Crime pays: Vagabond Audio sounds off about indie feature

10/20/2006

Repost of an article in Screen Magazine

By Amy Wilschke

Everyone knows that an ambitious writer will do anything to get one good story, which is the main theme of “Crime Fiction,” a feature-length independent film by Chicago filmmakers Will Slocombe and Graham Ballou.

For this project, the director/producer team enlisted the talents of Drew Weir and Vagabond Audio (Chicago) to create the sound design that would perfectly complement their darkly comedic crime feature.

The film itself centers on James Cooper, a textbook editor and struggling writer desperate to achieve success. His girlfriend, Hilary, is also a writer and much more accomplished than James, having reaped the rewards of success within the literary community. Hilary’s sudden death becomes the seed for James’ breakout debut, and he dives head first into a novel centered on Hilary’s murder.

According to Weir, one of the most crucial scenes for sound design came in the first five minutes of the film. “[The introductory scene] was going to be done with a full orchestra,” he says, “and the only really effective way to record the orchestra was to do a live recording.”

Weir says he had to use “guerilla tactics” to accomplish this. Since the University of Chicago Orchestra agreed to perform the score at one of its rehearsals, Weir says Vagabond attended the rehearsal with a stereo microphone and recorded the score.

“I used to do a lot of that kind of work in college, so I had a pretty good idea of what it was going to come out sounding like,” he says. “It was this feel that was almost like live performance versus a John Williams kind of soundtrack. We really played that up to our advantage as opposed to fighting with it and not being in a studio to do that work. It gave me the idea that the whole intro of the film could also be this warm-up overture of the film.”

During the first five minutes of “Crime Fiction,” the viewer sees the crime happen, although it hasn’t actually occurred yet within the story. Weir says the sound over this scene is recordings of the orchestra warming up before rehearsal. This audio is layered together to build the score of the introductory scene.

As a feature-length film, Vagabond says this brought its own unique challenges to the sound design when compared to traditional 30- or 60-second commercial work.

“You have to break it down,” explains Executive Producer Risé Sanders. “You can’t look at it as a whole. You have to look at each scene, which is still longer than 60 seconds, generally, but it’s still looking at each scene as a passage in the piece and trying to fit what’s right for that but making sure the overall tone remains the same.”

Sanders says there were some issues with the overall production audio that had to be dealt with, for example, noise interference that had to be cleaned up.

“There were scenes where the audio had to provide a cohesive master track,” she says. “The shots themselves were shot in a way that they could be edited together nicely, but there was a requirement for audio to pull the whole sequence together. That was a distinct challenge for Drew to make certain scenes feel continuous and contiguous.”

Weir offers an example: “I think the biggest case of that was the car accident scene,” he says. “They obviously were not able to close the street down to shoot this film on this kind of budget and with these kinds of locations. So we had a lot of traffic [and] interference noise.”

Weir explains that when the filmmakers approached him to clean up some of this excess noise, he explained the real problem to them. “The problem isn’t that a car goes by,” he says. “The problem is when it stops going by in the next shot. Your eye tracks it as it zooms by [and] in the next shot you’re not hearing it anymore, so we actually had to add [sounds] into that scene to make it feel complete.”

“Crime Fiction” will circulate at film festivals in 2007.