[race car engines]
- I started working on the film before production began.
I was a small child living with my parents guest house.
Hi I'm Don Sylvester.
I'm the supervising sound editor
for Ford v Ferrari.
- I'm David Giammarco.
I was the re-recording mixer
and sound editor on Ford v Ferrari.
- Today we're gonna be breaking down
how sound works in film and how we use it to tell a story.
I like to describe sound, at least movie sound,
as a tree of sound.
It has three main branches.
Dialogue, music and sound effects.
But inside those branches or below those branches
are extensions of different kinds of sound.
Dialogue has got production sound and ADR,
added sound later.
Music has got score and source music.
Sound effects has got a whole lot of different branches.
Foley, backgrounds, atmosphere, hard effects.
There's a whole lot of different sound editors,
each one cutting different things in different locations.
The difference between a sound editor
and the sound mixer
is the sound editor will assemble the sounds and cut them
and there may be more than one sound editor,
there could be ten, and each person then will be responsible
for a certain aspect of the sound, not all of the sound.
- The sound effects editor will compile sounds,
go out and record sounds, put sounds together to picture.
- At a point when the film is ready to show,
we're gonna have to mix these together.
Only at that point do these three elements
come together in a room like this.
They are then put together in sort of a recipe
that the mixer will then be the controller
of the flavors of those sounds.
And then he'll feature one sound over another.
The music may be stronger here
or the sound effects may be stronger here.
That recipe then is in his hands and as a mixer
he'll then control the overall soundtrack of the film.
- So sound mixing is bringing dialogue,
music and sound effects to a room like this.
We play through the reel and balance and mix
so that they play and balance well against one another.
A sound supervisor
will be hired on the show. - Oh, me.
- He will put a crew together
and he works closely with the director.
They'll speak about the vision of the film
and what kind of sound the director wants for the movie
and then we'll start putting the soundtrack together.
- I was brought on the film early
to work on what we call the previs.
Previs is an animated rendition of the scene
made by computers.
It's kind of a moving story board
and the director comes in and directs it.
They felt that they needed sound and I agree
they had to have sound to have the cars
have any kind of impact on the screen.
[car engines revving]
[rattling door]
I came in to make all the sounds for the animated previs
so that he could help figure out
what he's gonna actually do on the day
when it actually came to recording the cars.
And so as my job is to get that stuff realized.
- In this case being fortunate enough
to work with him four times
it was great to be able to kind of anticipate
where he's going to go
just because of previous knowledge from earlier films.
[fighting sounds]
- Once dialogue, music and effects are in a good place,
then we all come here to the stage.
It's only then we can judge
whether they're gonna work well together
in this environment.
That's what Dave does.
He'll mix it together.
The director will then now be able to hear everything
for the first time in this room.
- It's all acoustically treated
and we can create a theater environment in here.
- It's really remarkable that some of the hard work
that you go into making sound gets in this room
and it's not good enough.
And then we have to go back and redo it
because it reveals the true sound.
That's why everything
that comes out of this room sounds great,
because we've been there
and we've now heard everything we need to hear
and we've fixed it.
Well now let's look at some clips on the mixing stage.
[engine revving]
- In the beginning of the movie,
Carroll Shelby talks about how a man
becomes one with the machine.
Here's an example where of where the man
becomes part of the race and the machine.
He's thoroughly concentrating on his race.
And although it's a very intimate moment,
it's snapped out when reality comes back
and the car in front of him does an evasive maneuver.
So what is an internal moment?
It's probably when the sound goes away
so not only is it important when the sound is there
but it's also the lack of sound and we get to focus
on other sounds that are not the race sounds.
His breaths, there's a kind of a drone going on
which represents what we hope is an internal moment.
This is a lack of sound
that makes the next sound more impactful.
[car crash]
- So in order to try to achieve some kind of a realism
of racing in an open cockpit like this
we had this heavy buffeting wind.
[heavy wind]
Which also gives way to the design effects
that is all around us in the room in Atmos
and I can play that with the car.
[engines revving]
[drone sound]
This is the Dolby monitor that allows us
to see where I'm placing things in the room.
Those balls light up when program is hitting them
and that's where I placed the wind in the room.
It's up closer to the screen up on top.
It gives me a view of where I've placed things
and what's hitting things when and where.
Practical effects like when the car crashes
and comes flying by us,
that I'm using Atmos to take us through the room
as the car would go over us.
[crowd cheering]
- [Speaker] 22 miles remaining.
[wind blowing]
[drone sound]
- Of course the car crash comes flying over our heads.
[car sliding]
I'll just show you what music and dialogue were doing
through that same sequence.
[engines revving]
- [Speaker] 22 miles remaining
with Phil Hill and Dan Gurney.
[sad strings music]
[breathing]
- [David] So these tracks here all make up Ken's car.
These are the other race cars on the track.
From here down is tire suspensions, brakes squeaks,
squeals and things like that.
- You know there's a lot of elements playing here.
We can't play them all.
Engines and backgrounds and crowds
and some things like that, some feet.
You're not gonna hear feet in this scene
but we can hear the feet in the Ford scene
where Henry Ford the Second
talks about getting people to work with him.
[heavy footsteps]
- In 1899 my grandfather Henry 'By God' Ford
was walking home from Edison Illumination
after working a double shift.
He was ruminating.
That morning he had himself an idea that changed the world.
- In this clip, Henry Ford addresses the employees
of Ford Motor Company
and the voice needed to have the same impact
as his personality.
We wanted to make sure his voice
boomed throughout the factory.
It's actually heavily treated.
I don't think you'll notice that it's heavily treated
because it sounds right for the man
and it sounds right for the environment.
- So this is how he initially sounded.
- In 1899 my grandfather Henry 'By God' Ford
was walking home.
- So then we add that verb to him
to carry through the plant.
- In 1899 my grandfather Henry 'By God' Ford
was walking home.
- We also felt that the feet, his feet walking,
would also express some of his personality.
- Things need to have character
and they need to have more than just being okay.
- Every sound has an opportunity to create character
and character development and tell more of the story.
There was no feet actually recorded in the tracks.
It was nothing that was very useful.
So we had to add them.
You could do the real sound of leather
on what we think is concrete.
[footsteps]
It didn't sound right.
So the next idea was to put leather on wood.
[footsteps]
It didn't work.
So the only thing that really sold the idea
of a very forceful person with a strong personality
was feet on metal.
Now don't look closely
because there's no metal on that gangway
but there is now because his feet now sound
like the man who's in charge of a multinational corporation
and that's what we wanted.
[footsteps]
So here's an example of feet being done
a whole lot of ways but only one of them was really right.
These are all feet right here.
This is basically why we're employed
to put sound in scenes like this.
If we just used the production,
it would be a really good scene
but the character development that we want to push
is done entirely through sound.
We're at Le Mans and we're in the midst of the 24 hour race.
Ken Miles has made an unscheduled pit stop
and now he's racing to catch up.
It was pretty important for us
to get the actual GT40 sounds.
These are vintage cars however.
Almost impossible to find an actual vintage GT40 to record.
But fortunately, we found a collector in Ohio
who built a GT40 from genuine Ford parts
with all the tail-pipe and the engine sounds that we need.
We then when to Ohio and on his local track
we recorded a couple days of recordings with his car
and that's the hero car that we hear.
[engine revving]
And I've seen other GT40s.
This is the real thing.
- The way they recorded the cars,
there was microphones in the engine compartment,
microphones in the cockpit,
on the transaxles and transmission
to pick up different sounds.
So it was very well-recorded,
as well as microphones all along the track.
The cars are cut with a lot of separation
so I have complete control
over the interior sounds, the exterior sounds.
These are all the different microphones I had.
So I was able to get in pretty tight with the car
and balance between the different microphones
and then spatially place them around the room.
Like if we're in a shot that you see on screen
I'm keeping the engine with the car.
When we're in the interior of the car,
the engine sounds are all around us.
So here's some of the car by itself.
[engine revving]
Sometimes when you're listening to these tracks
by themselves and you hear the car engine
and sometimes it sounds weak or soft,
that's because there's a car skid there
or a tire skid or gear change that's filling that void
or it's for music or it's for dialogue.
- Okay so we're continuing on with the same scene
only this time we're gonna demonstrate
some of the sounds in reverse order.
Let's start with some of the crowds
and then build up some of the sound effects
until we finally have the full sound.
So all of our crowds are in different languages
as well as we have some PA announcers
in French and English.
So there's a whole atmosphere of the Le Mans place itself.
So when we cut back and forth from the race
we come to the stand, there's another world of sound.
[crowd cheering]
[car noises]
[crowd cheering]
The music's driving, but it allows for the effects to play
and it really, really works well
and hats off to Marco Beltrami and Buck Sanders
because the score works so well
with the way the sound effects can play.
There's the cut to the speedometer.
The guitars there are as big and powerful
as any engine can be
and it is the GT40 musically right there.
- He's pushing the car too hard, that's not the plan.
- Plans change.
[fast rock music]
[car noises]
[crowd cheering]
- It's almost as if the music
is in the same key as the engine.
I know Marco talked about that, and Buck,
about crafting some of the music to go with the engine.
[fast rock music]
[engine revving]
I never really isolated that moment before
but now that I have, that's the same key.
They're no dummies.
- Sheldon, he's pushing the car too hard.
That's not the plan.
- Plans change.
[fast rock music and engine revving]
[crowd cheering]
- Well there's a lot of ways to make soundtracks.
This is how we made ours.
It's very subjective.
It's purely out of the mind of James Mangold.
And so we want to thank Vanity Fair
for letting Dave and me come and talk about our little film
and we hope you got a little insight.
I know I did.
- [Director] Last take.
- Oh my god look at the time.
Got to go, bye now!
Who wrote this?