Behind the Seen Page 26
Despite their notes and comments, Weinstein and Pollack agree that this assembly, with some changes still under discussion, should have its first theatrical showing at the National Film Theatre in London to an invited audience of Minghella’s film friends and associates, and then in New York for a similar Miramax-invited group. These screenings will be held in mid-June. The picture editing of this version must therefore be completed, or “locked,” the first week of June to allow one week for a temporary sound mix to be done.
For the next four days, Pollack stays in London to go through the entire film scene by scene with Minghella and Murch, discussing and trying out ideas. As Murch says later about Pollack, “I have a lot of time for Sydney. It was intense, but enjoyable. He’s got a very good bedside manner about him.”
May 11, 2003, Murch’s Journal
Working with Sydney: got halfway through reel eight, the raiders arrive at Sara’s.
This is the week that we need the beta of FCP and figure out an exit strategy. Canadian geese honking overhead as I walk home at night.
Within the month, the crucial period begins for sound editing. Murch, Cullen, and the guys at DigitalFilm Tree have had their eyes on XML (eXtensible Markup Language), which may allow a developer to create just the custom software they need to move sound files without any clumsy reformatting or file conversions. Although Cullen now has the upgraded Final Cut Pro application, version 4.0, on his workstation, it doesn’t contain such a plug-in. And up to now Apple has not been willing to let Murch and Cullen have a trial version of XML, even though DFT believes it will probably work based on the beta testing they are doing. Murch sent emails about XML to Hudson and Meaney at Apple, and to their boss, Will Stein, and to Steve Jobs. Up to now, there have been no replies.
John Taylor, a Final Cut editor working with DFT at this time, is in email contact with Sean Cullen about the sound transfer issue. Taylor confirms that Brooks Harris, an original designer of the OMF protocol, can create what Sean needs with the XML plug-in, if Apple gives permission: “It becomes more of a question for Ramy on how to make this a go.”
Ramy gets in touch with Brian Meaney at Apple to make a request on Walter and Sean’s behalf: “They will be starting to hand over to sound department in two weeks. Again, this is a critical juncture. Can we authorize Brooks to see what he can discover/do with an XML export from our Beta FCP 4? Brooks is willing to allocate time to do this.”
Meaney does not want to jump the gun on an Apple developers’ conference on June 23 when XML will be officially unveiled. Meaney writes to Ramy: “There is no way to do anything before the conference... I’m afraid the answer is still no, as we do not have the resources to do this. I know that it all sounds very enticing, but really don’t have the ability to do this. I would not recommend waiting or scheduling anything based upon things that are not finished being developed, there are too many unknowns in that process.”
Cullen must move forward and prepare sound files for the sound editors using the clumsy Titan system translation. He and Ramy Katrib decide to make one more attempt to convince Apple to provide the XML plug-in. On May 14 Cullen writes a three-page background email to Ramy with all the information Ramy might need to take another run at Apple. Cullen summarizes the set-up, workflow, and achievements editing Cold Mountain on Final Cut Pro. He concludes with a plea that Ramy can pass on to Hudson, Meaney, and their boss, the director of professional applications at Apple, Will Stein: “It takes days to rebuild the sequence in ProTools when it could take less than an hour. If we had some idea about the timeframes involved for XML output: weeks, months or years, we could start making educated guesses about how to proceed. Without any hint of information, it leaves us out in the cold and we had hoped that Apple would provide a little more warmth. We are not asking Apple to take responsibility for any aspect of our show, we are only looking for information. We are not looking for a scapegoat, we are looking for a partner.”
Ramy and Zed later describe the ironic situation DFT faced, since they already had the XML plug-in from Apple on their computers. It was included in the FCP 4 beta test version Apple provided to them. One of DFT’s roles as an Apple development site is to help test just such new software. DFT could have emailed a file with the XML plug-in to London, surreptitiously, in a matter of seconds. “Instead we basically played it above board,” Ramy says later. “We appealed to Apple at the highest level—just short of Steve—saying we would like to have your permission to explore this new functionality with Brooks Harris, who’s world class, renowned.”
Murch keeps his eye on the XML issue and follows the email thread. For him and Cullen the sound transfer problem is the last Final Cut Pro hurdle standing between them and the finish line. Perhaps they will be able to get there without Apple’s help after all? Nevertheless, Murch offers to contact Will Stein.
Composer Gabriel Yared began working on music for Cold Mountain during production in 2002.
In emails to Walter, Ramy expresses his anxiety about pushing forward with the XML solution in the face of Apple’s discouragement: “Knowing what Apple has done to those who’ve broken their nondisclosure agreements has me concerned about what they will do to our Tree. They’re in a position to slice our throat regardless of how good-looking we are.”
Meanwhile, a new creative demand arises in the Old Chapel. It’s time that music for Cold Mountain be further developed. Composer Gabriel Yared—like Murch, a veteran of The English Patient and The Talented Mr. Ripley—had earlier prepared sketches of musical ideas and given them to Murch for placeholders. This is the best way to work with music while editing movies, since anything composed, orchestrated, and performed too early in the process is unlikely to fit the rhythmic needs of the picture, which is ever-changing. Whole scenes and sequences fall away in the early part of editing so it’s a waste of resources to prepare music too soon. But there comes a point when an assembly is far enough along that scoring and recording can safely begin. Minghella will work closely with Yared on the music over the next six months, spend many long days in Yared’s studio generating completely usable music tracks from samples, and attend the final recording sessions with the London Symphony Orchestra at nearby Abbey Road Studios. Minghella is himself a musician, a singer-songwriter who performed and recorded as a young man before getting involved in theatre and film. When he and Yared get to work, it’s a deep collaboration—more so, perhaps, even than Minghella’s relationship with Murch because of all the facets in filmmaking, music is Minghella’s métier.
May 15, 2003, Murch’s Journal
A beautiful morning. Another backwards-walking person: a girl this time, going up Primrose Hill. Gabriel is hungry for Anthony and can’t write music without Anthony being there. An eclipse of the moon tonight at 3am.
Murch, too, feels strongly about music. He is the one who has to braid the music with his edits, and music choices shape a film’s personality. Moreover, Murch can make magic happen at the intersection of film and music by working a music cue into an existing scene so it fits comfortably. He will mix and match musical moments to support a sequence; or even steal music designated for one scene and find a better home for it elsewhere in the film. As lead sound mixer, Murch will also be handling duties with music volume, EQ, and its blending with other sound elements. Murch knows that writing and recording music, especially large orchestral sounds, takes time.
Murch begins anticipating the first temporary sound mix, which is only a few weeks away. He has kept his ears open to what the sound editors are doing. As a former sound editor himself, it’s second nature. He sends the sound department his revised scenes for sprucing up as soon as they become available. They send him back QuickTime files with rough drafts of their work. He incorporates those files into his Final Cut Pro system and links his version to their new soundtracks. So it goes, back and forth between Murch and the sound department, all aiming at the day when Walter will sit down at the sound mixing console. By that time he will have previewed and man
y of the key sound elements, including the music, so he can concentrate solely on blending them together into an artistic whole—itself a hugely demanding job.
A full-length motion picture has thousands of sound effects. An axiom for sound editors, as for picture editors, is that their work should be invisible. Moviegoers should only rarely notice a specific sound. Instead, the cumulative effect of the soundtrack should take the audience further inside the movie. Sound editors and sound designers describe their task as “sculpting” an audio environment. And if a particular sound isn’t already in their library of effects, sound editors will either go into the field and record it live, or recreate it using whatever object or tool gets the job done. Murch, like most of his colleagues, does whatever is necessary to capture a particular audio moment, and is wildly inventive at coming up with the proper facsimiles to create it if the real thing does not exist or doesn’t sound quite right for the movies.
One sound cue in the first part of Cold Mountain is a particular challenge. Having just arrived in Cold Mountain, Ada Monroe takes delivery of her much-loved piano. It arrives from Charleston in the back of a horse-drawn wagon, and Ada sits alongside it as the instrument is jostled up the road to Black Cove Farm. She stops the wagon at the Swanger Farm where she sees Inman at work, as she had requested, plowing Swanger’s fields as a favor. As the wagon jerks to a stop, the piano emits a clunking sound of jumbling notes. “That’s a fine-sounding thing,” Sally Swanger says sardonically. Murch is not happy with the sound the piano is making.
Ada brings her beloved piano to Cold Mountain.
May 16, 2003, Murch’s Journal
The piano sound doesn’t work: “that’s a fine sounding thing.” It sounds like somebody is playing the piano badly. What would work best? A chattering kind of sound, with the hammers loose on the strings, dampened a bit. Bolt a paint shaker to the frame of a piano and let it go.
Sound editor Martin Cantwell eventually found a wrecked piano, extracted the harp, and coiled and uncoiled a thick rope across the strings. It gives a proper soft dissonance without sounding as if someone was playing the keys randomly.
Now that the first screening deadline is set, Final Cut Pro starts acting up. In part it’s a logical consequence of having a more evolved show for Final Cut to digest. The assembly now has more of Walter’s color corrections to the picture and his fine-tuned adjustments to the soundtracks. In a May 17 email to Ramy and to Aurora Video Systems, which provided the circuit card to digitize the video, Murch writes, “I am going through a bad patch right now with crashes—at least a couple a day—from trimming with color correction. The amount of color-corrected clips is increasing as we get more ‘presentational’ with the film. So this was always a problem lurking in the background but now it has come into the foreground. Especially foreground when Anthony and Sydney Pollack are in the room with me.”
“The Aurora guys were great,” Sean recalls later. “After a few phone calls and some late hours on their part, they fixed the problem, made it go away completely.” Aurora made a new software build of their driver to help reduce crashing with color-corrected clips when using Final Cut Pro’s trim window. Not only that, but they quickly posted the Cold Mountain fixes on their website for everyone to use.
The following week the other producers, Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa, arrive at Old Chapel to screen the assembly along with music producer T-Bone Burnett, who, with Minghella, had recorded period music prior to filming. Berger and Yerxa spend the next three days with Murch and Minghella going through the show scene by scene, just as Pollack had ten days earlier: critiquing the film, providing notes, and having Murch try out new things, such as having Oakley’s dying scene after the battle play out in real time, instead of intercutting it with the scene where Ada plays the piano as Inman plows Sally Swanger’s field.
During his second day working with Berger and Yerxa, Murch realizes Ramy has not replied to his last two emails. This is uncharacteristic.
* * *
Subject: All right?
Date: May 20, 2003
From: Walter Murch
To: Ramy Katrib
Dear Ramy:
Haven’t heard any answer from last two emails I sent you. Is everything all right?
Concerned in London,
W.
* * *
“There was only one time where I exited the scene for a few days,” Ramy recalls later. “And Walter sent me an email saying, ‘Is anything wrong?’ It’s almost like he sensed it. He picked it up. I never said anything, that my dad had passed away. I didn’t make a big deal about it.
“I wrote back that I was with him at his deathbed for the last week,” Ramy continues. “He writes a response which really helped me process it. I got blown away by this. It’s just something I’ll never forget from Walter, of all people. To even take the time. It wasn’t just taking the time, he related it to his experience.”
* * *
Subject: The lens
Date: May 20, 2003
From: Walter Murch
To: Ramy Katrib
Dear Ramy:
Truly sorry to hear about your father.
My dad died many years ago, when I was 24, and it still continues to hit me in unexpected ways, 36 years later.
The image to keep in mind is a slide projector with the lens suddenly removed. The slide is still in the gate, and the image is still projecting but in a diffuse way. Our bodies are lenses that allow “us-ness” to achieve a particular focus and presence on the screen of this world. But the slide—the soul, the spirit—is still where it was, throwing out its particular colors and tonalities, and tinting the objects that its light falls upon, waiting for a new lens.
When your “eyes” accustom themselves to the lack of sharpness, you will be able to discern the familiar shapes and presences.
Love,
Walter.
* * *
A week later Zed informs Walter that DFT has not heard back from Will Stein about the XML plug-in request. Murch quickly sends an email to Stein—himself.
* * *
Subject: FCP 4
Date: May 26, 2003
From: Walter Murch
To: Will Stein
Dear Will:
We have had successful screenings (plasma screen of direct FCP output) for Harvey Weinstein of Miramax (studio) and Sydney Pollack (producer). We are now headed for an official digital-image showing to Miramax in New York towards the end of June, followed by a 35mm audience preview in New York on July 20.
As happy as we are with FCP, we are still searching for a way to convey our sequence and media information to the sound department in a quick and complete way that includes all the metadata and that can be accomplished in hours and not days.
**To that end, I would like to ask your permission to allow DigitalFilm Tree (Ramy Katrib) to show the XML output of FCP 4 beta to Brooks Harris, one of the original designers of the OMF export protocol. Brooks feels he can put together a utility for us that will speed our plow, so to speak, in the next few weeks.**
Thank you in advance for the help you might give us,
Sincerely,
Walter M.
* * *
Stein relies promptly to Murch the next day, but the news is not good. He takes a firm position, saying the XML “is not as far advanced as the rest of the (FCP 4.0) application... it has known problems at this time that will prevent Brooks from being successful.” Stein goes on to acknowledge Murch is stuck with “an inefficiency... the current work-around process for audio is tedious, but I’m hoping it won’t slow you down too much. This was the one area we were most concerned about when you started Cold Mountain, and the biggest obstacle we were aware of for using FCP in a major film production. The XML interface should allow us to clean up this workflow in the future [probably July], but the timing is unfortunate for your current project. Best regards—Will.”
Murch is not easily discouraged. He sends an email back to Will Stein appealing the
decision: “I appreciate the dilemma and understand your position, but I would ask you to please reconsider... We have gotten this far—ten months from the start of shooting—with very little in the way of hand-holding, and I wouldn’t want to stumble unnecessarily at this late stage... Please would you see if there is some way to grant my request.”
But Murch doesn’t stop there. He sends Steve Jobs a long email, restating the Cold Mountain update he provided Will Stein, and informing Jobs of Stein’s decision to turn down the XMl request. “Thank you in advance for any help you might give us,” Murch concludes, “and congratulations on the thorough reworking of FCP in version 4.”
Meanwhile, there’s a film that needs Murch’s attention. Along with music, sound effects, producer’s notes, and preparing to lock the picture for the June screenings, it’s time for Murch to take up a new post-production task: visual effects. Although it’s a period film, Cold Mountain, like most major films, requires a number of computer-generated special effects to either fix problems with the images, or supplement what’s there. Not enough stars are visible in a nighttime shot: add stars. A modern-day sailboat appears, a speck on the horizon in Charleston Bay: remove it digitally. When the Home Guard garrotes Esco Swanger, the fake sword can be seen bending slightly in the last few frames: touch it up digitally. Inman reaches the snowy ridge above Cold Mountain town and in his close-up we ought to see his breath: draw it in. And so on. One of Murch’s jobs is to spot, or call out, each shot that needs a visual effect. Dennis Lowe is the visual effects supervisor; he was on location in Romania offering advice and will produce the final effects, doing many of them himself.