FULL THROTTLE FILMMAKING

It’s no wonder Ford v Ferrari won the Oscar for best sound mixing.

Supervising sound editor Donald Sylvester and his expert team made the car racing movie a triumph of audio technology.

Their challenge was how to make the dialogue of the actors be clearly heard over the roar of the car engines – especially in scenes where the cars and drivers are battling it out during the 1966 Le Mans 24 hour race.

The solution was to locate a Ford GT40 of the period – which they did in Ohio – and record the sounds of its engine, interior, transmission and tailpipe.

They did the same with a classic Ferrari race car – tracked down in Atlanta – and added the sounds of that one to their audio library.

When it came to filming, stars like Christian Bale and Matt Damon wore special DPA lavalier microphones hidden from view within their costumes so the sound team could pick up what they were saying over the noise of the loud race scenes.

The mixers ultimately stitched together the actors’ dialogue and the noise of the cars with the atmosphere of the crowd and PA system track announcements to give audiences a totally immersive experience.

The level of each sound element was strictly controlled to make the viewer feel right up close to the action, excitement and drama.

—Sandro Monetti

The new Invisible Man movie relied on old technology to achieve many of its chilling scares.

Director Leigh Whannell placed an actor in a green unitard body suit and removed him from shots in postproduction.

That particular disappearing act has been a standard special effects trick on film sets for years.

But state of the art CGI was also used to give the riveting reboot a modern feel and some jawdropping moments.

“It was a mixture of everything,” said Whannell. “A lot of old school practical stuff, which I love, and obviously CG is such a gift to improve your film.”

The Universal Pictures movie, which stars Elisabeth Moss and Oliver Jackson-Cohen, also gets it scares from clever sound design and cinematography combining to frighten audiences with what they can’t see but only imagine.

—Sandro Monetti

Movie distribution rules which have been in place in America since 1949 are set to be abolished.

The U.S. Justice Department plans to overturn the regulations because streaming and other technological developments have changed the film landscape.

“We cannot pretend that the business of film distribution and exhibition remains the same,” explained the Justice Department’s antitrust chief Makan Delrahim.

The old distribution rules enacted in 1949 were aimed at ensuring the largest studios did not control the film business and made illegal “block booking” – the practice of them forcing theatre owners to play the movies they wanted regardless of how they were performing.

Delrahim said, “That was when metropolitan areas generally had a single movie theater with one screen that showed a single movie at a time. Today, not only do our metropolitan areas have many multiplex cinemas showing films from different distributors, but much of our movie watching is not in theaters at all.”

But not everyone is happy with the rule change. The National Association of Theater Owners argue that abolishing the decrees could see a return to block booking, threatening the survival of smaller theaters.

“If distributors can engage in block booking, exhibitors may be forced to pack their screens with global tentpoles at the expense of targeted programming,” the association said in a statement, warning about the potential dominance of blockbuster films.

“Consumers will face increasingly limited choices at the box office and, without the possibility of a theatrical run, many films will no longer be made, limiting the availability of choices through home entertainment platforms as well.”

An increasing number of directors are introducing a no cellphones policy on set for cast and crew.

Leading lights of the industry introduced the phone ban idea and now it’s catching on fast.

Quentin Tarantino made the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood set a mobile free zone and strictly enforced it too by having everyone check in their phones on arrival each day.

Greta Gerwig introduced a similar system on Little Women having got the idea from her partner, Marriage Story director Noam Baumbach.