Centre audio scholarship opens new horizons

Fine tuning the Slate Monkeys’ soundtrack in a Centre studio

The next time you get a chance to sit down to watch a film, don’t. Watch, that is. Instead close your eyes and listen. Chances are you’ll be surprised by what you hear.

A good film soundtrack heightens emotion, punctuates action, and reinforces the storyline — all without you, the audience member, noticing. “Soundtracks are funny that way,” says Banff Centre alumnus and adventure filmmaker Paul Diffley. “It’s easier to spot bad sound than it is to appreciate good sound.”

Diffley, along with former business partner Dave Brown, is the Edinburgh-based filmmaker behind Committed 2: Grit Kids and If You’re Not Falling, which won the Best Climbing and Best Short Mountain Film awards at the 2008 Banff Mountain Festivals. He also took home that year’s Audio Post Production Scholarship, and as a result spent several weeks at the Centre last summer perfecting the soundtrack for his latest film.

Diffley talked to Inspired about the impact of the scholarship on his career and his latest film.

Tell us a bit about the film you worked on at The Banff Centre.

The film I chose to mix is called Slate Monkeys. It follows three very different climbers as they attempt, fail, fall, and finally succeed on an unusual route in North Wales.

Very early on in the edit stage I commissioned my friend and regular collaborator Chris Hall to compose the music for the film. His first task was to write theme music for each of the climbers based on their personality. I wanted to be able to tell who was climbing just by listening to the music.

As Chris is a climber himself, he’s able to appreciate the situations that the climbers face. He also added several subtle musical cues which follow the action on screen, for example as one climber’s foot slips there’s a “twang” of a guitar string.

In Banff you worked with Orest Sushko, a Los Angeles-based re-recording mixer who has won awards for his feature film work – what was that like?

It was a fantastic experience. Orest treats the mixing desk like an instrument to be played, not just some technology that needs programming. He draws an analogy between crafting a sound mix and polishing a gemstone. You work your craft for many hours cutting and polishing, making finer and finer cuts until hopefully you’re left with a flawless stone. However, the audience should not be aware of any of the individual cuts or polishing. The irony is that the more work you do, the more flawless the piece becomes, and thus the less there is to notice.

At one point during the mix we were struggling to get a line of dialog clearly heard above the background effects and music which were needed to maintain the flow of the scene. Orest summed up the situation by saying “Look, you either have to raise the bridge or lower the water!” When I came in the next day one of the sound engineers, Graham Lessard, had fixed the problem, and I asked “So did you raise the bridge or lower the water?” He thought for a moment and said. “Neither… I changed the shape of the bridge!”

I think because a lot of what they do can’t be seen or easily described they often resort to metaphor and analogy… along with hand-waving and gesturing that would rival a classical conductor.

What did you take away from the Banff mix?

It was wonderful to hang out with folks who spend their lives working with sound, who think in many dimensions at once. Firstly: time, the timeline of the mix, the cadence of the whole piece, etc. Secondly: physical space, mixing in surround sound adds two more dimensions (left to right, front to back). Frequency and dynamic range can be seen as another two dimensions. So that makes at least five dimensions these folk are working in. Now, try to imagine all those five dimensions of sound being mixed across the 160 tracks of audio and you get some idea of the scale of what these talented music and sound engineers do for a living.

My time in Banff has of course influenced the way I’m going to approach the soundtrack for every film I make in the future. I just think about sound differently now. My next film, Single-Handed, may not end up with 160 tracks of audio mixed professionally across five dimensions, but I hope it will at least use sound in a much more creative way.

Paul Diffley’s film and photography company, Hot Aches Productions, is based in Edinburgh, Scotland. His latest films are Slate Monkeys, Single-Handed, and Committed 2: The Walk of Life, which won the Alpine Club of Canada Award for Best Film on Climbing at the 2009 Banff Mountain Film Festival.

Banff Centre audio work-studies Graham Lessard and Gabriel Ferreyra Acuna also worked with Diffley and Sushko on the Slate Monkeys soundtrack. The festival’s annual Audio Post Production Scholarship selected by Centre alumnus and Academy Award-winning sound editor Mark Willsher, provides $10,000 in professional sound support and studio services. The 2009 scholarship went to director Fred Ripert for Autour de Babel.