Visitors to Apple's in-store Genius Bars with an interest in recording technology may have been puzzled to see a SoundField ST350 microphone featured in a video clip being played on heavy rotation in some of the computer retailer's larger stores over the past few months. The ST350 was used extensively to capture 5.1 location ambience during production of Baz Luhrmann's recent cinematic epic 'Australia', starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, and featured in one of Apple's 'Set To Screen' series of short video clips about film production (now available as podcasts for free download from the iTunes on-line Store). The 10-minute MP4 episode on Sound Design for Luhrmann's latest opus features Supervising Sound Editor Wayne Pashley using the ST350 to record wind sounds, salt flat ambience and musical performances on location in baking 40-degree temperatures for 'Australia', and Location Sound Engineer Guntis Sics being unequivocally positive about the crew's choice of microphone: "Traditionally, surround sound for feature films was created in post-production at the mix, using sound from many sources and sometimes many microphones. But the ST350 records actuality in surround, so for the first time in my career, I can go somewhere and record the place in 5.1, with just one mic."
Sound is often the poor relation in film production, taking a back seat to the visuals, but the medium's innovators have always accorded it equal importance - think of Orson Welles' carefully thought-out approach to sound and atmospheres in his early work, or Luhrmann's meticulous integration of ambient sound with musical numbers in his earlier 'Strictly Ballroom' and 'Moulin Rouge'. From early on in pre-production for 'Australia', it was clear to the location sound team that the film's sound would have to match up to the epic scale of the visuals Luhrmann was planning to evoke Australia's wide-open spaces, colourful characters, and rich history.
Although he fulfilled a studio-based post-production role when working on previous Luhrmann projects such as Strictly Ballroom and also the Australian hit production Happy Feet, Supervising Sound Editor Wayne Pashley was asked to go out on location to record the surround ambience beds for 'Australia', to allow Guntis Sics to focus on capturing the actors' dialogue on location. "One of this film's primary characters is the land itself," explains Pashley. "Because of the sheer scale of the picture, and the epic feel to the images on screen, the idea was to match that with the audio, and give a sense of the scale of the Australian landscape in the sound as well as in the images on the screen. So the ambiences had to be in surround; we wanted to immerse the viewer in them. And when [dubbing mixer] Anna Behlmer was mixing the soundtrack, she treated some of the 5.1 ambiences almost like a separate character in the production. Baz was very into that." Indeed, Luhrmann can be seen enthusing about the importance of sound in the narrative of 'Australia' about three-quarters of the way through the Apple Podcast on Sound Design.
"We also wanted to be true to the landscape of Australia. So often in big productions like this, the sound design guys just reach for 'Bush Atmosphere Number Three' or whatever, and everything comes out sounding the same. Also, what you hear is usually completely unrelated to the environment you see on the screen. We wanted this to be different. 'Australia' is, I think, the first movie that sounds correct, that gives a true sense of how this country sounds."
Wayne Pashley, Supervising Sound Editor on 'Australia', on location with the SoundField ST350
Above Left: The four-channel Sound Devices 744T recorder used with the ST350 to make the SoundField B-Format ambience recordings
Most of the film's location recording took place in the barren north-western corner of Australia, in the Kimberley mountains near where Western Australia borders the Northern Territory. "To get a 300-strong film crew into that region was very challenging," says Pashley. Also, it's a very sacred area to the indigenous culture, so rather than send a full second unit crew in there to gather surround soundscapes, we thought it would be better to just send me to camp out with a small rig and a 4x4. I could have dragged five microphones and a Pro Tools rig around the remote countryside, but that didn't really appeal! The combination of the Sound Devices recorder and the single SoundField mic was a lot easier to carry, and just as flexible in terms of what we could capture with it. More so, in fact."
Asked to come up with a simple and portable setup capable of recording surround sound, location equipment supply specialist Lewis Mallia of Sound Devices' Australian office suggested the combination of the Sound Devices 744T and the SoundField ST350. Although he wasn't familiar with SoundField products prior to his work on Australia, Wayne Pashley quickly saw the system's potential. "I would go so far as to say I was able to make recordings that I don't think I could have made with a bigger rig. For example, I recorded some of the indigenous cast chanting as they walked around the microphone outdoors... that would have been impossible to record in a studio, and difficult with a complex location rig. With the SoundField, it was all set up and recorded in a few moments without being too intrusive to the performers."
Recording in SoundField's four-channel proprietary B-Format, Pashley was able to create a 5.1 mixes of his recordings at leisure during the post-production stage. If recorded to a suitable four-channel medium, the B-Format signals from SoundField microphones can be decoded with absolute phase coherence to a variety of possible formats long after the original recording. Thus Pashley was able to create 5.1 and/or phase-accurate stereo mixes from his four-channel location B-format recordings using SoundField's Surround Zone decoder plug-in for Pro Tools, depending on the requirements of the film's dubbing mixers. "I usually did a simultaneous stereo fold-down alongside the 5.1 mix, taking up eight channels in Pro Tools, in case there was a problem with the surround, so that there would be a few options at the dubbing stage" he explains. "I'd used the mic in all sorts of crazy places - on the back of moving vehicles, placed inside metal tanks and containers to create some of the sound design elements in the film, as well as to record the atmospheres, and I had gigabytes of material. I recorded everything from wind, water, animals and insects to the period vehicles used on the production, and it gave the dubbing mixers a lot to draw on for the mix - some of the detail on the soundtrack of the finished DVD is beautiful.
"I got really into the SoundField Surround Zone software. On some of the recordings, I needed to back off some of the low-end on the dubbing stage - recordings of vehicles and exhausts and things - so it was good to have discrete control of the LFE channel. But I was also able to use the ST350 as a directional microphone for on-set dialogue on the sound stage recordings, by adjusting the polar pattern retrospectively at the post-production stage, and controlling the SoundField B-Format recordings in Surround Zone. The ST350 was also great on some of the studio-based crowd scenes - I used it instead of a standard X-Y stereo pair to give a sense of movement through the crowd in surround."
With 'Australia' complete and a worldwide success, neither Wayne Pashley nor Guntis Sics are leaving the ST350 behind. Guntis Sics purchased the ST350 mic used on 'Australia' from the production crew when the film wrapped, and Pashley is already planning uses for it on his next projects. "Happy Feet 2 is on the horizon, and I keep thinking of all kinds of uses for it in a snowy environment," he enthuses. "I'm a great advocate of the SoundField approach now - I couldn't believe how easy it was to get great results in 5.1 with the ST350. And it's not a clever-clever scientific tool for use in the studio, either - it was very robust. It had to be, to survive in some of the extreme environments I used it in!"
