Sound for Stomp

To mirror IMAX’s wide visual scope, the location audio workfor Pulse, A Stomp Odyssey, demanded daring and stealth on NewYork’s Brooklyn Bridge.

In the minds of its creators — Englishmen Luke Cresswell andStephen McNicholas — Stomp is a malleable idea aboutrhythm as language, a nonverbal way of communicating throughpercussion. That concept formed the basis for their celebratedtheatrical event, simply called Stomp, and a series ofever-evolving films, from their first short, Brooms, which wasnominated for an Academy Award, to an HBO special, to their mostambitious effort so far — the recently released IMAX film,Pulse, A Stomp Odyssey.

Currently being performed in five theaters around the world,Stomp involves a small community of skilled performers playingeveryday objects in a kind of infectious rhythmic back-and-forth;purely abstract, but with a subtext of race and class that fills thetheater with thomps, whacks, scratching, banging, and clanging. Overthe course of an evening, the solos and duets build to larger ensemblepieces and climax in a wonderful, percussive orgy of loud sounds andpowerful rhythms that never fails to bring down the house.

The concept for the IMAX film was to expand Stomp's reach: totake the show's creators, technicians, and performers around the world,and join the Stomp cast with local performers in a planetary,percussive dialogue. “We always had a desire deep down to do aglobal drum rhythm project,” McNicholas says. “Somethingthat paid tribute to the people who inspired us, for example the Kododrummers from Japan. We wanted to do something that celebrated greatrhythms of the world.”

In its theatrical form, Stomp required a signature sound.Cresswell and McNicholas turned to their old rock 'n' roll band buddyturned audio engineer Mike Roberts to help them figure out what thesonic aesthetic would be. “The show creates its own sound,”Roberts says. “What you have to do is reinforce the energy andthe movement onstage. You are trying to involve the audience in thespace with the lights and the movements.”

The HBO special, Stomp Out Loud, elaborated on the audiotechniques employed in the theater. In both the scenes filmed onstageand the location scenes, the miking involved arrays of open mics withonly a few radio mics stashed in drums or hard-to-reach places. But thewide vistas and the great detail that the IMAX camera captures requireda rethinking of the theater audio technique. To get impact meant hidingmultiple radio mics on people's bodies or within drums. The open mics— the Sennheiser shotguns that Roberts loves — would nowdocument ambience as well as performance.

In any of the larger projects that Cresswell and McNicholascontemplate, Roberts is an integral part. He is there at the very firstplanning stages, as well as the final mix, suggesting the great rangeand diversity of his skills. I have worked with the Stompcreators and Roberts since 1996, recording or playing back music fortheir commercials, then the HBO special, and, most recently, the IMAXfilm.

In the large-scale projects, all of the sound that is heard on thescreen is live and direct, with one notable exception: In Pulse,in the scene filmed on New York's Brooklyn Bridge, what we hear on thescreen is wild sound recorded on location at the end of the shootingday. Producing the sound for that scene reveals all of the perils andchallenges of doing location multitrack audio. In retrospect, it leadsus to wonder whether we were arrogant, naїve or foolish to thinkthat we could record usable sound for an IMAX film on the BrooklynBridge. At the time, we wondered who was in charge, the bridge orus?

“I was under no illusions about the Brooklyn Bridge,”Roberts confessed later on. “I knew it was going to be hellish.Everything was against us — the weather, the distances, thelogistics, the location of the truck. People told me you can't do thisin a complicated way.” But because the charge from Stomp'screators was to bring back live, direct sound, Roberts felt he had nochoice.

The Brooklyn Bridge scene happened at the end of a grueling'round-the-world adventure, in the middle of a New York winter, on avery snowy weekend. It was cold, and daylight was short. The sceneitself involved two marching percussion bands — one hip-hop andthe other a conventional drum band. They were to play on the walkwayabove the traffic lanes of the bridge and, at some point, meet near thecenter of the bridge. Because we could not stop traffic, we askedourselves if they could make enough noise to mask the enormous trafficroar below.

Chris Anderson brought his multitrack Nevessa sound truck, alongwith a couple of assistants, down from Woodstock. We would park thetruck at the base of the Brooklyn tower of the bridge. That meant anenormous multicore cable run up to the bridge from the truck —probably 150ft. to 200ft. — and that was only the beginning. Weprobably ran somewhere between a quarter- and a half-mile of cable.That raised the issue of whether mic-level signals would be ofsufficient strength and integrity to reach the inputs of the truck'sconsole. So we decided to rent an active mic preamp rack to deliver thesignals at line level to the truck. On setup day, we tested everythingwe could. We had one 8-channel radio mic rack from Sennheiser and two4-channel quad boxes from Lectrosonic. They worked well on Friday, butwe knew they wouldn't necessarily work as well on the shoot. We testedall of our open mics, all of the mic lines, the simple stereo rig— consisting of a Fostex PD-4 and the Neuman M-S stereo mic— the active preamp rack, and all 52 lines of the audio snake. Itall worked.

We set up on Friday, but by that afternoon we got word that snow wasexpected the next day, and as a consequence, we would film on Sundayrather than Saturday. All valuable items had to come off of the bridge,leaving only cables and the 52-pair snake.

Our seven-person crew started work at 5:30 a.m. Sunday morning. Iassigned myself the cushy job of working with Chris Anderson in theheated Nevessa truck, monitoring the recording, while Roberts took hisfour guys up to the bridge to set up in the cold and the dark. By 7a.m., though, the walkie crackled with Mike's voice: He needed me onthe bridge. I left Chris alone to run his truck, knowing I probablywould not return.

For the Brooklyn Bridge shoot, the Stomp crew overcame longcable runs and limited daylight to capture the audio from twopercussion bands.

Once on the bridge, I noticed that the PD-4 stereo rig had not beenset up, let alone tested. Then, as the day progressed, necessitydictated that the bands be placed closer and closer to the Manhattanside, farther and farther away from our staging area. Cable runs grewlonger; radio mic signals grew weaker, and our anxiety levelsincreased.

Even as the sun was rising that morning, losing light was in theback of everyone's mind. Getting good, live multitrack sound isnormally a major priority for the Stomp directors, but it wasclear that on this day, archiving images — not recording sound— was paramount. There were two elements to the recording we weredoing — impact was to be handled by the radio mics placed onselective performers, and space was to be captured by the array ofshotgun mics we placed along the walkway. But because the radio micswere performing so erratically, we knew we wouldn't get much impact, atleast on a consistent basis. And we soon found out that the walkwaywasn't wide enough to permit us to hide the elaborate shotgun arraythat we had planned from the ever-seeing IMAX camera during aturnaround shot. The wild sound recording would make or break ourday.

“It was the toughest day's work I have every done,”Roberts admits. “Looking back, I prob-ably pushed people toohard, trying for a result we were never going to get. I am slightlydis-appointed, because it is the one event where we used wild track,but I am [still] very pleased with the outcome.”

During the editing, co-director Steve McNicholas saw the BrooklynBridge scene spring to life with the wild sound. “Whenever wemention the Brooklyn Bridge,” he says, “Mike's eyes lightup.”

Cresswell and MacNicholas edited the film themselves on Final CutPro. Once reasonably sure of a cut, they would bring Roberts into theprocess. He described the parallel picture editing and soundconstruction as “working right to the edge of the technologies.We all have the same media — about 150GB of video media. Theyemail me the edit as a reference movie. What Final Cut Pro gives me isthe ability to look at the cut, any scene. I stream the video in fromFinal Cut Pro into my Pro Tools AV, using Final Cut Pro to get my syncreferences. I then lift the audio from my DA-88s, and conform that topicture in Pro Tools AV. So I am building the edit changes andgradually building up the program in Pro Tools AV.”

Pulse was supposed to be completed by the end of the spring2002, for an early summer release, but the demands of editing pushedthe release date back substantially. That played havoc with the finalmix dates for the film and the IMAX room at De Lane Lea Studios inLondon, where they had planned to take the project, was not available.Roberts and his directors decided on a two-pronged strategy for themix. The music would be brought to another old colleague, Sven Taits,at De Lane Lea, for a mix to Dolby 5.1, and those stems would travelacross the ocean to be finalized into the IMAX format, with its fivediscrete tracks and a sub, in Toronto at Masters Sound, IMAX'shome.

Of all the pieces Taits mixed, he was most drawn to a brief,underwater musical sequence filmed in the United States. Luke Cresswelljoins his Stomp cast members banging out rhythms below thesurface of a large outdoor tank in Burbank. “Both Luke and I arevery keen scuba divers,” McNicholas says. (So is Roberts.)“We've always been interested in the way sound travels atdifferent speeds underwater, the effects you get with bubblesunderwater, the way metal hits underwater. Also, because it's IMAX, wehave to have helicopter and underwater shots,” he says,joking.

The piece was recorded with a pair of B&K hydro-phones augmentedby four waterproofed Countryman B-3 mics. When the piece arrived at themix, Taits didn't have to do much to it. “I EQ'd it a littlebit,” he says. “As the track goes on, I started adding someeffects just to give it some shape. The choice of micro-phones workedvery well. No one is going to believe that this was recordedlive.”

While Brian Eimer, who did the final IMAX mix in Toronto, facedchallenges, he was also presented with a gift: He had the opportunityto mix a direct-sound film, unusual in the IMAX world.“Pulse is by far the most production sound we have everreceived on a project. It's not something you can emulate in the studioafter the fact. It would certainly take away from the performances onthe screen. You wouldn't enjoy the journey as much.”

Eimer adds: “There was a real opportunity in this one to playwith the 3D space of the theater and create a surround field for themix. As the music was mixed, we had to make sure that the positioningof the performance elements be kept forward. At the same time, weneeded to feel the transition from one environment to another. Forexample, when we went to New York, we really made sure to have apresence of that [place], and when we went to South Africa, we reallyfelt that we were in that location.”

Pulse, A Stomp Odyssey is a short film, lasting around 40minutes. Yet it challenged everyone involved to work to the peak of hisabilities. At the end of the day, what satisfies most is the knowledgethat our technical skills were brought to bear on a vast andentertaining canvas that contains a serious and, we would like tothink, important ambition: to celebrate life and brotherhood. Its goal,as McNicholas noted, “is to link arms with the rest of theworld.”

Larry Loewinger is a sound mixer and president of SoHo Audio, NewYork.