What The Oscars Have Taught Us: Why You Should Capture Authentic Sounds

To understand why Donald Sylvester and ‘Ford v Ferrari’ received an Oscar nomination all you have got to do is listen carefully.

Not long ago we talked about the films competing for the Oscar for best sound editing. Now that we know that ‘Ford v Ferrari’ took home the Oscar in this year’s edition, we can safely say: well deserved.

The film, directed by James Mangold, provided us with high octane races in real race cars. What the audience may not have realized while they were watching the movie is that the cars they saw in the moving images did not even deliver the noises you hear in the film.

In an interview, sound editor Donald Sylvester mentioned that those cars we saw on the screen were all picture cars. All kits. In fact, he never got to even know what kind of cars they used for shooting the movie. Probably a Nissan or something reliable. 

As mentioned in other articles, sound editing refers to the way all the sounds we hear during a film are captured. There is perhaps no team that may have had a tougher challenge of capturing proper sounds for their movie than the ‘Ford v Ferrari’ sound crew. The film narrates the story of racers Carroll Shelby and Ken Miles who, in 1964, teamed up with Ford to build a Racecar to beat Ferrari at the well known 24 hours of Le Mans race. The duo ended up building the Shelby GT40, which hit the road for the very first time in 1964.

The sound editors were given a daunting task: they were responsible for hunting down the authentic cars show in the film to capture the engine sounds we hear on screen. Of course, it was not particularly easy to come across a Shelby GT40 for the film, especially when only 105 GT40s were produced in that decade.

Once they did, it was even trickier to convince the owner to let them use it. Fully intact vintage sports cars are hard to find for the sake of shooting a racing film; however, the film’s sound team was lucky enough to find a guy in Ohio who had built his own version of a Ford GT entirely from scratch using original and vintage parts.

Before that, Sylvester and his team had managed to locate all the remaining GT40s on the planet, but no owner wanted to work with them for fear they would ruin their cars. Once they managed to talk the owner of the real-but-not-real GT40 into working with them, the sound crew placed microphones in the car and drove it around a track.

After laying their hands on one of the cars, the sound crew still had to find a ‘59 Ferrari. Luckily enough, they found one in Atlanta, whose owner was kind enough to let them take the car to Florida (because of noise limitations in Atlanta) and run it through its paces. After that, the hero Ferrari joined the Ford GT.

It was really important for the team to be able to record authentic engine noises in there. Had they done otherwise, people would have certainly noticed. In fact, Sylvester mentioned in the same interview that he was waiting for people to come at him.

The recording processes started out with the team recording the picture cars but replaced the engine sounds during the audio post-production process. In fact, it is known now that mixing was a challenging process as finding the cars. 

The cars, given their age, were extremely noisy, so all the sound from cars was rather unusable, as they interfered with the dialogue, making some scenes much louder. This forced the sound team to rebuild and recreate essentially all the production sounds at a later stage during the audio post-production process.

On top of that, the engine sounds had to be paced and contained with what Christian Bale’s character was experiencing. For the sake of keeping the storytelling element intact, if you watched the movie, you probably found yourself following where he was in the races at all times, paying special attention to his state of mind.

Additionally, the crew spent a lot of time in the final mix working on the Le Mans scenes, experimenting with what parts should have been rather visceral and full of adrenaline and raw racing, and what parts needed to be calmer and potentially taking music cues out, really calming down effects.

Just being able to get the most out of those engines for the sake of being loud would not cut it. Silence is also a powerful sonic tool as well. And as for the music, the mixing team came up with some particularly clever: they integrated Marco Beltrami’s score by using the engines as the low notes.

So, what is the lesson in all this? There is no doubt that you should always look for authentic sources of sound when capturing sounds for your film, irrespective of whether you’re an avid audio post-production enthusiast or a pro filmmaker. The true sound never lies.

*The images used on this post are taken from Pexels.com