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The Sound of Roma.
I started thinking about a “Roma” blog post a few minutes into the movie.
Why Black and White? What do those almost endless pans mean? How similar or different is the composition compared to “Gravity“? What’s the meaning of “water” for Cuaron?
But as I started reading more about the movie, which by the way was written, directed, produced, shot, and co-edited by Alfonso Cuarón, my attention quickly drifted to the film’s sound design.
First things first.
I am assuming you know about Roma. If you don’t, here’s the executive version. Roma is a semi-autobiographical take on Cuarón’s childhood in Mexico City in the early 70’s.
So far Roma has won the Golden Lion in Venice, received 10 nominations at the 91st Academy Awards—including Best Picture, Best Foreign Language Film, Best Director, Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress. It is tied with The Favourite as the most-nominated film, and with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) for the most Oscar nominations ever received by a film not in the English language.
It also won Best Director and Best Foreign Language Film at the 76th Golden Globe Awards, Best Director and Best Picture at the 24th Critics’ Choice Awards, and at the 72nd British Academy Film Awards won Best Film, Best Film Not in the English Language, Best Direction and Best Cinematography.
UPDATE 20190225: Roma delivered Netflix its highest Oscars prestige yet, contending in 10 Academy Award categories, and wining three: Best Director, Foreign Language Film and Best Cinematography. Alfonso Cuaron gave Mexico its first foreign language film Oscar.
Sound Design.
Now, back to sound design. So it happens, the sound supervisor and re-recording mixer was the Academy Award-winning Skip Lievsay, who also worked on “Gravity“, “Children of Men“, “Y Tu Mama Tambien” and all 18 movies by the Cohen Brothers.
The most informative resource was this interview with Skip Lievsay on YouTube. Here are 3 of my favorite sections:
The full interview.
I highly recommend listening to the complete interview to learn:
- How not having a musical score keeps the audience guessing what will happen next
- Why it was important to Cuarón to have the dialog emanate not just from the screen channels but from all around the audience
- The stunning five-day loop group recording session with 350 actors
- How the final mix of the film took 10 weeks, 7 days a week, 12 hours a day.… wow…..
The technical stuff.
Filmmaker Magazine has another great article on Roma’s sound design. It’s a bit technical but enjoyable.
“In Atmos, we were able to use the x-axis and the y-axis as well as the z-axis. That’s the trick — using the z-axis in terms of extra reverbs or spatial ability.”
Filmmaker Magazine
A (much) deeper interpretation.
If you are interested in a more esoteric approach to Roma, pay close attention to these comments by another maestro, Guillermo del Toro.
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The Cloud Wars.
Adobe recently announce that “everyone can join the Creative Cloud,” and while customers will have access to a free membership to explore certain features, a monthly price of US$50 (based on a one-year subscription) has been set. The idea is that users can access the latest version of Adobe’s popular programs (like Photoshop CS6 and Lightroom 4), without buying the boxed version and subsequent upgrades. In addition to receiving updates to the programs as soon as they are released, users also get 20GB of cloud storage for syncing their work.
On Amazon, Adobe Photoshop CS5
At the same time Adobe set the “Creative Cloud” pricing, Amazon lowered their S3 storage rates. Small businesses with fairly typical 50 TB of data capacity, will see a 12% reduction in costs. Bigger companies storing up to 500 TB of data will enjoy a 13.5% reduction in costs.