: Music editing from the start.

WOODY: Most people probably have no idea what a music editor does.  What is the primary function of the music editor?

CHUCK: Number one is to serve the emotional needs of a film.  That is broken up into two phases: One is the temp phase and the second phase is the final, where you are working with a composer.  Even when you are working with the composer, you are still doing the number one function, which is to serve the emotional needs of the film.

In the phase called temp, that is when you consider yourself the first composer on the film.  We look at the film, and with or without the director/editor, figure out where music should be, and what kind of music should go into those scenes.  The music editors start picking pieces of music, and that could be from any score, any composer that we want to use.

WOODY:  Just to get the emotional quality of the scenes?

CHUCK: Exactly.  Is it tense?  Is it romantic?  Is it full of action?  Then you go to the scores that work best for those scenes and for the film itself.  If you know the final score is going to be by a certain composer, if you can find music from that composer’s catalog that at least helps because there is a language already being spoken that the composer knows.

WOODY:  You can do this temp process without the director?

CHUCK: Absolutely.  I’m working on a movie right now where all they did was send me the movie, and I start sending them music.  I’ve been doing this for so long and working with various directors and picture editors for so long, they trust me that I will find the right spots and put the right music in.

The picture editors are the first line of defense before it gets to the director.  They sometimes send changes to me before they show it to the director.  There are a lot of film editors that don’t want to deal with music and there’s a lot of film editors that consider themselves music experts and put in music before the music editor even comes on.  Other editors bring us on immediately, even while still shooting the movie.  We can give them music for scenes; post production supervisors complain about that, but in the end it pays because you end up with a proper temp score.  We do know our business.  We are concentrating completely on one thing.  More often than not, for a temp, I don’t spot the movie with the director.  Trust me to figure out the right spots.

WOODY:   Do you find yourself going to music libraries as much as contemporary releases?

CHUCK: We have at our company over 2000 soundtracks of actual released movies rather than a production music library.  We find very little value in production libraries, just because of the nature of the quality.  Most of those are usually not large orchestras (if they get to use real orchestras) or they are synthesizers which don’t give the quality that we want.  A large majority are from “name any composer.”

WOODY: Obviously you have a long history of doing this work.  At this point there are specific composers that hire you or bring you on?

CHUCK: Personally, I only have worked recently (steadily) with Randy Edelman and whenever possibly Joel McNeely. Some other editors work exclusively with a particular composer.  I have a bigger relationship with directors and film editors, that’s who usually comes to me.

WOODY: You are probably brought on even before they chose a composer?

CHUCK: That happens maybe about 50% of the time. The one I am working on now they already had a composer lined up and he’s done several films with this director.  He uses his own music editor so I am only going to cover the temp part of this movie.  Which is fine.  If I come onto a movie with Randy Edelman and if there is a temp editor I will take over.  So it goes both ways.

WOODY: Tell me about the process after the temp, the actual collaboration between you, the editing team and the composer?

CHUCK: When the composer does finally come on, if I’m staying on the project, then we will definitely have a spotting session and go over all the places that we’ve covered in the temps, and if there’s any new ideas by the composer.  It will get more specific and that’s when the music editor becomes bit of a secretary taking exact notes of where each cue will start, so that the composer, when he gets our summary of all these cues, knows exactly what he’s doing and how many minutes he or she has to record.  During the final process we try to get the director involved with the composer; listening to demos, going to the composer’s studio and going over individual cues; as many as possible before it gets to the scoring stage where there will be no surprises for the director; he can pretty much improve as many cues as possible before it gets in front of an orchestra.

It is nice when you have a relationship with the sound effects people, or the sound editors, because there are moments in the temp where a sound effect, whether a car driving or explosion or even sound of wind, if that is played an emotional part of the scene or it just takes over and there is no reason for the composer to do much, then it’s nice to know that in the final there won’t be any kind of battles on the dubbing stage between music and effects.  As a music editor, number one is serving the emotional needs of the film.  If that means taking music out because the silence is more powerful, then so be it.  Even if a composer has written music for it, don’t fight the picture.  If it’s not serving the needs of the movie, as much as maybe someone’s bit of dialog or some creaky windmill, there’s cooperation and coordination between the sound effects and the music people that’s very important.

WOODY: So besides choosing and cutting in the temp music tracks do you also edit the final recorded score?

CHUCK: The music is represented fully by the music editor all the way through, whether it’s the temp guy or the temp guy becoming the final guy, working with the composer, the music editor brings the composer’s freshly scored and mixed music to the final dubbing stage. We protect the music all the way through the end.

WOODY: On a technical level, are you in charge of doing the music cue sheets and/or are you involved in any of the licensing of outside materials?

CHUCK: In the actual licensing of songs, or pieces of source music, other than from the composer, that comes from either the music department of the studio or an independent music supervisor.  We are responsible when the movie is completely finished to give the details of the title of the cue and how long it plays and the usage of it (whether it’s just playing in the background or if someone is singing in the foreground, then a visual and vocal cue) so we give a preliminary music cue sheet for the legal department in whatever production company you are working with.  You turn over those times and lengths and names of cues and how they are used, then they’ll do the final cue sheet, because they’ll have all the other information, like the writers of the songs, publishers, all that stuff.

WOODY: What seems like a grey area to many is the distinction between a music supervisor versus a music editor; I know a lot of people juxtapose the two. Would it be correct to say that the music editor is in charge of score elements where as a music supervisor is in charge of outside or licensed elements?

CHUCK: Yes, that would be fair, except for the editing. The music supervisor is responsible for bringing the songs to us, and the music editor will take those and edit them.

WOODY: So you are tasked with cutting in all of the music tracks.

CHUCK: Yes. Once we get to the dubbing stage the music editor brings all of the music songs and score.  From another rig (always using Protools pretty much) there’ll be the dialogue and then another rig will be sending sound effects and those will be coming into three separate places on the mixing board where you’ll have two, maybe three mixers up there. There used to be three mixers.  It used to always be a music mixer, a dialogue mixer, and an effects mixer, but as you probably know now a days there’s pretty much a dialogue mixer that switches over and mixes the music, and the sound effects person who deals pretty much just with sound effects. So those are the guys that receive all these different elements and those are the ones that make it into the final elements combination.

WOODY: Tell me about your company Liquid Music. How did that come about?

CHUCK: Well for 17 years I was a part of Segue Music which was probably the biggest music editing company in town for a long time. One of my bosses, Jeff Carson, he and I started Liquid music about 5 years ago, and that happened because Segue Music was purchased years ago by Zomba Records who saw a benefit of having a music editing company within their own record company. Then Zomba Records was bought by BMG publishing – that was over 5 years ago – and BMG was just a huge, huge company and they just had no idea what a music editing company did and for a company as small as us compared to all the other companies that they owned it just didn’t mean anything so they folded the company. That’s when Jeff came to me and said ‘hey, I still like this idea of how we work. Would you like to start up another company?” And we picked three music editors from the other company and started Liquid Music. And we have a sixth person who does all our bookkeeping and that stuff. So there’s a total 6 people from the outset and we’re still 6 people strong.

WOODY: How long has that been?

CHUCK: Over 5 years.

WOODY: That’s great you were able to turn the situation around.  Tell me about the facility itself do you have Protools bays, or…

CHUCK: We do. We have six offices all looking out at trees, and today there’s a pretty blue sky, and five of those rooms are Protools rooms. Three of them are mobile units so that for dubs, and temp dubs and finals or mixing sessions we could ship any one of or all three of those out if we’re that busy. There are five editors and five Protools stations here.

WOODY: Are any them set up like a mix stage or are they editing stations?

CHUCK: Definitely editing. Each one does have a little 16-track mixer but it’s all very rough mixing against whatever dialogue picture editorial has put into the picture at this point. We get nothing from the sound effects editors unless it goes through picture editorial and they may have some special sound effects that they’re using otherwise we’re just dealing with the music that we cut in and the production dialogue and effects.

WOODY: You have had a long and accomplished career and you’ve worked on some really terrific things. Are there any specific gigs that you’d like to discuss?

CHUCK: There are a lot, but I thought that I’d just jump to three. “American Pie”, mainly because that was the beginning of my relationship with Paul Weitz and Chris Weitz, the directors on that. Not to mention the fact that it’s “American Pie”! I love those guys, and they’re great people to work with. The other one that probably not many people know of, and not many people care about is “The Mirror Has Two Faces.”

WOODY: Wasn’t that Streisand?

CHUCK: Very good!

WOODY: I took my mom to see that; she loved it.

CHUCK: Oh! Well fantastic! The main thing about that one was just going to her house to meet her and Marvin Hamlish, and – it’s Barbara Streisand for God sakes! It doesn’t matter what kind of music you like, you know, it’s Barbara Streisand. So I got to work very closely with her at night doing mixes over at what used to be A&M records up till 3, 4, 5 in the morning, just me and her and the operator over there and just having a blast. It was a really fun time. Another one that comes to mind is “Red Dragon.” I worked with Brett Ratner on pretty much all his films from the past 10 years, and “Red Dragon,” that was one where I temped the movie and then Danny Elfman wrote a great score for it.  Actually during the temp music phase the film got previewed, somebody got into the screening and then put up a review on one of the geek websites.  The review said that “Danny Elfman did a great job with a new score for Red Dragon” and didn’t realize that actually I had just temped it. So I got my first review.

WOODY: Review on a temp! Perfect.

CHUCK: Yes. I got a great review for a temp that Danny Elfman supposedly scored. So that was a memorable moment for me.

WOODY: So tell me about – obviously you’re a big fan of Juice Newton, but tell me about other composers or types of music that you enjoy.

CHUCK: I like all types of music. I mean, you know I’m old enough that Motown was a part of my life.

WOODY: I tracked a bunch of songs for Lamont Dozier.

CHUCK: Oh! You did?

WOODY: He’s an amazing guy.

CHUCK: I actually got to meet him last year at the academy when we nominated songs. And he was there, and I mean my god. The credits that guy’s got.  I also like of course the English stuff, Beatles, Stones, all that stuff, as well as the newer stuff…The Killers - my sons bring newer music to me, Animal Collective, I really like. I shut nothing out.

WOODY: So with all the availability now of popular music – you know, the myspaces and that stuff – do you find yourself reaching for that or spending time trolling and looking for that kind of stuff?

CHUCK: Not really. Once we get the film in our hands we just really are focused on scoring the film, temp scoring it.  The stuff we’re looking for is really more score.

WOODY: The other stuff really more the domain of the music supervisor.

CHUCK: They get the upfront credit, so let them troll through everything that exists!

WOODY: Yeah they get the head credit!

CHUCK: Yes they do.

WOODY: So where does the music editor fall within the hierarchy of audio post?

CHUCK: That all depends on where you are in the process. The music editor is the most important person in the world for – several weeks. And then when the credit rolls, we are not that important. So it just depends on what’s going on in the movie and how much trouble it’s in.

[Laughs]

WOODY: Regarding the technology, you’ve worked in the movie business a long time and the gear is always changing.  Obviously today it’s all about computers, Protools and digital audio.  Has this changed your way of working or has it changed the work that you are required to do now?

CHUCK: The work is the same, as far as finding the right music for each scene, but the technology has made it so much easier searching for it.  Before we used to listen to vinyl, LP Soundtracks, 1/2 and 1/4 inch tape of scores that we kept after working on a project.  That was our library, LP and tape, and in some instances audio cassettes.  We would send those out to be transferred to mag, and that could take a whole day turnaround just to get the order in.  Now it’s just at our fingertips.  That has been a huge change.  And of course the editing portion of it is ridiculously good.  No more pops to deal with if you make a bad edit.  There is no such thing as a bad edit because you can always fix it.  The technology has made it a wonderful medium to be in.

WOODY:  And also since the technology has made things easier and more accessible it creates the idea that “Okay, you have a day to turn this thing around.”?

CHUCK:  Absolutely, that has happened for all of us in this industry; the post-production schedules have shrunk as they see it doesn’t take as much time between reels to load at a dubbing stage, same thing at a scoring stage, don’t have to wait for the projectionist to rewind to the beginning of the cue, it’s just instantaneous.  They expect less time for the same amount of work that you used to give them.  Sometimes it puts the pressure on, but at the same time the speedier technology does help us.  I don’t know whether it’s hurt us overall, or not yet. I’m not really 100% sure yet.  After doing this for this long, I still love doing what I’m doing.

WOODY: What is it that you love about the work?

CHUCK: It’s two things. It’s the creativity.  As I said before, we are like the first composers, and the things we can do now with ProTools, rather than just taking, finding some piece of music from a certain score, just tossing it in and making a few edits, we can enhance it with little toys that ProTools provides.  Pitching things so that you can have something from one score laying on top of another piece from another score and if it’s a half step off musically, or a whole step tone-wise, you can pitch one or the other to match the same key and have two different things going on that creates a whole new cue.  So there’s the creativity part of it, the other part of it is working with great people.  I’ve been really lucky over the years to work with great directors and editors and mixers and sound people who are just a pleasure to work with.  Just nice people.  There’s an occasional jerk out there once in a while, but I count myself very lucky to not have to deal with that very often at all.  That’s a big part of it.  And my coworkers here at Liquid Music; I love coming to work with them.  It does not suck.

WOODY:  Is there anything you don’t like about it?

CHUCK: If anything, it’s the politics within the studio or within a project itself.  Just trying to figure out who’s really in charge of the project.  Is it the director, for sure?  Or is a producer that’s really running the show?  Sometimes you just have to balance the two personalities or sometimes someone at the studio is really running the show and neither the producer nor director know it yet.  It’s dealing with the politics sometimes that is a little unpleasant.  It’s finding your way in that forest and making sure you don’t get lost.

WOODY: What qualifies someone as a really great music editor?  What qualities?

CHUCK:  Fortunately when Jeff and I both started the company we both admired each other enough and we both agreed on the three people that we wanted to bring with us.  For their various strengths, which was not only the ability to match the best scores with each scene and temping, but also the ability to get along with just about anyone.  Also the ability to communicate with them, whether they’re the director, producer, other editors, heads of post production, just getting along and communicating with them is a huge part of being a good music editor. We’ve got that with our company.

WOODY: Are they musically inclined or a musician themselves?

CHUCK: What’s really interesting is that three of us are musicians. The other two have no musical background at all. My partner Jeff is not a musician, and he’s been a great music editor for as long as I’ve known him. He has the intuition and the ability to do this work. And he’s really great with people.

WOODY: That’s so key, isn’t it? It doesn’t matter that you know Protools cold. That won’t get you the job.  The social aspects play a huge part in the collaboration of making films. Knowing Protools and knowing how to run a room with a lot of different personalities is not the same thing.

CHUCK: Well I can guarantee you that there are a lot of people out there who know how to operate protools and know how it works way better than I do.  But there are just other things that are more important in the whole picture. You’re absolutely right about that.

That’s what Jeff and I have been trying to do with Liquid Music, and were succeeding at it.  When people call and they ask for me, or ask for Tanya, or Andy to be their music editor, what we’d like them to know all of us during the project, so that when they call they go “is anyone there available” and we are.  Over the five years we’ve been doing this, we’ve really improved that. So that a post production supervisor will call and say ‘is Andy available?”  “If not, then who is, cause I need this temp done now” and that’s really a great thing.  Each one of us represents the company.  The five of us here are it so at least we know who we have to work with and we’re not afraid to send any of them out anywhere.

WOODY: What advice do you offer someone who says “Hey, Chuck, I want to be a music editor. What should I do?”

CHUCK: Wow. That is a good a question. Because of the technology a lot of the jobs that used to get you into music editing are gone. That’s apprenticing and assistant positions. Here we have neither. We have no film to wind up anymore; we have no transfers to go pick up so we don’t even need a driver anymore.

WOODY: There are no fly on the wall opportunities?

CHUCK: Right. There are so many people who want to intern here, once they come to our office and see how cool it is.  We have to unfortunately turn away people who want to work for free because they would just be doing nothing. My advice would be to get in a sound house that can take you in just so you can get your hours and just keep cutting music and tracking things on your own, and get to know post production people. Jeff and I made a concerted effort over the last 5 years to get to know all the new post production people we haven’t worked with before just so they could see what we do here. That might just be an edge that music editors are starting out that we can give them if they’ve got their hours and they’re in the union just to get them going. Just work on your personality. Try to get along with everybody.

WOODY: Do you have any advice for a composer?

CHUCK:   If they’re brand spanking new, let us help them.  Let us help you see what your powers are as a director, as a composer…let us help you avoid political landmines that can happen within a project – between a project and a studio itself, or personalities within the producers or production companies and studios – let us help you get through the process more than telling you how to compose or telling directors how to direct. I think that would be our best advice. It’s on an individual basis, depending on the personalities of the new director or new composer cause that’s always a part of our job and it’s part of Jeff and my strengths – feeling out ‘what is this person like, what is the best way to deal with this person.’

WOODY: Right. The thing I often tell people is don’t discount your sound person. While this might be your second feature film, this may be your sound person’s twentieth.

CHUCK: Exactly.

WOODY: You do music editing everyday. You’ve done it every day for decades, and so the experience level is so vast. To not take advantage of your expertise doesn’t make sense.

CHUCK: That’s the thing. Even working with directors who have been doing this a while, we still have done more movies than they have. We do 3 or 4 films a year, and you add that up with how many a director does it’s not going to come close. But the ones that are really new to it, those are ones you can help if they’re open to it.

WOODY: Thanks Chuck for all the great info.

WOODY:  As a production recordist, what is the scope of your duties on set?

ERIC: The way I look at it is I am responsible for everything audio that happens on the set in order to collect the tracks that need to be put in to the soundtrack of the film.  Whether it’s playback equipment, speakers for audience if need be, whatever it might be audio wise in order to collect those tracks that you know are going to work best in the editing.

WOODY:  So if you’re doing a multi-camera show, and they’ve got audience in there on risers you have to mix for the audience as well?

ERIC: Exactly.  That would be a circumstance where you’d be responsible for the PA (Public Address Playback) or if you had a pseudo-live performance you’d be responsible for that.  Whether you’re doing that or if you have a separate PA mixer it’s still in the scope of your duties to put that team and gear together and make sure it’s right.

WOODY:  So you hire additional crew?

ERIC:  Yeah.  Anytime there’s additional crew I would clear it through the PM (Production Manager) and say “this is what I’ll need, I’ll need a playback person” or “I’ll need a PA system or operator or a PA company”, if it’s that big.  Whatever it takes.

WOODY:  Let’s talk about your location sound recording cart.  What are your pieces of gear and what are your preferences?

ERIC:  The O1V (Yamaha Digital Mixing Desk) would be the heart of it.  I have the 16 in-out AES digital card that feeds both my recorders.  And I can digitally feed external video decks whenever I need to.  I can route anything to what I want.  So it’s the recorder, the desk (O1V), the 2 Comtek DSC 25′s , one for production and one for sound so you can have a private conversation.  And then I also have a full onboard computer.  Not a laptop, but a full computer.  When I was putting the sound cart together for a full sound cart, I had a checklist.  I need video monitors, at least two, I need playback, and also I’ll need to check my email.  And with everything I went, “computer will do that,” “computer will do that,” so I built an IBM based computer that has a four input video card and two tuners.  I can take the wireless feed right off of the camera if they’ve got one, and it also has playback capabilities and I’ve got full editing.  I use Sony Sound Forge and Vegas.  I can also do multi-track record and playback, which I’ve used before for off-camera response and things like that.  And then I’ve got an Lectrasonic 6-pack.  I’ve got six wireless and I normally go wireless boom so I also have two transmitters that plug right into the booms.  So my boom operators can be totally wireless and not have to worry about cable, reposition if they need to, walk along steady-cam and not have to worry about cables at all.

WOODY:  So your crew communications are wireless as well?

ERIC:  Yes.  Absolutely wireless.  I’ve done things where all of a sudden the boom operator at the last second has had to reposition around lights  He just runs over and he’s ready.  No delays, no tripping or other uncomfortable things.  I think that’s everything pretty much.  I my O1V have modified for DC, so I have a 105amp battery that sits in the bottom of my cart and when it’s plugged in it’s constantly charging and it can keep everything going for about eight hours.

WOODY:  What device are you actually recording to?

ERIC:  I go back and forth between my primary and my secondary recorder.  I have a Deva 5 10 track and a Sound Devices 744 4-track.  Eight tracks are digitally sent to my Yamaha 01V digital console, I can put eight tracks digital direct into the Deva and keep that there.  My preference of actual delivery in a recorder is 744.  One really interesting reason I found out just talking with editorial is that when they’re taking dailies the file name Deva gives is basically like a PNO (start ID #) number.  It starts out “one” and increments “two, three, four, five”, so you’ll always have to reference back to the sound report.  It’s just extra steps.  When you input the scene and take information on the Deva 5 it only goes to the Meta data, not as a file name.  In the 744 it goes into the Meta data and it goes into the file name.  So when they drop my disk in is if they need scene 20B take 1, it’s right there in the file name.  The way mine is set up it says “T” between the scene and take number.

WOODY:  And then it does “T1, T2, T2″?

ERIC:  Yes, it’ll continually increment until you change.  If you go from Bravo to Charlie it will go back to “one” again.  I was told on a show that I took over and started using the Deva on that it was putting about two hours extra time into syncing their dailies because of the lag time of having to constantly reference the sound report.

WOODY:  So you find yourself going to the Deva just when you need more than the four tracks that the Sound Devices 744 will give to you?

ERIC:  Pretty much.  Sometimes I might use that as just the extra track machine.  But if I see something that’s always going to be two wireless or radio mics or I can see that this is going to be just a boom and every once in awhile I’ll have to pull out a couple of wireless mics for a shot here and that’s about it, I’m going to go with the 744.  I’ve just found it’s more intuitive and the updates are far fewer in-between, but they always work.

WOODY:  And it’s a fantastic sounding box.

ERIC:  Yes.

WOODY:  What file format are you recording?  Are you recording Wav 48K 16 bit or are you going 96K, 24 bit?

ERIC:  For what I do it’s never 96-24.  That’s only going to be used for effects or music.  If I were to record effects, although most of that’s done by sound designers when I need something specific, they’ll do a high resolution because they’ll need to manipulate it.  So for that reason they’ll do it and for music that’s just the way they do it.  But as far as what I do, I’m either 16 or 24 bit.  I prefer 24 bit, but there’s a lot of places that either can only handle 16 bit and they’ll just truncate it down if I give them 24 bit, which doesn’t do anybody any bit of service, or sometimes you get the people who want it 24 bit and that’s the people, the editors or the editorial supervisor or whoever it is that really is keen on it and then it’s like, yeah, these guys are going to care.  It’s kind of a good feeling.  When you get the 16 [for delivery specs] it’s like, well, that’s the way our equipment’s set up for it so we’re going to do it that way.  That’s just kind of the attitude I get with that.

WOODY:  Boom or a lav?  How do you make a decision between the two?

ERIC:  It’s dictated by the shot, primarily.  Or the genre.  If you’re chasing a bunch of people then you’re going to be wireless, but as far as a dramatic, it’s totally dictated by the shot.  Your preference is [boom] microphone, and there’s different kinds of microphones and patterns of microphones and ways you can hide microphones if you need.  One of my favorite things in the world to do is to hide a microphone in plain sight of the shot.  Whether it’s a press conference and one of those microphones in front of them is your microphone or if you can actually see the microphone but can’t tell what it is, that’s my favorite.  It doesn’t happen all that often, but we look for it.  The preference I think of everybody, for dramatic especially, is a boom microphone.

WOODY:  So when you have a situation like that where you have five or six radio mics out there, are you doing five or six discrete tracks or are you mixing them down to two tracks?  How are you dealing with that?

ERIC:  Primarily, since we have the tracks, I send them the tracks pre-fade (each mic recorded to it’s own discrete track) and I’ll also provide a mixed track.  It all depends on what the editors want, too.  I can do anything.  So whatever they want I can do.  Obviously I do a mix for the context for the people listening on the headsets around video village.  With that many wireless tracks pre-fade, it would take forever for an editor to really weed through it without being on set and knowing what’s going on.  So for expediency on the editorial side, I always give one [of the delivered] channel a mix.  That way they can cut their picture to that and then it can go into sound editorial or if they’re doing their editorial on Avid or Final Cut they can go through [the isolated tracks] if they need to fix stuff if they need.  But I think most of what I gave them today is just as good if not better than if they want to do sound editorial.

WOODY:  Who’s your boss?

ERIC:   On the set the director is the ultimate authority.  But at the same time the producer is the one that signs the check.  And so you’re keeping both of them happy.  And what happens is if the director asks you something that you need something extra for, whether it be extra people or whatever it is that you don’t have with you, I will need to go to the producer and say “this is what we want to do, this is what he wants, so here’s how we can get it done, what do you want to do?”  The financer makes that decision and then the producer talks to the director.  So, in a way they’re both, both the ultimate, the one that you’re trying to help with the vision, is the director.  That’s the one.  They’re going to tell you want they want to do and you can suggest a few things, but they are the ones that are really in charge.  Because they need to be that way.  And then if it gets financial or sticky then you go to the producer and say, “what do you want me to do?”

WOODY:  How closely do you find yourself working with the DP?

ERIC:  As much as possible, for two reasons.  First off, whether I can’t stand them or not, I always get along with them because they can make or break you without even trying.  It’s not worth getting into a pissing match.  It’s gonna be over, and they can make you look a lot worse than you ever could do to them.  You know how it works on the set.  They’re what they are.  I find that some of them have a great rapport, some of them will want to work with you and you always need to give and take.  You give a lot more than you can so that when he really needs something he knows you’re not being a pain in the ass.  [Make them understand] that you’re actually asking because you’ve tried everything else and you just can’t do it any other way.  They’ll help you because they know that you’re not just being a whiner.  That’s really important.  So, it is a give and take situation and I always give first because I take where I need it.  We have a lot more leeway than they do.  You can’t re-light a scene in post.

WOODY:  That’s good advice.   You know, when I’m doing a feature I don’t usually get to talk to the location recordist, but I can know within the first scene what the whole show will sound like.  I can tell by the way they’re handled the tracks, whether something’s on mic or off mic, the recorded levels and so on.  I can immediately see, all these tracks are problematic or instead that this guy’s a good mixer, he was just having a hard day, because all these tracks are good except for this one scene.

ERIC:  Sometimes in features, the entire editorial department may come on when it’s almost wrapped or wrapped, but you’re clearly after wrap cause that’s when pictures lock.  So you’ll never get a chance.  They’ve way moved on.  In doing TV it’s a constant process.  You’re about three episodes in when they start doing the first mix.  So you’re still on while the post [department] is working.

WOODY:  So in those instances, other than your camera log, do you actually get on the horn and talk to editors or post sound people or is it just sort of, I turned it in and it’s been noted in the log.

ERIC:  If I’m doing it serious, I try to go to a mix, the first mix especially, and sit in on that.  Those are the people that are going to be doing it every day and you want to let them know who you are.  And there’s things that they don’t even see, the stuff that’s cut out, they see the final product.  So they don’t see the actress that absolutely doesn’t want you to touch her to put on a radio mic or the great one, the actresses that you’ll put a radio mic on and as soon as you turn your back, they think you don’t know what you’re doing and they’ll take it and put it somewhere else and it just sounds terrible.  And you go, “I just put that in place, that shouldn’t have been that way” and you go back and it’s moved because they, [the actors] know better than you and they’ve ruined the take.

WOODY:  Or they take it into the bathroom and drop it into the toilet.

ERIC:  That’s happened. (Laughs)  A hair dryer on them for about an hour usually brings them back to life.  So they, [the post department] don’t get to see those things.  They don’t know the political things and stuff, and so you can kind of get a rapport with them, otherwise they say “I don’t get why they did this, I don’t see why you couldn’t have put a microphone over here cause this sounds terrible” and once they get the idea of, okay, the DP’s hard-lighting or whatever it is or whatever the political things are, they know.  And also I found places when they’re in the mix that I say, “you know what, I know that track is good if you look”, and I’ll usually remember where it is.  And I’ve done that a couple of times on shows.  And they go back and they drop it in and all of a sudden that thing that they were going to live with is now better.  With TV sometimes, you don’t have the time, you don’t have sound editorial.  They do everything on the Avid and most of the time they don’t even go to those tracks and they just send them to the mix.  The mix sometimes only has five or ten hours, depending on what it is, to do everything and they can’t go searching for everything.

WOODY:  Do you think they’re using your comp mixed track more than they’re reaching for those isolated recordings?

ERIC:  It’s interesting.  The show that I’m finishing up now, editorial actually wants everything split out as much as possible.  They only get two tracks that’s delivered to Final Cut, but if I have two mics they want them on two mics.  So in that case, they’re post-mixed, but they just want more separation.  They want to be able to have more manipulation for whatever they do.  I don’t really know what they use.  I just like to know that I’m not getting a phone call, because it’s all there.  If you had an issue with this, that track’s right there, go for it.  And I know it’s clean.

WOODY:  So what is the personnel of your crew?

ERIC:  Generally myself and a boom operator and a utility sound who is also going to do second boom.  That’s for single camera productions.  If I were to do a four-camera proscenium style, live style show, I would have upwards of six people on the crew, including myself.  It would be a mixer, and what’s called a booth A2 or also known as a recordist who operates the audio recorder but also does other things, then you have two boom operators because you’re covering all angles and they’re on Fischer booms, and generally you’ll have a utility sound technician that pushes the boom as well and also sets mics and will do an additional third or forth boom, which I’ve had happen.  The booms are on wheels and they’ll need to be moved from set to set and often be moved during a shot because of extreme upstage-downstage or even left and right stage action.  You might need to take an entrance that’s fully upstage and so you have to push the boom in because there’s just not that much of a reach for a stage type of show.  That adds up to a pretty good sound crew.

WOODY:  So you’re essentially the crew head?  So does it work that you are hired by the producer as the location recordist, you’re given the scope of the job, and then you turn back to them and say, I’m going to need five people for this show?

ERIC:  A lot of that is known.  Maybe the beginners wouldn’t know.   It depends on the show.  Now if I’m doing a single camera show, I’m rarely going to need more than two other people.  And that’s assumed.  Now if you have a big scene you’re going to need extra people or a playback operator or such, they’ll generally tell you first.  The director will usually figure out I’m going to do this and this and this, it’s a lot of people, we may want to let sound know we may need another boom cause I want to have all this in the shot.  A lot of this stuff is bouncing back and forth in a real time situation.  A lot of times they’ll know that.  It’s rare that I’ll need more than 2 booms, which for the second boom the utility sound technician will take care of.  But as far as hiring, they absolutely don’t care.  They hire me, and I give them a list.

WOODY:  What are some of the challenges of location recording?  Is there a particular story you can tell?

ERIC:  I know I’ve got stories but they’re all in the back of my head buried in places I don’t want to find them.   (Laughs)  The very first thing I do right of the bat is walk around and look for the noise and listen for noise, whether it be fans or humming and where’s it coming from and can we turn it off.  Get every bit of noise, find out where it is and we either get it shut off or if it’s a refrigerator can we have someone on this to turn it on and off.  It’s the very first thing I do when I get on any set, even if it’s on a stage, just listen for noises.  Maybe video assist has noisy computer fans, which is quite often, and they’ll be right next to the set.  It’s like, let’s move you back a bit and put some pads in front of this.  The time you really notices the noises are when everyone finally shuts up when you’re doing a take.  If you can deal with those first thing in the day [is best], because maybe they need to find somebody with a key to go unlock something to be able to get to fan control or something.  So it’s the very first thing.  Reel the carts in, look for the noises and any potential noises – this is a hardwood floor, do we have any hard shoes – whatever could possibly happen, that’s the first thing.

WOODY:  Do you also deal with reverberant spaces?

ERIC:   Oh yeah.  Sometimes I get my furniture pads out if I can and I’ll spread them out on the floor.  You can spread those all over a floor or get some C-stands and clip them along walls.  Usually the floor is the easiest because it’s usually the most reverberant part.  And at least if you can dampen one or two walls you’ll cut your reflections down immensely because it’s going to stop after one or two reflections instead of going on and on and on.  That’s what really kills you.  And sometimes if it’s too live, you have go to two wireless mics just for that.  Or what I’ll do is I’ll boom it, but we’ll also wire them.  So when you’re sitting in a quiet room and you’re trying to do your edits and your reverb is overlapping or it’s just too much, you can always go to the wireless mics in your backup [track deliveries].  It’s one thing that the multi-track has given us is being able to present options.  We prefer to use the boom, but if we’re not too sold on the sound of it, but we don’t really want to go with wires in case maybe the room works well, so we’ll give you that option.  We’ll give you a boom on your dialog track, and then just sitting on tracks will also be their wireless tracks.   The other challenges, other than the obvious, are what are your shots and just trying to keep up with that.

I started [working on] a stage based [television] show, and the producer said, “I don’t really want to do this, but we have an exterior that we need to shoot.”  I hate starting a show off in the exterior right off the bat, but they’re forcing me into it.  So we’re going to shoot it outside the stage on the Disney lot right up against that wall on the west.   So I go out there and as soon as I turn the corner to it, I hear what sounds like a jet plane getting ready to take off.  We are two hundred feet from the central air conditioning plant for the entire [Disney Studio] lot where it runs 24/7, 365, it does not shut off.  And I walked back and said, “you can’t shoot out there.  You’re right next to the thing.”  “Oh, I didn’t even think of that.”  We ended up shooting with the idea, I said, “okay, they’re in a car, if we have all the windows closed, that’s fine.  You’ll still hear it, but you can bury it, it’s fine.”  Well then, not only did the DP want the windows open for the cross shot, but he also took the windshield off and the car was facing that.  So, our very first shot on a show that never has [had any] ADR (automated dialog replacement) was ADR’d.

WOODY:  What kind of advice would you give to a first time director of a feature film regarding your job and what they should know about location recording?

ERIC:  I think the main thing is, what I said before about when you’re doing your location surveys, listen.  It looks quite pretty.  I did some stuff for some first time directors who were doing a series of one-minute films.  They found this great location where they wanted to have a stalled out car out in the middle of absolutely nowhere where you can see in the distance for miles.  Just nothing there.  Just mountains and trees and a big cavernous canyon.  They found the greatest location.  I drove about an hour plus to get to this place, and I parked and they said this is where we’re going to shoot.  I said okay and we have the 15 freeway on a grade about 5,000 feet away and I said, “are you going to see the freeway?”  And they said no.  And I said, “cause you’re going to hear it.”  And we’re talking loud just to talk over the [noise of the] freeway.  Trucks are at low gear, high whine and on the other side they’re braking.  Well, it’s what you’re going to hear.  And they’re like, oh, we didn’t think of that.  So it’s the same thing – listen.

WOODY:  That’s the best advice.

ERIC:  I shot for a first time director, it actually collapsed after the first day, but it was a Sunday morning.  They were supposed to be in there five or six o’clock to this restaurant where he had access.  And we’re shooting upstairs in what was supposed to be a desolate bar in Harlem.  Where we’re shooting, which was the bar area of this restaurant was a mezzanine of a big huge family style restaurant that only had a thick curtain between the bar and that.  The idea was the kitchen staff would get there about 1 o’clock and they opened about 4 o’clock for dinner.  Well we didn’t get the first shot off until noon.  The DP just lit and lit and lit and so by the time we finished up, we had a full family restaurant with kids screaming, dishes clattering, an open air kitchen down below, it was like, none of this is going to be used.  None of it.  And the guy kind of realized it and realized he had made a mistake with the DP.  It ended up collapsing and he realized he had to re-think it.  He realized he wasn’t ready.

WOODY:  What is your background?  How did you get started?

ERIC:   I started playing with tape recorders as a little kid.  I discovered public radio when I was a junior in high school so I just rode my bicycle down to the local college station and got my [radio] license and started doing broadcast.  Not as a personality, but I would engineer for other people, do taped and live shows, sometimes voiceover station ID.  But pretty much just keep the station running.  I did a lot of weekends where you’d start off with your taped programming or you’d send live or something that had just been recorded, go into some other taped programming, someone would come in and do a two hour show and you’d engineer for them and that kind of thing.  And that was kind of it because I didn’t know you could make any money doing sound.  The only thing I knew was radio and I know there were concerts.  And I tried the radio, I couldn’t get a paying job anywhere, I didn’t know anything about concerts, and it never ever dawned on me that anyone was making a living or had a job in sound on movies and television.  And I ended up getting a job for a company called AudioTech, which was a small company split off from a company called Burn-Shoker Audio.  And they were a PA company, a sound reinforcement company that was geared towards television.  And the very first thing they did was they took me NBC who was a client and showed me around to where I’d be delivering things and picking up things.  And I looked around and I remember that day clearly because I was in such shock.  I saw people walking around carrying microphones and cables and operating consoles and it never ever dawned on me [that people did sound for that].  So from there I just kept working and meeting people in television and film and kept learning and doing different things.

WOODY:  Any advice regarding location sound for budding directors?

ERIC:  One thing I’d like to say to budding filmmakers and directors is try not to let the technology get in the way of the story.  More and more directors are relying on video assists.  I’ve actually seen productions come to an absolute standstill because there’s been a problem with the video assist where they [the directors] can’t shoot unless they see the frame.  Well, look through the eyepiece, get the idea of the frame, and then trust your operator and your DP.  They made films for 90 years without video assists and they’re some of the greatest films ever made.  Regarding the multitracks and the wireless mics – instead of relying on wiring everybody, you know we have 12 people on a scene, and 12 wireless mics out, you know, stage your shots a bit, don’t just rely on that.  Rely on sticking to your script a bit more.  I’ve just seen people go into things with an idea and “we’ll work it out in the process.”  And either you’ll boom it and half of it’s off mic because everyone’s just shouting out things that come to the top of their head, or you wire everybody and it’s just a wireless nightmare.

WOODY:  What do you love about your job?

ERIC:  I like being involved with the picture making process where you have all these challenges.  I guess that’s one thing, to have a challenge, and to watch it.  To watch the director say “okay, here’s the scene and this is how we want to do it.”  And then the scene plays out and you watch them develop the characters.  I’m in this work because I love movies and I love the process where you see it start from just a bunch of people with a script and then by the time you’re done the characters have direction and they pull things out of the script that you’ve never seen before or [they create] shots that are really cool and really make that scene work.   It’s very satisfying.

WOODY:  We’ll keep an ear out for your work!

WOODY:  How do you define Foley?

MONIQUE:  I sit in a room with a microphone and an engineer records me making sounds for use in television or film.  At a minimum, I cover all of the human sounds, by this I mean footsteps, hand pats and grabs, and props that the folks onscreen handle.  This does not preclude animal sounds, we do animal footsteps and movement as well.   There are sounds that are covered mainly by foley, and others by a sound editor that may be cut from a library.  Who covers what is dictated by:  time, budget and available resources.  Sometimes, both Foley and effects will cover a particular sound and the re-recording mixer will use a combination of both.  If it’s a big sound like a car crash, our tendency in Foley is to cover the debris from the crash as opposed to the actual impact, which a sound editor would cut in as a hard effect.  If I have the time I may help the impact along, but I won’t be able to get as large of a sound as an editor can cut in from a library.  We don’t generally do sounds like engines or motorized sounds.

WOODY:  I think most people would be surprised at the amount of Foley that gets done.  How much Foley will you do on a feature?  Do you do all the human sounds?

MONIQUE:  On a standard feature we do all of them.   Some of the Foley “legends” will do far more than just the human sounds.  They will do huge impacts for example,  I heard about a foley artist that covered the sound of a train chugging along and screeching to a halt on the tracks for a film that featured a very long train sequence.  The fact that they covered the train in foley instead of recording an actual train blew me away.  Part of the reason they can do this is because they are very talented, but also it is because they have a stage that affords them a lot of space and a lot of really great large props, also they have the time to experiment and figure out how to create something as involved as that.  They may have a month to do a film, which is generally not the case with me.   Usually I do a feature length project in five days.  I don’t have the time or the resources to experiment with that kind of thing.   But it can go far beyond human sounds if you’ve got time.

WOODY:  When you say “legends” you’re talking about studio Foley artists and large Foley stages like Warner Bros. or Paramount?

MONIQUE:  Exactly.

WOODY: You’re doing the Foley for a full-length feature film in five days?

MONIQUE:  Five to ten is the most I’ve been given.  Budgets have gotten tighter.  ProTools has been really good and bad for the industry.  In some ways it’s been great because you can redo a take very quickly.  In the old days when you were shooting tape everything required a pre-roll.  Back then, to redo the slightest thing took twelve seconds just to prepare for that, whereas now, it’s instantaneous.  If you don’t like it you can very quickly redo it.  But it’s also brought down the budgets because people are doing guerilla Foley in their garages.

WOODY:  Probably also with ProTools you have more and more tracks.  Do you find that, too?

MONIQUE:  Yes, absolutely.  When there were less tracks, we also worked in pairs because that way you could double up on things.  Double up on footsteps for crowd scenes, double up on props, like somebody would get one aspect of a sound while the other person would handle another.  Say it was a dining room scene and if you have very few tracks you could have somebody doing chair creaks of people sitting at the dining room table while somebody else is handling glassware or dishes and you can do it simultaneously.  Now, with so many tracks, you keep everything on it’s own track.  Which is good in some ways but also it’s a lot more for the mixer to contend with.

WOODY:   Do you generally work solo or in teams or both?

MONIQUE:  Generally, I work solo.  They still work in teams on the lots at Sony and Warner Bros., but it’s getting to be less and less at your little boutique studios which is where I work.  They tell me they don’t have the budget and they don’t see the value in having two people because they think that someone is just standing around, which isn’t the case at all.  It works really well to have two people doing Foley for a number of reasons.  One is that somebody might be stronger at a certain thing than another.  I recently had to do a film where I had to walk Samuel L. Jackson, and I weigh about 120 pounds, and it’s a struggle for me to sound like a plus 6-foot man.  So if I had a partner that was maybe a bigger person, male or female, they might have been a little bit better at that.  There were some things they did with the EQ and the way I physically hold my feet and do the steps and choices of shoes that help me, but the reality is in having a partner there’s somebody who is going to be better at one thing or the other.  And also it gives you a bit of a break from not having to do every single thing all the time.

WOODY:  I’ve personally never recorded two Foley artists, but I’ve often thought that it could be a really creative atmosphere.

MONIQUE: Yeah.  It’s much more creative because two people, well I don’t want to say two because whoever is recording the Foley has a very heavy influence on the creative process, so having three people in a room coming up with ideas is much better than just two.

WOODY:  So you see the engineer as a partner in the collaboration of the Foley recording?

MONIQUE:  Oh absolutely.  I don’t really know how to articulate how important the engineer is in the entire process.  Usually we will have a discussion as to what we are going to cover first or what we think is the most important thing and we will do that first.  Within a reel we won’t necessarily go linearly.  Because we are trying to budget time, we sort of pick what is the most interesting or what relates to the story.  If there is something that is a really key prop that’s used over and over and over again, then that’s something that we really want to establish.  And sometimes we will record that in it’s entirety throughout the film all at once for consistency’s sake.  I recently did a horror film where somebody spends a lot of time with a box over their head with a bunch of locks on it, which is not pleasant, I’m sure, for the person wearing the box.  But anyhow, I could use that wood box with the latches that I have created for the sound, and if I do it over a period of days, I might change the way that I handle that particular prop.  It might be rattling more one day than the other.  So when it’s something like that, we will usually record it all at once just so we get the same sound from it and that my interpretation doesn’t change depending on my mood over the days.

The recordist is huge, huge, huge – on the level of morale for the space that’s created because it is such an intimate space, especially if I’m working by myself and the person on the other side of the glass is my only contact.  There have been many times that I have worked with people that have had such great, great, great ideas that I would not have come up with on my own, and together we build on each other’s ideas and it is an amazing thing.  Also, I don’t always have the best judgment of how the sound is translating through the microphone.  I can be thinking that something is just right on, and if I’m not working with somebody who is really skilled in that awareness of what is working and what’s not, I’ll go back and listen to what we have recorded and it’s not so good.  I can’t always tell how the microphone is picking up what I’m doing and I heavily rely on the recordist’s judgement.  I work with a bunch of different types of engineers.  Some are truly mixers and have taken it to an art form and EQ and modulate and do all sorts of things and others I work with just do straight recording, but are very picky about my interpretation of what I am doing.  I’ve been really blessed and I have avoided situations where I would have to work with someone who either is unpleasant or lacks really, really great judgment.  The people that I work with are really quite incredible.

WOODY:  It’s great to hear that you rely on a real collaboration with the engineer.

MONIQUE:  It’s more important than anything.  It’s more important than the props I have to use, it’s more important than the stage I have to use, it’s more important than the show I’m working on.  I’d have to say it’s singularly the most important thing.

WOODY:  That is very encouraging.  Let’s shift gears a bit – how do you determine what to cover within a scene?

MONIQUE:  That comes from experience and budget and time.  Usually when we start a film we’ll start at the beginning and we’ll work reel by reel.  Let’s say we’ll start with a cloth pass. And that will be the first time that I’ve usually seen the film.  I generally don’t see what I’m working on until the time comes that we are recording [the session].  When I do the cloth pass, I like to wear headphones so I can listen to the production audio so I can hear what the film sounds like.  Because a lot of times we are trying to sound like production so the foley can be used and not pop out in a bad way.  The floor surfaces and shoes need to sound similar so if they replace the production dialogue in a scene with adr the foley matches up.  So I’ll do a cloth pass which involves me close mic’ing manipulation of cloth to emulate the characters’ movements.  I’ll have a variety of types of cloth depending on what the people are wearing.  A denim shirt kind of does it all, it sounds like almost anything, but if someone is wearing a silk blouse, for example, I’ll have a piece of silk handy.  So we’ll do a movement [cloth] pass, which is something I never noticed prior to doing Foley.  Now I hear it being used all the time, even on television.  It’s just an interesting thing that you may not even be aware of on a conscious level until someone tells you about it and you’re like, oh that’s that rustling sound.  So we will start with that and then we’ll do a footsteps pass where we will get all the characters’ footsteps on the various floor surfaces.  A good Foley stage has a cement surface, a wood floor, a dirt pit, a gravel pit, a way to make the sound of grass.  We will do the footstep pass and then we will do a pass of props.  You’ll do a setup for basic hand props and then, depending on the time and the budget, you’ll cover things that maybe the effects people will be covering as well, but since you have the time, you will be able to do that.  But if you don’t have the time and you think it is something the effects guys are going to cover anyhow, then you’ll just skip that.  You pick your battles.

WOODY:  What are the tools of your trade?

MONIQUE:    I’ve got about forty pairs of shoes.  I’ve got a small portable kit that I bring with me.  I have a foley purse with some stuff in it that rattles kind of cool.  I’ve got a lot of metal things, some hinges and wood, glass, plastic and rubber items.  Things are basically categorized into like materials.  I have a backpack with various paper (photos, newspaper, cellophane, wax paper, etc.)  I’ve got some different clothes that I carry with me (a leather jacket, nylon windbreaker).   It’s really great when you can find something that squeaks or creaks.  It’s invaluable stuff to me.  I was at a yard sale and I was looking for a day planner to use as a Foley prop.  So I’m at this yard sale and I’m opening and closing this day planner.  I’ve got it held up to my ear and this guy looks at me, I guess the owner of the day planner, and he said, “it’s only a buck.”  And he thought I was trying to decide whether or not I wanted to spend the dollar on his planner for some other reason.  It didn’t sound good, so I didn’t buy it.  My favorite props I think lately, are a couple of pillow cases filled with cornstarch, which I use for snow.  The reason I put the cornstarch in the pillow cases is [that] it contains it so I don’t leave the stage with a nice white powder covering everything.  But cornstarch has a nice screech and creak to it that’s really, really cool.  The crunch sounds like snow.  It also works really well for body falls in animation.  If somebody falls in sand, it’s got a lot of loft to it, and it’s more of an interesting sound than just using sand, for example.  A chamois has been a great friend of mine.  When you get them wet, they make lots of cool dimensional gushes and mushes and things like that.  And I’ve also gotten a lot of mileage out of a pinecone.

WOODY:  Really?  What do you use a pinecone for?

MONIQUE:  I can step on a pinecone and the cracking of it can sound like ice breaking.  If the pinecone is worn down a bit and I manipulate my fingers on it can sound like little bug legs.  It can sound like all sorts of things.  It’s a secret favorite of mine.  I remember telling an engineer I worked with, “don’t tell anybody about the pinecone.”  There are Foley secrets and with the exception of when I was training, I’ve almost always worked alone.  I’ve gotten to have a partner a few times, but the downside to working alone is that there are some Foley secrets that I don’t know – that are only passed on if you’ve worked with someone who knows them.  But I’ve developed some of my own, so I’ll do those for now.   (Laughs)

WOODY:  When you go to a Foley stage or a session, what items do you anticipate they will have there for you?  Obviously you aren’t going to be carrying a car door around with you.

MONIQUE:  Exactly.  A car door is important.  There was a long time where one of the stages I worked at didn’t have a car door and I was trying to use a folding chair.  It was terrible.  Finally one day one of the sound editors took pity on me and went to “pick-a-part” and bought a car door.  A car door is a big one.  A wood chair is nice because nothing sounds quite like a wood chair, especially one that has a little bit of creak to it.  I prefer not to carry dishes and glassware with me, so it’s nice that, even if they don’t have a proper Foley stage, usually the places I work will have a kitchen.  Nothing is sacred or off limits.  I will grab whatever is around the facility.  I won’t break it or anything (usually).

I’m definitely resourceful and I will find things and use them.  Some of the creativity comes from, in my experience, trying to make do.  Working at little boutique studios, they don’t have everything that one needs, literally.  So trying to figure out how to make a wide range of sounds working with very little is, I think, a great part of the creativity.  On the other hand, having done this for 11 or 12 years, a lot of times movies have someone riding a horse.  Not as much in contemporary films, but I did a lot of old movies where I did the Foley.  And I’ve always faked it with some cool leather creaks and some belts I use as reins, but the other day I was somewhere that actually had a saddle and I got to use the saddle for the creaks.  And it sounded so good, I was like, oh my god, I can’t believe I’m finally getting to use this thing!  So it would be a luxury to work somewhere that had all sorts of cool things, but it’s also honed my creativity to not have that option.  If I would have always had the chance to literally use “the thing” then I wouldn’t have grown in the way that I have needing to improvise and make do.  Also, the literal prop does not always sound the best.  It just depends.

There have also been situations where you spend a lot of time compensating for the shortcomings of a room.  Say the stage is an ADR stage and there are no Foley pits, there is no dirt or gravel or grass area, you can still make do, as long as you have a decent concrete surface, which can be used for tile, cement, or asphalt.  For dirt footsteps,  you can throw a carpet down and throw some dirt on the carpet and walk on that but you have to walk much softer so you don’t reveal the floor underneath and there are other things you have to do to try to pull that off.  You can do it.  It doesn’t sound as good, but you can get away with just about anything as long as the room is quiet and it doesn’t have weird bounce.  I’m not an acoustician, but there have been times that in working in makeshift rooms there’s weird bounce that happens from all of the right angles in the walls and the ceiling.  I recently worked on a stage like that where I was walking “a big guy” and I was walking really hard and it sounded great to me, but then when I listened to the recording I sounded like a woman in heels.  There is just a bizarre, weird, echo bounce thing that can happen which makes things more difficult.  So I ended up having to walk this big guy really soft so that we wouldn’t hear that [the poor room quality].  It compromises the quality when you don’t have a great stage, but we can make do with just about whatever we are given.

WOODY:  You do Foley for feature films, but you also do it for television as well?

MONIQUE:  Yeah.  Because I work at a few different places, I get to work on a really nice variety of projects which I think is helpful as far as one not getting into a bit of a rut.  I work on feature length films, good and bad.  I work on television.  I recently started a really great one-hour drama, “Mad Men”.  I sometimes get to do animation, which is the most difficult thing I do from a creative standpoint.  I work on reality TV, which most people are just amazed that there is Foley in reality TV.  That seems to be a huge secret that no one knows.  Even people in the industry are shocked when I tell them that I do Foley for reality TV.  I’ve done Foley for “Survivor” for 13 seasons. I am currently working on “American Gladiators” and “Wipe Out”.  I did Foley for many years for “Fear Factor”.

WOODY:  So you’re doing the munching of spiders?

MONIQUE:  Yes, yes, yes.  People eating intestines and things, the sound of people in a fish tank full of roaches moving about.  All of that stuff does not really have a sound associated with it, we put that in.  At first when I started “Fear Factor” I was very creeped out by the content and then what I grew to realize is it was one of the most creative things that I’d ever gotten to do from a Foley standpoint because it’s not straightforward.  It’s not setting a wine glass down.  There’s only so much pizzazz that can have.  But having to come up with a way to make the worms sound different than the roaches and the pig intestine chewing sound different than the hundred year old egg involves some true thought.  And plus, they actually play the stuff up, which is really nice.

WOODY:  That was going to be my next question.  Did you find that they use this for the on air mix or is it more for the M&E and foreign delivery.

MONIQUE:  For “Fear Factor” it made the mix and it was played up.  On “Survivor”, they say they use what we do, but the show has such wonderful music, the composer for that is just outstanding.  For something like “Survivor” we mainly cover the competitions.  So if somebody is going through some sort of obstacle course, that’s what we cover.  We also cover them traipsing around through the jungle and certain things that didn’t come out well in production because they don’t mic reality shows for those sounds the way they do when they are shooting in a controlled setting.  They mic for dialog, but no one bothers sticking a mic into the tank of cockroaches and I don’t even know if they would, what that would sound like.

WOODY:  I often prefer to work with Foley artists than to have to search through my sound effects library and layer and create and edit sounds.  Many times it’s better and faster and more creative to do it with a Foley artist.

MONIQUE: It’s so weird.  People get so cheap when it comes to Foley and they think, oh I can just cut that, but they don’t realize the time it takes to cut something like that that’s multi-dimensional and nuanced.  It takes quite awhile as opposed to we can do it in a matter of seconds.

WOODY:  So how did you get into Foley in the first place?

MONIQUE:  I was very fortunate.  It was accidental.  I had been doing art department work and I knew that was not where I wanted to end up.  It seemed like a lot of moving furniture to me and I didn’t want to be a production designer.  I couldn’t really see it going beyond the dreaded furniture moving that I was doing.  So, I thought I wanted to get into picture editing.  I was at a party and I met someone and he said he was in post and I thought that meant that he was a picture editor.  I didn’t know anything, I thought that post was picture editing.  And I said, “oh I’ve always wanted to do post.”  And he said actually he was in post sound.  And I said “oh, I’ve always wanted to do that.”  I just went along with it.  He said he actually recorded Foley and I said you know, that has always been interesting to me because I’d seen the LA Times trailer [shown during the pre-show of film screenings which depicted various crew positions in motion pictures] they had a few years ago and it did look interesting.  So the guy called me a couple of days later and he said “we’ve been trying to train somebody and it’s been about a month now and he’s just not getting it so we’re auditioning people.  Would you like to come in?”  So myself, along with about ten lucky others, all had a chance to come in and try to walk footsteps in sync or move a piece of cloth.  Nothing real taxing or complicated, but just to see if you could hit sync with what was being projected.  They picked me and ironically I worked for them for about a month before the purchase of their building fell through and thus, their foley stage went along with it.  And so I had about a month experience and I sent a resume saying that I was told that I had potential talent but I had very little experience.

I was really lucky.  My timing was good and I met some very kind people who were willing to show me some things, which is extremely rare.  There’s not that many of us, I think there’s maybe only a hundred Foley artists in the state [California], and the work isn’t long like editors who can work on movies for a year given the different budgets.  But Foley artists, our job, even on a big budget thing, maybe get twenty days a month.  So everything is very competitive and no one wants to teach anybody how to do what they do because then that person is going to be willing to do what they do for cheaper.  It’s funny.  It’s very, very difficult to break in to.  It’s very, very competitive.  No one wants to show anybody anything and I managed to get some people to show me some things and to hire me.  I still am stunned.  I don’t know quite what happened and I don’t think I realized how lucky I was at the time.  I felt glad, I thought, this is cool, but I really didn’t know how truly lucky I was.  I am glad I didn’t know how hard it was to break into.  My naivete probably helped me along quite a bit.  If I would have known how hard it is to get into foley I may have not thought it realistic.  I meet people all the time that say they’d love to do Foley and I wish them well, but it’s very hard to break into.

WOODY:  I get that question all the time.  “Hey, I’d love to do Foley.  Would you hire me?”

MONIQUE:  I think part of the problem is schools, too.  I met a kid a couple years ago who went to a recording school and his parents paid I think about a hundred grand in tuition for him to go to school there.  And of course his parents were expecting that he would be able to come out here and get a forty or fifty dollar an hour job, which is what the school said would happen if they trained in this area.  I’m not saying all schools are to blame, this is just an isolated story, but the poor kid came out here, he was doing an internship and making nothing, and the next level up from that he was maybe going to be making $8-$10 in the machine room somewhere.  And he was super bummed because his parents kept asking him when he was going to make that big salary he had been led to believe he was going to get upon graduation.

I recently was on a judging panel for a paid internship that the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences holds.   The person who receives the internship gets to work at a sound facility here in Los Angeles for a month or two.  And it’s a paid internship, it’s not a huge amount of pay, but it’s still some pay.  But they get the experience of that.  There were maybe thirty applicants and we had to narrow it down to three.  They have to write a letter explaining why they want to do the internship and what they hoped to gain.  It’s really interesting.  They get letters of recommendation from faculty and it’s just really interesting seeing what peoples’ ideas of what this business is and what’s going to be expected of them and what position they get to assume upon arrival.  There’s, of course, a number of talented people coming from USC, but the panel also likes to give opportunities to people from other states where they don’t have a chance to meet people and make contacts the way they do out here.  The exciting thing about it is there are a lot of bright talented foks out there that really are into sound, which is very cool.  I don’t know that that was the case twenty years ago.  I think people are a lot more educated about the importance of sound than they used to be.  It used to be kind of an after thought, didn’t it?

WOODY:  In many ways it still is.  One of my rants is that people think sound for film and TV is just a technical job.  They have no idea the amount of collaboration and creativity involved.

MONIQUE:  And I don’t know if they’ve changed course, but it used to be AFI didn’t even teach sound.  It’s weird, too, about that collaboration thing.  I think that’s really huge as far as what we do in general.  Editors have a tendency to work a lot by themselves, sound editors in front of a computer, but they’re still collaborating with the sound supervisor, with other editors on what the tone of the film is supposed to sound like so that there’s some continuity, and then with the dialog [editor] and with the mixer.  All of these forces come together and it’s really a hugely collaborative effort.  Every once in awhile I’ll meet somebody who is a Foley artist/recordist where they maybe have some way to push play from the stage, like they’ll have a little portable console and they’ll record themselves.  And that’s like working in a vacuum.  I would rather not do Foley at all than to work like that.  The collaboration is what makes this really interesting.

WOODY:  It also makes it better.

MONIQUE:  Oh, so much better.

WOODY: I don’t think people think of the sound portion of motion pictures as being artistic.

MONIQUE: I think it’s moving more in that direction where people are beginning to understand, but I think it has a long way to go.  Another thing, too, is that people have a tendency to run out of money.  They spend all of their money in production and then if they have a little bit left, that goes to picture editors and that process, and by the time they get to the audio portion, that’s the last thing.  And then they have neither money nor  time.

WOODY:  A lot of times directors don’t understand or see the value of what we do until they sit in on a sound edit or mixing session.  What do people most misunderstand about what you do?

MONIQUE:  I’d have to say that what they misunderstand about Foley is that they imagine the difficulty would come from the creativity or from the sync.  Both of those things are difficult, but I find the thing that is the most challenging about doing Foley is having to pay such close attention the entire time.  You are glued to every second on that screen and you have to almost be psychic to be able to tell what a character is going to do next and to be able to do that in sync with the right intensity.  It requires a great deal of concentration.  So there will be times where I’ll work a really long day, maybe I’ll work a double shift, and people would imagine that I would be tired because I’m running and slamming things down and moving about and that’s not the part that’s tiring.  The part that’s exhausting about doing Foley is having to pay such close attention from the moment you’re in record.

WOODY:  Can you give me some insight in terms of your brain -you’re looking at something in life, a prop or item in a store, and somehow your brain sees that but hears something else.

MONIQUE:  It’s weird.  Sometimes people have said to me that as a Foley artist you probably hear things differently.  And that’s not true at all.  I hear things the same way everybody else does.  The only difference is that I might be, on occasion, more aware of them.  Like I recently bought a silicone, waffle-weave pot holder and I bought it because it was cool looking and I needed a new pot holder, but the other day when I was rinsing it I realized that it made this cool kind of sucking sound.  And I’m like, oh, this would be cool for something.  And I didn’t know at the time, and I still don’t, what it will be used for, but there will be a day where I’m sitting on a stage and I’ll need that particular sound and my brain will go, oh, that pot holder you have at home would be perfect.  Another thing is a lot of times the recordist will come up with a really great way to articulate to me what is or is not working about what I’m trying.  Say I’m trying to do a bug crawling and the legs sound too big or too crunchy, a good engineer will be able to tell me specifically what about it that isn’t working and then I’ll have to just be resourceful and based on the description of what is needed try to just experiment and figure out what will work.  Sometimes they can help me with EQ and sometimes they can actually help with suggestions.   As far as what part of the brain,  or what makes a foley artist able to access those ideas – I used to have a lot more fear about it.  I’ve actually lost sleep over thinking “how am I going to make this particular sound?”   But what I’ve come to realize is that we always work it out.  Whether it’s my idea or the engineer’s idea, at the end of the day we always work it out.  So I don’t have that fear so much anymore.  If I don’t know how to do it, I just go, oh I don’t know how to do that, but I know that by the time I need to I will have figured it out or the recordist will have or we both will have.

WOODY:  When you see the final project, how much of what you do, do you think, makes it?

MONIQUE:  It really varies.  That’s where the re-recording mixer is the final say.  Some mixers love to use Foley.  Others really just like to use production and only use Foley when absolutely necessary.  I have learned through some disappointments early on.  I was doing “Gods and Monsters” maybe my second year of doing Foley, and I remember there was this one scene where Ian McKellen’s character operates on Frankenstein.  He opens his head and he removes his brain and then he stitches it back up.  This was one of those occasions where I lost sleep trying to figure it out.  I was pretty inexperienced and it was so specific and the sound supervisor said “oh we want something really cool for this,” so it was really something that kind of freaked me out.   I couldn’t tell you what I did now, it was too long ago, but I spent about an hour on it actually recording different elements for it and all together it sounded really cool.  I remember the sound supervisor called me in to a room where they were watching down the Foley and the director was there, and they were so complimentary.  And they were saying, “Monique this is just amazing, this is exactly what we want!”  They were thrilled and I was thrilled and everybody was thrilled and then I went to the screening a few months later and I was all excited about my big scene and all I heard was music. (Laughs)  So I’ve learned to separate myself from attachment to the outcome of what makes a mix.  As long as what the engineer and I have come up with sounds cool when our session ends when we play it back, as long as that sounds good, whether it makes the mix or not I’ve had to separate myself from caring.  Of course it’s nice when it does, but I can’t take that as a personal failure if it doesn’t because it’s really not anything to do with that.  Or sometimes it might be.  Sometimes they may not like it, but it’s generally just a creative choice.  Clearly with this Frankenstein scene they opted for music.

WOODY:  Do you enjoy the work?

MONIQUE:  Yeah!  Yeah, yeah, yeah.  I’m picky about where I work.  If something doesn’t feel right, like if I don’t get along with the people, I don’t work there.  So the show can be bad, the show doesn’t have to be good, it’s nice when it is, but really the most important thing is who I’m working with.  And if the show is bad it just gives us something to laugh at.  Sometimes we take our work for granted and we’re really fortunate to be living in a beautiful place, [Southern California] working in this industry that so many people would love to be a part of.  So many people have jobs they don’t care about.  They just do it as a means to an end, but I’d like to believe that if I came into a windfall of money from the sky, that I would still do Foley because it’s fun.

WOODY:  And I hope I’m behind the glass with you!

Todd Sklar, writer and director of “Box Elder” has just wrapped the first leg of his nationwide tour for the film.  The tag line for his movie “Box Elder” seems to sum up what it’s all about best – “On the the road to nowhere, these guys call shotgun.”  Todd took time out from scheduling the next leg of the tour to talk about directing, the tour and of course – sound.

WOODY: Many first time directors are more attuned to the visuals and the technical aspects regarding the picture than the audio and the recording process on set. Did you find that to be true for yourself?

TODD: I would say that for me story and performance always come first, but visually, as the technical aspect of the film, I understood that better. In a weird way sound is something that I am very acutely aware of when I am watching films but I have no practical production experience with it what so ever. It was more so the lack of know-how in the translation from point A to point B. I love overlapping dialogue and I really wanted that. I would always source “Mash”, you know how great that is.

WOODY: Altman was a master in his use of sound and production dialog.

TODD: Exactly, exactly. But I did not understand necessarily how much effort and work he put into that you know? They don’t have audio commentary tracks on DVD’s with sound guys talking about how you approach sound. The first time I watched “Boogie Nights” P.T. Anderson was talking about how they got that first tracking shot and so I can understand how to do that and plan how to do that. A lot of it was just not having the experience to understand how difficult of a thing production audio is. And the weird thing is, going into making the film I had so much research that I was doing and everybody, any idiot who’s made a film in the world would warn you and tell you how important sound is, and I was well aware of that. But you really don’t understand how it’s your number one priority if you do not know what you are doing. You should be listening to the sound guy and telling everyone else to shut up. That’s a learning lesson without question.

WOODY: And have you made other pictures as well?

TODD: I have made some shorts, but I would not really even consider them shorts. I would call them “film experiences” because they are all so flawed in their own little way. I have no background in film and didn’t go to film school. The only reason I made shorts was to get that hands-on experience and to learn story telling through the lens in a hands-on approach. Every one of the shorts I made was way overtly ambitious in every aspect of the medium, the story telling and everything. That way I could try to stretch myself and figure out how to do certain things. So they are all very much flawed and hard to watch.

WOODY: So that was inspiration to go ahead and tackle a feature-length project?

TODD: (Laughs) Yeah. It’s interesting because my technical prowess didn’t actually grow that much. I think my ability for story telling has always in its strongest form been natural instincts and intuition and what not. The thing that kind of progressed me into doing a feature is just the last short I made before this feature was around twenty-eight minutes long and that was heavily condensed with a lot of scenes. It was really too heavy and that was in its shortest form. I just could not fit all the things I wanted to do in a story in less than ninety minutes. So for me, I didn’t set out to necessarily write a feature, but I think the first treatment was twelve pages longer than my first draft of the script, which was like 160 pages. (Laughs) Either it’s going to be a TV show or it’s going to be feature.

WOODY: So you out grew doing shorts?

TODD: Pretty much. And only in the story telling aspect. At that point I did not even feel comfortable making another short as far as my technical skills go. I had to pick that up at a much more relevant pace to match the story telling.

WOODY: So in terms of actual time from when you finished the script to actually wrapping was what, 9 months or a year?

TODD: Yeah, a little bit less than that.

WOODY: And how about the post process? How long did it take you to get from wrapping production to a locked picture edit?

TODD: That was a crazy experience as well. (Laughs) Our editor Kamau [Bilal] was editing overnight the rough cuts of each scene that we shot during the shooting. So we had our first actual rough cut of the film I want to say less than five or six days after we wrapped. So that helped a lot. That really expedited the initial post process. Then from there me and Kamau worked together every day for a little less than 2 months. We did one day of re-shoots and then just edited around 18 to 20 hours a day between me and him. And I want to say we wrapped around mid September and had picture lock in the beginning of February so that would be about five months.

WOODY: In terms picture cutting, did you think that was about right?

TODD: I thought it was unbelievably fast. Our ethos during the whole process was that we were going to make the best movie possible and we’re not going to have any deadlines, festival or other. I worked at Sundance that year, so I was gone for a month doing that and then we did an initial round of ADR that took two weeks, so we had about a month and a half of that five months where we weren’t cutting at all. So technically it was really more like 3 1/2 months. And I thought for that, that’s just incredibly fast for a movie that going into it with as much improvisation as we did and also leaving ourselves as much exploration room as I needed to figure things out. I thought 3 1/2 months is pretty incredible to burn through and find the story that we did. That said though, keep in mind that Kamau and I were literally editing 18 to 20 hours every day during that period. So as far as actual hours go, it’s probably not too quick compared to a regular production, but as far as actual days go I thought it went pretty quickly.

WOODY: What format did you shoot?

TODD: We shot in HD. We used the Panasonic HVX and it is 720p and stereo sound and we used the 35mm adapter and shot most of the film with either the 35mm lens or a 50mm lens. Some of our close ups, especially the outdoor stuff, we used an 80 to kind of get the faces to pop out a little more. But a lot of that with the lenses works out because of the campus. (University of Missouri, the setting for “Box Elder”) My DP and I worked together a lot in preproduction talking about different styles and the kind of things I was interested in and the films that influenced me in general. He did a great job of understanding what about those films I liked and then we were intuitively able to create similar things. So in a weird way there is not a lot of rip off shots if you will. They’re very kind of (Jim Jarmusch) “Jarmusian” and Wes Anderson like with the relation between characters and space and settings. I think it helps tell the story because the whole idea was keeping the campus as a character in a way.

WOODY: How did you do your production audio?

TODD: That’s a really good question. We had the wonderful Jesse “C-Nug” Brown who was mixing and doing boom at the same time.

WOODY: Wow, that’s always a challenge.

TODD: (Laughs) It really is. This was his first feature as well and so it was a nightmare for him but he was a trooper and he did an unbelievable job. Primarily we used a Sennheiser Shotgun and some wireless lavs as well. For a little while we were using plate mics just to get production audio around the set, but mostly we just shot with a shotgun, a boom, and tried to keep the sound as natural as possible. Our production audio was easily the weakest element going into post and that was primarily because of my inexperience, again technical inexperience. And for C-Nug this is his first feature and his first time working with any of us, so he didn’t know anybody on set. It was very hard for him to kind of step up and say “hey guys I think you need to do this” or “I think we need to do that.” He did try to do this and unfortunately we didn’t listen as much as we should have. Thank God he was a trooper about that because a lot of people know they’re right and they should if they know their job, and you’re telling them to shut up or don’t worry about it. They will just storm off or get grumpy or say “I do not want to work with these people.” C-Nug was just like you know “it’s cool, let’s do it your way, we will worry about it later.” And he never once in post when we had sound issues was like, “I told you so”. You never heard him say that one time. It was always “what can I do to help.” So we got really, really lucky to have a personality like that on set even though we kind of did not utilize him as skillfully as we should have.

WOODY: Prior to “Box Elder” had you had any post audio experience?

TODD: No I didn’t. Most of the time whoever is [picture] editing for me would do all of that for me. It’s a very interesting thing – I’ll say three of my four shorts the DP ended up doing the editing and did a lot of the sound design and the other one the editor did a lot of the sound design and sound effects and cleaned it up. I never recognized this until looking back, but in almost everyone of those processes I was in the editing room you know like twenty-four hours a day being a partner in every decision until – “now I’ll just clean up the sound and we will look at again it tomorrow.” And I can’t believe that I never once considered what “cleaning up the sound” was. It’s pretty amazing especially knowing that I would break and I would go and stay up for twelve hours and think about a new scene to shoot and the editor would stay up for twelve hours “cleaning up the sound” but I never connected on how intensively he was working on that. So my lack of experience in post sound definitely crippled the film a little bit.

WOODY: So when you began to focus in more on just the audio were you horrified, did it open more doors for you or did you see it as a chance to change the pacing or to help scenes in a way that you hadn’t prior?

TODD: That’s very interesting. In every other facet of the post-production phase I did a good job in making sure to stay creatively thinking “how can we make the film better.” How can we take this and creatively either fix it and find a creative solution or use it to our advantage and to the film’s advantage. But at that point with the audio we had tried so many things and failed so many times that I had become more lenient there than ever before. It’s either – we are going to try and fix this and get it the way I want it or we are just going to bite the bullet and do what we have to do. And that was my attitude going in. But then after working on it and focusing on it and realizing the possibilities that were still there even though we were in a time crunch, it opened up to me – we are still creating a film here! What I really look forward to on the next one is doing the post edit for the sound as a whole new other edit again. For first time filmmakers, especially in a time crunch and budget crunch, it’s a tough thing to remember that you’re not just fixing the mistakes, you’re supposed to be creative. I looked at it more as a “mistake fixing” scenario than a creative one.

WOODY: Kurosawa said something like, “Cinematic sound does not merely add to, but multiplies two or three times, the effect of the image.”

TODD: That is great. That is really good. I’m probably going to steal that.

WOODY: If you were advising other first time feature directors, do you have any advice either about the production audio or the post audio process?

TODD: For post audio I would say take half of your post budget and dedicate it to post audio. And that’s a minimum. And I would also say take half of the time you’ve allotted for post and dedicate that to post audio.

WOODY: You know a lot of people will think you’re crazy for saying that. (Both laugh)

TODD: Here’s the thing. We had a production with “Box Elder” that was the epitome of “we have one less day” or “one less … thing” than we need. And that said, throughout the whole process, from every aspect, from money to time to resources, everything, the only thing that we actually ran short on was time and money for post audio. We got away with everything else. Everything else we found a creative solution to make to make it work, make it fit. I would much rather error on the side of having too much time and too much money for post audio verses the other. I don’t think you would waddle around if you had extra time. You are already so close to the finish line. And my advice regarding the production audio is, and this is so repetitive because everyone will tell you this, but it’s the most important thing in the world. I was very well liked by my actors and my crew was very supportive but the biggest aspect of my production for me was to protect the actors, to make sure they had an atmosphere and an energy where they could create and people weren’t inhibiting that or offending them or making them feel uncomfortable or make them feel like they had to perform. And a lot of that was because of the natural energy and the creative energy and what not. But I think that the sound person, whoever is doing production sound should be defended and respected by the director in the exact same regard. Especially because it is so often that the sound person is looked at as the evil guy on set because “oh no, we didn’t get it because of this or that” or “I’m not quite ready yet because I’ve been waiting on you guys and now I have to start doing my job.” It’s definitely a job that everybody on set doesn’t really take into consideration and it’s so important. So one thing I will be doing next time out is being as conscious of my production sound person as I am with my actors and just as protective. You know C-Nug was amazing – being on set in his first feature, he doesn’t know anybody there, and it compromises that situation and makes it so much more pressure filled. I really feel like it is the filmmaker’s obligation, it was my obligation to say “Are we okay? Is the refrigerator on?” Because that way if he says “no, we need fifteen minutes” I’m on the hook. I’m the guy who makes that decision and says “you know what guys, I know we want to shoot this, we want to make the day but we need to wait fifteen minutes to get the sound in.” He’s not being the bad guy, I am. I think that is part of what being a filmmaker is all about, being the bad guy, making sure that you are the one making those decisions. Because everyone who is there, they showed up to make your film. They don’t care if they have to wait fifteen minutes – they came that day to do what you needed them to do. They didn’t come that day to do what C-Nug needed them to do. That’s not his responsibility, its mine. So I think the biggest thing for any future filmmaker is to make sure you are responsible for your sound person. That is totally your responsibility. And that was like the biggest thing that I learned- because I did not recognize that at all – I didn’t defend him at all and that should have been an absolute priority. It’s incredible to think that like I was so protective of these actors because it was their first time, I never once considered to think about that for the sound person. Yeah man what a trooper, what a guy.

WOODY: So now you’ve packed up your film and you’ve taken your show on the road. You are driving around the country, bringing your film to the masses. How did the actual tour concept come about?

TODD: I originally came up with the concept before I was actually writing the script, or it was right around that period of time. It was primarily based around my experience that I had with booking bands and concerts in Columbia, the college town I went to for school. I had a lot of success with graduate marketing and e-marketing and event planning and event coordination and event booking. I didn’t have any background in that so I was using a lot of hustling, just kind of intuitive skills to make that happen. I felt like if I could do that with bands in a small college town then I could probably do it with movies. Not too different of a business. And when I started to explore that, the difference between the two of them I found was that it really wasn’t that different of a business model. It was just that the movie industry on the distribution side of things is a lot more of a mess than the concert industry. So in actuality the situation is more stacked in my advantage to book a film in a town and make it an event than it is with a concert, which is really eerie to think about because it is such a different trade off on the financial side of things. But based on that I had a pretty large social network in different college towns and I did a lot of road trips, so I knew the country fairly well and felt that I had the right guys in place to come along with me to make it all happen, so it was kind of fundamentally based on that. And also at the South by Southwest festival there was a panel that Richard Linklater was on. It was right after he had sold “Fast Food Nation”, and they were asking him the things he was shocked by as far as new trends in filmmaking were concerned. The questions were geared towards digital cinema and how did he think technology has affected cinema. He said how he was shocked by how technology wasn’t changing cinema. He was blown away that when he sold “Slacker” at Sundance in ’91, I think it was, the same person who had sales rep’d for him then was his sales rep when he sold “Fast Food Nation.” He was just blown away that every other aspect of the industry had changed ten times over in the last sixteen some odd years but not with the infrastructure – those same people were still doing the same jobs. There just had been no change what so ever. And that to me was like, if this guy thinks that there is a problem then I am not crazy and maybe, just maybe, we have not a solution but the beginning of something. So that was just a real source of inspiration.

WOODY: And how has the tour experience been?

TODD: The tour went pretty well man, it was pretty crazy. It was a good venture. We ended up showing the film in a little over thirty-three theaters, which is a good amount for any independent film and ended up selling about nine thousand six hundred tickets or a little more than that. So, yeah, we did well with that. With that said, the whole idea of the first tour was to kind of make it a beta stage for the distribution model itself. We took a lot of risks and tried every trick in the book at cost effectiveness. We ended up spending more money than we should have, but through trial and error we made a little bit of money. We need to make a lot more, but it was good. It was defiantly an incredible thing. It was amazing to see, you know, a couple of hundred or so odd people in the theater every night watching your movie. The great thing is getting to know your fans. These people become zealots because it’s your audience and you’re doing a very direct marketing, doing a niche-oriented first hand, person-to-person target marketing. You’re picking up people who you think and kind of know are going to love the film and getting them in there and knowing that they’re going to love it is a very inspiring thing.

WOODY: So how many times did you end up watching the movie?

TODD: You know its funny. I watched it all the way through at start for I don’t know, I didn’t get sick of it until maybe half way through the tour, then I would kind of watch it in parts. Then it got so busy towards the middle of the tour that during the screenings I would be working outside the theater still trying to set things up for the rest of the tour, so I ended up not watching it for about a month and a half. Then I kind of missed it. So the last few weeks I started watching it again, which is kind of nice.

WOODY: Sometimes when I re-watch a picture I spent a lot of time with after a break I often find that I take something new and different away from it.

TODD: Totally, see that’s the best part. That was the first experience for that with me finally with the film, to see it with new eyes for the first time at the end of the tour, which is really nice.

WOODY: Many filmmakers make their project and just shop and shop and shop it hoping a sales rep or distributor will pick it up. I really admire your proactive approach to getting your picture out to audiences.

TODD: I think a lot of filmmakers and not just filmmakers there are a lot of people in the industry in general, I think it might be more of a producer/investor thing than a filmmaker thing, and they don’t make content for themselves and they definitely don’t make content to story-tell. They don’t make the content to show it to people, they make the content to either make a profit or build or progress a career in some way shape or form. So then the idea of making a film, then the plan is to sell it and the investors will make money and the producer will have a blue star on their resume and the filmmaker will get to make another film and everyone is happy. That’s the goal. Where as with us, I already had an investor group interested in making my next film before I had even started shooting this one. There was no pressure what so ever to try and get my next film made. I had no interest in progressing a career and neither did Brock [Williams - Producer of Box Elder]. We just wanted to make a film so that we could show it to people. I think that’s the other thing that didn’t necessarily play into the actual distribution model but the thing that kept it alive the whole time from like November 2005 or whatever to actually touring it, the fact that no one got in the way of saying, you know, maybe we shouldn’t tour. It’s just that we all wanted to make this film to show it.

WOODY: So what’s on tap for the next Todd Sklar project?

TODD: (Laughs) Well we are touring again in the fall. We’re going to the west coast then we are touring in the east coast and we are going to make a documentary while on tour this time. That’s going on and then summer of next year the plan is to make another film. I have a script that I wrote before “Box Elder” that’d kind of a little bigger in scale that I want to make going across the U.S. and kind of like a little road movie and hopefully a with a lot of the same people.

WOODY: Can’t wait to see it.

Jackie took time out from her crazy schedule to talk with us about the art and process of dialog editing. She is also an accomplished pianist and composer.

Woody: How did you first get into dialog editing?

Jackie: I was just a musician and I wanted to do something else. My major had been film and I thought, okay, well, maybe music editing because you know, I know music and I like computers (Laughs). How’s that for a brilliant way to get into something? Then I went over to Digital Sound Works where a friend of mine had sent me and they said “well we don’t do music editing here, we do dialog editing, but, you know, we could teach you.” And they just hired me as an assistant dialog editor, showed me how to do all the assistant dialog editing stuff and from there they taught me dialog editing. It’s just unbelievable that they picked me over other people who went to school for four years to do to the exact same thing. They picked me with no experience because they wanted to teach me from scratch their way, you know.

Woody: Right.

Jackie: And because, you know, I’m a nice person (Laugh). There’s that of course. (Laughs)

Woody: How long does a feature dialog edit take?

Jackie: Well it’s pretty standard. I mean, it’s generally about two weeks. This is for smaller, Indie pictures, major motion pictures can take quite a bit longer because of picture changes.

Woody: For what length picture?

Jackie: An hour and a half, 90 minutes.

Woody: A ten day edit?

Jackie: Yeah. I mean if they throw extra things at you like, I don’t know, finding alts or whatever, that’s the assistant’s job anyway, then you know then things can start to take longer. But generally for your basic dialog edit, removing the PFX (Production Effects) and laying out the tracks properly for the mixer, yeah it’s a couple weeks.

Woody: So what is your process when you start?

Jackie: The process. My first step is, I should say is to watch the picture, but it’s not because I get too eager. What I do is remove all the stuff that doesn’t need to be in there, like if they give you stereo tracks there’s always one track that sounds terrible. So you remove whatever is the excess. Sometimes your stereo tracks are needed because one is on one person and one is on the other and it’s an ambient and you need them both. But a lot of the time you’ve got to get rid of all the excess.

Jackie: Then the first thing I do is delete all the automation that the picture editor has created. I do a universal read “off” for all automation. And there may be some choices that the picture editor made, like in this last movie I did somebody was beating somebody up and the production sound slowly faded out as the music came up. So it’s good to know that, but that’s on the guide track, I don’t need to see his automation in order to know that happens, I see that from the guide track.

That’s one of the rules – the guide track is king. Because that’s the decision that the director has made. They said, okay, this is what we like. So if you don’t hear it in the guide it doesn’t go on the edit, even if it makes sense or vice versa.

Woody: What next?

Jackie: I lay out the tracks –one, two, three, four and five- to make sense for the mixer. For example – you have “Scene One C” all on one track cause it’s all from one angle, so it’s all one particular sound. You have “Scene One A” on the next track which is all from the close up. And you have “Scene One F” which is a distant shot or whatever all on a different track so that the mixer can do his one mix on each track. (Laughs) I assume that’s what you guys do. That’s what I was taught to do (Laugh).

Woody: That’s the right approach. You consider track management as an important part of the job?

Jackie: I think whatever we have to do to make it easier for the mixer the better, because the mixer and the mixing stage is what costs money. So whatever we can do to save time on the mixing stage is what our job is. Cleaning things up, making things uniform, making things easy to see and read and understand for the mixer I think is the most important part.

Woody: Do you bring your own materials to add to the edit?

Jackie: I have a little CD of fills (roomtones) I bring that I keep adding to if I find something brilliantly clean and wonderful, which is rare. And that is another whole issue that is very important. Roomtone is key. I would say if you’re not going to record room tone, don’t bother recording the movie. Here’s the thing, even if you have perfect sound recorded on set, you still need room tone because stuff does get pulled out even if your production dialog is perfectly recorded.

You know, you listen to any room and you think, oh that’s just quiet, but really, it’s just so different from every other room. It’s unbelievable how I can take room tone from my little folder that sounds like it might match the other room and I cut it in and it is completely different. There’s no way to match exactly any room without recording that room itself. The only way around that is to find enough of the real room tone and piece it all together because you don’t have one big long piece. You piece it all together and then create one big long fade into one of your own room tones where you actually have a 10 second piece. And do it subtly enough. Room tone is the key to a clean edit, for sure.

You need it for the basic edit, you need it for the PFX track when you pull stuff out, and you need it for the ADR when you pull that production dialog out.

Woody: For someone who may not know – what exactly is PFX?

Jackie: Any production audio without dialog, people opening and closing doors, walking, sitting, putting their coffee cup down, even breathing, panting, if they’re running around or whatever it may be, all of that needs to go on a PFX track cause it makes for a better M & E (Music and Effects Track) in the long run. If it’s something that they’re going to have to replace with Foley, if it’s an action that you actually need to see sound for, yeah, that needs to go on an M & E because it’s the real sound. You don’t want to have to Foley absolutely everything just for the M & E.

Woody: That sounds like it’s a huge part of the dialog edit.

Jackie: That is the most tedious part of the job. And that is actually where room tone becomes most important because you tend to pull out chunks and you know you do have to back fill it because at some point they may choose Foley over the production effects at which point they won’t have any sound in the background. If they use production effects of the PFX track, great, you’re all fine, but you need to back fill it anyway because during the mix they may go – “you know what, I like the footsteps from the Foley people better. ”

Backfilling means putting in room tone so that the dialog track plays without the replaced dialog or the PFX – seamless, as if nothing was removed. And the important part about PFX is you have to ramp in and ramp out of the PFX tracks, you can’t just pull out the handles. If you put the coffee cup clanking sound onto the PFX track and then simply pull out the handles you’ll have the same sound on the PFX track that you have on the dialog track and they are going to phase against each other. So you have to find different sounds to ramp in and out of the PFX track or out of the dialog track so that you do not have the same sound overlapping each other. Cause then you end up phasing tracks now playing together and then the mixer gets really mad at you (Laughs).

Woody: So now we know that a dialog editor pulls the production effects onto it’s own track the PFX track What then is an “X” track?

Jackie: An X track is something that you need to save, but you’re probably not going to use. It’s where the bad sound goes. And if you desperately have to go back to it, it’s still there in the session, so you just pull it back up from the X track. You’re trying to save the mixer time. You’ve pretty much decided that it’s no good, but the director may go “oh that’s a horrible ADR line, what’s production sound like on that” and they can pull it back up and say “here’s production.”

Woody: So besides sounds you may not use the X track contains the production audio of lines that have been ADR’d?

Jackie: I prefer to have a nice clean dialog edit before I ever make pulls for ADR because a lot of times they will put back the production and blow of the ADR. So you want the edit nice and clean and then pull out the production tracks for ADR and backfill once you get the list. I end up collaborating a lot with the ADR guy because he often asks me if there happens to be any alts in the session or how’s this or that or the other thing really sound. He’s judging the ADR often times off of the guide track and most of the time the guide track is a compilation of those two stereo tracks. He is hearing stuff like radio mics, phasing and stuff like that, but one or the other track might be perfectly clean. I’ll call him up and say you know this line, that radio noise is not on the other track and it sounds fine. I’ll pretty much just get a list from him and then call him back and go “why is this line needed, because it’s fine.” Or I’ll also say why not this line, because it sucks. But I’ll wait ‘til I get the list before I start annoying him. (Laughs.)

Woody: Any advice for new directors?

Jackie: The problem starts from the very first day of shooting with the sound person on set and how the sound recording is approached on set. I think it’s worth it to spend more money on the dudes on set recording the sound and to make sure he knows exactly what he’s doing. I can only tell them that it sucks after it’s been recorded, I can’t tell them how to make it better. And room tone! Those two things: a real sound dude and room tone.

Woody: What is it that you love about dialog editing?

Jackie: It caters to my personality of liking a challenge. You get this thing, you see the diamond in the rough and you get to chip away until it’s a diamond. You get to clean stuff up and make it beautiful. How bad is that?

Woody: That’s perfect.

Jackie: And I get to work at home.