IT’S ALL IN THE FUTZ

George Clooney and Sandra Bullock spend the majority of Gravity’s running time ensconced in bulky spacesuits, communicating over helmet-to-helmet transmissions. When mixing the dialogue, Skip Lievsay created a special EQ to “futz” the audio — making it sound like it was coming over a radio rather than from a person in the room. He could then adjust that element based on the demands of a given scene. In emotionally intimate moments, he and Cuarón opted for less-processed audio, so words sounded clearer and warmer; other times they could dial up the futz in order to accentuate the distance between the players.

SL: The other side of the dialogue question was the panning. Alfonso likes the idea that the words are attached to people. If you’ve ever seen Children of Men, you see that nearly all the dialogue in that movie is panned [to match the actor’s position on screen]. I like that idea. It removes a certain veil of film shenanigans where the old simple idea is that all dialogue comes from the center channel — which is a film construct. It doesn’t happen that way in life, and it isn’t really necessary to do that in the modern film formats.

"Alfonso likes the idea that the words are attached to people."

Let’s say a person within the geometry of a scene, a person comes in the door — which would be geographically in the rear, where the left surround would be, let’s say. If you put the sound of the door and their “Hey, what’s going on?” dialogue over in that channel, nearly every filmmaker will tell you, quite scientifically, that will distract the audience and throw them out of the scene … Even though the actors on camera turn and look to that direction, and then the camera spins over to see the person entering, most filmmakers will argue with you that that is a distraction and that you need to hear it on the center channel, or maybe on the left side — maybe. And I think one of the great things about cinema is the presumption that things are happening outside of the proscenium. That the film is pointed in one direction, but everything else is still going on outside of that frame.

SCORE

Steven Price started on the project as a music editor before his ambitious ideas earned him the composer role. Cuarón’s primary directive was to avoid a traditional symphonic score, something that Price took to heart — with a twist.

SL: Price created a lot of sound with samplers and digital equipment, but he also recorded a score at Abbey Road, which they then took and manipulated those sounds. So there are quite a lot of orchestral movements in the film, but they’ve all been futzed and kind of wrangled a bit so they don’t sound so dry and ordinary. So within that idea, Price and his crew did a fantastic job of delivering material that was orchestral emotionally, but not literally.

"Price and his crew did a fantastic job of delivering material that was orchestral emotionally."

GF: He got into this amazing idea of changing score … When we weren’t going to use sound — you know, like traditional sound design, like blowing something up — to let the music be like a ballet at that particular point. And even the timings and what he was using. We know what he was using all the time, and we’d talk all the time as well. So it was a very cohesive journey through the film.

Gravity’s score received the same kind of dynamic panning as the sound effects and dialogue. Lievsay and music editor Christopher Benstead used 5.1 mixes of the score broken down into groups of instruments and sound types — called “stems” — that they could then manipulate individually across the 7.1 soundstage while mixing. Lievsay controlled the volume while Benstead handled the panning.

SL: What we did basically was, we would rotate the whole track. So if you imagine a steering wheel, on the top of the wheel is LCR [the left, center, and right audio channels behind the movie screen], and on the bottom of the wheel is left surround and right surround. And you turn the steering wheel, you can see what that’s going to create panning-wise. … So the emphasis goes from front to back, so it creates a gigantic feeling of movement when you reverse roles, basically, and the energy which is always in the front rotates to the back, and the afterburn — in the form of the reverb — ends up in the front.