ONLINE ADVANCE
Guild Members Score HPA Awards
By Michael Kunkes
|
On November 1, the Hollywood Post Alliance (HPA), held its second annual awards ceremony at The Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. Judging from the packed auditorium––the HPA, formed to serve businesses and individuals who provide expertise, support and advocacy for the creation and finishing of movies, television, commercials and digital media––will be seeking a new venue for 2008.
The evening was especially sweet for a group of Editors Guild craftspeople who won in several categories. When the award for Outstanding Audio Post in a Feature Film was announced, it was time for Soundeluxe supervising sound editors Karen Baker Landers and Per Hallberg, along with re-recording mixers Scott Millan, CAS and David Parker of Todd-AO West, to be Bourne again. Winning for The Bourne Ultimatum, this same team collaborated on the first two Bourne movies, along with picture editor Chris Rouse, ACE.
|
Accepting the award, Millan mentioned that Bourne Ultimatum differed from the previous two films, chiefly because a major time crunch in post-production negated the creation of any temp dubs or the early planning of an overall sonic style. “The final mix was our one shot up at bat,” he explained. “We knew we had to create something that usually takes a lot more time to evolve, and every discipline of audio post was challenged by those time constraints.”
Later, Millan elaborated on his acceptance speech. “One of the things that’s always a challenge when doing a sequel is how to continue to engage the audience, and I think this one was a little more of a roller coaster than the others,” he said. “It was always propelling Matt Damon’s character through the film along with the audience, both pictorially and sonically. The movie was constantly in motion.” Millan added that despite the frenetic pace, the second half of Bourne provided the opportunity to slow down and provide a few psychological moments as the main character begins to recognize places he’s been before. “Having a secondary, emotional style to the film was critical in order to avoid the clichés of the genre. That was our challenge and it all worked out quite well.”
Another group from Todd-AO scored the award for Outstanding Audio Post for Television. Supervising sound editor Mace Matiosian, MPSE, re-recording mixers Bill Smith and Yuri Reese, ADR supervisor Ruth Adelman, MPSE, sound editor Jivan Tahmizian and sound effects editor Chad Hughes were all feted for their work on “Living Doll,” the season-closing cliffhanger of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. Accepting the award, Matiosian stated, “The HPA recognizes the collaboration between mixing and editing, and that’s exactly what happened on this show. The creative process that was begun in sound editing continued right onto the mix stage. We have a great team and it’s nice to be recognized as a team.” The crew also thanked CSI executive producers Carol Mendelsohn, Kenneth Fink and Naren Shankar. “They bring their own ideas to the show but they always accept and are thrilled by what we come up with. It’s great working with people like that,” Matiosian noted.
“This episode had a psychological twist that lent itself to great sound design, especially in the POV moments that allowed us into the mind of the killer,” he added. “We worked with composer John Keane and found a lot of opportunity to take our sound design and integrate it in and out of the music, sometimes to the point where it was difficult to tell the two apart. CSI is a fun show to work on, because, week to week, it gives us the chance to do some great work and explore the 5.1 format to its fullest.”
Michael Ornstein, ACE, won the TV Picture Editing award for HBO’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, for which he had already won a 2007 Primetime Emmy (shared with ABC-TV’s The Path To 9/11). “HBO produces the best material on television,” said Ornstein. “The wonderful thing about them is that they take the time to do it right.”
|
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee redacts and dramatizes Dee Brown’s sweeping 1971 non-fiction history of the subjugation of American Indians in the 19th century down to the crucial 15-year period from the defeat of Custer at the Little Big Horn in 1876 to the “battle” of Wounded Knee in 1890. Ornstein came to the project, his first at HBO, at the invitation of his frequent collaborator, director Yves Simoneau.
“We were allowed to deconstruct nearly every scene and put them back together, ending up with many different versions of each,” Ornstein added in discussing the project, which made extensive creative use of flashbacks to tell the story. The Wounded Knee massacre itself was told in flashback through the eyes of two characters who were there. “We told the story linearly, then from each character’s POV in flashback before ultimately coming back to what I had originally structured. It was an interesting storytelling exercise and, from an editing point of view, it informs many other scenes in the movie. This was a joy to put together.”
Of Guild interest among the non-competitive awards, Quantel Corp. (www.quantel.com) won the Engineering Excellence award for Genetic Engineering, an all-new linking infrastructure for post and DI, and a Special Recognition was given to KIWA’s VoiceQ (www.voiceq.com) a frame-accurate ADR and language translation cueing application.
Michael Kunkes is a freelance editor and writer specializing in animation, production and post-production. He can be reached at writermk@sbcglobal.net.