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How to Rebuild The Sound of an Arena Concert: Sound Designer Lawrence Everson on Contemporary Color
Contemporary Color Contemporary Color follows ten color guard troupes from across the country as they perform in multiple concerts put on by David Byrne in Toronto and Brooklyn. Crafted to appear to take place over one night at the Barclays Center in New York, the Ross brothers’ documentary places as much emphasis on the process of the show as it does the concert itself. Swiftly moving through the interior of the arena, into the stands, onto the stage, and even away from the arena entirely, Contemporary Color creates a visual landscape that sometimes moves into the abstract to recreate the environment of the performance.
The Ross brothers once again paired with sound designer and long-time collaborator Lawrence Everson in order to fulfill their experiential imperative. Everson was responsible for the sound design in Bill and Turner’s previous films, 45365, Tchoupitoulas, and Western. Contemporary Color marks the first time that the Rosses invited sound recordists to their shoot, tackling the challenging environment that is a series of concert performances.
I spoke to Everson about his background in sound design, the concept and execution behind Contemporary Color, and the intricacies of crafting auditory landscapes in documentaries. The film plays next this Saturday at AFIDOCS.
Filmmaker: How did you figure out that you wanted to work in sound design, initially?
Lawrence Everson: I knew early on that I wanted to work in film. That came about from starting to read behind-the-scenes magazines. Cinefex is one, it’s a special effects magazine. I would also read American Cinematographer. I loved the behind-the-scenes process, and that drew me into the field of film. I went to film school at USC, but I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do in film. I tried a little bit of everything, and really found myself gravitating to post production. I really enjoyed film editing, and I loved just sitting in front of a computer, being creative all the time. Trying to put all of these puzzle pieces together is something I found really, really enjoyable. So I thought for a long time that I was going to be a video editor. Then the more I started doing stuff with video editing, the more I started falling in love with editing the soundtracks and sound effects. That opened my eyes to the field of sound and audio mixing. It was all of the things I loved about video editing, but just so much more — so much more layering.
Filmmaker: Was there a particular film or a set of films that inspired you in a way?
Everson: No, it wasn’t, but one thing that I loved was when I went to the film program at USC, I was one of the few people that sought out the critical studies program as opposed to the production track. I felt like I could learn a lot of the production skills by helping all of my production friends with their films. Helping out on films, being a PA, just sort of learning by doing, reading manuals. But I really wanted that classroom film studies education. I felt very fortunate that I could go to classes and watch movies all day long for four years. There was just this overwhelming breadth of all the films that I watched. Learning the educational aspect, and the theoretical side of filmmaking. That stuff really stuck with me a lot more than the technical side. All of the technical stuff we learned, back 15+ years ago, will all have drastically changed by now. The theoretical stuff, and all of the storytelling stuff — that lasts forever and that’s really important stuff no matter what the technical process is.
As far as individual films go, one of the classics that everyone mentions is Ben Burtt’s work on Star Wars, just because of how novel the sound effects process was. Star Wars is really special throughout all of the films in history as it’s one of the few films that if you mention it to someone, some of the first things that people think about are the sound effects, not the visuals: Darth Vader’s breathing, the lightsaber sound effects, the screaming TIE fighters, the laser shots, and John Williams’ score. It’s amazing that in a film full of incredible, never-before-seen visual imagery, the sounds are some of the even more iconic things. Gary Rydstrom, he’s always been a hero of mine. The work that he has done on films like Saving Private Ryan or Jurassic Park are just some of the most incredible film sound works that have been done. When I was a little kid I saw Terminator 2. That was one of the first movies I can remember seeing in a theater. I was playing a game of HORSE in the backyard with my dad, and I called an impossible shot from the other side of the yard that no little kid could ever make. My dad told me that if I made that shot I can get any wish that I wanted. So I said I want to go see Terminator 2, and he laughed at me. For some impossible reason I ended up making that basketball shot. He struck true to his word; my mom was pretty mad because I was way too young to see an R-rated film at that time. I remember being in Terminator 2 for the first time feeling: “Oh, this is how big a movie can be.” Seeing this blockbuster on that scale is one of those iconic, defining moments even to this day. Even though I work in these various small, odd, artistic documentary movies, I still love going to the blockbusters and seeing the sheer layering and incredible work that goes into the sound design on these humongous movies.
Filmmaker: You mentioned fiction films, and you’ve done work in a variety of fields. Was there anything in particular that moved you towards documentary work?
Everson: From a sound-post perspective, I treat documentaries and fiction films very similarly. There is an element of world building and sound supporting the narrative that happens regardless of whether it’s a fiction or a documentary film. There is something that I really like about documentaries and the world of documentary filmmaking. Part of it is because it is real — they’re real people or real events or real places. Part of it also feeds into my love for travel and experiencing different parts of the world. Working on a documentary film, or even just watching a documentary film, enables me to experience a different part of the world that I normally wouldn’t have, and learn some perspective from that.
I love the documentary community as well. It’s a slightly smaller world and one that’s very interconnected, where a lot of great people are making really great films and everyone sort of knows each other. I find it to be a very supportive community just because of how hard it is often times to make a documentary film with the budgetary considerations that happen.
Filmmaker: I really love your article “Constructing Reality for Nonfiction Film.” You make the case that the most important thing in sound design is following the director’s viewpoint on truth and reality. What direction did the Ross brothers give you for Contemporary Color initially?
Everson: One thing that I really love about our relationship, really since the beginning, is that they have this great combination of vision and trust. They’re really good at bringing me on board early in the process and involving me in these creative conversations about the overarching story ideas and concepts for the film. They also have this tremendous trust in me where they are like: “Here are our ideas, but go play with them! Come up with your own ideas. Let us know what you’re thinking and how that that’s going.” Then we get together again for the final mix and go through what works and what doesn’t. They’re really good at having topline elements for all of their films that they communicate early, that is maintained throughout the whole process.
For Tchoupitoulas, for example, one of the things we keyed on was this childlike wonder of experiencing things for the first time, and sights and sounds. For Western a lot of the focus was on, Tchoupitoulas was a really loud movie, this is going to be a very quiet one. The symbolism of landscapes, in a narrative and storytelling sense. For this film, one of the things that got me excited for it early was when they talked about the concept: this mashup of old WWF wrestling and vintage sports broadcasts, this Muppet Show conglomeration. That’s suddenly when I understood the style. I grew up on Jim Henson, he’s another huge childhood hero. I love The Muppet Show not just for its humor and its creativity, but what they were going at by that analogy in terms of: Here is a show that takes place in this one environment of this theater, but you’re watching it from the audience’s perspective, and also from backstage, you’re watching individual storylines play out with these colorful and quirky characters, but it’s all wrapped up together in this variety show and these musical acts. That format sparked something in my mind. The idea of David Byrne as this almost Kermit-like character — he is the ringleader and guiding everyone through this hurricane that he has created, but is also helping everyone move their way through the hurricane of this big spectacle.
Filmmaker: Did that initial Muppet Show idea evolve as you actually ended up constructing the audio? Or did you stick true to that?
Everson: I think we stayed pretty true to that. With everything you have an idea and a game plan, and then you get a little improvisational as it plays out. Bill and Turner have a really good grasp on staying true to their concept but allowing the people that they work with to influence it in ways. The three different stages for me [started with] the initial conversations we had — the creative conversations that took place about six months before the filming of the concerts themselves, the idea generation phase. Then the concerts themselves: being there, supervising the documentary sound, production sound capture, and experiencing those concerts and seeing all behind the scenes. Then lastly, the third stage, is the edit of the film and seeing how it progressed from the initial rough cut through to the final cut. All three of those things shaped my ideas for what the sound of the film could be. By the time we actually started the official sound editing and mixing process I had a pretty solid idea of what we wanted it to be. It was just a matter of executing from that.
Filmmaker: In Tchoupitoulas, you went to New Orleans after the film was already shot to build a library of sound effects. In your piece you said: “It was paramount that I knew what it was to experience the French Quarter, to see and feel the city, and in a way to live a little bit of the experience of the subjects of the film.” How did you prepare in advance to capture this particular environment?
Everson: Being there for an experiential purpose was really vital. I try and push that on every documentary film that is feasible. I feel like so much the world building part of sound design, being able to support the story, comes from this concept of experiencing or living something, understanding it, and then figuring out how to recreate that. You can impart that experience to the audiences. I don’t have background in being in a band. I’ve never part of an international tour, or a big tour, or a giant concert setup, so I experiencing that would be something that would be really valuable for me to understand.
This was unlike a lot of documentary processes, which are six months, nine months, year long, two year long shoots of incrementally shooting. This was concentrated. It was a very intense shoot on a finite amount of shows with a lot of people. Being there to help coordinate stuff, coordinating our production sound recordists, being a liaison between the amazing front of house music team and our post sound music mixer and myself. We recorded all sorts of ambiences: from the concert, the arena, the empty arena before the stage is set, backstage, air conditioning and hums, crowd recordings. We had multiple microphones, including a 5.1 DPA mic in the crowd every night, capturing cheers and audience reactions. Building that library that we could use to recreate this world using the actual building blocks of the world itself. Part of it was experiential, so when it came time to do the edit the film is moving around all these different parts of the arena and through all these different environments. I had a very intimate understanding of not only how those environments all sounded but how they all interconnected, which was important because the audio in the film acts as a through line to keep everything feeling real time and interconnected. When you cut away from the music act on the stage, Bill and Turner wanted to still hear that through the walls, or echoing down the hallway, or in the loading docks. You had this sense of knowing where you were in the overall flow of the concert, regardless of if you were in the dressing room or the rehearsal stage, or backstage, or in one of these subjective dream moments. There was always some sort of continuity to keep these grounded. Knowing what the difference was when you’re on the floor and play full volume versus in the loading dock. I tried to recreate those spaces in the film and keep the audio both authentic to that but also narratively cohesive as we jump around. We knew that since we’re not exploring tons of different environments outside of that, the environments we had inside all had to be very detailed, immersive and realistic. Being there to experience that was key to those things because I wouldn’t have known what it would have been like or felt like without being a participant.
Filmmaker: In the previous Ross brothers films you had them pick up a lot of audio, so being there in person must changed your process from start to finish.
Everson: That was one of the things I was really thankful for, being open to the idea of having sound recordists there. Traditionally for their films, so much of the process is the two of them shooting, editing, and doing sound. Doing everything themselves. With this, we knew it was going to be a complex thing with lots of moving parts. The other thing that was tricky about this film is that it’s such a challenging environment to record in. You have these giant stage monitors blasting music incredibly loud. That drowns out everything else. You have the hustle and bustle of thousands of people moving around backstage. Setting up the lights, the staging, the musicians, the color guard teams, their practice, their equipment. Then also a dozen camera people running around too, capturing all these different things. We knew that it was going to be a very challenging environment as far as audio capture was concerned. We had some additional location sound people that were paired with these camera crews, that were just vitally important for trying to capture as clean of audio as possible. Matt King, Kyle Porter, and Scott Taylor were our three main production location sound recordists. Shaun Hettinger was also manning the surround mic up in the stands. The people that they were paired with as far as the other documentary filmmakers capturing some of the behind-the-scenes, behind-backstage stuff, also generally were similar to Bill and Turner in how they operate with a very one-man band aesthetic capturing sound and video. There is a little bit of this fear of: “We’re in this hectic run-and-gun, unscripted environment with people running everywhere in confined spaces, and we have this sound crew that we’re not familiar with, is that going to interrupt the filmmaking process?” To my relief, everyone was really cool with the idea. The production sound people and the camera crews developed this wordless style of communication and synergy, where everything was unscripted and about plucking out moments of intimacy from this insanity. The production sound people were great at seeing where the camera was focusing and managing to position themselves with the wireless booms to capture as clean of audio as possible as the shoot evolved. A lot of the times there just wasn’t the time or opportunity to wirelessly mic people, especially if they’re rushing out to the stage to perform or rushing back to swap out their equipment.
Filmmaker: What type of equipment was everyone using? I’m assuming different people were responsible for different equipment.
Everson: The location sound crew was connected wirelessly to the camera. They had a wireless boom, for the sake of speed and efficiency. We wouldn’t have time to mic people, for the most part, ahead of time. Especially if it’s for the color guard teams and grabbing interview as they were running back and forth the stage. We had production sound recordists with a wireless boom throwing to camera, and then also recording backup onto their field recorders just in case there were any dropouts or problems with the wireless. We knew we could have a clean backup recording that way. Bill and Turner both had the shotguns, Sennheiser 8060 microphones. They had a shotgun on their cameras and wireless mics that they would use. When they knew that they were going to have one on one in dressing rooms or interviews with the musicians, then we would have time to wirelessly mic them then. Up in the crowds, all those camera crews were just recording scratch audio for syncing up later. Pretty much anything in the arena itself, once the music started playing, would just be blown out. It would just be all music. The two things we wanted to capture from the arena side were the crowds, so I spent a lot of my time, when not in a supervisor state, running around and capturing as many different perspectives of crowds in the arena as possible. Upper deck, lower deck, underneath the loading area, way off in the stands, behind stage, in front of the stands. We had a 5.1 DPA microphone that was also there, just for crowd capture purposes. We really wanted the crowd to feel authentic. The type of crowd that’s cheering for a color guard concert is a little bit different of a sound and makeup than, say, a sports crowd or a straightforward music crowd.
As far as the music was concerned, we had this amazing group of people capturing the music all the way through, including the front-of-house engineer, Paul Hager. We were in great hands because the band that was playing, and all of this incredible music, was being captured by the front-of-house team, and then sent to Dan Romer, who is an incredible music mixer. He did the music mixing for this with also a little bit of 5.1 mix-in done in New York with Martin Czembor. I knew that the music was in good hands, all the way from on stage through to the end of the film. Being able to focus on the dialogue capture backstage as well as the crowd capture out in the environments was my main priority.
Filmmaker: After recording the entire sound library, trying to take audience to a real place and crafting that environment, where do you go after that?
Everson: It’s funny because you take this long break while the film is being edited. They actually edited this one far more rapidly than a normal documentary process. Eight months or a year is standard documentary edit time. This one was six months. For me there is always this gap where they have to edit the film and that takes a really long time. So you put everything in the back of your mind and work on other projects. Then it resurfaces once they have a rough cut that they feel isn’t complete, but is very symbolic of what they want the film to be. Watching the rough cut, that’s when everything comes out of storage in your brain. You start really thinking critically about: How is the design process going to work? How is the editing process going to work? How is the cleanup process going to work? How are we going to do all of these tricks?
The picture edit is the first step towards informing what the sound edit is going to be and how the transitions are going to work depending on what’s cutting from what and how rapidly. It’s this sequence of every couple of weeks or months watching a new rough cut until picture lock. By the time you’re having those discussions and watching cuts, you feel pretty good about the overall concept. Every film I work on we do what’s called a spotting session, where you have the directors, editors and producers, whoever the main creative forces are, all come together at the first day of post sound. We watch the film all in a room together, and talk through the creative game plan from scene to scene and shot to shot. I ask questions about: “How do you want this to flow? How do you feel about this?” By the time that spotting session is done, suddenly you have this really clear game plan for how you want everything to go. The rest of the post-sound process is the execution of that. There is usually a year-long build up that by the time you actually start work you have a good idea of what you want to accomplish. That makes it easier than someone just cold dropping a whole movie in your lap and being like: “Hey, you’re not familiar with this at all but we need you to start and we’re on a time crunch.”
Going into it a part of me was like: “So much of this is going to be the music, and the music is being handled by these incredible music mixers. They’ll make my job a lot easier!” I didn’t think, because it was such a different type of concert film. While the music performances are going on, there is also these color guard performances that involve dozens of people, all dancing, jumping, and spinning flags and rifles. A lot of that is also punched through as well. Anything that was recorded while the music was playing, was going to be overpowered and blown out. We were able to get the color guard teams in a rehearsal space and record a sound library of flags waving, rifles being tossed, rifles being caught, sabers being tossed, sabers being caught. We had these really great, authentic sounds of one person spinning a rifle, of five people spinning a rifle, that we were able to edit into the film itself. We also had a foley team, Brian Straub and Matthew Manselle, that did foley for the foot falls and the dances. Myself and sound editors, Erika Camp and Jake Dilley, would cut in rifle catches, rifle throws, and the flag movements so it felt like you were getting all of that from the live performance. These extra elements, in addition to just the music, were really challenging but also satisfying to all come together in the mix. You have the crowd yell out, which is what they do in the performances. You have these families, friends, and other color guard teams in the crowd really excited when someone catches, does a really tough movie, or an extra-high rifle throw. These are all pockets of cheering during the performances. Having to dance between the music, the rifle catches, the flag waving, and the crowds cheering. Then we’re cutting away and going backstage and into the rafters, or going into a dream sequence.
Filmmaker: Did you have more or less foley than you usually would for a documentary?
Everson: I would say probably more, but in really specific cases. A lot of times for docs — and this is where it goes on judging the subject needs of the directors and also the needs of the film — you have to be a little bit wary about pushing sound effects too far, in terms of creating a world that may not be necessarily authentic. Other ones are much more focused on emotional truth and subjectivity, where you can really go bananas with sound design and sound creation. This is probably the most complex doc that I’ve worked on in terms of the amount of moving parts, but also how simultaneously all of those parts interact with each other. It wasn’t like the narrative stopped for a music performance. The narrative continued through the music performances, and I feel like that the way Bill and his team edited the movie, from the picture editorial side, it almost felt like three different movies all playing simultaneously. You had the concert film, the backstage film, and the artistic, subjective dream-like element. The complexity was making sure that all those moving parts fit together. Anytime that you’re trying to foley a dance performance, it’s tricky because with 20 to 50 people in the dance troop, all with props and rifles and flags, there are a lot of elements that have a very specific rhythm and cadence to them. Editing those sounds, and foleying those to make the timing on synch but also emotionally realistic, was challenging. You have this tremendous amount of work that goes into all of this, and then it played so low in the mix that it’s barely perceptible. It almost feels unjust to the people that spent so much time on the editorial, but we wanted it to feel authentic.
I remember the first time we played back Bill the mix with the foley, the flag and rifle catches, some of the surround sound, and the audience coming through the surround. Suddenly it went from watching a movie about a concert performance to actually experiencing a concert performance. We all sort of felt like we’re onto something good. This is becoming really beautiful and then we pursued that. There was this conversation where we weren’t sure how much of a balance we should have between hearing the sounds of the color guard teams versus it being just music. There is plenty of times in the film where we pull it back to music and no other sounds. Determining that balance was trial-and-error, that improvisational part of film mixing.
Filmmaker: The film is so much about crafting a real place, but it does a great job of not attempting to replicate or replace the show. It’s so much about the process of the event taking place. The film cuts out about 20 minutes of the show. Was the music-mix team responsible for that? Were you involved in that? What were the challenges of cutting out the time while keeping the rhythm of the performances?
Everson: Bill and his editorial team were brilliant at making everything feel like you’re watching a real-time show while actually being 20 minutes shorter than the real show and throwing in all this extra narrative and behind-the-scenes stuff. The music decisions were made in the editorial. The music mixers had two versions: the stereo version, the soundtrack version where everything is mixed full and uninterrupted, and then those mixes were made into the 5.1 mixes for the film. Bill and his editorial team would decide when to cut in the performances, when to cut backstage, and they would cut the music. It was a combination of me and primarily Dan Romer, the main music mixer, as a team going through the transition and deciding what to do with the music. Dan was brilliant at connecting the songs where the edit was a bit troublesome in terms of the rhythms of the song. He was fantastic at smoothing over those edits to where the songs felt really cohesive and fluid. Once we had the music in place all the way through, edited properly, it my job was to world-ize it. Making sure that when we’re cutting away backstage we’re treating it so it sounds like it’s backstage, or it sounds like the bass is thumping through the walls of the dressing room. When we’re jumping to a distant crowd perspective, treating it in a way that those perspective jumps feel natural to the spaces that they’re being presented in.
Filmmaker: During the show there are video pieces playing on the Jumbotron. In the film they’re displayed by recording the screen in the arena, but it sounds like the audio is taken from the original source. Did you choose to use the master audio of those performances, or was it actually the recording from inside the arena that just sounded very clear?
Everson: It was a combination of the two. I was the one that sound edited and mixed the interstitials as well. I had incredible familiarity with them from doing the mixing work on those prior to the shows. We also had access to all of the elements of those. It was a combination depending on what felt the best for the story purposes. There were some times when we would be using the recordings captured from the performances because they felt right. There are other times when we wanted to get a bit cleaner, or we wanted to get a bit more creatively manipulative, where we go into the stems and use the clean recordings that way. Sometimes you’d want it a little bit cleaner because the screen was closer and you want it to feel more connected to the material. Other times, there were certain parts where we wanted to hear the dialogue that was being said, but we wanted it to be really echoey and bouncing through the loading dock. That’s really hard to do with the crowd recording of the interstitials because there is so much extra noise there. It was much more clear to just take the dialogue stem from those interstitials without the rest of the elements, and then manipulate that with delays, echoes and reverbs to give it that sense. There is a lot of scenes where so much stuff is happening simultaneously but it all has to be understood. They wanted the dialogue to sound like you’re hearing it in a loading dock, but it was still really important to hear what was being said because that’s a story element. Hat tip to Dan Romer for composing some of the music tracks for the interstitials as well. He did a fantastic job.
Filmmaker: Did you do any additional dialogue recording takes for some of the interviews? Or do you think that would have messed with the atmosphere of the show?
Everson: No, there wasn’t any ADR. There are some parts that are a little tough to hear because of the different challenging circumstances of that audio landscape. Every documentary I’ve worked on there is always the wish to go back and re-record that line better. Unless it’s a voiceover narration, I’ve never ADR’d a speaker or an interviewee. If something is really hard to hear, we’ll subtitle it. That feels far more authentic than re-recording someone’s voice. It’s definitely one of the challenges of documentaries; a lot of times what you get is what you have. They are all shooting run-and-gun in unscripted environments, so it’s chaotic.
We did have this overarching idea that to create more of a narrative we’d use the interstitials used in the concert itself as the stop gaps between acts. There is about five minutes of downtime in between music acts. This gave the audience something to focus on during those five minutes, but more importantly, helped give this great backstory and introduction to the world of color guard. They knew that they wanted to use those as a narrative device, which was a really brilliant way of interjecting characters and an overarching narrative that goes beyond the concert film into the concert itself without ever actually leaving the walls of the arena.
Filmmaker: There was those abstract scenes outside of the arena. What were the challenges of creating the right sound atmosphere for those?
Everson: Those were fun because they are purely subjective moments. Any time you go into the realm of subjective, the reigns come off with what you can do as far as audio. Suddenly, you’re not really hearing what reality is, you’re hearing what someone’s perception of reality is. It’s such a ripe place for creativity and experimentation. The music is sharing the stage with the color guard performers. So you have this duality going on with this music spectacle, but also this visual spectacle. In those subjective moments you strip away the stage and all of the performers. You’re usually focused on one person or one thing. We used those to really let the music shine and be uninterrupted in a way. Most of the time we would pull back a little bit as opposed to going full on crazy with the sound design. If it’s the guy running with the flag flapping, we wanted that flag flap intensity to match the music build. If it’s just a very quiet, beautiful moment where someone is dancing by themselves under a street light, we would have enough of the outside atmosphere of crickets, traffic and things to give the sense that this world is different than the one in the arena. It was really a chance to let the music shine, and let the music and the visuals do their own wonderful poetry. That’s something that I enjoy about mixing — regardless of what the plan is, it’s really interesting to listen to a scene with just music and turning all the other sounds off. Or turning the music off and listening to it just with the sounds. Or listen to just the dialogue. Or nothing at all, just silence. It’s funny how that’ll completely change your emotional connection to a scene.
Filmmaker: Is there anything you would like to add?
Everson: The main thing I wanted to touch on was just the narrative structure that Bill and Ellen [Schwartz], the [assistant editor], and his editorial team, put together for this film. One of the things I love was the first five minutes of the film. You get a tour of the entire Barclays Center, so you see all these different environments and know how they interact with one another. When you jump around later in the film, you get the spatial orientation. From a sound perspective it acts as a primer for the audiences. You understand that now we’re cutting from here, we’re cutting to there, you’re still hearing the music here, you’re still hearing the voices there. All the style tricks that we do in the film are all set up in the first five minutes. It was one of my favorite parts in the film to work, because of how rapidly it jumps from place to place to place in this environment, and how much information is given. At a certain point you’ve got vocals in the music track that’s playing. You’ve got dialogue happening on the screen. You have dialogue from the PA announcer all simultaneously happening. They’re all important to listen to. So to be able to thread that needle and hand that baton off from one to the other to the other, because we have all three going at once, was a really fun challenge. From the picture editorial side, I loved the way Bill cut that and structured it. It’s fun to jump perspective and to change those sounds. A lot of times in films, long unbroken shots are amazing for sound because you can fill the world with so much detail that’s continuous. But when you cut rapidly you can also do fun things with the transitions from one scene to the next, or one cut to the next. You can play with peoples’ expectations and subvert. Seeing what the picture editorial side did and trying to match that level, and hopefully go one step further with the audio.
