For producer/director Brian J. Terwilliger, his documentary feature “One Six Right” had to be a perfect-10 film. This film about Van Nuys Airport, with its colorful history and ups and downs, reflects what’s happening in general aviation across the country. For Terwilliger, this wasn’t going to be a typical indie kind of film. There was to be no compromise for him to achieve what he considered the best.
“I truly love Van Nuys Airport and I think it’s a love story,” Terwilliger said in the “making-of” companion documentary, “One Six Left.” “You can make a love story about anything, and in this case it’s a long piece of pavement in the middle of the San Fernando Valley in southern California that has the name ‘One Six Right.’ And for me the way to do that was to take the viewer flying.”
CAPTURING THE STORY
Terwilliger set out to “capture the spirit and the beauty and the excitement of that perfect day and perfect flying conditions and the smooth air right at sunset,” and nail the perfect landing. “If I could capture the essence of that experience in a film, then I’ve succeeded,” he said.
Every aspect of production had to be right on, each step and element a perfect 10.
(click thumbnail)Producer/Director Brian J. Terwilliger watches the final output of the film’s printmaster at Technicolor’s THX/Dolby stage in Burbank, Calif.That started in production and on-location shooting. The quality bar was set with Sony high-definition CineAlta cameras, aerial cinematography, the settings and sound for 85 interviews, and authentic, accurate and clean wild sound recorded for each airplane and effects (see Part 1).
The process continued to postproduction and editing, and that carried through to the sound design and an original musical score. All told there were more than 120 hours of footage—not including archival material—that Terwilliger took into the edit suites in a process that took 54 weeks.
First came picture editing on Apple Final Cut Pro HD with Editor Kim Furst.
The film consists of a series of sequences, smaller stories that flow from one to the next, working together to create the whole. The story progresses from people talking about learning to fly, the introduction of the main character—the Van Nuys Airport itself—and then back to people relating why they learned to fly and the excitement of flying. It also includes fond memories of log books, the history of the airport, world record flights and joyrides, and the airport’s impact on the surrounding community.
No story would be complete without conflict, and the film discusses the airport noise problems and the threat to Van Nuys and other general aviation airports. The film ends with optimism, looking forward towards the future with the romance of flying forever remaining alive.
One of the challenges of the film, and one of the aspects of which Terwilliger is most proud, is that there is no narrator. The story is told by the deft intercutting of the stories that people told Terwilliger during their interviews.
Terwilliger conducted pre-interviews with all participants, but the recorded interviews were conducted some time after to maintain the spontaneity and freshness of the stories. During the early interviews, topics came up that Terwilliger didn’t originally anticipate, like the significance and fondness for log books, especially what they meant for the older pilots. Terwilliger made sure he prompted this question in further interviews, but for the first 20 or so, he wasn’t able to go back and ask.
Since the prompts were the same for all those interviewed, “everyone was telling the same story, but a different version,” Terwilliger said. “It was up to Kim [Furst] to make it happen. She listened to all the stories, and was able to find a thread.”
Most of the people interviewed never met each other during the 14 months that the interviews were conducted, and yet as the scenes came together, the story tellers look like they finish each other’s sentences.
SOUND AND SCORE
(click thumbnail)Producer/Director Brian J. Terwilliger at the Firehouse Recording Studios in Pasadena, Calif., for the final orchestra recording session.During picture editing, Terwilliger created a rough-cut sound mix on Final Cut Pro HD primarily using synchronized audio that was recorded with the pictures. The sound may not have been the best for various reasons. It may have been a long shot too far for the mic to pick up what was being recorded. Or some extraneous airport noise may have interfered. Yet the scratch mix served to create a template for the final mix and aided in verifying specific sounds. It also, as Terwilliger said, made it easier to replace sounds with those from the original files of catalogued wild sound recordings.
Also during picture editing, Terwilliger played with temp (temporary) music that provided the mood, set the scene, and created the emotion, pacing and tempo that he was trying to convey. Certain scenes were cut to music, while for others this wasn’t as critical.
An original musical score was in the plans from the beginning.
“I knew well that music was a critical component to the movie especially [one] that has such big images and such majesty,” Terwilliger said. “If you don’t have the right music to back it up it’s going to fall flat. Music drives the emotion in any film. Sound and dialog and images can only go so far.”
Terwilliger met with composer Nathan Wang early in the project, sharing initial footage and temp scores. Once the picture editing was complete and locked, director and composer spotted the movie together. Viewing a copy of the picture with burned-in time code, Terwilliger described what he wanted musically, scene by scene, sequence by sequence, noting those scenes that were cut to a particular rhythm and timing.
“And he clearly got it,” Terwilliger said, referring to Wang. “He hit the exact notes.”
Wang created the initial compositions in his studio with synthesizer and sampled sounds, tweaking the score over a six month period, and ultimately produced the sheet music for the orchestra.
With Wang conducting the score to picture, the orchestra was recorded on multiple channels of Digidesign Pro Tools, with different sections or instruments on separate tracks for flexibility in the final sound mix. Some instruments like the French horn or clarinet were recorded in isolation booths as they played along with the orchestra. The ability to bring specific instruments in and out of the final mix proved quite useful later on.
Another musician and composer, Freddy Clarke, produced and performed original guitar music for the movie, as well.
SOUND EDITING
With the picture edited and all the sound elements including music gathered, it was time for sound editing, with sound supervisor and re-recording mixer Willy Levins. (Actually, almost all of the sound elements were ready. Even during sound editing, Terwilliger still had to go out to record more of the particular sounds he needed.)
There was no doubt in Terwilliger’s mind that the soundtrack would be in 5.1 surround, to complement the HD images and to provide that polished look and sound he was going after.
The online editing and mixing took place at Technicolor in Burbank, Calif., a THX-certified mixing theatre.
“The only way to mix was on a big stage,” Terwilliger said. “It was a very high-end room.”
It was also important for Terwilliger to produce a Dolby certified mix, in order to use the Dolby logo in the credits. “We had a Dolby engineer there for the final mix to QC the sound,” he said.
In general, for the orchestral pieces, instrument sections and individual instruments were placed in the soundfield as one would expect to hear if sitting in a concert hall. Certain sounds were mixed for the surround speakers, with some reverb added to give the orchestra a fuller sound, and to increase the dimension of the surround soundfield.
Sound editing also involved replacing the scratch tracks with the correct wild sounds and in some cases sound from B-rolls where the pictures weren’t used. All effects were recorded specifically for the picture, with some scenes including tower communications that related to the particular airplane shown ready to take off or land.
For the aerial shots, all the sound was recorded on the ground at different distances and positions from the airplanes. These were artfully combined to create what one would expect to hear from those planes in flight. Sound for some of the planes—particularly the jets—were created from a blend of other airplane sounds, but the results were true to what those aircraft actually sounded like. For Terwilliger, who knows his planes, authenticity was imperative.
Ambient sound during the interviews was cleaned up, and matched from cut to cut. Interviews were enhanced with a little reverb or equalization.
But elements by themselves don’t make an exciting aural experience in a movie. Rather it’s the artful blending of music, effects, and the interviews that set the mood, place the action in a particular era, reveal the emotions, and progress the story of each sequence and the film as a whole. More specifics later.
