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(The following is excerpted from the presentation of Mallboy's soundtrack at the 3rd Cinesonic International Conference on Film Scores & Sound Design. A complete transcript is included in the book Cinesonic - Experiencing the Soundtrack.)
Defining Roles in Pre- and Post-Production
Film composers or sound designers may think they work in isolation, but they don't. Your craft and equipment and work methods might be your own, but all your creative ideas have to be channelled through other people. I always encourage film composers and sound designers to be as experimental and inventive with their ideas as possible, but that's only the start of it. You then enter a process of collaborative negotiation to figure out 'what is best for the film'. That's a phrase Fiona has taught me the value of on many occasions. As a sound designer, you may have a great idea, but you have to question whether that idea is suitable for the film as a whole or for a particular scene, or for a certain tonality or direction of the film.
The great thing about working with Fiona is that she has an expanded notion of what it is to be a producer. She does not stick with either the temporal or monetary divisions which usually govern a film's breakdown into pre-production, the shoot and postproduction. Granted that all productions have, broadly speaking, to be managed in that manner, Mallboy gave rise to many opportunities that allowed for a deviation from those divisions. Even though these deviations may have been slight requests on my part - like having meetings during pre-production about how the sound would be mixed in post- production - the fact that Fiona would OK these requests ended up having enormous ramifications for how the sound and music worked in concert with the editing.
For me, working on Mallboy was a test to see whether my sound design theories could be put into practice on a professional feature film that wasn't overly experimental or intellectual - the kind of thing with which I am normally associated. Most important, I wanted to see if I could effectively employ a radical approach to managing the complete sound post-production, and still achieve a respectable, industry-standard, non-alienating film.
There are very few directors who are also musicians. I don't mean those directors who did a bit of jazz piano once and can maybe play a few notes. I'm talking about someone who has worked in recording studios and toured with a live show, and dealt with all the different creative processes which arise from composing solo, performing live and working with a band. And it's the rock and pop industry that gives people that experience; you don't get it elsewhere. Having someone with a background like Vincent, from The Underground Lovers, making a film gives you such a rich opportunity to see what kind of direction will result. On Mallboy it worked beautifully because I could use a lot of shorthand with Vincent in terms of talking about mixing, cross-fading, equalization and things like that. It allowed a more expanded means of dialogue.
However, this is not to say you can’t have that with a director who is not attuned to music or sound or hasn’t had that experience before. If a producer recognises in the beginning the importance of how the composer and sound designer can talk to the director, then the producer can usher that in, even at the pre-production stage and during the shoot. It may only require a few sessions where you just play a bunch of records among each other to get a sense of your tastes and preferences, and what you each think is an interesting sonic period in the history of record production. Such simple discussions can have profound effects later on, even when you don't appear to be directly influenced by them.
There's always an incredible pressure in sound post-production due to time running out, and that's when you need to become a bit more automatic and instinctive in your dialogue with other people, and if you have a couple of meetings beforehand to attune everyone to orientations and preferences in sound and music, the dialogue in that final pressured period could be better. Frankly I don’t know how sound designers and film composers can do their work when they're meeting a director or producer after the picture has been locked-of. You would be coming in very cold to that situation.
(My work on Mallboy entailed production and mix of the Sound Design, engineering, mixing and editing the Score Production, and overseeing all tasks involved with Music Supervision. These areas of the soundtrack are discussed in detail in the TECHNICAL section.)
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