Golden Reel Awards nominates two SCAD senior films
Photos by Katherine Rountree
The month of February is packed with awards shows celebrating the best acting, directing, animation and even sound editing. On Feb. 15, the Motion Pictures Sound Editors (MPSE) will be hosting their 62nd Golden Reel Awards. Not only do they celebrate the best in featured films and television, but they will also celebrate the best in student films. This year, “Hominid” and “Sea Odyssey” — two SCAD senior films — have been nominated for the Verna Fields Award for Student Film Makers.
“What it has always attempted to do was to give some exposure and legitimacy to the craft of motion picture sound editing,” explained David Stone, a professor from the sound design department. He was the vice president for MPSE for several years and has won numerous awards for his work in “Top Gun,” “Die Hard” and “Beauty and the Beast.”
According to both films’ Kickstarter pages, “Hominid” tells the story of “two primatologists [who] are funded for an eight-week research expedition to Washington State to find the truth behind the mythos of Sasquatch.” “Sea Odyssey” is about “a father [who] embarks on an ambitious deep sea expedition to find solace in the shadow of his son’s looming death.”
While SCAD has never won, several student films have been nominated in the past.
Professor Stephen LeGrand demonstrates the foley stage.
“SCAD’s name is starting to become familiar with these Hollywood sound editors,” said Stone. “And so the students do the school a favor by exposing everybody to our work.”
“Our films sound as professional as they possibly could,” added Stone.
Stone said that student nominees could expect a typical awards dinner where everyone is dressed up and handed out the awards. “When the students go as nominees, they get a free ticket to the event,” he said. Although the students need to pay for their hotel and flight themselves, “it’s really fun for them because it’s their first industry event.” He added that aside from exposure, the Golden Reels were great for networking.
Sound design students become involved with the student films from the very beginning. “These students are supposed to be recoding on set,” said Stone. “Then [when] they take the post-production sound class next quarter, they become supervising sound editors and they are responsible for creating a team of student sound editors to put everything together.”
Stephen LeGrand — a professor from the sound design department, and winner of awards such as the LA Theatre Critics Circle Best Sound Design for a Dramatic Production — added that once the students are in post-production, the sound editor is in charge of getting people to take care of the foley or any dialogue replacement.
“What people don’t necessarily know — and this is what’s most fascinating — is that most sound you hear in a film is put in after,” said LeGrand. “The only sound we get on set that we really want is the dialogue. That’s the main thing we’re after.”
The role of a sound designer in a film is crucial. “In a big Hollywood movie, everything you hear is artificial,” said Stone. “But in our craft, the idea is to fool the audience into thinking that the camera hears [the sound].”
“The best foley is the kind that nobody knows is there. It just promotes the reality of the film,” said LeGrand.
“Like the audio version of makeup,” added Stone.
It takes several layers of sound to produce one sound. “Everything you hear is artificial,” said Stone. “And everything you hear is hand-crafted so it can be in separate layers to be mixed.”
Stone used his own experience while working on “Dracula” as an example. To give the castle gates a life of its own, he used layers of animal noises as well as rusty metal. The sound designers “anthropomorphize objects to push the drama of the scene,” he explained.
“Reality is not that interesting enough for a distilled idea of a film,” added LeGrand.
“When movie sound editing and mixing is doing its most fundamental part of the job, it’s giving the sound part of the story, telling the story; it is creating a narrative text with sound,” explained Stone. “When it’s beyond that and it reaches for artistry, you’re adding to that text adjectives and adverbs in the sound, telling not just what happened, but how did it happen and how did it feel.”
