| The end of 1996 saw the release of the movie of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Evita. The production attracted early attention following the casting of Madonna as Eva Peron, the charismatic wife of the Argentinean president who rose from lowly beginnings to immense popularity by making promises to the country's poor; before dying an early death from cancer. The film was shot on location in Argentina and Hungary amid tight security because the story still has great significance for the Argentinean people and there was supposedly adverse local reaction to the casting. |
Musical movies are less common than they once were and now there are greater expectations of the sound. Lloyd Webber's musicals tend to be complex with rapid tempo changes and songs flowing into each other. It was certain that this musical movie was going to place high priority on the sound.
Director Alan Parker is no stranger to music films - both Pink Floyd's The Wall and The Commitments were his. He had very specific instructions for Ken Weston, the head of production sound, at early pre-production meetings. "Alan wanted everything digital from the pre-recording, to the FX, to any dialogue, and the rushes. The brief was 'no 1/4 inch and no greaseproof pencil', anywhere."
Weston has been working in film and TV sound for over 25 years, first as a boom op and then as a production mixer with over 20 feature films among his credits including several BAFTA nominations and awards for Best Sound.
Evita is almost totally a musical. There are only a handful of dialogue lines and 119 minutes of solid music. It was a very different role for the production sound crew - as Weston put it, "We were literally there to serve the picture"
Unfortunately neither a music editor or sound editor were appointed before shooting began and the kind of pre-shooting preparation that the music editor would handle fell to the production sound crew. This meant that they needed extreme flexibility on location to meet virtually any production requirement. Additionally the songs of Evita vary in tempo and the ability to simply cue artists from just the previous lyric line frequently isn't much help. There had to be a way of adding a count-in or cue, either over or in the music, undertake it on location, and whenever it was required. Handling this on a tape format would be time consuming and would also disrupt SMPTE Timecode replay tracks if editing were needed.
Pre-production meetings focused on ways of best handling location playback of pre-recorded tracks for action and lip sync. With some songs featuring several singers and many other elements there was a need to provide different mixes of the same track for different artists. It was also necessary to be able to playback tracks line-by-line as the director required. In looking for a technical solution virtually every multi-track format was considered but the final choice was dictated more by circumstances.
Ken Weston was discussing the available options with Richard Daniel, co-owner of dB Post, a Film/TV sound postproduction facility in London, when the subject of hard disk recorders arose. Weston and Daniel had worked together on several films since meeting during location work on Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.
"We looked at one of dB's 8-track AMS AudioFiles which would have done the job" said Weston, "But is was far too big too have to wheel around on a trolley. A smaller option was the SADiE Portable from Studio Audio & Video, which I'd seen at the APRS exhibition. I didn't have too much time between films but I went up to their premises and checked that it could do what we wanted and ordered one. It was a bit of a chance as I'd never used one and I don't think it had been used in this way before"
The SADiE Portable is a compact customised Pentium 75 PC with SADiE electronics and running SADiE Version 3 software. It has a colour LCD screen with audio storage being on removable SCSI hard drives.
 | The music tracks were recorded in London - the orchestral beds at CTS in Wembley and the vocal tracks at Whitfield Street and Metropolis using a Sony PCM3348 digital multi-track. This was then sub-mixed to eight tracks at Metropolis to provide stereo orchestra, and vocals spread over four tracks. The remaining two tracks contained 25fps Timecode and 'Speaking Clix', used as a guide for the film editor. The digital control track was run at 30fps NDF Timecode. This sub-mix was recorded onto a 3324 and designated the playback master. From this were made copies onto Tascam DA88, DAT, Exabyte, 1/4 inch tape (Nagra) and CD-R. The Exabyte was used to load the audio into the SADiE while the other formats were really just for backup and keeping on-location options open. |
The 25/30fps Timecode tracks were needed because no decision had been made about whether the movie was to be posted in the US or Europe although it had been decided that the pictures would be edited on film. The 'Speaking Clix' track is a technique developed by Richard Daniel using a spoken count and a pip on the frame every two seconds and was there to make the film editors job easier when laying up musical tracks against pictures - particularly on multiple repeat sections when it is not so easy for them to ensure that they have selected the right chorus.
As the music tracks arrived these were loaded into the SADiE by Colin Codner who then had to start work marking up the songs line by line and locating all the cue points.
"We had a songbook referred to as The Bible that contained all the songs with each lyric line numbered. All the cues have to be entered and the songs broken down and on screen sections named. It was essential to check in great detail where the recorded tracks differed from the Bible and note all those changes. This took about four weeks to complete"
Codner acted as sound playback operator for the shooting. He wasn't familiar with the SADiE before and had to take a hurried course in it and learn the rest as he used it.
Due to shooting schedules, there was no time to check out how the complete system would work in practice - this was very much going to be a seat of the pants operation. Ken Weston managed to tempt Richard Daniel away from his management desk to act as technical backup for the new technology which was doubly important as there was little local support to be found at the shooting locations. It wasn't until the start of shooting in Buenos Aires that the way in which the systems were to run was finalised.
The SADiE sat on a Urstacart with a Soundcraft 8-channel LM1 mixer used to create the playback mixes. Splits in the SADiE outputs fed a loom heading to a second Soundcraft mixer that the created a mono mix of the playback for rushes which then went to one track on a Nagra-D digital recorder with a second D for backup. The remaining three tracks carried the 'Speaking Clix' and two tracks left for any live location sound.
The SADiE was always run on an uninterruptable power supply (UPS) that was fed by a small generator until mains power was available on set. This meant that playback for rehearsal was possible even though sound had to wait its turn for mains power until after the lighting was rigged.
Despite admitting to having been paranoid about the SADiE on location, Ken Weston says it worked very well and a spare system lent as backup wasn't used.
"We racked out a truck, thinking that we might have to run the SADiE inside but it was always used outside. Initially we had some problems with the removable hard drives but we overcame that. A 'tropical box' we had built with extra fans wasn't needed and the unit worked in all the location conditions including sand and rain, the 90 degree heat of Argentina and the snow in Hungary".
Operator Colin Codner just ensured that it operated under an umbrella and had a screen hood made up so that the colour LCD screen was readable in intense sunlight.
There was a minor hiccup in Hungary when the SADiE wouldn't play out from its hard drive. A call to an emergency backup number in the UK and they were "talked through fixing it over the phone, just ensuring that the multi-way ribbon that had worked loose was fully connected", and it was fixed before shooting resumed. The fact that so much of the other equipment proved troublesome on location, mainly due to rough handling while shipping to Argentina, says much for the SADiE portable's reliability.
Audio playback was either by Bose 822 speakers or Garwood Radio Station monitor systems (specialised radio system for sending cue or monitor sound signals) dependent upon the situation and the artist. When possible the Radio Station with the small in-ear earpiece was used but sometimes on a close up with a tight lens even the very fine filament cable to the earpiece could be seen if the artist was to move. To overcome this there was the need to use an induction loop in the form of a loop of cable plugged into the Radio Station receiver. This was placed around the artists neck and an induction earpiece used to pickup the signal from the loop. In other occasions a larger number of induction earpieces were used with a cable loop being placed around the feet of the artists and fed from a power amplifier.
The transmission range of the Garwood Radio Stations was also an unknown factor before shooting began as the manufacturers only claim quite modest distances.
"There was one scene where Antonio Banderas was placed on the back of a truck lip syncing on a long lens" said Ken Weston, "I'd built some 'hot boxes'; a speaker box containing a JBL speaker, a car amplifier and a lead acid battery. We attached a Radio Station receiver to the hot box and hid it on the truck. Banderas could adjust the playback level from a controller in his pocket and we sent the playback signal through the Garwood from 300 yards away."
"In some situations the Garwoods were used in place of cables. Alan Parker doesn't like to hang around and so it was easier to send sound to the video assist by the Radio Station than run out a cable. During the Requiem scene there is a funeral procession that stretches for about 500 yards. We set up four playback stations along the route, each with four Bose 822 cabs and a Citronic 1200 watt amplifier. The two nearest to us were fed with cable but the furthest two we fed by Radio Stations and they worked very well "
It was in this scene that further advantages of a hard disk replay system were also brought into play.
"The Requiem for the Funeral scene lasts 1 minute 40 seconds but it takes far longer to move several thousand people along the procession. We were able to instantly loop the music to create the right length for the shooting even though it will be shorter in the movie."
There were a couple of playback scenes where the SADiE wasn't used. It was decided not to use it in a bus travelling around the streets, not because of the powering requirements but due to lack of confidence in the computer functioning while being violently bounced around. In these cases the playback was from 1/4 inch tape but from masters compiled on the SADiE to cover most eventualities.
From the initial brief that there would only be just a few lines of dialogue, much changed, as did the requirement to record live vocals. It was originally planned that just two songs would be shot with live vocals from Madonna - the epic final scene from the Casa Rosada balcony and the death scene. Eventually far more was recorded live - either with 'silent playback' using the Radio Station or induction loop or sung totally unaccompanied. However in one situation, musical director David Caddack played electric piano on the set following the live vocal. This was fed DI through the Soundcraft mixer and into the Radio Station to Madonna leaving the option for an orchestra to be overdubbed behind the voice at a later stage.
Because of the importance of the vocals a number of mics were tried out. The basic location mics were all Sennheiser MKH series - 70, 60, 50 and a 40. A Neumann U47 was tried for Madonna and it proved a better sounding singing mike with a rounder, warmer sound but in the quieter scenes it picked up a lot of camera noise and was unusable. In the end a MKH50 was used for all vocals. It is good at minimising noise and still sounds effective as a quality vocal mike. A few songs needed the use of radio mics and these were then either TRAMS or Sanken COS11s hidden in hair or on costumes feeding Audio RMS2000 UHF transmitters.
Ken Weston is quite matter-of-fact about the chances of those live vocals turning up in the soundtrack. "There is no way that you can match the sound from the studio floor or the location with that of the recording studio, even using the same mics. The tracks we did live certainly had a lot more emotion and performance. They also had the location ambience which Alan Parker prefers to the very upfront vocal sound sometimes used in musicals but the decision was to be made in post production"
The grand finale 'Don't Cry For Me Argentina' was a major production. Five thousand extras packed the square in front of the Casa Rosada with Madonna on the balcony above them. She had a very tight dress on and understandably didn't want to use the Radio Station body pack. Her monitor was sent by Radio Station to an amp on the balcony, which in turn powered an induction loop at her feet, while she wore an induction receiver. Other takes used a pair of speakers at her feet. Fourteen speakers were used to bounce sound off the buildings in the square. It was at night and the atmosphere was electric.
Richard Daniel commented that the Argentine crowd was remarkable. "It was more like having 5000 actors rather than extras. Because many of them had lived this story it was very real to them and they reacted accordingly. Our local drivers were crying and the hard-bitten crew wasn't far behind. It was just incredibly moving".
After Argentina the production moved to Hungary for further location work and interiors. With addition of a few palm trees Budapest apparently passes quite well as Buenos Aires as it still has a 1950s character that latter has largely lost. The final stages of shooting were handled back in the UK at Sheraton Studios.
At the completion of shooting sound editor Eddy Joseph and music editor Graham Sutton were appointed to pickup from where the production crew finished. While a complex task remained with much re-recording, overdubbing and syncing to take place with the music and songs, the editors confirmed that the care taken over the use of Timecode and 'Speaking Clix' has paid off and worked well.
A year after the initial commitment to use the SADiE and with the experience behind him, what would Ken Weston use if presented with a similar situation today?
"I might do things slightly differently but I wouldn't change too much. I'd probably still use the SADiE but this time learn more about it before going"