It’s one thing to get up to speed on a typical feature film, but
production sound mixer Drew Kunin had to ramp up in a hurry working on
the Robert Altman-directed musical Prairie Home Companion, a project that requires him to record dialog and music on location at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, MN.
"We fell into the deep end of the pool right off the bat," he says. The
first day of the six-week shoot, Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin and Lindsay
Lohan powered through nine and a half pages of dialog, which, says
Kunin, "is extreme compared to a normal film. That established our pace
from the get-go."
What’s making this remotely possible for Kunin and the rest of the
technical staff is the combination of what he calls "two parallel and
interlinked systems" that include a pair of Aaton Cantar-Xs, an
eight-track digital sound recorder that’s being used for dialog tracks,
and Gallery Sound’s Metacorder, which is a digital audio
workstation-like software suite being used for the music tracks.
According to Kunin, a Yamaha PM1D digital console helps tie the system
together. In fact, the PM1D is the board used for the radio broadcasts
of A Prairie Home Companion. "Part of the control surface is
doing the mix for the musicians and the other part is doing the mix for
the house, because we have a live audience and monitors," Kunin
explains. "It’s a pretty big set-up, but we’re helped by the fact that
almost the entire film is being shot in one location."
Of course, Altman is known for dialog that overlaps, which offers Kunin
another interesting challenge. "Everyone has their own channel and I’m
putting radio and lav mics on almost everyone," he says. "That, in
conjunction with one or two booms, gives us all the individual channels.
"Essentially the plan is that I will mix down live to two mono mixes on
my Sonosax board," he continues. "I’m doing the best I can to match
what the cameras are shooting. Above and beyond that, each and every
microphone is on its own discrete channel, and that allows them in post
production to go back in and remix and rebalance. Because there are
three cameras [Sony F900 HDCAMs], we shoot very long takes and there’s
a lot of talking with the overlapping dialog. This gives us the ability
to address the mixing in ways you normally wouldn’t."
Every day after shooting, Kunin sends a DVD of dialog channels to the
editing team and archives the day’s work on a hard drive. The music
being recorded on the Metacorder will be used down the line, when the
post-production sound editing kicks into high gear.
While Kunin has crewed with Altman once before— on a commercial shoot years ago— working on Prairie Home Companion
has been a test of his skills. "It works counter to the ways I’ve
worked in the past, but it expands my repertoire. I see the advantages
of it," he reports. "It requires that everyone in the production
understands what we are trying to do. If they get behind it, and they
do because it’s the way that Robert works, it’s great."
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