Delivering Detailed Sound for Documentary ‘Never Look Away’ – with Bruno Barrett-Garnier

In her documentary film Never Look Away – in World Documentary Competition at Sundance 2024 – Director Lucy Lawless shares the life and work of the courageous New Zealand–born CNN camerawoman Margaret Moth, who captured the realities of war from inside the conflict. Lawless’s documentary blends archival news clips, interviews, and designed Diorama sections to tell Moth’s story as well as look at the development of the 24-hour news cycle and our insatiable appetite for conflict coverage.

Here, Bruno Barrett-Garnier (sound designer/re-recording mixer) talks about Lawless’s desire to create a detailed soundtrack that helped paint a clearer picture of what’s happening in archive material that was degraded and low resolution, how they approached cleaning-up the archival sound and interviews to create a smoother, more intelligible dialog track, how non-literal sound design was used for the Diorama sections to create a claustrophobic, distressing atmosphere, what creative avenues they explored during the mix, and much more!

How did Director Lucy Lawless want to use sound as a storytelling tool for her documentary Never Look Away? What were some of her initial ideas for using sound to help tell this story? What were some creative sound ideas you wanted to contribute to the film?

Bruno Barrett-Garnier (BG): Steve Finnigan [Head of Sound, Managing Partner / Images & Sound Ltd. Auckland New Zealand] made contact in April 2023 to set up a meeting with Lucy and myself to view a pre-lock offline cut. At this stage, all the music was temp and much of the archive audio was from bit-crushed video file downloads.

‘Never Look Away’ Director Lucy Lawless

Lucy was keen to hear more detail from the soundtrack, particularly during the archive material. One scene where sweetening the archive was important was where the cameraman got shot against the wall in Sarajevo. The original quality of the video was so degraded and low resolution. In this case, we wanted to have detailed sound so people could hear the plastic of the camera casing shattering. Also important for archive scenes were authenticity and realism.

The Diorama and newly shot movement scenes were intended to be non-literal sound design moments. In the Diorama, Lucy was keen for these to have a claustrophobic atmosphere, to cause subliminal distress to the audience. Also, there were some graphics and visual effects generated cards that required a device that could reoccur throughout the film.
We discussed archive audio restoration and clean-up possibilities, as well as how we might re-create audio for shots when that wasn’t possible.

The film is a conversation. There is a lot of interview dialog. I was keen to maintain the natural dialog dynamics and to design our sound effect elements so that the result wasn’t an audio overload for the audience.

The picture lock arrived in August 2023; temp music had been replaced with work in progress original score from composers Karl Steven and Jason Smith and the cut had evolved considerably from the pre-lock version. Around 50% of the archive was from a broadcast-quality source. This is when we got underway with sound design for the project. What I like to do first is create a sound spotting sheet for the entire film. This is a detailed breakdown, sometimes shot by shot – although mostly in scenes, it sets out our sound design plan for what we want to achieve in each section of the film.

Packaged news reports were to play single speaker, from the perspective of the camera. Supplementary archive was to have an immersive ‘surround’ treatment.

I color code the blocks with what stage the scene is at: “wait for picture,” “Foley spotted,” “work in progress,” “sound edited,” “pre-dubbed,” “mixed,” or “needs a fix.” As I track-lay, I also briefly note the contents of each unit. For me, this is a great way to organize my thoughts and get a sound plan together, and maintain a project overview. It is also a useful tool to use to discuss planning out the soundtrack with directors. The spotting sheet is a spreadsheet, separate from the Pro Tools session. I can share it with production, composers, and other sound editors. This allows everyone to track progress of the project.

Once I had created the sound spotting sheet and edited up a few examples, Lucy and I had a session working through the locked cut and planning out the sound design. For the archive, we decided on two different treatments. Packaged news reports were to play single speaker, from the perspective of the camera. Supplementary archive was to have an immersive ‘surround’ treatment. This treatment decision for archive material also drove some of the picture grade direction.

For the title cards, we aimed to develop effects using sounds that originated from tube radio and broadcast statics as the source.

With a locked cut and a plan in place, we got underway with the sound edit. Step one was to tackle the literal and obvious sound effects stuff. Simultaneously, Mike Bayliss [Dialog Sound Editor, Images & Sound Ltd. Auckland New Zealand] was brought on board to pull together the interview dialog.

Can you talk about some of the challenges you had in terms of production sound? What was your approach to cleaning it up (Light cleaning? Extensive cleaning?) Why that was the right fit for Never Look Away? Also, any useful plugins for noise clean-up?

BG: The interviews had been shot in reasonably controlled locations mostly with a combination of lapel and boom mics. Movement and room tone from interviews usually plays back fine when the interview is on camera, however, once the image cuts away to stills or archive any extraneous noise becomes a distraction. Also, with lengthy interviews, there is a change in voice projection and tone over time, and editing may stitch together a complicated selection of sentences and words to get what they are after. It is fair to say that Mike had a bunch of things to contend with to get a smooth interview dialog edit.

The process we follow is to first re-assemble the interviews from original location recordings, then use Sound Radix Auto Align Post 2 to time align the lapel and boom mics. Each interview subject was allocated their own set of tracks, which resulted in around 24 tracks of production interview dialog. The clean-up required was light – removing ticks, clicks, and some body movements, and reducing some of the background noise. More complicated is smoothing out intonation and pace bumps. Goyo (now Supertone CLEAR), iZotope RX10, and Waves Clarity were used on this project for interview dialog clean up.

On a few occasions, editing had the selected shots from different news bulletins and I was able to create clean effects versions by comping these together.

The Archive audio came from several different sources. Margaret Moth estate edited network news clips or low-res digitized archive. One challenge for production in these projects is obtaining clearance and high-quality archive footage. Sometimes the archive shots used in the original lock will need to be changed completely if clearance doesn’t work out. We typically have a second lock date in the schedule for “Archive lock.” The idea is that production has some flexibility to change out a shot for something similar if needed and have time after the lock date to replace any data compressed low-res with a better-quality version.

Often with the archive audio, you need to extend out the supplied clip handles to hunt down authentic replacement audio suitable to fix issues or add details. On a few occasions, editing had the selected shots from different news bulletins and I was able to create clean effects versions by comping these together.

There is a lot of hum removal required (iZotope RX10) as well as clicks (Spectral repair) and good old-fashioned cut/splice/fill editing required to smooth things out.

Low-bit-rate audio is a real problem. There were a lot of red flags on the timeline during my first sound edit pass until at the last moment the full-resolution CNN footage arrived, and much of the heavily bit-crushed material was finally replaced with full bandwidth versions.

With documentary films, there’s an assumption by the audience that what they hear is what was really happening in that moment, but sound people know it’s been recreated/fabricated to represent what it probably sounded like in reality. So, can you talk about your approach to adding sound effects and sound design to Never Look Away?

BG: For the news archive sections, we did want these as authentic as possible. Scenes of kids chasing tanks armed with rocks, the scenes from Sniper Alley in Sarajevo, and the section from Qana – what you hear in these scenes is predominantly original archive audio. Where we added new material, it was to elevate an aspect of the vision that might be missed, such as a rock hitting a tank and then bouncing on the road. The sound was in the archive but not clear enough to play. Topping with an added sound effect added the detail and brought attention to a moment that could otherwise be missed.

In Sniper Alley, again we added detail, sometimes footsteps from Foley or gunshots from library – all guided by what we hear in the original archive.

The scene in Qana was very difficult to edit. I wanted this to be 100% from original material collected on the day, which required trolling through archive material to find suitable sound to replace a news announcer, technical fault, or to create audio for a mute section.

In the supplementary archive sections, we were happy to broaden the sound field to create a more immersive experience.

In the supplementary archive sections, we were happy to broaden the sound field to create a more immersive experience. Some events were layered, and additional effects were added to allow for panning. Mostly, the additional sounds came from library material.

Predominantly, if a moment didn’t need any added sound material, we were happy to leave the space. We didn’t take the approach that we will build this or that option in case it gets called for in the mix. We wanted to put our effort into what was needed to elevate story points.

One area where we changed this approach however was the Diorama scenes. Here the sound design was intended to blur the lines between effects and music. We wanted non-literal emotive sounds that played with the score and picture. In these scenes, I deliberately overdid the amount of initial sound design material created, allowing us to subtract sounds once we had the final music and were all together on the mix stage.

Sound Team, L to R: Steve Finnigan (Supervising Sound Editor), Bruno Barrett Garnier (Sound Designer/ Re-Recording Mixer), Mike Bayliss (Dialogue Editor), Narelle Ahrens (Foley Artist), Andrew Thorne (Foley Engineer), Sarah Ryan (Foley Editor)

The mixing stage of post sound can be as creative as editorial. What were some creative decisions you made on the dub stage? Can you talk about a few scenes where you tried different approaches mix-wise? How did they change the experience of the film?

BG: Originally, I was brought on board as sound designer and sound editor for this project. However with schedules moving by August, my role had been extended to also cover the re-recording part as well.

During the sound edit, I’m making sure we have the right material available for the mix, split out logically and presented to allow creating our deliverables as simple as possible. I want to leave scope for the direction we take in the mix to change.

Once we get into mixing, the issue of context is what I’m paying most of my attention to, as well as sound field placement, equalization, balance, and reverbs.

Interview dialog is a large component of this soundtrack, so the first step was to get a natural balance through the film. The idea was that we would fit our dynamics around the dialog.

I’ll often try a scene without music or without effects to see how they play individually as a way to find the right approach.

Then it is a case of working out which other elements are driving the moments in the scene, like music/effects. I’ll often try a scene without music or without effects to see how they play individually as a way to find the right approach.

Just after the opening title sequence, our first archive section of a film crew in a war zone is a good example. Here, I first tried keeping the archive very real and close. As the dialog was discussing the events more as a reflective memory, I also tried dreaming out the archive with a little reverb and space, pushing some of the percussive effects elements around the dialog. The second approach worked well and makes a good point of difference for this scene from both the titles section and other archive scenes in the film.

The pre-dubbing takes the most time. On this project, I was able to pre-dub dialog and effects in my own sound editing room and then have a catch-up with Lucy to play through the whole film. We still had the work-in-progress original music score at this point and no online picture yet.

As the dialog was discussing the events more as a reflective memory, I also tried dreaming out the archive with a little reverb and space…

It’s cool playing the pre-dub to directors. They have been living with the offline sound for so long and have a mile-long wish list that can’t be achieved in offline. Then suddenly, boom, the interview dialog is sitting well and the gaps and bumps in the soundtrack have gone. For me, it is useful as well to get a fresh perspective from someone who hasn’t been scrubbing over the material. We can sit back and review how things are going.

One scene where the news crew gets stopped in the Westbank originally had score running through it and I think this decision was made in the offline because of the original quality of the archive sound. The music added good pace to the scene, however after the clean up, the scene played well with only archive and effects, which gave more of an experience that reflected what it would have been like for the crew on the day. So, we were able to remove the music cue from this scene.

After pre-dubbing we moved to Theatre B at Images and Sound. I had some time to get things in shape before composers Karl Steven and Jason Smith joined us for the final mix pass and then playbacks.

What makes the sound of Never Look Away unique, or what was unique about your experience of working on this film?

BG: Margaret Moth was clearly an amazing camerawoman and lived an incredible life. We had access to unique archive content on this project. It was important to treat that carefully and not to overplay or add material that would detract from the authenticity of the original. At the same time, there were gaps that needed to be filled and we wanted to make a soundtrack that worked in a theatrical setting allowing our audience to both hear every word of the interview dialog and experience what it is like to work in a war zone.

I think the most important thing we are all striving for, especially in sound, is to take the audience on a somatic roller coaster – to give the audience the ride of their life.
 

A big thanks to Bruno Barrett-Garnier for giving us a behind-the-scenes look at the sound of Never Look Away and to Jennifer Walden for the interview!

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