Crip Camp sound Asbjoern Andersen


James LeBrecht is a sound designer, filmmaker, and disability rights activist. His credits include Minding the Gap, Pitch Black, The Skulls, Battlefield Earth, and Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story. Nicole Newnham is an Emmy award winning documentary filmmaker, writer, director, and producer. Her credits include Crip Camp, Awavena, and The Rape of Europa. Crip Camp is an Oscar nominated documentary about teens with disabilities and a summer camp that would help change their world.
written by Doug Siebum, photos courtesy of Peter Lyons and IMRSV Sound
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DS = Doug Siebum
NN = Nicole Newnham
JL = James LeBrecht

DS: Hello and thanks for agreeing to do an interview. Can you each introduce yourself and provide a bit of your personal stories and how you two ended up making a film together?

NN: I’m a documentary filmmaker. I’ve been working in documentary film for 25 years. For the last 15 years, I’ve had the pleasure of doing all the sound design and mixing work on my films with Jim, who runs an amazing company in Berkeley. He has worked on a lot of legendary documentaries. We always really enjoyed working together.

After I finished a film, that was also about young people starting a social movement, Jim asked me to go out to lunch with him. He pitched me on a few story ideas that he had around people with disabilities. I was really intrigued because, Jim had become an increasingly powerful voice and activist in advocating for better representation for people with disabilities in film. Also, for better access for filmmakers with disabilities. We had a great lunch and we were kind of saying goodbye and Jim dropped as an aside “you know, what I really always wanted to see was a film about my summer camp.” I kind of rolled my eyes because I thought, a lot of people think they went to a really special summer camp, but it was only special to them. Not necessarily something that a documentary needs to be made about. Then Jim started telling me the story of Camp Jened and it was unlike anything that I’d ever heard before. It was such a fun story filled with so much joy. The subsequent pictures Jim sent me after that, of the camp, made me incredibly excited. I felt that Jened was a world that if we could make film goers step inside it and experience it, it would shift the ways that they saw things, like it shifted my perspective.

JL: I’ve been working in audio for about four decades now. Starting off in theater and moving into film. I have been working almost exclusively on documentary and indie features for the past 25 years. As Nicole mentioned, I had the great experience of being able to work with Nicole on three of her feature length documentaries through Berkeley Sound Artists. I really really loved her work and thought that she was quite exceptional. During the period of the last 10 years or so, I’ve been chomping at the bit because I just didn’t see documentaries about disabilities that I felt were really telling the inside story. It was very surface level about different issues, but it wasn’t “this is what a lived experience is.” So like Nicole mentioned, we had that wonderful lunch and she got interested in this idea of this documentary. I knew that there was a story here about this exodus of people from New York to Berkeley in the mid 70’s and this possible connection to a greater story. As Nicole started digging into this, I think it revealed itself to her and then to me too, that there was a much bigger story to be told.
 

DS: Jim, can you talk a little about your journey into the world of sound? Can you talk about your time in college and then becoming a theatre sound designer? I know you go a little bit into that in the documentary.

JL: For sure. With all of Nicole’s experience that she has, and our collaboration on the audio, and her background and experience in audio and sound design for film is quite extensive also. So I wanted to make sure that we’re clear on that.

DS: Excellent.

JL: So my journey into sound [Jim repeats sound, sound, sound, sound like a delay effect]. When I was a kid, my father had a Hi-Fi in the basement, down in the play room in our house. You could open up this one door and look inside and see the tubes glowing and such. He was also one of these people that would record things on to his one stack reel to reel off the radio. One of the local New York stations would play a Broadway cast album, I think every Saturday evening and my Dad would record those. So I had this natural interest in audio, Then for my birthday one year, I got a reel to reel. In High School, I fell in with the Drama click and I wound up doing sound for a couple of productions. I bought some sound effects LP’s. I got into it that way. I went off to college to be what I thought would be an Acoustics major. I wanted to do sound for the Grateful Dead. I didn’t realize that acoustics was all math and physics that I was not excelling at.

So at the end of my first year I went down to approach the Drama department at UC San Diego. They were doing a big outdoor production that was taking place right at the central library there at the school. It happened to be a flat concrete area that was completely easy for me to roll around and get around. There were cables all over the place, but for a manual wheelchair user like myself, popping a little wheelie as you get close to a cable just to roll over it, was like second nature at this point in my life. They made me the head of the sound crew because, I don’t know, nobody else wanted to do it.

I got hooked on doing sound for theatre. I pursued it the way most people do. I worked at the Utah Shakespeare Festival one summer. I worked at the Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts (PCPA) down in central California for a summer. There I met some people from the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. When I graduated college, I heard that my buddy, Paul Dixon who had worked with me at PCPA and was the resident designer at Berkeley Rep, was leaving. So I applied for the job. Even though it was not the most wheelchair accessible place in the world. Paul Dixon told me this great story where the managing director said to him “Paul, he can’t walk and we’ve got stairs.” Paul said “he’s the best damn sound designer I know.” As Paul told me later, I was the only sound designer he knew. He had also worked with me that summer, so he knew that I could do the job. I had 10 wonderful years at the Berkeley Rep.

I got connected to some of those people and invited some sound supervisors to come to shows on my comp tickets.

I realized that there was a big post production facility in Berkeley that was run by Saul Zaentz, the movie producer who had produced The English Patient, Amadeus, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I got connected to some of those people and invited some sound supervisors to come to shows on my comp tickets. We went out for a beer afterwards and I got to know some of them. When I was ready to make the move, I got on as an intern at the age of 33, on a film. I was able to prove my worth and work my way up there. In 1996 I decided to try to open my own small company within the building, so that I could do some other things including some of the smaller documentary projects that they may not have been really interested in, because there was not enough money there for them. My company was Berkeley Sound Artists.


From left to right: Dan Olmsted, Jacob Bloomfield-Misrach, Bijan Sharifi, James LeBrecht, Jocelyn Fabello, and William Sammons

DS: You were pretty successful as a theatre sound designer. You wrote a book and everything, so you had a pretty good career.

JL: Yeah, I did. I won a bunch of Bay Area Theater Critic Circle awards for my sound design which was really wonderful. I was working at Berkeley Rep, which is a rather prestigious regional theater, and at La Jolla Playhouse as a freelancer, and the Old Globe Theatre, and over at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco. It was really really wonderful. My tenure at Berkeley Rep, I came to a point where I wasn’t happy there. There were situations there that were making me put in 48 hours straight on certain projects. I just wasn’t happy. It was a different place. Not a horrible place by any stretch of the imagination. It just evolved into a different place, which happens at all regional theaters. I just didn’t really feel like I wanted to continue working there.
 

DS: Did your time in theatre sound influence your work in film sound? and if so, how? Can you provide any examples?

You have to make it your own. Do something different. Make it unique.

JL: It was an interesting transition, because in theatre, we’ll stay up until three in the morning after a preview, talking about everything. Certainly when I started off as a junior member of the team, I realized that I wasn’t going to be talking to the director about anything. I was going to be talking to the sound supervisor. I kind of missed that artistic engagement with the director themselves. I feel like a career in theater in general is an incredible training ground to do anything else. You so much, have to be a team player. You have to be reliable and show up. That work ethic is necessary in many other industries and certainly the film industry. I itched to be doing sound design beyond just editing footsteps and editing ambiences into scenes, and tried to maybe add in a little something here and there when I could. I think that the advantage of having worked in theatre was that I was experienced with working with many, many, many directors in many different genres and styles of theatre. When you’re working in sound for film, especially as a mixer or as a sound supervisor, you’re working with many different directors. So I think it really was a great experience. In ways of thinking about sound design specifically for film, I was forced season after season to really stretch my imagination and really experiment with sound, with new tools or software, and really come up with something that was mine and unique. As opposed to just pulling it off the shelf. I think that kind of feeling, that one aspect of it when I was running Berkeley Sound Artists, that’s one of the things I impressed upon the people that were working with me. You have to make it your own. Do something different. Make it unique.

DS: I have noticed that from the people that work at Berkeley Sound Artists. You’ve definitely had an influence on them.
 


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DS: Nicole, can you tell me a little bit about your experience with sound and how sound has influenced your documentary work?

NN: I felt very lucky early on in my career to land at Berkeley Sound Artists and work with Jim. I was very interested in the impact sound had on film and how that could be pushed in documentary. I had been really influenced by Walter Murch with an Apocalypse Now lecture when I was a graduate student in the Stanford documentary film program. He came down with the great 16 mm print that showed all the different tracks laid out. He had one of the scenes of Apocalypse Now and really had an impact on me because I could see through that demonstration the emotions that were added by each layer of sound.

I’ve always tried to think about sound design as something where you can take a lot of liberty, and have a lot of fun to be creative, and work on peoples emotions in a way that’s sometimes harder to do in picture, because it’s more obvious. Jim has been a great partner in doing that. I think there definitely are some directors that probably don’t get as geeky and into the weeds as I do, but I just love it. I love thinking about and considering every single sound effect. The experience of working on Crip Camp was really wonderful, because we were able to discuss the sound design from the very beginning of the project. It’s something that other collaborators that I’ve had, haven’t necessarily been quite as interested in doing. Sound has always been part of the discussion from the very beginning. There were things about Jim’s experience growing up, that he really wanted to make sure were a part of the sound design that I didn’t understand until they were laid in, how powerful they were going to be.

One of my favorite examples is that Jim and the guys at Berkeley Sound Artists were really taking pains to make sure the wheelchair sounds that we were adding in as sweeteners were exactly the right vintage, and the right kind of chair, and the right kind of wheel. So it’s really that kind of wheel crunching over the same kind of gravel that is the kind of gravel that they had on the path at camp. That kind of evocation of a powerful memory of your youth through sound is really wonderful. I didn’t really appreciate for myself, how the fact that they took such great pains to create what the sound of a world full of groups of manual wheelchairs was. Until we finally got to when Crip Camp follows people from camp out to Berkeley, and they start the independent living movement, and the Center for Independent Living (CIL) is helping people get access to power chairs. So when the film enters suddenly the world of CIL, you enter a world of humming power chairs. And we have a character that talks about the liberating experience of getting a power chair. It was so cool to go from the world of manual chairs to the world of power chairs and you felt like YEAH. Now people are getting their freedom and their independence and it was just an emotional or subconscious way of feeling that shift in liberation and that accomplishment that everybody had made. I just loved it.
 

DS: Jim, your company recently merged with IMRSV Sound. Was the time that you were putting into Crip Camp the motivation for merging the companies?

JL: It really was. When we started, it really became apparent to me rather early on, that it was going to be next to impossible to run a company as well as give the film my attention. Initially I was looking for someone that might be able to run the company as an employee. Long story short, there was some interest from one person to buy the company, but I had been talking to Jacob Bloomfield-Misrach. I really liked him and we were starting to work together already. He said “I might be able to make an offer myself”. His offer to me was really really good. It wasn’t like “oh my gosh, I’m going to retire now,” but it basically allowed me to get out of debt and to hand it off to somebody that cared about people, employees, clients, and the quality of the work as much as I do. The answer’s yes, there’s no way I could have run the company and been giving Crip Camp the time that it needed from me.

DS: I’m sure it felt good to hand off the company to someone with the right touch to carry on your vision for the company.

JL: I was assured also, that we were going to continue employing some of our long time editors and sound designers like Bijan Sharifi and Dan Olmsted. They all do really really great work. It was just a no brainer that was going to happen. It felt good knowing that basically the same crew was there. There was fresh energy into running the company and expanding what it could do. I’m so happy in the direction it’s been going in and working in. I’m still doing some mixing. At the moment it’s more depending on the schedule of Crip Camp and such, but there are certain films and filmmakers that I really adore and have worked with in the past, that I would try to drop everything I could just to work with them. That remains to be seen. I’m still working for the company. I call Jake “boss” and he calls me “boss,” so it’s pretty funny.
 



CRIP CAMP: A DISABILITY REVOLUTION | Official Trailer | Netflix | Documentary


Crip Camp Trailer

DS: Did the two of you have an overall vision for the sound of the film before you started on post sound?

JL: I don’t think I did. I think the aesthetic actually started in the editing room with our editors, who were starting to put in temp sound and I was asked to put in a few sound design moments to help fill things out. What do you say Nicole, did you have any sense of it?

NN: Yeah, I think we did have conversations from the very beginning about the overall aesthetic of the project and definitely wanting to make sure that it had a very immediate, authentic sound, to match the real immersive, but very raw kind of video footage that the first 40 minutes of the film are made up of. Then as we got further into the edit, we figured out how to play with time a little bit. So that we would flashback to people’s memories from their childhood from the camp, but that black and white footage at camp kind of became the present tense. And so that gave us the ability to flush out the sound of things like Judy’s childhood in Brooklyn a little more dramatically. Then when we came back to camp, we wanted to keep it really real. We did add things that the mics weren’t picking up at the time. Like the wheelchair wheels on the gravel. We didn’t do it in an expressionistic way or anything.

Later on in the film, when Jim was narrating and remembering his trip out to California we could have some fun with the sound design and put some humor into it. I think it’s true what Jim’s says, we kind of evolved that as the aesthetic as we got into it. Because the film itself was really evolving as we tried to figure out, how do we interweave all of these different stories, but keep Jim as a guide and as a through line? How do we navigate all the different points in time that the film covers? All of that.

JL: I remember one day, for the drive up to camp, the editor had put some birds in there. To me they were stereotypical happy birds, and typically, maybe 9 out of 10 documentaries, I would have tried to go with something that sounds a little more realistic such as, that has to be a blue jay from the Catskill Mountains or something. The kind of generic and happy quality of it felt so appropriate for what might be a home movie aesthetic. There was just something about it that felt like the recording didn’t need to be from Cornell.

NN: Right, because that was your memory. That was like you driving in and narrating your impressionistic memory on the bus.

JL: Yeah, it was impressionistic, so it didn’t have to be this accurate and logical study of birds in Hunter, New York. It just could be “happy birds” or “hot bugs”.

NN: Or frogs. They put some frogs in. A track of frogs during that drone shot that takes you back to camp and it’s supposed to be a shot from Jim’s point of view looking out the plane window and thinking about this place. So it really is an impressionistic memory shot invoking the power of this particular patch of the Catskills in Jim’s memory. They were over the top frogs, but they did that. They brought that back. They were the frogs of his childhood memory [Jim laughs].

JL: Frogs are really important to me. I had made a recording. My aunt lived in a gated community that had a golf course. I remember being there in the mid 80’s with my Sony TC-D5M and two Radio Shack PZM microphones. I put a microphone on either side of a small bridge over a water hazard and then just rolling away. That 45 minute recording of frogs became one of my favorite recordings I’ve ever made.
 

[tweet_box]James LeBrecht and Nicole Newnham talk about the sound of Crip Camp[/tweet_box]
DS: There was a good amount of archival footage in the film. How did you deal with that from a sound perspective? Did you have to make some modern recordings appear to be from an earlier time to fit in with the archival footage?

JL: Yes. First off, the archival black and white footage, some of it really suffered from wind noise. We were able to really knock it down pretty well using Izotope RX. I have to tell you, it’s a miracle worker a lot of the time. I wanted to keep a little bit of the rawness, like a little mic handling, or occasionally a little bit of wind on the mic. It added to the legitimacy of the recording. If it sounded too clean, it would sound sterile and artificial. When it came to kind of matching sounds for the news footage, at the company we have a template for all of our sessions. One aspect of that template in Pro Tools is what we call our vintage sound effects routing. In which you could take a new, really fresh, clean recording and run it though an auxiliary that has a low pass filter and some compression and maybe a bit of tape saturation to it and such to make it sound like it was recorded and played back on 16mm. We know the quality of the audio on 16mm is not as good as modern day video or 35mm.
 

DS: Jim, your voice as Nicole mentioned, was used as part of the voice over narration for the film. Who’s decision was that? How did it feel to be on the other end of the microphone so to speak?

I have a Zoom H6 with the mono shotgun head on it with a windscreen and headphones. Whether we were in the editing room or another place, we could start recording voice over whenever we wanted to.

JL: Well, we saw this certainly not as the Jim LeBrecht story, and it’s not. My “character” would be a guide and just another important character in a bigger story. It was kind of interesting, all of the VO that I did, my narration, was not done in the studio. I have a Zoom H6 with the mono shotgun head on it with a windscreen and headphones. Whether we were in the editing room or another place, we could start recording voice over whenever we wanted to. Often it was Nicole that would be asking questions and I’d be trying to explain something and we started a good conversation, and we were like “we should record this.”

NN: I agree. What was interesting is initially we thought that Jim’s narrative voice would play a larger role in the film. What we discovered was two things: 1) It didn’t really work very well as we got further into the movement story, because Jim was not at the 504 sit in, or an activist in some of the seminole moments. Having this voice of god character, that was not on camera, which was kind of our attempt to make the film more of a personal film. It was difficult. 2) People wanted to stay on the roller coaster ride of the archival footage, and feel like they were in that history in a present tense kind of way. Having a disembodied narrator distracted from that too.

So what we ended up doing pretty late in the game was filming an interview with Jim on the camera. Then we still had that really critical, I think it’s the heart and soul of the film, kind of personal perspective of Jim guiding us into the story and pulling us through it. Because he was on camera with everyone else, he was kind of on the same level as all the other characters. That was important for us in terms of making it clear that this is a film told by a group of friends, about a group of friends. Ultimately it was about a movement and not just one person’s film.

The process of recording voice over and narration was incredible. It wasn’t just a process of creating narration, it was the process of trying to figure out how to tell a story a lot of times. Or figuring out what was a theme, even if it wasn’t Jim’s character that was going to talk about it, it was something another character had to discuss. We would discover that during the process of recording narration. It was a combination of an interview and a conversation that we were having. Jim would reveal something, or say something, or have a thought and we would be like “oh yeah, that’s the key for how this scene should work or that’s the underlying meaning that we should put over here.” It turned out to be a really incredible way for us to collaborate as co-directors.

JL: Years of therapy really helped, I have to tell you [everyone laughs].
 

DS: What do you feel were some of your more creative sound moments in this film?

NN: The bong hit. The motorcycle crash.

JL: There was this moment about being in college and trying to drive my friend’s motorcycle. We have this motorcycle crash and I’m going “ahhhhh.” Also, when we’re talking about Al Levy, we wound up probably burying the sound effect too deep, but I had the sound of a bong hit and exhale in that story. Aesthetically it was fun, but I think we lowered it because we were concerned about it being too over the top.

You would think that a film that’s co-directed by a sound designer would have all these incredible moments, but what makes an excellent sound designer is what you don’t do also. Indeed when we’re at the end of the film, we have this drone shot of the campsite, and we have some atmosphere in there and some frogs, which is probably Nicole’s favorite sound in the film. It wasn’t over embellished. It wasn’t this symphony of audio that climaxed in the film. It was just the right level of things to do. If anything I found a great deal of satisfaction in the foley recordings of manual wheelchairs that Bijan Sharifi and William Sammons did. It enabled us to really feel like we were coming up the ramp, up to the bunk, because there’s a recording of wheelchair on plywood that fit like gold. And also the recordings they did of a manual chair on both old asphalt and grass. Even with a kind of far distance shot of me as a 15 year old rolling by the girls bunk, you can hear a little bit of that wheelchair noise there. It fit just right. Those foley recordings were very very helpful for us. I think painting with sound is more like watercolors than with oil based paints. What do you think? Does that analogy work? I’m kind of like the jester of analogies sometimes.

Where you might not know that the guy that sits in his wheelchair like Buddha is named Buddha, every time he shows up, someone’s in the background saying “hey Buddha!”

NN: I like that analogy. I think it’s true. We have to be judicious about where those watercolor brush strokes would happen because we’re also really representing the footage as being raw and authentic. What I think of as some of the most creative sound work actually was with the people’s video archival itself. Basically going and hunting for atmosphere of laughing and putting it underneath some of the jokes people are saying, so you’re hearing kids laugh in the background of a shot. Flushing out what it would sound like to be standing at the edge of the swimming pool on a summer day with kids laughing in the background. Putting stuff like, every time some of the very minor characters whose name’s you never know, but you get to see repeatedly in the camp show up, somebody’s calling their name. Where you might not know that the guy that sits in his wheelchair like Buddha is named Buddha, every time he shows up, someone’s in the background saying “hey Buddha!” I think that those things subconsciously help create the feeling on the part of the viewer. That they’ve entered a real world, with real specific people in it. I thought a lot of the work that you guys did in that way was real beautiful too.
 

DS: If each of you had to choose one moment of the film that was your favorite moment for sound, what would it be?

JL: Do you want to go first Nicole?

NN: You know mine, it’s the frogs. Every time I hear the frogs when we’re flying over the campsites, I start to cry. For me it emotionally signifies that this is a place with romantic attached childhood memories. It’s not just the frogs, it’s the depth of all the sound effects that are in there, and the way that you come out of the music in the mix and into that moment. It’s almost like you’re suspended in the air and the quiet for a second and then the sounds of your memory start to return. It’s beautiful.

JL: I would say that it’s not sound effects, but it’s music. There are a number of different music moments in the film that are just so freaking right. I would say that the use of Richie Havens performance of Freedom from Woodstock, right near the beginning of the film is just so evocative of that time period and the spirit of the time. I don’t think that anybody can find fault with it. It’s a piece of music that repeats the word “freedom” a lot, but it’s so much more beyond that. Certainly for somebody of my age, the connection is very very strong to the utopian atmosphere of the late 60’s and early 70’s that we were going to change the world. We were a youth movement that was going to stop the war and everybody was going to experience liberation. For me that piece of music is great. Equally important is Sugar Mountain at the end of the film. It is so evocative and so right. It’s also a piece of music from the time. It’s not the studio album recording, it’s from the Canterbury House recording from 1970. Boy, I still get chills when I start hearing it.
 

DS: There was a scene in the film were you returned to where Camp Jened once had been. Did you record some ambiences while you were there?

JL: The location where the camp was, is now a service yard for a construction company in Hunter, NY. The only building that’s standing from when I was a camper is what had been the new dining hall that had been built in 1969. Indeed while we were there, I did record some ambiences. Just some general atmosphere there. Also there’s a small creek that runs behind the camp and I went over there with my Zoom H6 with the stereo shotgun attachment and did some recordings. I certainly got some good blue jays and such from the ambience recordings.
 

DS: Was it a tough decision to do the sound yourself? Did you question whether or not you wanted someone else’s ears to do the sound work, like maybe you were too close to the project?

JL: That’s a really great question Doug. I wasn’t quite sure. I got some guidance from Gary Rydstrom. I would assume that most of the people that follow you would know the sound designer for Jurassic Park and a million other films and multiple academy award winner. He said to definitely have somebody else do it. So we initially talked to Lora Hirschberg. If I wanted somebody to deliver a baby of sound for this film, she’s on an extremely short list of people. As it turned out, our schedule shifted and she wasn’t able to do it. With that decision I felt like I really wanted to do it. I didn’t feel like I was necessarily so involved with other things that I couldn’t give it my full attention.

DS: Right, the other thing about that is, you have a good team of people around you. It’s not like you’re doing the sound 100% by yourself.

JL: No, in fact Nicole and I are co-directors. It was going to go back to the base. It felt like for me that I was working on one of her films. Although it was our film. My feeling was that the best way to approach this was like that. I’m always in the room with her. I’ve always kind of had my opinion in the mix room that I try to approach things as a co-collaborator with folks, when it’s appropriate. That’s usually why they want to work with us at the company. I think that approach made it really work well for both of us. How did that feel Nicole?

NN: I think that it allowed you the capacity to take some direction and do the work and then come back and say what you thought about it. That was my experience of it. Jim would ask me what I thought about this is or that. I would say what I thought, and we would try it. That gave Jim the distance to listen to it, think about it and then come back and say if he thought we should go off in a different direction, or something didn’t quite feel right, or whatever. We were kind of feeling our way together towards an aesthetic that made sense to both of us. I think at that point in the process, if you have a good collaborative relationship, you’re growing closer, and closer, and closer together in terms of how you envision the film in your head and what each moment is trying to say emotionally. There wasn’t a whole lot of daylight between us, which made it a really fun and joyous process. I think we both felt like it was really nice. When you’re finishing a cut, there’s so many dynamics with executive producers and temp screenings, and various opinions and all of that. For it to just boil back down to, at the end of the process, the two of us in a room having fun, playing around with it, and getting it just right was really a wonderful way to finish the process.
 

DS: Nicole, did you know from the beginning that you wanted Jim to do the sound on this film or did you think that maybe you needed someone that wasn’t so attached to it?

NN: I knew that I wanted Jim to be able to put his whole heart and soul in it and it was going to be a really important part of the process. Having him involved in it was going to make a big difference in the film. I was open to what Jim thought was the best way to handle that. I was respectful of the fact that he might have felt like he might not have been able to be as much of a director if he wasn’t in the director’s seat with someone else doing the work. We took a long time making a decision about what the right thing to do was. Or Jim did. I left it up to Jim. He thought about it a lot and at the end I think it was more of a decision based on a gut feeling than an intellectual decision. Sometimes you make decisions because you can’t not make that decision. It felt like at that point Jim was so itching to get his hands on it and do it that he would have been leaping over the keyboard and grabbing the controls from anyone else that was trying to do it.

JL: Yeah, I started imagining what it would be like and it would be way too frustrating. I know exactly what frequency I want to roll things off at or I can hear the fade in my head, please just let me do this fade. So it worked out for the best.

DS: Well I think you made the right decision, because you got a great result.
 

DS: You used the stage at Fantasy studios for the final mix. Can you talk a little about the experience of mixing your film on that stage? Fantasy Studios is closed now. Is it hard to gain access to that stage?

JL: Indeed Fantasy Studios itself is no longer and will not be coming back. They were running the studio. As things wound down with the studio closing, the running of the stage for playback screenings for people in the building or this particular situation was really left to Alberto Hernandez. So it wasn’t too tricky, but it was really like taking the stage as is. Alberto did a good job of keeping the stage up and running and he did a shakedown of it before we mixed.

We spent just two days on that stage. We spent time at IMRSV Sound/Berkeley Sound Artists in their rooms doing all the heavy lifting and decisions, but it really needed to be in a theatrical space to finish the film with maximum confidence. We certainly finish films in our space that go on to be played at festivals and such without going to a large stage, but that’s usually due to budgetary restrictions. In this situation it certainly was appropriate. My god, I mean Barack and Michelle Obama are the executive producers. Netflix owns the film. It turned out to be pretty good. I was really happy with how the stage translated from Berkeley Sound Artists room 312. I didn’t have to do any global adjustments. I was really happy with how the surrounds were playing in comparison to the smaller room. Lord knows what’s going to happen with that building or what’s going to happen with that stage, but it was kind of bitter sweet to be able to finish the film there. On the stage where the English Patient was mixed and so many other extraordinary movies.

DS: What I can tell you about my experience, is just being in that room the few times that I’ve been in it, I absolutely love the room. It’s just beautiful. I hope that whatever works out in the future for the building, that room stays alive, because it’s a fantastic stage.

NN: Yeah

JL: I think the landlord has tried to do things and it kind of remains to be seen what the future may be. There’s always hope that maybe there will be a closer connection between that room and IMRSV Sound. Right now due to COVID-19, no one is going in that building anyway so hopefully it remains on the table as something that could happen.

NN: I love that room and I love the building and the history of it. What I loved was bringing our colleagues from Netflix and from Higher Ground up to Berkeley and being able to invite them in there and bring them into that place that has so much history for our documentary community and for Jim and Sara and myself. I think that it was a spectacular place to screen our rough cuts and also to work and I really hope that there’s some way to save it. I feel like that kind of legacy should be preserved. First of all, it’s not like it’s some old fashioned thing, it’s beautiful and you couldn’t find a better place to do your work. I do feel like there’s something about the history of the building, and things that have been made there, and the community that’s been formed there, that’s really an important legacy.

A huge thank you to James LeBrecht and Nicole Newnham for taking the time to share their story with us. You can find James LeBrecht on imdb here and Nicole Newnham here.

 

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