The Kite Runner

Heightening Emotion with Sound

By Blair Jackson
liiilfii llossfinis novel The Kite Runner was a huge l>est-.seller when ii came out in 2004, bul llit-re w:is no jiiiarantee thai ii couki siietcssrully he made into a film. Hvt-n with a proven director at the helmMarc Forster. (if Monster's Ikill, Finding Nevertand anti Sircitigcr Than Fictionihe siory of :in Atjilmni boy's return to his native land, since taiien over by the Taliban, to help an old friend, didn't exactly scream "hl(K'kiiii,stcT." Throw in the Tact th;it tlif film features a casi oi" foreign unknowns, is largely in languages otiier than English, and has a grim sexual assault of a (iiildasoneof its key plot-points, and it's t-asy to see why movie producers mighl have viewed it as a risky project, nn^-X why ultimately it was made more <jn an indie budget than a tnajor studio outlay. Still, director Forster managed to attract a

top-notch sound crew lo work on die film, and even tliough everyone involved had to dig deep to be creative within certain Mnancial restraints, ihe result is a film that is being acclaimed tor it.s power, sensitivity and artfulness. Spearheading the pixst sound team at Skywalker Sound in Marin County, Calif, was stipervisor Frank Eiilner (/te/lhjy. Ihe Village, Charlolta's Web), whcj was joined by sound designer StfVe Bcwtldeker iX-Men, Chariic tiuil llx' ChtK'olale Factory. Carfx^e ii/icie), re-recortiing mixers Michael Semnnitk (two-time Oscar winner for The Lord of the Ring.s: Return of the King and King Kong: RiitatoiuUe) and Lora Hirschlx-rg

(/{(iliiuin Ik'gins. the I'nvtige, fiitu ibe Wild). When I sjxjke with lioeddeker ;md Seiiianick, ihey had ju.st compieietl work on Stveeney Ttxid (and Semanick also worked on Vnre Will/ie fit(X)d), so

Tekkonkinkreet
A Sonic Journey to the Heart of Anime
By Mitch Osias

ekkonkinkreet is the first Japanese feature film and, more to llie point, ihe first anime to be helmed by a non-Japanese director, AintTican Michael Arias. In late 2005, uilh ihe production already well under way. Arias invited me to supervise his film's sound design. I was initially intrij^ut'd by the story and design, and excited by the opportunity to collalxrate on a traditionally anitnated film. I^ter, when he told me to get ready to wf)rk in Tokyo, I knew 1 was heading for a unique experience, a sonie journey to the heart of anime. On myfirsttrip to Japan, in April 2006, I had iO days in which to spot the rotigh cut wilh the director and make lix:ation recordings. Armed with the screenplay. iho nutnga on which the film is ba.seii, a Sotmd Devices 722 field recorder, and a

Sennheiser MKH4ias MS microphone, I left New York eager to jump inio this projeci After arriving at Narita Airport, I made my way via untlerground shuttle and commuter train to Kichijoji, a western stibuHi of Tokyo and a center for animation prtKluciion. It was a short walk from the train station to Studio4"C, Tekkonhinkreet's anmyjiWon produttion company, which is well known for their work on Ihe Anitnatrtx. which Arias had produced. Over the next three days, he and I watched and discussed tlie rough ctit. 'iTie film wa,s to be comiileied in O t o Ix'r so what I saw wa,s alx)ut S()-pei'cent

animatic MOS, Arias veH>ally filled in llnholes and Ix'autifully articulated his aural vision lor Tekkimkiiikreet. We hail detailed convers:iiions alxRit Tekkf>ti's historical and culttiral context, filled with aesthetic references to films such as City of God, Blade Run HIT and [Micati^wn. mixed in wilh discussions of Walter Murch and ("ieorge Lucas's col.mi.xtiniiiif.com launttiy ^('OH. MIX 79

this and more importantly, how am 1 tiiko ;Ki\';intaj;e of the .strengths o\' tliis way ol workinj.;?' I'm surf ihiu applied lo I'elc. The challenge of working in a different country, on etjuipmeni in a situation where there were .so many new varialiles, wa.s certainly similar to Zoetrope in its ear!y days, land aLsoI in many way.s to Apocalyfise Now. We were doing .so much thai was new for the first lime on that film, it jusl makes you have to come up with nuw ways of ;ipproaching lhe niattTi;il. You have to rcjiivenaie, even to tbifik aboiii doing it." "(iltimateiy," Homer adds, "this was working in the Zoetrope way, which is .someihing I'm a big fan of, actually; it's .stnietliing ! have Ix^nefited from. E.s.sentially, it's 'IX) [iinre with les,s; let your !imitati(His spur your ca^ativily.' I feel tJuU I came ihroiigh this rejuvenated in the .sease that it was exliilaraiing. After having gone through it, I fee! miu h more fearle.ss t!i:in 1 was before doing it. Ix-cause I've faced it and I've done it. I can find a way to make it work."

The Kite Runner

I mm man HI they've Ix'en very hiisy fellows of lale. Now, it's common on big-budget films for the .sound supervisor and./f)iprinci[wl sound designer and their crew to spend weeks or even months oul in ihe field recording !>oth !iard eftect.s and vaiious raw material elements that can Ix" used for background.^ or combined in interesting \^ays to create original FX. We've all read many a .stor>' al")Lit painstaking session.s ivcording specific guns or cars or dogs, or traveling to exotic liKTales to capture "'correet" ainbiences. In the ease of Ihe Kite Runner, however, Fulner and B<x*tk!eker t(K)k a differentanti more economica!approach to collecting much of ihe material ihey needed to convey the sound of Afghanistan over a three-decade peritxl. (Acliially filming in AfSlett'Shurtz is the fitrtmTCk'ni'ml Mariagtrof ghanistan was oul ot" the ([ueslion, so varithe Stiitl ZAU'titz f'ilin (I'litir diuifiinner Cl.\f ous icKations in C!iina, jusl over the bonier o/HMI's Studios 301 in Sydney. Australia

friMii Alg!iani.stan. were used instead.) "Vthal we emied up doing, which worked out amazingly well,'" Bix'ddeker relates, "was we h(X)ked up witii two diKUmentaryfilmmakers,one of whoin had done a d(K-Limentar\' about Afghanistan, among other places, in the '70s and 'HOs, and another who hail just recently been there. We made a deal wiili them where we said, "Okay. Wf'if going lo go ihnnigh all your inalerialall your .sound recordings, all of

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your DV viUeooitn .stuff: anything that had sound on il, and ,see wtiai wf can iisu.' So 1 wtmld go tiiroiigh it. clean it, make it into a library, and we then paid them for the right ro use it and gave them tiieir library hack. It was atnazing how much we learned about Afghanistan by going through all this material, and it soh-ed one our big problems going in, which was how do we get authentic-sounding Alghani background.s and exteriors and cars and such that are appropri-

ate for tlie period?" Ttie two tiocumentaries in question were Shadow of Afghanistan by Jim Burroughs, Suzanne Bauman and Dan Devaney, and Beyuiid the Call by Adria Belie, "Marc iForster] wanted it to .sound as aeeurate as possible, as if it wa.s a docunientury, but not sound like a documentary," Boeddeker says. "It's like a Hollywood version of a very accurate documentary-type sound. So that's what we were d o ing when it came time to temp. And that was greatil was just rightThen we said, 'Let's go back :md look at il from an overall emotional story standpoint antl work on .some .sound design things,'" Such a.s? "We started doing ihings like taking some of [main chanicterl Amir's memories and, if it was a positive memory we'tl heigliten the positive side of it witli sound, and if it was potentially a negative memory we made it sound worse. For instance, when tliey first go back |in a flashback) to

Afghanistan, when everything's happy, you don't see birds, but we filled the courtyard with tons of birds and you can hear people in the distance and there's laughing and kids singing; a lot of positive type of tilings and good home feelings, Tlien, when he goes back years later, ithe capital city oil Kabul's been completely destroyed, and the .sound i,s very stark and quiet. There are no birds. It turns out the Taliban actually did go in and chop down a bunch of trees, so it's a legitiniiite sound choice, as well. But there's no laughing. And we put in occasional distant gunfire which ended up lieing very effective. It's from one of the documentaries, so it's real stuff. The ldo(.:unientary filmmakers] had also recorded some guys listening to a Taliban battle over the radio, so we ended up putling that in a .scene, tooit's on in the background. You hear this yelling and screaming and gunfire and explosions; it's very .strange." "Steve and Knink did a great job of bringing me a lot of diffea^nt tracks to layer," adds Semanick, who mixed the show on a Neve DFC. "A loi of what came to me frotn the documentaries were .stereo tracks they had preppcd up. and there were also

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sf>me mono tracks, so I could place this one slightly left, that one slightly right, so it'.s nol just a .stereo background; il has a little more deptli. Like when the kids run through the marketplace in Kabul in "69, what Marc Forsler stressed is that he really wanted it to be a lively, active place; a fun place to gro\\' up in. So we'd have all these great .sounds coming from all oversomeone's making something over here, .someone's yelling over there, and I'd move it all around the room lu.sing the surrounds!."

Semanick says director Forster "is a great one lor letting you am with it. He has specific ideas, of coLirse, but he also gives you the op}->ortunity to take it and be creativesort of. Show me something so that that I feel the emotion of this .scene.'" A,s (iften as not. it was the unexpected choices of what sounds to emphasize and the .subtle application ol' processing that carried many of the film's most effective .sound moment,s. Semanick cites a .scene in which our protagoni.sts are trying to escape lo America by traveling in a milk tanker, "and it's almost completely dark and the sound is all the rumbling of the truck and the eerie tones inside there, the reverb of the inside of this truck, which creates tliis uneasy feeling of i?eing trapped inside," Also clialletiging was the controversial rape scene, which is jiist a miiiLite long, biit pivotal to the emotional core of tlie story.

"That's prett\" much alt sound design and effects at the Stan." Semanick notes. "Tliere's some clase-up shots, and a kid stiirts be-ating liim up, and it cuts track and fortli, and it happens down an alleywayIt all becomes sort of ethereal, so I st;irted to reverl") a lot of the soimds, like the belt buckle coining undone and tliose .sorts of things. Tliere are lots of little sounil de.sign things gtiing on tliat are .sort o) sp(K)ky and make you fec'l unea.sy and help e.srai>lish tension. Then the music comes in, tcK), and at times it's haal to di.stingLii.sh tlie sound effects from die music, which 1 think L part oi' tJie lK*auty of that .scene." S As for the kites of the titlekite flying (and kite fighting) being a popular pa.stime in Afghanistan and among Afghanis in Americatliey tlid require some speciiil recordings by Boeddeker and Eulner, Ilie tluo each brought Sound Devices 722 recorders to a windy spot near the marina in Berkeley, Calif., and then had a kitc-ilying specialist from L.A, named Basir Beda demonstrate some of the amazing things thai can be done with kites. (The marina area is the site of a popular annual kite festival, which draws thousantls of spectators,) "The weather wasn't particularly good

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If you were to listen to ihem cio.sely, nii a coupk' of iheni you can catch a tittle bit of train l.soundl on there." Later, ,some nmre kite recortlings were made out at Skywalker Kanch, and some of the kite material was Liihanced with Foley, but those original Ik-rkeley recorttings t^ecame the base soimd for the kite scenes. Semanick mHes, "We pieced a lot of kiie sounds together tr^-ing to give characler to each kite so it's not jusi a single sound all ihe time. Kites actually make a very C(H>I .md interesting .sound when they irhL-ih by you.

iii t have lo do a whole lot to the rebecause they soundetl sogixxl, but I did a lol with the movement of the kite, panning it left and right and sort of whipping it across the screen. Tlierc are also a lot of .shots wilh llhe charjctenil on tlie grouiui where tliey're ltx)king up at the kites, but you re UK)king at ithe )xx)plel, so I got to pan the kites a lot in the surnninds. lA kite flyer woukll pull, and you'd sec him look to the left, so in ihe left suiTound you hear the kite whip. Thai was fun lo do lx.vau.se il gave the uhok- .scene moiv chanictcr." M

ihat day," Htx.'ddeker recalls, and really, I wanted to record them mostly as a reference, because it's a pretty noi,sy place there's traffic, harbor Ix'lls, planes and you naine it. So Basir would lly the kite and Frank and 1 just sttxxl next to him. getting all the,se fly-hys. I was even recording mono instead of stea'o, becaust.-1 tlidiVt think this was going to \~ic OUT only shot at doing the kitesI thought we were going to get mics and try and attach them to the kites and do all this other kind of stuff another time. But when we got back to Skywaiker .Sound. we discovered that what we'd recorded standing right next to him had tliis ama/ ing jets-by phase-y kind of thing; I'm m it even sure exactly what caused it. I endeil up taking all those recordings and using ever>- kind of clean-up tool I could come up withlike the Waves re.storation stuffantl crazy amounts of EQ'ing and gating to get alt ihe traffic out of the.se bys, and 1 entled
Lip ni:iki[i}; ,i liugL' library ot kite .soiintls.

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