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Walter Murch Special: K-19: The Widowmaker

October 27, 2009 by Miguel Isaza

K-19

The history of the disaster of the sovietic nuclear-submarine K-19 presented in theaters, with K-19: The Widowmaker, an independent film that cost $100,000,000 to make. It’s about the disaster of the sovietic nuclear-submarine K-19. An interesting film with a lot of work of foley and impressive recording.. Walter Murch worked as re-recording mixer. Let’s read this article on Mix Online, with several interesting notes about the recording and foley sessions:

“It’s very difficult to get a sense of space in an enclosed [environment] like a submarine,” says picture editor and re-recording mixer Walter Murch. “If it’s not lit and art-directed right, everything just sort of blocks up.” […]

“When I started working on features,” says Walter Murch, “the idea of doing Foley was very exotic and nothing that we could afford. On The Rain People, Francis [Coppola] was shooting on location with the actors, and they were traveling across the country. At the end of the day, he would ask the actors to walk through all of the moves they made without saying anything. On THX [1138, George Lucas’ first feature], I would put the Nagra somewhere and walk around duplicating the footsteps in a real space. We did versions of that on The Conversation and American Graffiti.

“On Godfather II,” Murch continues, “we’d figure out the rate at which the principal was walking, and we had a little portable electronic metronome, which we would set at that frame rate. I remember doing the footsteps for Fanucci where he comes up the stairs before he’s killed by DeNiro [young Vito Corleone], and we found the marble staircases in the old Zoetrope building were very much like the staircases in that actual location. So, I set the metronome and I had my assistant at the top. I walked a couple of flights up, so you hear these footsteps coming from far away. They get closer and closer, which is the whole idea of the scene, and then I stopped, as Fanucci stopped, at the top. I said Fanucci’s next line, and when we took the track and sunk it up, all of the footsteps sunk up. On the Foley track, you can hear my voice, and it exactly syncs with the lips of Fanucci.”

Read More…

K-19 The Widowmaker at IMDb

Filed Under: featured, interviews Tagged With: films, foley, k19, sound design, sound editing, walter murch, walter murch special

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