I watched “The Making Of: A Star is Born - 2019 Oscars” and learned a lot about the challenges and complexities of working with sound on large scale productions like A Star is Born (2018). This video turned out to be specifically about the sound-mixing in the production, a category with which the film was nominated. It was set up to be viewed as a video or listened to a podcast and was essentially just a conversation with three men who worked on the sound-mixing of the film.

 

The biggest new thing I learned about the film that I didn’t know was that all the singing done within the film was recorded live because Lady Gaga insisted it be live, as she does with her concerts. This was extremely challenging to do for many reasons. The first being that it required the actors to sing in front of real audiences without spoiling the soundtrack of the film a year before its release. In order to do this they had to perform the music live in front of audiences of thousands without amplifying the audio to the crowd, who were therefore just standing and watching them furiously act and move around on stage. This lack of amplification for the purpose of not spoiling anything caused another challenge: making the performance sound like a real concert at the locations being filmed at. They recorded live audio at a variety of different arenas, stadiums, and festivals. In order to make the audio sound like it’s amplified through each stadium they had to use a technique I had never heard of before called impulse response. From what I could gather, the process is something to the effect of blasting low and high frequencies in the location and placing a surround sound mic in the middle, then using the information from the microphone’s recording to create what’s almost a sound mold of the space to produce audio that echos and carries as it would at the location. I've learned that in a large film production, there is more than one sound guy on set, and many don’t even deal with the microphones directly.

 

One scene they mentioned that stuck out to me was their description of a scene with Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper sitting in a parking lot and singing acapella, which is a very stripped, raw scene. They explained that they used not one, but four mics for the two characters, even going as far as recording the audio of the man eating Cheetos in the background, which they ended up scrapping anyway. They talked about the common struggle many indie and low budget films can relate to: dealing with environment. They didn’t have the power to shut down a street and film, so they had to adjust to the passing traffic and life surrounding the filming location.

 

Because the video was so focused on sound-mixing and audio, there wasn’t much discussion of the process from script to screen, but they did say that hours of pre-production and pre-recording of audio went in before they got on the stages and performed, and it had to be planned out how they could hook up the instruments and the microphones for each location to the cameras, because the equipment was different and they were given really short time frames to work in.

 

I would love to work on a film set, I think I would want to help the Director of Photography because I think they have a highly influential level of creative control over the feeling and direction of the film.