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Brian Emrich makes time in his very busy schedule to answer some questions put by Richard Dodd and some of our film student members.
I’ll kick off by asking you one of the questions we are asked the most on The Reelshow by students:
How did you go from being a student/beginner in the business to the point where you are now & were there any lucky breaks or was it just hard work? What was your first ‘big’break?
I got involved with sound design in film as a bit of a fluke. I was working at this PR firm back in the nineties that did press for several of the major electronic/techno acts of that time and the producer of “Pi” called us looking to license some music from these artists to use in their film that they were shooting. They also mentioned needing a composer for some original score and a sound designer. Being a musician I had always wanted to score for film but the owner of the PR firm was dating musician Clint Mansell at the time so she pushed for him to compose and I got the sound design gig kind of by default. I had never thought about sound design as a career before this but after doing “Pi” and “Requiem” I realized how in tune I was with sound as it’s own separate entity. So I never had any formal training previous to “Pi” but I do think my musical background played a big part in my approach to creating sound.
With “Pi” I was inexperienced with the logistics of placing sound into movies so I had to learn on the spot while they were editing picture. I stuck with it for close to a year, never realizing how well the movie would do. None of us did. We were all learning the in’s & outs of filmmaking together as a team. Then during Sundance it won the “best director” award and that catapulted us all into a new level of filmmaking. A very “big break”!
Once “Requiem” came out and became a cult film I started getting calls from other directors to work on their films because they loved what I had created for Darren’s first two films. So I guess it was at this point I had become more or less a professional. And through the movies I’ve done, I have been able to transition over into the advertising world and make a good career in doing sound design for commercials. And most of these jobs are pretty high end and creative in their own right so I really enjoy doing them.
I’d say there’s a bit of luck involved along with being in the right place at the right time for helping in one’s success but also having the creative skills will be the big payoff.
I believe film sound design has been your main focus for the past few years and that you worked on Darren Aronofsky’s film ‘The Wrestler’ Some of our student members have put together a few questions...
Do you record location sound as a ‘guide track’ or do you use original sound in the final product?
With “The Wrestler” and as with most movies, the audio is captured on set by a sound recordist and then during post it will be decided what additional fx will be needed to flesh out the movie. Some production sound is kept intact but a large percentage of new fx are added onto this or ends up replacing it. It’s the same with dialog/ADR. If something can’t be understood during the editing, then they’ll have to get the actors back in to rerecord those specific lines of dialog. This is called looping.
“The Wrestler” was shot in a more guerilla style giving it a documentary feel so a lot of the original sound from the actual shoot was usuable. We didn’t want to make this film sound like a big budget hollywood production so we kept things much more raw.
We went to some wrestling matches and recorded the entire evening of events which included the matches themselves and the audience responses. I brought several mics with me and we had recorders set up across the room from each other in order to capture the size and ambience of the entire room. When we placed the final recordings together in Pro Tools it sounded great. Very dynamic and spacial. These were used throughout the wrestling matches in the film to recreate a realistic crowd setting.
How many people are in your location team and what do they do.
Our team on “The Wrestler” consisited of a supervising sound editor, a sound designer, a foley editor & a dialog editor. There might be an additional editor here or there that would be brought in for a week or so in order to help out with backgrounds or basic fx if need be especially if we were running short on time.
When I need to go out on a location shoot it could easily be just myself going at it alone and this holds true for anyone else that would be helping to cut f/x. I might bring along a friend to help me out or arrange to go with another editor on the project. Many times we can’t afford to have two of us going out together because someone needs to be staying in the edit room cutting in fx as time is always of the essence. Of course on big budget movies the team might easily be larger and the location shoots much more involved. Every movie is different with it’s needs.
Could you list your basic sound recording equipment for a location shoot.
For my audio recorders I mainly use Sound Devices products. I use the 722, 744T and 788T digital recorders. They range from a stereo, a four track to an eight track so I can use many different microphone configurations at any given recording session.
For my main mics I use a Neuman RSM-191 A-S Stereo, a Sanken CSS-5 stereo shotgun and a Holophone H4 SuperMINI 5.1 surround mic.
I also have many other smaller mics I use for more experimental recording like contact mics and holophones (for underwater recording). I have other more compact digital recorders like the sony PCM D1 & PCM D50 which are great to carry with me when I’m moving about to capture things off the cuff.
What is the average length of a location shoot?
I don’t know if there is an exact answer for this question. As I’ve mentioned above, every movie is different and has different demands. I make up a list of recording notes to bring along with me and most of the time I’ll bring my laptop with the quicktime of the film so I can reference anything specific I might need to see while I’m trying to capture sound. Sometimes the timings of a shot are important to what has to be recorded so having it in front of you to view makes all the difference.
I ususally plan these location shoots for a day trip and get everything captured in that time frame. I went to the Guatemala for several days to capture jungle ambiences for “The Fountain” which obviuosly involves traveling greater distances and more time is needed to make sure you get what you came for.
I also have to factor in the time needed to go through these recordings and edit, name and catalog them into my library before I can even use them in the film. This is the tediuos part especially when you have hours of audio to sift through.
What would you look for in a ‘trainee’ who applied to you for a job?
I think what would appeal and impress me the most is someone that has a good understanding of audio (including music) and it’s relationship with picture. Anyone can learn how to use the equipment if instructed properly, it’s having a creative mind that can’t be taught and I feel is neccesary for survival out there in the real world.
And I guess working with someone who is truly interested in what they are learning would really help.
Would you recommend a career as a sound designer?
Yes, I would but I’m seeing how hard it is for my close friends that are just starting off in sound to get work that is paying. I didn’t get paid to work on “Pi” until many years later after it had recouped it’s expenses so it’s a matter of taking on these jobs because you enjoy your work and stick with them because you never know what will come out of it. I suggest taking on any films that come your way (or even search them out if need be) no matter how small or independent they are, and use this experience to get your chops up to par. There are lots of college students making films and they are always looking for people to help out. You’ll need to prove yourself in the early stages.
The more experience you get the better for you and your confidence. I try to stay away from the “paint by numbers” approach to things and create outside the box. You want your stuff to make a difference so let it be known. Of course try to stay in the realms of what the big picture is to the film and don’t try to lose touch with the director’s vision. Everyone from the cinematographer to the composer to the editor, etc. should all be in sync with the final vision thus greatly increasing the chance that you will end up with a respectful piece of art.
Finally What has been the ‘magical’ moment for you – when you knew you had just recorded something totally unique?
I’ll expalin a few things that I did while making”The Fountain” where I was trying to achieve a certain sound element and sometimes ended up with more than I’d hoped for.
This might be hard to describe but I’ll try. I have this homemade office desk sculpture from the seventies made from clear epoxy resin, some small stiff steel wire and pennies. Each penny is contained inside a semi-sphere of clear epoxy and these each have a wire attached. They each go into a small epoxy base, which it stands on. Kind of resembles strange plants or mushrooms. It was probably created as someone’s school class project and I found it at a flea market. When you shake the entire thing lightly it creates an amazing musical flexi-tone. I had the idea to try and record it with a contact mic (used mainly for recording string instruments like a violin), just to see if anything worthwhile might come out of it. I placed the mic onto the base of this sculpture and lightly shook it and also pushed down on the individual penny stems. The mic picked up vibrations and resonance through the epoxy as if it were inside the epoxy. I then pitched the final recording down an octave and it sounded like huge pieces of flexible glass or plastic material. There’s a scene in “The Fountain” where the smaller “bubble-ship” breaks away from the big ship, that I was having trouble tackling where this sound ended up fitting in as if it was planned but was completely unexpected.
Also for “The Fountain” I had this idea of creating sounds for the “Shibalba” nebula using a hydrophone and underwater speakers. I created several long passes of ambiences on my computer and gathered up some sacred Hindu chants and oms and put them on a cd. I constructed a six-foot flotation device to enable me to hang the two underwater speakers and the hydrophone off into the water so the distance between each speaker and the mic would be identical. I went to a very large lake one late night so the water would have a very minimal amount of wake. I had a portable cd player through a battery powered guitar amp that I hooked the external underwater speakers to. The amp stayed on shore and I dragged the flotation device out a ways till I felt it was deep enough. I then played the cd of ambiences through the speakers into the lake and captured it with the hydrophone into my audio recorder. Apart from standing in freezing water for several hours nearly catching pneumonia, the idea was a success. The entire outcome produced really only one usable sound but it was exactly what I was looking for and is one of the more important sounds in the movie.
One other fun idea I had was back when I was working on “Requiem For A Dream”. I needed to make a sound for a close up shot on a syringe filling with bubbling liquid. I decided to take solid fuel hobby rocket engines and mount them on wooden dowels like a skyrocket and launch them into a lake from a boat. I recorded the sound of them burning down through the water with a hydrophone hanging off the boat about twelve feet. This was an idea that was planned and it luckily worked out great.
What does the future hold for you and what other ambitions have you got?
Even after having done sound design for close to twelve years I still feel I have much more to explore in this world and I plan on keeping at it for many more years. I do also compose music so I’d like to get more involved in this aspect of filmmaking when time permits. I have done some music for “Pi” and “Requiem” but scoring an entire film would be of great interest to me.
There also might come a time where I’ll try my hand at writing a script for a feature film as I’ve always wanted to explore this too. It’s hard to say what’s around the corner…
Brian Emrich IMdB
A Reelshow International Interview 2009
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