‘My job is to get the best quality so the home viewing audience can understand the lines the actor says,’ proclaims Toronto-based location sound recordist (or ‘production sound mixer’) Urmas Rosin.

And get the best quality Rosin most certainly did on Joan of Arc, the four-hour miniseries from Alliance Atlantis Communications. He and Casablanca Sound & Picture rerecording mixers Lou Solakofski and Orest Sushko won the award for Outstanding Sound Mixing Achievement in a Movie or Mini-Series from the Cinema Audio Society, March 4 in Los Angeles. They were also nominated for an Emmy, and the production took home the Motion Picture Sound Editors Award for Dialogue and adr in a miniseries at the Golden Reel Awards, March 25 in Century City, California.

Rosin admits to having harbored dreams of being ‘The Great Canadian dop’ during his York University days, but adds, ‘there were six guys in my class who could shoot the pants off me,’ including Emmy Award-winner Douglas Munro and Paul Sarossy.

So he turned to his other love, sound, and has since amassed credits including the series Due South, Top Cops, Lonesome Dove and Lexx, the tv movie Major Crime, and Canadian indie features Zero Patience, Rude, and ‘some real stinkers, too.’

He attributes much of the success on Joan of Arc to director Christian Duguay. ‘He had this incredible, infectious energy,’ Rosin says. ‘It went to the entire crew. Because he was working like a madman, it infected the rest of us.’

The soundman also felt blessed on the Czech Republic shoot in that he had boom operator Tomas Cervenka, a local veteran who counts Amadeus among his credits. (The boom operator’s son, Tomas Jr., served as cable man.)

At a budget of more than $22 million, Joan had a standing crew of 190, and featured such name actors as Peter O’Toole, Shirley MacLaine, Peter Strauss, and Leelee Sobieski as Joan, the 15th century teenage French warrior who, inspired by divine voices and visions, set out to unite France against its English enemy.

Although shooting was hurried, wrapping in mid-March 1999 and going to air May 16 on cbs (and July 11 on cbc), production allowed the sound department the time to do their job right. ‘If we had a problem, they would give us time to fix it,’ Rosin says. ‘It wasn’t always everybody looking at their watches.’

He recalls the feeling on the set as ‘ ‘We came all this way – let’s get it right.”

Filming in large part in the Czech countryside allowed Rosin to record high-calibre tracks. ‘Where we shot was very quiet,’ he says. ‘There wasn’t much traffic through the rural areas. [There was] nothing like the air traffic we get in Toronto. Outside of Prague, we had to stop shooting because of airplanes maybe once.’

Rosin credits the assistant directors for their part in keeping the set quiet, and the special effects supervisors for keeping fires in the battle-heavy miniseries down to a dull roar. ‘If you use a propane fire, it makes an incredible hiss, but they figured out a way to get rid of that,’ he says.

With such a talented cast, Duguay wanted to retain the flavor of the performances and avoid too much adr (automatic dialogue replacement, where actors are called back in post-production to rerecord dialogue). This put more pressure than usual on Rosin to get broadcast-quality sound on location. Of course, some amount of looping was unavoidable. (Rosin and Sushko estimate that in the end 30% to 35% of dialogue was replaced.)

‘Essentially all [the sound for] the action scenes was redone – not so much for performance, but more in terms of noise,’ Sushko explains. ‘That stuff was all shot without too much regard for keeping the sound for the final product.

They knew it would be replaced.’

The loudest film

wins – or does it?

Rosin acknowledges a trend in film and tv whereby productions with deep pockets are bombarding the audience with an increasing amount of noise at a higher volume.

‘One of the reasons I think Joan of Arc won [the CAS Award] is the loudest movie usually wins,’ he admits. Interviewed just prior to the Academy Awards, Rosin applied this logic to make his sound picks: ‘If you look at the Oscars, I’ll bet my house Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace wins this year, because it has the most zaps, zings, zowies, powies, and kabooms.’

[Writer’s note: Taking this comment to heart, I chose swtpm in the sound categories in the office Oscar pool. The sweep of the two awards by The Matrix relegated me to second place, out of the money – I believe Urmas owes me a house.]

‘It’s much more difficult to do a dialogue-driven piece [than an action film],’ Rosin continues. ‘It’s much more bare-bones. It has to be a lot more subtle and a lot less intrusive.’

One film that particularly influenced the way Rosin recorded Joan of Arc is the British feature Mrs. Brown. ‘The recordist on that, Alistair Crocker, let everything go,’ Rosin says. ‘[In the] North American style, even when you have a really wide shot, you can basically hear everything. They’re into radio mikes in really close proximity – you can almost hear people breathing.’

But he feels a good working knowledge of picture editing can save time in this kind of situation. On Joan he would often ask, ‘ ‘Am I going to sweat the super-wide shot?’ No, because the editor is going to cut into a two-shot and you can use the sound from the coverage of that two-shot. It’s not necessary to radio mike every single speaking person, because they’ll only be on that [wide] shot for geography.’

‘Period’ sound

Rosin believes certain sound qualities captured on Joan could be regarded as imperfect from a technical standpoint, but actually enhance the project’s overall texture.

‘We were in some incredible 14th century castles with vaulted ceilings, and you wanted to hear that,’ he says. ‘I wanted to hear the echo and the slap. I wanted to hear Peter O’Toole with his incredible voice bouncing off the walls.

We were in this amazing surrounding you wouldn’t really want to duplicate on a soundstage.’

Rosin insists that the cinematographer, costume designer, and art department aren’t alone in paying attention to period detail, adding: ‘It’s not only mimicking the look, but mimicking the sound of the time.’

The sound editors (supervised by Ton Bjelic and John Douglas Smith) also made an invaluable contribution to aural historical accuracy. ‘They got authentic sounds of things – the creaks, the groans, and the cattle,’ Rosin notes. Rubber mockups of armor and fake swords were employed for actor safety, leaving foley artists Steve Bain and Donna Powell to recreate convincing sounds of medieval war.

Communication is key

In an ideal world, the audio post side would have a representative on set at all times, but that method is less common since the decline of the Hollywood studio system, when studios employed in-house sound teams. Today, both production and post people are subcontracted out (although aac owns Casablanca), and tend to work separately. But they do try to keep the lines of communication as open as possible.

‘We had some dialogue location tapes sent back here when they were shooting in Prague,’ Sushko explains. ‘It allowed us to deal with logistical issues as far as, ‘How are we going to post-sync this? Are we going to post-sync here or there? What format and what currency are we going to use?’ And the location guys like it because they want to make sure they’re delivering something the mixer can use.’

As with everybody else in the audio post process, composers Tony Kosinec and Asher Ettinger were faced with a tight deadline to write and record their sweeping dramatic score, which combined various synthesized and live instruments. ‘They did a wonderful job in no time flat,’ Rosin offers.

Of the multiple-award-winning sound collaboration, Rosin summarizes, ‘All the cards fell into place.’