Sitting alone in a dark room all day listening to a myriad of odd and obscure sounds isn’t everyone’s vision of the ideal way to spend their working life, but for sound editor Gael MacLean it’s pure bliss.

‘Lack of parameters’

After several years in the industry working successfully as a film editor under the tutelage of well-known West Coast picture and sound cutter Haida Paul at the National Film Board, MacLean became fascinated with the ‘lack of parameters’ involved in working with sound and, spotting career opportunities in Vancouver’s growing production industry, opted to make the shift to sound editing.

While the move seemed a bit surprising to her colleagues, MacLean, who has a background in music playing the guitar and dulcimer, says the decision came naturally. Despite her knowledge of music and film, she soon learned that acquiring the technical skills required in sound editing would require considerable time and focus.

‘There’s a lot more technical knowledge involved in sound editing than in picture editing,’ she says. ‘As a picture editor in the mid-eighties you had your flatbed and that was about it. Moving into sound meant that I had to learn sound recording techniques, sound transferring and all the principles of layering sound, because instead of dealing with just one track, often you are dealing with up to 50 tracks. And I needed to develop a whole overview for how the sound design would work.’

‘Learned by doing’

Learning these techniques, says MacLean, ‘was like most aspects of the film industry – you learned by doing it. There really isn’t anywhere where you can go and learn this stuff.’

MacLean says Paul was the first person to ‘clue her in to the realization that you don’t always have to be literal in the creation of sound for films. This critical realization allowed me, as an editor, a lot more leeway and creativity in contributing to a film.’

MacLean cites as an example Linda Ohama’s award-winning documentary The Last Harvest, which she cut last year. Documentaries, she says, traditionally have had a very literal style of cutting, with certain sounds that ‘fit’ into the landscape. ‘In this case, I chose instead to use a lot of special effects to create a mood within that landscape, rather than just using the narrow band of sound you might normally hear in it.’

‘Treated sounds’

In another documentary, Blockade, directed by filmmaker Nettie Wild, MacLean used a lot of ‘treated sounds’ whereby she would pick certain sounds like the call of a loon and manipulate them by either slowing them down, speeding them up or giving them a higher pitch, using the sounds as a sort of emotional effect rather than just the accurate rendering of the loon.

Retired Canadian sound editor and the 1993 Genie Special Lifetime Achievement Award winner Ken Heeley-Ray provided MacLean with further inspiration. She says Heeley-Ray was responsible for setting the standards for sound editing in Canada during the early seventies, ‘back when if a film sounded bad people would say, `Oh, it must be Canadian.’

‘Most Canadian films of that era sounded very flat and thin, as though only the production tracks had been used with very little layering,’ says MacLean. ‘Heeley-Ray looked at the good work that was being done in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world and brought the production values for sound editing up to a new standard in Canada.

‘Now,’ she says proudly, ‘we have a real richness in terms of quality and depth of sound to most of our Canadian films that can stand up to films produced anywhere else in the world.’

What really happens

MacLean says she saw editing as the one area of the industry where she would most likely learn what really goes into filmmaking and how a film is put together. But once bitten by the editing bug, she decided to stay with it. She went on to hone her sound editing skills on such films as Wild’s Blockade and A Rustling of Leaves; Anne Wheeler’s tv feature Angel Square, for which she won her first Genie award for sound editing; the animated films Good Things Can Still Happen and The Art of Healing; the tv series Moccasin Flats; and the recent features The Burning Season and The Lotus Eaters. The latter earned her (along with fellow sound editors Anke Bakker, Alison Grace, Ellen Gram and Maureen Wetteland) the 1993 Genie for sound editing.

Creating the sound on The Lotus Eaters was a pleasure, says MacLean. ‘We had a great team of very supportive sound editors all working together, and the producers, Sharon McGowan and writer/coproducer Peggy Thompson, were very supportive of what we were trying to do.

Layers

‘In every film you want to create something that is entirely different. But in this film (shot in b.c.’s Gulf Islands), we didn’t have an area that required flashy special effects, nor was there a lot of music, so we instead tried to give the sound a richness to create an ambience of island life. We used a lot of layers of surrounding water sounds, rustling of leaves in trees, waves, birds and wind to achieve that unique kind of atmosphere.’

The big challenge in editing these days, she says, ‘is to retain a quality of sound that we’ve all been working so hard to set in face of the dwindling budgets and reduction in funding.’

Changes

For most indigenous producers in Western Canada, sound is still one of the first areas that gets trimmed when the budget needs tightening. But that’s changing, says MacLean. ‘Sound editing has gone through so many changes in the last few years in Vancouver as producers here have started to recognize the importance of spending more money on the sound in their film. And only recently do we have our own mixing theater in Vancouver.

‘I think with indigenous filmmakers, it’s been a gradual awakening process as to the importance of sound, and especially in light of the recent changes in sound in theaters, most having Dolby six-track. They are now starting to understand they need more sound in their films; otherwise it sounds thin and empty.’