In this episode, (Part 1 of 2), Neil and Jason talk to the Oscar-winning Production Sound Mixer Simon Hayes about his demanding work on location, and deep-dive into Simon’s philosophy and approach to modern location recording techniques, the importance of a fully-digital signal chain, the understanding he establishes at the beginning of each project with directors, and the very different considerations he applies to recording and mixing musicals such as Les Miserables, Cats and Wicked; action films such as James Bond’s No Time To Die, X-Men: First Class and Guardians of the Galaxy, and the refreshing nature of shooting low-budget, single camera productions, epitomised by the spirit of his early work on Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels…
It’s a compelling and unique insight into film sound for experts, novices and movie aficionados, alike.
(Left to right: Simon Hayes, Dr. Neil Hillman and Jason Nicholas)
About the presenters:
You can find more about Simon and his work here: https://www.simonhayes.com
Details about Neil and Jason’s work as dialogue editors and mixers and how to contact them is here: https://www.theaudiosuite.com
Details of Neil’s 1-to-1 and Coaching Programmes for ambitious media professionals are available at:
https://www.drneilhillman.com and https://soundproducer.com.au/coaching and www.soundformovingpictures.com
Technical notes:
Written, produced and presented by Jason Nicholas and Dr Neil Hillman – IMDb
Recorded using the Squadcast remote recording system
Programme edited by Jason Nicholas
All original motion picture soundtrack clips are licensed through SceneClipper Inc.
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Transcript:
Announcer Rosie
You’re listening to the Apple and Biscuit Show with Jason Nicholas and Dr. Neil
Hillman.
Neil Hillman
Hello and a very warm welcome to the Apple and Biscuit Show. I’m Dr. Neil Hillman.
Jason Nicholas
And I’m Jason Nicholas.
Neil Hillman
If you’re a first -time listener, it’s probably useful for you to know that Jason and I are two seasoned sound professionals working in the film and division industry, and the purpose of our podcast is to share the many ways that sound is used in moving picture productions, to entertain, inform, educate and engage. We invite guests to appear on our podcast with this intentionally wide brief in mind, but it’s also a great excuse for us to meet up with colleagues we greatly admire and have them join with us in conversation, because how they utilise sound in their work interests, intrigues and inspires us as fellow professionals.
And we like to think that all of this helps us to bring a different approach to our sound and sound design work and not least of all thanks to our backgrounds. Whilst we’re both practitioners who spent years carrying out location sound recording, dialogue editing and being re -recording mixers, we also have strong academic links to the topic of moving picture sound. Jason, with his scholarly interest in human psychology, and me with a research background in sound design and its effect on human emotions. Our call to action is to create awareness of the powerful and often underestimated role that sound plays in modern moving picture production. And in doing so, we also aim to foster a genuine and ongoing connection with our listeners.
Jason Nicholas
Hopefully the content of our podcast and the guests who join us will prove enlightening to anyone with an interest in the medium and the part that sound plays in filmmaking regardless of their level of experience. Maybe you’re a student just embarking on your studies, an industry newcomer or you’re already an experienced professional. Maybe you just love movies. Wherever you join us from you’re welcome along and as always we know that there’ll be plenty that we can learn from our guests.
Neil Hillman
Today on the show we’re delighted to welcome the Oscar -winning production sound mixer Simon Hayes. Simon won his Academy Award in 2013 for his remarkable recording work on location for ‘Les Miserables’, for which director Tom Hooper insisted that the actor’s vocal performances should be as originally recorded on set and not subsequently overdubbed later in a post -production studio as is usually the case. Simon subsequently reprised this relationship with director Tom Hooper on the film version of the musical Cats. With an enviable CV and an impressive list of credits to his name, such as the cult hits ‘Lockstock’ and ‘Two Smoking Barrels’, ‘Shaun of the Dead’ and ‘Layer Cake’, musicals such as the previously mentioned ‘Les Miserables’ and ‘Cats’ as well as ‘Mama Mia’, he’s also been engaged to record action films such as Marvel’s ‘X -Men First Class’ and ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’, along with the ultimate engagement for any British production sound mixer, a James Bond film, ‘No Time to Die’. Now in the spirit of openness and knowing Simon as I do and being able to confirm that he is so one of the industry’s good guys, I’m embarrassed to admit to you all just how downright jealous I am of that James Bond credit. I was sure that was going to be my gig. Sadly not. Simon, welcome. Are you well and where do we find you?
Simon Hayes
I’m fantastically well and I’m honoured to be here. Thank you very much for inviting me on. I’m in London right now. I’m in a little break between two movies, which is rare for me, so I’m enjoying myself. I’m kind of getting my head around next year’s work, thinking about workflows. I’m training hard physically, and I’m just making sure that I’m moving forward rather than backwards.
Neil Hillman
All right. Excellent. I know that you push the envelope in all things. We’ll start with the technical bits of it, of you pushing the envelope, but I think most people would say that they understand what a sound recordist does, and maybe a few people might even go so far as to say that they understand what a production sound mixer does. But I’m pretty sure that many people would be surprised when they understand the full responsibility of your role. Would you be kind enough to provide an overview of your responsibilities and how that initial approach, for instance, to work on a certain production is made to you. Who contacts you?
Simon Hayes
It could be a number of people, but the jobs that I’m most like doing is when the director has asked specifically for me. That’s probably due to a previous experience and a collavoration that we’ve had. Those are the jobs that I’m most comfortable with, because I know that the director knows me, knows my work and feels comfortable handing over the reins and the responsibility for the production sound to me. But of course, there are some jobs that come in directly from a producer that I’ve worked with before or perhaps a unit production manager who say, “We had a great experience with Simon Hayes to a director, why don’t you consider him?” And that’s when I go in for an interview and sit down and have a conversation about what I would like to bring to the table, how I’d like to collavorate with them, what I think their story and their narrative deserves acoustically and how we should best move forward. I mean, there’s a complex range of things though that a production sound mixer is doing these days. It’s not just, you know, recording the dialogue, for instance, is it? The production sound mixer is responsible for everything acoustically during the making of the movie. Later on, a huge post -production sound team will join well not always huge it depends on the size of the movie but a lot of times on the movies that I’m doing a huge post production team will join but while we’re actually shooting the movie it’s myself and a small team that are completely responsible for every single acoustic decision every single sound mixing decision every single track laying decision on that movie set and So you know, it’s a very, very creative endeavour. I’m making hundreds of creative decisions every 10 minutes, and the director generally leaves me to make those decisions because they have so many other responsibilities to think about. And so they kind of say, OK, we’ve got Simon and his team in, let’s let them do their thing.
Neil Hillman
So how is your sound cart different on a typical shoot today compared to, and I’m guessing ‘Lock, Stock’ was a Naga and a Boom op? How are things different now?
Simon Hayes
Very, very different, but if I can just stop you there regarding lock, stock, we just moved on to that DAT tape. But effectively it was a very, very similar workflow, and when I say very similar, what I’m talking about is the fact that we are using linear tape and two tracks and now we are non-linear recording on to a hard drive and on a bog-standard movie we’re recording up to 32 tracks. I’d hope that on a on a dialogue movie without any music I’m probably not going to record more than 14 tracks generally but I’m on a machine that can cope with 32 tracks and I’m ready for absolutely anything. Where that differs completely, how the game has changed, is that when we were recording onto a single mono track, which was slightly before my time, when I started we went straight onto a stereo Nagra rather than a mono Nagra, but when I was assisting, mixers that I was working with were often working to a single track Nagra. And where we are now, where we’re recording onto 32 tracks, is that the mix track in those days was all sound post would get generally. And so the decisions that I was making on the set couldn’t be undone. Now, lots of people hark back to that as a golden era in production sound and they feel that it was wonderful that the decisions that they made on the set had to be used throughout the whole post-process and couldn’t be undone. I think that that’s a very, how can I say? I think it’s a very romantic view of our past. I think that where we are now, where my decisions can absolutely be undone and will be undone by every single dialogue editor, I think that’s a real positive for movie sound. because what we can never know on a film set is exactly how the picture editor is going to intercut scenes. You can never know how long they’re going to hold the wide shot. You can never know whether they’re going to intercut scenes in a completely different way than the original script depicted. In other words, going backwards and forwards between scene five and scene eight to tell a story. And when we’re recording on the movie set, we can never think about whether those atmosphere tracks are going to cut gently and in a sophisticated manner. And so by multi -tracking and by giving choices, what we enable a dialogue editor to do is to use far more production sound and to not have to go, OK, well, this is what I’ve got. And it doesn’t really work the way that this has been cut. So let’s go back and loop it. Let’s put let’s get the actors back on to an ADR [Automated Dialogue Replacement] stage I think that the fact that we can now obviously I’m very very proud of my mix But I think it would be completely egotistical to think that my mix is better than something that could be remixed through some studio monitors in the context of the picture that’s now been locked and with knowledge of how the sound effects and how the score are going to work with that dialogue.
Neil Hillman
I think both you and I agree on this. We’ve both written about the honesty and the artistic truthfulness of the original performance from the actors as opposed to ADR. And I guess what you’re doing then, what you’ve explained is that you’re giving the dialogue editor options to actually continue to use that original sound as opposed to as you said railroad in them down a road that says well You know we’ve gone as far as we can with this We can’t use this we are gonna have to replace the dialogue and gonna have to ADR it I mean to that end what benefits has the change from analogue to digital created? I know that you’ve very recently moved to a totally Digital chain now haven’t you from the actual microphone right the way through whereas before we were still at the very front end, the microphone was, if you like, the still, the non -digital part of the chain.
Simon Hayes
Every step that we make towards a fully digital chain, we can express ourselves more creatively by allowing more dynamic range. In the old days, when we were recording onto an analogue tape, the sound mixer would be constantly fading up whispers and fading down shouts. Now, that’s because you had a very, very narrow piece of dynamic range to sit into on an analogue tape. But what you’re in fact doing by fading and turning up and turning down levels is you are removing the dynamic range from an actor’s original performance. Now, the actor is using that dynamic range for a reason. If an actor whispers, it’s because they want to go low. If they shout very loud, it’s because they want to make an impact through shouting. And if you like equalizing those levels, normalizing those levels, what we’re doing is we are detracting from the performance that they’re wishing to give us. And so effectively, the primary positive from working in a digital chain is that we can allow that dynamic range to exist and we can leave that compression, if you like, to the re -recording mixer coupled with the director when they’re sitting in the final mix and when they are listening to the film in the context of a movie theatre and score and sound effects rather than me giving them something that I have equalized, if you like, from a level perspective. Now, there’s far more to it than that. If we’re to talk about where we have gone with digital microphones, what I’d like to say is this. There is a purity to digital and everything comes back to signal to noise. Everything that I do comes back to signal to noise and it sounds so simplistic, But there are two types of signal to noise. There is the signal to noise acoustically, and that depends on how close you can get your microphone. Whether it’s a lav or whether it’s a boom microphone, and I should explain to some of your listeners that a lav mic is a radio mic, if you like a personal mic that’s attached to their body, or if it’s a boom microphone that’s being held on a pole above their heads. So there’s an acoustic signal to noise. The closer you can get the mic to the person speaking, the less room and the less background noise, environmental background noise you’re going to be recording. But then also, there’s a secondary signal to noise, which isn’t quite so prevalent, but it’s the equipment signal to noise. And that is the actual vocal that you’re recording versus the amount of electronic noise, the self-noise of the equipment that’s recording it. And so the further we can go into the digital domain, the earlier we can get into digits, the less we’re going to have of that secondary electronic digital noise, the self-noise of the equipment that we’re using. And where are you now with that latest version of Sherp’s with their digital microphone? For the last movie and a half, halfway through two movies ago, we went completely digital when the new Sherp CMD42 preamp came out. And we started using the sound devices A20 and A20 mini transmitters. And what we’re doing is we are converting the analogue acoustic performance that we’re recording through a microphone capsule, which of course is analogue because we’re humans, we are analogue, but we are converting that analogue signal, that vocal, into digits absolutely as soon as possible. As that analogue signal leaves the microphone capsule and goes into the microphone preamp, we convert it to digits and then we are sending digits down a very short cable from that microphone preamp into the radio mic transmitter. And that radio mic transmitter is sending completely uncompressed 48 kilohertz, 24 -bit digital sound to the microphone receiver. Now, that’s beneficial for a number of reasons. The main it is that we don’t have to use cables anymore. I absolutely loved using cables and I used cables up until six months ago because I felt that the moment I went onto a radio transmitter on a boom and a radio receiver, I was losing a percentage of the clarity of the signal because there was a certain, it was either an analogue radio system or it was a digital radio system that wasn’t able to transmit 24 bit 48 kilohertz. With this new radio mic system we’re using there is absolutely no loss in going radio. Now what that does is it gives a freedom to the boom operators. Film sets now are extremely fast paced and we’re generally on the films that I’m doing shooting three cameras and the boom operators need to be able to move freely if a lamp suddenly comes in at the last minute they can’t be saying look can you just hold on a second I need to reroute my cable because I’m going to have to go and stand 15 foot to the left and so it just means that they can react fast we’re often handheld we’re often using techno cranes which as you know you know we’re not having to do that the old school methodology of laying a track and putting a dolly down and levelling the track the and just goes ‘jump’ and the cameras in the position that the director has just asked for and my boom operators need to be able to react to that and I was starting to feel that my pursuit of excellence in the in the sound where I required cables was actually becoming a negative and so this came at a very, very welcome time so effectively we are completely digital. As soon as the sound leaves the microphone capsule, we go into the digital domain and it stays in the digital domain. So my mixing desk, my board, as the Americans call them, that is completely in the digital domain. So everything, my fades are digital, my ISO tracks are digital. And what that means is it just means that I’m giving a pure signal to the dialogue editor. And what I want to do is I want to give the dialogue editor the very, very highest quality and best chance of being able to use those original performances. Now where that interestingly moves into, why would the dialogue editor feel that those digital performances are better than an analogue performance? I think that you can hit your plugins a little bit harder. You can use your plugins in a little bit more of a robust manner before you start hearing artefacts. And I think that that’s really, really important. And I’m not talking huge amounts, I’m talking five to 10%, but that five to 10 % could be what you need to do to be able to keep that original performance rather than to say, you know, well, this isn’t quite working. I need to get these actors into an ADR studio.
Neil Hillman
Interesting. I mean, what we used to say was I’ve got a £3,000 radio mic that now sounds like a £300 -pound analogue microphone when we used to put a cable on the end of it because we were always concerned that there was signal loss when we were in the RF domain. So you touched on radio frequencies there and the fact that you’re using radio mics. The set itself is actually awash with radio frequency, isn’t it? And you presumably also have to band-plan for that as well.
Simon Hayes
Yeah, probably about 10 years ago now, we realised that it was becoming a Wild West on a film set and that rather than there just being a couple of departments coexisting who used radios, it was everyone. So let’s go through this for a second. Let’s talk about the camera department. They’ve got remote focus on three different cameras which are basically working on a radio link to manage the camera’s focus. We’ve also got a DIT and a director of photography often sitting in a tent a few yards away from the cameras who are pulling the stop, they’re pulling the iris control. They’re doing that with a radio link. They’re all working on remote monitors, which are Teradeks often, which are channel hopping and trying to find the clearest space as you’re shooting. So that’s the camera department. Now let’s move over to video. They’re doing the same thing with Teradeks. Let’s talk about the grips. The grips are all on comms. Now we’ve got three cranes. We’ve got seven grips on each crane they’re all being directed by the key grip via the DP and the operators so they’re all on comms they’ve all got headphones with boom mics coming off them that’s that that’s working in the radio domain then we’ve got special effects who are obviously triggering explosions or even turning their fans on and off via radio then we’ve got the electricians the gaffer and his team are now working on a desk and being able to dim lights wirelessly from a lighting desk and even using moving lights so that they don’t have to go up on a ladder and readjust a spotlight, they can they can move those lights via a radio link. So effectively the whole film set is one big wild west of radio frequencies. And so what we started doing 10 years ago was we started contacting the unit production manager as soon as we were into prep, very, very early on, and just sending an email and explaining to a UPM who probably at that point didn’t really understand how radio worked because it’s not their job to and what the negatives were of not coordinating frequencies and the negatives are it’s very simple it’s gonna hold you up if focus isn’t working you’re gonna have to go again okay the most expensive thing on a film set is not shooting you’ve got to keep shooting and anything that holds you up is a is a completely crazy negative and so what we started doing was we started saying right We’d like to contact every single head of department. We’d like that head of department to assign whoever is the most knowledgeable in their department about radio. We’d like to assign the job of being in charge of that department’s radio frequencies. We’d like to send a Google Doc where we all talk about on the Google Doc. We all set out where our frequencies are, which pieces of equipment we can compromise on because we can choose the frequencies, which pieces of equipment we can’t compromise on because they’re unlocked frequencies, and start to collaborate and assign each other pieces of the RF real estate so that when we turn up on the set, we’ve all got our own spaces and we’re not channel hopping and basically being detrimental to each other, which was what was happening.
Jason Nicholas
You mentioned what you’d like to hand off to the dialogue editor at the end of the shoot. And we recently interviewed John Warhurst, who mentioned that in the making Les Mis, the two of you had a direct line to each other to discuss the logistics of recording and all the other things that have to be sorted for making a large -scale musical film. And traditionally, and I’m saying in air brackets, there isn’t a lot of communication between location and post sound other than sometimes making some notes over a coffee when the sound is handed off the end of the shoot. Do you think that situation is changing and perhaps in both directions where location sound professionals might be involved more in pre -production as well?
Simon Hayes
It is changing and it’s something that throughout my career, I’ve pushed to change. Right at the beginning of my career, I had a look at film sound and I just thought this is really weird. Why aren’t production sound teams? Why aren’t the production sound mixers talking to supervising sound editors and dialogue editors? Why don’t we have this conduit of information and why aren’t we collaborating from the get -go? And there’s many reasons for that. One of the reasons which is difficult is sometimes when you start shooting the post -production sound team haven’t been hired yet. They haven’t been chosen. But one of the things that I’ve tried to do on every movie that I’ve ever made is the first thing, when I get hired and I’m offered the job, and I say, “Yes, please, I’d love to come in and work with you,” and my next question is, “who’s the post -production sound team? Have you considered who it’s going to be? Have you got a phone number for a supervising sound editor?” Then I’ll phone the supervising sound editor and say, “Who have you got in mind as a dialogue editor?” And it’s basically just reaching out early on and trying to get that information. And 50% of the time that information’s there, you just have to ask and then that collaboration can start. And often, right at the beginning of my career, post -production sound teams were quite surprised to hear from me and I used to get told, “This hasn’t happened before. It’s wonderful that you’re making contact.” But I think it’s becoming more and more the norm now. I know that on the last 5 to 10 movies that I’ve done, I’ve always been able to collaborate and talk about workflows and talk about how I’m going to deliver my tracks to the dialogue editor before I started shooting. And that’s a real positive. I think it’s an industry -wide positive. And I I guess kind of connected to that is how do you see the role of the location sound mixer evolving in the coming years? I suppose that’s both a technical question and in terms of responsibilities and the position in the production team. The production sound mixer is always going to be solely responsible for the production sound. What will change within that role is the sort of technology that we’re presented with, which allows us to do our creative job on the set. The technology is just tools. It’s like a musician’s musical instrument. And we should be adept and obey with that technology as it changes, because it allows us to be less constrained when we’re making our creative decisions. And so it’s almost like form those function. The technical tools that we have allow us to make quicker decisions and provide higher quality tracks. So when you ask how will the location sound mixer evolve in the coming years, I think that what we’ve all got a responsibility to do is to keep up with emerging technology. And I think that that’s something that historically hasn’t always been the case, but technology is changing so fast now. What I’d actually like to see, I’d like to see training schemes for production sound mixers. I’d like to see schemes where you do a course on Dante, you do a course on digital radio, you do a course on what plugins are available that the dialogue edit is going to use. And I think that that would be really, really positive. I think that we should all be re -skilling as we go along. Because I know that the landscape now, from a technology perspective, is completely and utterly different to where we were five years ago. In five short years, it’s changed radically. You know, I’d like to see production sound mixers having an elementary knowledge of what’s possible on Isotope RX and not all do. I’d like production sound mixers to have done a course Pro Tools so that they know when they’re working with a Pro Tools operator on a set what’s achievable and they’re able to direct the Pro Tools operator because that’s what I do on a musical. I’m directing my on-set Pro Tools operator. Now to be able to effectively direct an on-set Pro Tools operator I should know that software and how it works and so I would I’d really, really like to see a brave new world where production sound mixers have courses and I’m not talking about long courses I’m talking about an afternoon on the internet where they can say right and potentially what I think would be wonderful is if your IMDB page show that that you ticked off that course. And so what we then start to see is we’d start to see production sound mixers always keeping ahead of the curve. How does that benefit the industry? Well, it benefits the industry because we’re going to save more original performances. We’re going to deliver better tracks to dialogue editors. What happens then? We make better films. More people enjoy the cinema. It’s a win -win.
Neil Hillman
It’s a commitment to lifelong learning, isn’t it?
Simon Hayes
Yeah.
Neil Hillman
So sound recordists that are just starting out and paying their dues on modest shorts and corporate videos and micro -budget features as we had to are listening to us here, they could be thinking, well, this is all fine and dandy for Simon to be afforded the proper respect and listen to because he’s won an Oscar. But I’m on a shoot where just having a sound recordist on the job is seen as a borderline luxury, what can they do to establish with those people who are hiring the plain common sense of having well-recorded original dialogue?
Simon Hayes
Well, one of the things that I’d like to pull you up on, Neil, before we even get into me answering that question is the term sound recordist. I’d really like to see more respect for the head of department in production sound and i think that one of the things that i would urge all of our listeners to do is to start using the uniform term production sound mixer. Because that’s what we’re doing we are sound mixing on the production and i think that the terms sound record is all location sound record is minimizes our creative input and makes it seem like it’s a purely technical endeavour. And what I think that we need to persuade our colleagues in other departments to do, including directors and producers, is understand that we have a collaborative and creative partnership with them on the movie set, whether that’s a small $1.5 million film or a TV show or a huge $250 million movie. And one of the things that I think that we can do is to let them know that we are taking full responsibility. And I feel that the term sound recordist slightly minimizes that responsibility that we take on. But to answer your question, it’s okay for him, he’s got this huge crew, he’s potentially won a couple of awards and it’s not so easy for us. What I would say is this: if the small movie that you’re working on, or the tiny TV show doesn’t have the budget for a proper sound team, let me tell you something else. They certainly don’t have the budget to ADR the show that you’re on and so in a way you should be using, or we should be using the fact that they don’t have a big budget and that we’re working potentially understaffed because that’s the requirement of the small film or the TV show that we’re making. We should be using that as collateral to be able to say, “Now listen, guys, can we just take a moment here? We’ve got wind in the trees here. It’s an extremely unique atmos. It’s not something that the dialogue editor and the supervising sound editor are gonna be able to rebuild. Can we just take a minute here and get this atmos?” And when they say, “we haven’t got time for that, we’re on a quick moving show.” You know, the answer should be, “Guys, you haven’t got a budget to ADR this scene. We’ve just had low level romantic dialogue. These original performances are golden, but the wind in the trees in the background is changing the whole time. We’ve got to get a minute of atmosphere track here because it’s going to save the scene.” And so one thing that I always did when I was doing low budget movies, and by the way, I still do low budget movies whenever I’ve got the time to because they’re great fun and they give me an opportunity to go back to my roots. And what I always say is, look, often with, and here’s another thing, this has just come to me, this is a really important point. Often on a low budget movie or a small TV show, you’re not relying on special effects, you’re not relying on people flying through the air on wires. You’re not relying on massive stunt chases in vehicles. What you’re relying on is actors’ performances. And what we are doing is, we are capturing those performances. What we should all be talking about on the set is performance, not sound. Because the moment we talk about sound, people who don’t understand what we’re doing just glaze over. It’s boring to them. It’s kind of ‘anorak-y’. The moment we change that word sound to performance, they actually start to listen. There is prick up and they think, oh, performance, well, that’s important to us. That’s what we’re all here to do. We’re all trying to capture that original performance. So often what I’ll do is if I’ve got some kind of issue that needs explaining, I will say, look, just to be able to capture this performance rather than going to a director and saying, “Look, I’ve got a problem with the sound.” And the two different responses I get from articulating the same issue in a different way is just incredible. And so, yeah, on a small movie, if you are on your own or just with one other person and you’re struggling and people aren’t wanting to listen to what you’re asking for, just go to the first assistant and the producer and say, have you got the budget to ADR this? And I would imagine that most of the time it’ll be no. And not only that, let’s not just talk about the financial cost of ADR-ing, let’s talk about the creative cost of ADR-ing. The performance probably won’t be as good as the original. And if you’re Because as a director, if you’re ADR-ing because you think you can better the performance, that’s where ADR is an incredibly valuable tool. And that’s why we need it. Because sometimes you get into the cutting room as a director and think, you know what? We want to go in a slightly different direction with this. There was, you know, there’s an emotion that I feel we can dig into in ADR that we couldn’t get into on the set because we didn’t do enough takes. That’s where ADR is an absolutely fantastic tool. What’s a real shame is when you have to go into an ADR studio because of a technical issue with the soundtrack when you felt the performances were absolutely nailed and what you and the cast wanted on the day, but you’ve got to go back and try and recreate them due to a technical issue or potentially someone not getting an Atmos track of that wind in the trees.
Neil Hillman
Are there any examples or stories that you could perhaps bring to mind and share with us about where you’ve had a discussion on a film and you’ve been able to capture something on location that perhaps the director didn’t think was possible and you’ve sort of pleasantly surprised them and you’ve been very proud of that achievement. Is there anything that comes to mind?
Simon Hayes
Well, look, practically the whole of No Time to Die, the Bond movie that I did, there is an idea that it’s going to be extremely difficult to capture sound in that kind of environment when you’ve got wind machines, you’ve got stunts, you’ve got V8 engines in cars and what I realised was for ‘No Time to Die’ was I had to think about the workflow required to catch that narrative and it was going to be a very, very different workflow to if I was doing a costume drama and I also knew what was required for the dialogue editor to be able to really, really dig into denoising plugins and that signal to noise and so basically on a movie like that rather than thinking about acoustic continuity and what the sound is like in the space, which is what I would do on a costume drama. What I’m thinking about on a Bond movie or a superhero movie is I’m thinking about what’s going to be happening with the score and what’s going to be happening with the sound effects. And what I can tell you is, is that any space around that dialogue is going to be unwanted. What my dialogue editor needs is close up sound. They need signal to noise because then you can play the score louder. You can play the sound effects louder and you can also hit the de -noising harder. So for instance, Daniel Craig, you know, holding a submachine gun creeping through an underground cave with rain machines drips all over him. You know, there’s an incredible amount of background noise there. So how do we deal with that? We get the lav, the radio mic as close to his mouth as possible. Okay, and so perhaps you might listen to that without the background noise and go, it doesn’t sound quite as nice as if it’s down on the solar plexus and there’s a bit more air around it. But that air, when we have the background noise, all that’s going to do is mean that you guys in sound post can’t hit your Isotope RX or whatever denoising plugin it is that you feel is most appropriate for that job. Whereas if I can get the microphone right up onto the, for instance, you know, into a tie knot or into the edge of his t -shirt, then I can bring my game down. You’re going to have a closer vocal. And yes, it might sound a little bit thicker and you won’t have such a beautiful bit of air around it, but what you will be able to do is to salvage that dialogue and really, really hit the denoising hard. And that could very well be the difference between ADR in that scene and not ADR in that scene. But I’d like to digress slightly. When you ask me, you know, are there any examples and stories I can share about the value of location sound? Let’s just talk about the fact that it’s often in a first assistant director’s mind that they can just you know they can fix it all in soundpost and that they can just ADR it. What’s very interesting now, especially on large movies is the amount of time that that movie is spent in the cutting room. It’s not a fast turnover now. They could be cutting for six to nine months. Now, what I think we need to educate our colleagues about is the fact that it’s very, very difficult to ADR before you get to picture lock. Now, just to describe that to people that potentially don’t know what I’m talking about, when you picture lock, it means that you have decided on every single clip on every single take and that won’t be changing and so you can effectively go in and ADR and you know that things won’t change, but before you get to that picture lock on a superhero movie or a Bond movie or any large -scale production you’re going to need to take that movie out and put it into audience test screenings. First of all you’re going to need to show it to a room full of 16 studio executives to see what they think and then potentially you’re going to do a studio execs and friend and family a slightly bigger screening with 60 people and you’re going to ask them “what do you think about the pace of the movie, do you think that that the relationship between the two love interests worked, do you think the movie was too long anywhere, do you think it was too short?” And then potentially on very big movies, you’re going to take it out into the wild. And you’re going to do one showing in Los Angeles with an audience test screening, another showing in Austin, another showing in New York, you’re going to do one in London. And you’re going to back with test screening audiences of 120 people. And you’re going to then take that back to the editor with the director. And they’re going to be, based on what those audience test screenings tell them, they’re going to be changing the pace of the movie very subtly, potentially swapping out takes and going for a more loving look in someone’s eyes because the audience didn’t feel that the relationship between the two love interests was working quite as well. And you’re going to be holding that look a little bit longer. And so, effectively, our production sound, even if you do decide that you’re going to ADR something, our production sound has to be good enough to see this movie through all of those audience test screenings. And so what I find slightly frustrating is when I’ve got a first assistant director, for instance, on the set saying to me, “Look, don’t worry about it, we’re just going to turn the wind machines up super, super loud because we’re going to loop [ADR] this scene anyway. And the point that I will make to them is, look, can we just work here? Can we just work out exactly how much wind we need? And rather than using the V8s, can we see whether we put the electric fans onto max and get them a little bit closer, whether we can actually get usable production dialogue here? Because it’s not just about the fact that you’re saying we can ADR this scene. You’re not going to ADR it until nine months’ time. And we need to be able to show this movie, audience test screenings with this production sound before the dialogue editor has even started. Really, ADR isn’t the answer to every single problem. And we need to have a presentable soundtrack to get us through that first six to nine months of cutting before we get to picture lock. Yeah, and I think that’s where what you’re saying earlier about being in production, the production people really have a close understanding of what happens in post-production and what’s needed through all that process that’s imperative.
Jason Nicholas
You’ve recently written a bit about, quote, “return to the boom in lieu of a reliance on radio mics with lavs.” Do you think there’s some kind of movement towards this? And is there some scope here to focus on the value and the craft that a boom-op brings to the set? And are directors actually asking for this and does it come from an awareness of how easy it is to remove a boom-op from the frame, when needed, in post now?
Simon Hayes
I don’t think there’s so much of a resurgence of a return to the boom. I think that the boom has always been an absolute imperative of filmmaking for a number of reasons. What I would say is rather than me writing about a return to the boom, what I think I’ve written about is the fact that on every movie that I do, I’m looking at the story, the narrative. I’m looking at the director’s style. I’m looking at how many cameras the director is going to be And I’m also looking at the actors’ previous performances and starting to think about what kind of level they like to work at. And what I will do is I will use all of that information and start to work out exactly what my workflow for that specific project is going to be. And if I think the project is going to be better served prioritizing booms, that’s exactly what I’ll do. And that’s what I did on the last film, which I made. But if I think that the project actually is going to be better prioritizing lavs, then that’s what I will do. However, I do think that nowadays, it is absolutely necessary to have two boom operators on every film set if there’s two cameras, and since we stopped shooting on film and started shooting digitally, even a one and a half million-dollar movie, you know, the very smallest and micro budget film is going to be shooting two cameras. And that requires two boom operators. Why does it require two boom operators? Because it means that we can cross shoot close-ups. It means that when actors are having an argument, we don’t have to go back to that old-fashioned tradition of asking them not to overlap or step on each other’s lines. And how does that help the movie? How does that help performance? It means that they aren’t going to have to stilt their dialogue. They can completely behave naturally and we can capture it because there isn’t anyone off -screen who is off-mic. All of the off -screen dialogue is captured on a boom at the same width as the on-screen dialogue. It means that if we’re cross- shooting close-ups, both of the characters can be recorded on the boom. And so, boom operating is absolutely necessary. What I would say is, I would like to see more boom operators swinging the boom rather than thinking I’m just picking up a bit of Atmos and the LAVs are doing the heavy lifting. What we always try and do in my department, and my two boom operators have been with me throughout my career is, even if I feel that the LAVs are going to be the best choice for the scene in my mix, the booms will still be swinging. Even if the booms are six foot above the actor’s head, they’re never going to be kind of at 45 degrees, just pointing into the scene, just trying to pick up a little bit of width to help the dialogue editor put some width around the lavs. What my boom operators will always be doing, even if I’m mixing the lavs, and that’s what I’m putting into my mix track, they will always be providing the very best on mic boom tracks possible because what we don’t know and I know that I’ve said this before in this podcast but what we don’t know is what the picture editor is going to do. If the picture editor is going to use B camera and it’s a close-up and A camera’s got six foot of headroom then it could very well be that that lav that I’ve chosen to put in the mix is going to be used but it may well be that a camera is being used and it’s a nice acoustic and there’s six foot of headroom and the dialogue editor actually in their cutting room listening on Pro Tools through studio monitors listens to my mix and goes you know what he’s got a real forced perspective here on the lav let’s just let this breathe a little, goes to the boom track, here’s that boom that’s completely bang on mic but it’s six foot above the head, and goes you know that sounds really nice I’m going to let that work. And that’s a really, really good example of the fact that a production sound mixer, when I’m making my creative decisions about what goes into my mix, it’s a guess. And that’s why I said right at the beginning that we’re in so much better shape now that we’ve got multi -tracks and we’re not having to commit our mix on two tracks and not give a route out because we can never know which camera angle is going to be used. We can never know how hard the director and the re-recording mixer want to hit the score. And it may be that they don’t want to use score at all because they feel that the emotional performance can only be detracted by score and it’s actually better for the movie to just let the dialogue play. And in that case, there’s going to be nothing to disguise the slight bit of clothing rustle on the lav, but the boom is going to sound beautiful.
Neil Hillman
Now we’ve been deep diving and I promise listeners who are sort of sticking with it, who are perhaps not, you know, fully au-fait with sound, but do stick with it. But this is going to be the most nerdy question so far. After this, we’re opening up a little bit more. So, I apologise in advance, but this is a totally nerdy topic I want to talk to you about because you’re here and I want to ask you; and it’s about those microphones that are in the boom operator suspension at the end of the pole and particularly how this has changed over the years. Pretty much I think up until the mid -1990s I was following the way that I’d been schooled in the 1980s and I was using the Sennheiser 416 for interiors and a Sennheiser 816 for exteriors and I think I’m right in saying that the 416s of those days had a presence lift as well in their frequency response to compensate for quarter-inch tape. Anyway, when we started to move off quarter-inch tape and we went on to DAT, I loathed DAT, but there we are. We went into the digital domain. It was a cue for me to become much more conscious of what was going on at the end of the boom, because for interiors, I changed so that I would only you know, that’s just, we would, we would make it work on a Cardioid mic. And in my case, I had a matched pair of AKG451EB mics with CK1 capsules. And I dispensed with the 816 altogether for exteriors, but I did stay with a matched pair of 416s for my exteriors. And I know that all sounds very agricultural now, but there we are. Those were the workhorse mics that never, ever let me down. How did your taste change over the years?
Simon Hayes
I’ve got so much to say on this, it’s a great question. And before I get into my opinion, when I started as a sound assistant, I was assisting my father who’s a production sound mixer and we’ll talk a little bit more about him later. What he always said to me when I started was, listen, you’re gonna go out and you’re gonna work with other mixers shortly. And let me tell you, right now in the UK, there are two different types of sound mixers. There are sound mixers that have been through the BBC training scheme, and they will generally use 416s on interiors and 816s on exteriors. And then you have sound mixers like myself, who have come from a more diverse background. My father’s background was, I’d like to say the music industry, but he actually in a band. And so his, his knowledge of sound recording came from recording his own band and being around studio engineers and watching what they did. And his natural instinct and many other people’s natural instinct who didn’t have BBC training was to actually use the AKGs. And so my first boom microphone as an 18 new old boom operator was a 451 with a CK1, which is what you moved on to. And it was only later when I went to work with other sound mixers that I came across the 416s and the 816s. And look, as you know, there isn’t a right and a wrong. It’s just very interesting that I immediately knew where you’d been trained by the microphones that you were using. And it’s digressing that you moved later onto those cardioids and hyper-cardioids away from those gun microphones. But anyway, I’m digressing. We’re going into history now. Let me answer the question. What I’m going to say now isn’t going to be popular. But before anyone judges me, have a really good think about what I’m about to say. I don’t think it matters anymore what microphones we use. Now let me qualify that. In recent years, when I’ve been into mixes and I’ve seen what the re -recording mixer is doing, they are working their EQ hard. They are EQ-ing the microphones that we’ve recorded in the context of of how the vocal needs to sit, and I know I keep saying this, how it needs to sit around the effects and the score. They’re also EQ-ing the microphone based on what the acoustic is in the room or the location that we’ve recorded in. They’re also EQ-ing the microphone to help the lavs match the booms a little bit better and the booms match the lavs a little bit better. And so my point being is that by the time our tracks end up with the re -recording mixer, I don’t think it’s going to matter whether that piece of dialogue was recorded on a Schoeps, a Sennheiser or a DPA, boom microphone. Oh, I do think lavs matter and I’ll come to that in a second. So you may ask, well, why do I use Sherp’s? Why don’t I just use Sennheiser or DPA? Well, the reason why I use Sherp’s is because what I do think matters about our microphone choice is two things. Firstly, how close our boom operators can get the microphone. Okay, that above all else matters so much more than whether I’ve got a Sherp’s, a DPA or a Sennheiser on the end of the boom pole. That is going to make an absolutely radical difference to how the dialogue sounds rather than the very slight tonal difference between two different manufacturers microphones. So that’s the first thing, how close that microphone can work and how good our boom operator is and how well he or she can keep our actor on mic. But the second thing that makes a huge, huge difference isn’t the brand of the microphone but it’s the signal to noise and how transparent that microphone is. So what I want is I don’t want a microphone that sounds like a Sennheiser or sounds like a DPA or sounds like a Schoeps, I want a microphone that sounds like the actor that’s speaking. I want it to be as transparent and as neutral as possible and it just so happens that in my opinion it’s Schoeps that gives me on boom microphones that transparency. Now the second issue here that I must qualify after saying that I don’t think it matters what brand microphone we use is that I think that what is really, really important nowadays is that we can get that signal into the digital domain as early as possible so that we’re not asking potentially a radio transmitter to do the analogue to digital conversion, using potentially slightly poorer A2D converters because of size and weight and cost in comparison to the A-to-D converters that Schoeps could put into a microphone preamp like the CMD42. And so rather than me thinking about what does one brand of microphone sound opposite the others brand of microphone. What I’m thinking about is, is this microphone capturing this dialogue in the most neutral way possible? And are we getting it into the digital domain as early as possible? And I think that my microphone choice is based on those two characteristics. I don’t want a microphone that sounds like a sherp, so I want a microphone that sounds like the actor and I want a microphone that I can get into digits as early as possible because I believe and it may I may only be talking about three or four percent, Neil, but I want that three or four percent if I can get it into the digital domain as early as possible am I just going to have a more robust chunkier signal that you guys in post can manipulate a little bit easier and the re -recording mixer at the end of the chain when he or she is deciding how he wants this piece of this scene to sound can apply their EQ as robustly as they need to where they’re not having to fight against the sound of the microphone what they’ve got is a really, really transparent, chunky digital signal that they can EQ to their heart’s desire. Because one thing that I can tell you is any dialogue that we hear in a cinema now doesn’t matter tonally, whether it was recorded on a Schoeps, a DPA or a Sennheiser, because tonally it will have been changed by the re-recording mixer to make the scene sound the way they want it to sound. What we’ve got to do with our microphone choice is to provide the re -recording mixer with the best signal -to -noise possible, which is why I said it sounds simplistic, but it all goes back to signal -to -noise.
Jason Nicholas
This might be sort of a self-evident question, but are there any of your earlier films that you recorded, and you get to listen to you today that you think would sound radically different if you approached it in the way that you do now?
Simon Hayes
I think that I’ve managed to make the right decisions for the right films and that’s one of the skills that I’ve been blessed with. I don’t go back and listen to any movies that I’ve done and listen to them with disappointment and think if only I’d have had 32 tracks or if only I’d have had this or that you know when I listen to ‘Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels’ I’m incredibly proud of it it was my first movie and I actually think to this day it’s one of my best sounding movies but let’s remember that it was not easy but it was far… Let me think about how to phrase this.
Jason Nicholas
I suppose it’s sort of like asking, you wouldn’t say, oh, what if Rembrandt had Photoshop? What would he have done?
Simon Hayes
No, no, no, it’s a good question. When I go back and I listen to ‘Lockstock and Two Smoking Barrels’, I still think it’s some of my best work, but I was able to make that my best work because we were shooting on one camera. And so the fact that we didn’t use any have mics, any personal mics, doesn’t matter because actually when you’re shooting on one camera it’s really wonderful to allow the acoustic to match the picture. A wide shot sounds wide, a close shot sounds close, and a mid-shot sounds mid. And you know, when you’ve got, you know, Lenny McLean standing on an exterior in a wide shot shouting, “If you don’t want to be counting the fingers that you haven’t got” that sounds better on a wide boom than it’s gonna sound compressed on a on a tight lav and so I still listen to that movie and think god it sounds good and what did I do on that movie I just didn’t put any bass roll off in I got the booms as close as possible didn’t use any lavs didn’t EQ anything I never EQ anything on a set all I’ll do if I need to put a little bit of bass roll-off on. Generally, 60 Hz. If I’m in trouble with wind, I’ll bring it up to 90 Hz, never, ever above 90 Hz. If there’s still wind above 90 Hz, I’ll let you guys deal with it, because I know that my next step is 120, and that’s when I start getting into the human voice or artefacts within the male voice that I don’t want to lose. I want you guys to be able to sweep it and perhaps go, “Oh, Simon hasn’t quite got rid of the wind at 90 hertz. Let’s see whether 94 and a half hertz will do the job, rather than me going with a hard cut at 120. Anyway, I’m digressing again. When I go back and listen to the films that I’ve done, I’m incredibly proud of them, and I made the right decisions at the time.
[Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels excerpt plays]
Can I also just circle back to what I was saying earlier about microphone choices don’t matter? Something that I think is really important that I didn’t cover them. And it’s incredibly important is that with lav mics, it does matter. And I’ll tell you why. When I first started using and I started using lav mics very, very late for these reasons. First, financially. Secondly, I didn’t have enough tracks and I didn’t want to ruin my boom tracks by mixing in lavs to them. Thirdly, you know, it’s a black art lavs and I didn’t quite have the skill set I didn’t really start using lavs regularly until I got multi tracks because I knew at that point I wasn’t gonna have to compromise my boom tracks I wasn’t gonna have to mix the two together and send something to you guys that you couldn’t undo It just so happened that I was fortunate the kind of projects that I was working at that point were one camera So I didn’t have to supply lavs or potentially just one or two scenes in a movie where it was only, you know, the big crane shot at the end where they walk off into the distance and you don’t do any coverage. Of course, you get a couple of LAVS out for that. But I wouldn’t LAV everyone on every scene. But what I did notice when I moved on to LAVS pre -DPA, and I’m not going to name the brands, but everyone knows what brands we were using pre -DPA. I noticed that the sort of scenes that I would get the lavs out for on the sort of movies that I was doing were, “Okay, we’ve got three cameras coming in today because we’ve got a massive stunt scene where three cars smash into each other. Then all of the occupants of the cars get out of the cars and they have a massive fist fight in the road.” Okay, and we’re going to cover it with three cameras, going to have two cameras on long lenses picking out the fight and a wide shot showing the whole scene. And so in other words, you’ve got a fight scene. Well, what do people do when they’re fighting? They scream and shout at each other. “Yeah, that’s your fault, it’s not my fault…” And what I found when I was putting lavs on was the dynamic range of the lavs was so narrow, they were just distorting the moment someone stepped on normal dialogue, they sounded fine. But I want to use a boom on normal dialogue. When do I need the lav? I need the lav when they’re shooting three cameras and I can’t get the booms in close enough and two of those cameras are lensing in. And what I noticed was every time I got the lavs out, I’d be turning down the transmitter gain and thinking it’s still distorting. And what was distorting was the capsule within the lavalier mic itself. It just couldn’t handle the SPL of a human voice shouting. And there’s nothing we can do about that down the line. It’s cracked off right at the beginning. Now, why I think that it’s really, really important and why I only use DPA lavs now is because they can handle that dynamic range before I start talking waxing lyrical about how beautiful the frequency response is and how flat it is and how and how we could record string instruments with them and that’s what they were designed for. I could talk about that all day, but let’s just put side by that for a second. And let’s just talk about the fact that I can put a DPA in the centre of my chest and I can scream at the top of my voice and it will not even start to sound compressed. It will sound open, neutral, and there will be no hint of square wave distortion. And so that goes back to is microphone brand choice important? Well, the brand isn’t important, but what is important is that you’ve got a microphone that isn’t going to square wave, because I know that you can de-clip very slightly, but it never sounds quite as nice when you’re de-clipping a square wave signal. I know you guys have got incredible plugins now but let’s face it if I can supply a signal that doesn’t have any compression within the capsule and certainly not any distortion you’re starting from a much, much better place and right now as far as I’m concerned the only lav that can do that on a screaming human voice or let’s talk about for instance Cynthia Erivo in ‘Wicked’, who is one of the most fantastic but loudest vocalists I’ve ever recorded. If I’m going to have to record her singing beautifully at incredibly high, and I’m talking about SPLs where she’s hitting long sustained notes at a higher volume than I can shout, then I need something that’s going to be completely and utterly happy in those utter SPLs and I believe that the only microphone lavalier-wise right now that can do that is a DPA.
[Excerpt from Wicked plays]
END OF PART ONE
Announcer Rosie
You’ve been listening to Part 1 of our interview with Oscar-winning Production Sound Mixer, Simon Hayes.
In Part 2, Simon talks about his long-standing friendship with director Guy Ritchie and how they first started making films together; the work-ethic Simon learned from filming with his father, Production Sound Mixer John Hayes; other Production Sound Mixers that have inspired Simon; and the importance of a life lived outside of the film business, to your health and finances… Plus, you won’t want to miss hearing how Neil offers to grapple with Simon in the dojo, to decide who between them should mix the next James Bond Film.
The Apple and Biscuit Show is written, presented and produced by Jason Nicholas and Dr. Neil Hillman, and edited by Jason in our Sydney studio.
Big Chris
“There is one more thing… It’s been emotional.”
