EVA VALIÑO: “Direct sound is the result of collective creative work”.

03/28/2018

We interview Eva Valiño, a sound engineer. Despite studying Information Sciences and the Performing Arts and working as an advertising copywriter in Costa Rica, when the world of sound entered her life, she decided to go to Cuba to study film at the San Antonio de los Baños Film and Television School.

Throughout her career, she has worked with directors from our film industry, such as Icíar Bollaín, Carla Simó, Jaime Rosales and Manolo Martín Cuenca. She won a Goya for the sound of the film Te doy mis ojos, and she was recently nominated for a Goya for Caníbal and for a Gaudí award for her participation in Verano 1993.

 

Many people don’t know exactly what it means to be a sound engineer. Can you explain what it involves?

I suppose that being a sound engineer means thinking and recording the sound part of a film. As a sound engineer, I am responsible for capturing the sound in natural spaces and fixing it on an adequate medium with the best quality possible, respecting its original form, recognizing the specific tone of each film and defending the intentions and the style of each director.

 

What do you consider yourself to be: a sound engineer, direct sound or head of sound?

I suppose that before a sound engineer I consider myself to be a filmmaker. The idea of my work is to give a meaning and a specific value to the image through sound. To record sound to be able to represent time through an image belongs solely to film and to the filmmaker.

 

From where does the general idea of the sound for a film come? Do directors have an idea of the sound when they consider a film or is it directly the work of the sound engineer?

The idea of the sound arises within the specific imagination of an author, of the director. The links and complicities with their sound engineers will make the ideas grow, expand or take a certain shape. The sound has several lives and forms over the creative and construction process. First, it is an abstract idea suggested within the script, when filming it is transformed into a specific matter filmed in time and incarnated in the form of a body, noise, voice and silence, and later, in the cinema, it is projected into the atmosphere and enters through all the pores of the people and, finally, if all has gone well, the meaning of this unique mixture of sound and image creates a new meaning, which explodes within the soul or the conscience of each spectator. As a lover of direct sound, I understand that my task consists of defending it in any situation. Because good direct sound is life, is movement, is truth.

In principle, both directors and producers know that defective sound can drive the audience away from their film. Even so, each era has its advantages and its limitations. We are enjoying an era of important technological progress and we are suffering from an era of fundamental ethical and aesthetic failings. This is also reflected in how we listen, how we look for the images and how we relate on and off the film set. Digital technology offers us unique, light, powerful technical means, multi-track recorders, features which were impossible not long ago, wireless microphones, plug-ins from digital post-production platforms,… All this has created the illusion that nothing, neither the image nor the sound, has any link with the present time. At present the sensation is growing that you should not be committed to the present time because everything can be modified afterwards… This perspective creates false expectations and all kinds of limitations, even before you begin to shoot.

Today it is relatively easy to guarantee minimum acceptable sound quality, in terms of comprehensibility and exploitation of the dynamic range. I believe that the challenge for all of us as filmmakers and as technicians goes beyond guaranteeing this minimum.

 

Does the sound engineer create or do they just record?

It would be a lie if I said that shoots are always spaces of creation. The great majority of films seek the implementation of a previously designed plan in an increasingly short amount of time. The sound engineer creates and needs minimum conditions to guarantee silence, concentration and the intensity that they require to wait for that unique and unrepeatable moment for all of us, the film crew.

 

What problems can you encounter?

The main enemy is defending something invisible in the 21st century. The other day I went to a concert by the English musician Benjamin Clementine in a Barcelona concert hall. The musician, annoyed, had to shut the audience up several times because people were talking. Afterwards, someone said that maybe the place chosen for the concert was not ideal. I do not agree; I do not believe that the space was the cause of the problem. Less than two months ago, Daniel Baremboim had to interrupt his concert in the Palau de la Música because of the intermittent noise of people with their mobiles, coughing, etc. The space is not the problem; it is the people’s lack of ability to concentrate. Only an attitude of attentive listening is really capable of permitting the transcendence of sound in a space.

The main problem on shoots is that there is little culture of listening, less culture, less ability to recognize the value of subtle forms. If we look closely, many of the technical efforts are aimed at increasing the volume of things. We are becoming vocationally deaf.

On shoots, the absence of time brings many people together, in a great rush, in a single place, and this creates a thousand forces in opposite directions. Everyone has the same objective, to do their job as well as possible. We often forget that the only really important objective is for all of us together to make the best possible film.

 

It is very important to control the acoustics of the place where you are shooting. How do you confront the sound which must be much more difficult to control?

To fight against external airborne noise we work with blankets and absorbent textile materials or with small wooden and fibreglass constructions. Normally, the structural noise can only be avoided by preventing its creation, adapting the schedules and the shooting times to the needs of the sound action and by acoustically improving the spaces. In general, against a resonance which is too long we work with blankets or mouton placed on the ceilings in an ephemeral manner. That is, without making changes to the structure of the spaces. Obviously, the budget and the effort employed will depend on the specific setting and on how long you’re going to work in the same location

The other day I was lucky enough to be able to talk to Chris Newman, the sound engineer from mythical films: The Godfather, Hair, The Exorcist, The English Patient, Valmont, Amadeus … In 1984, to shoot the sequence in which the king invites Mozart to play in the palace in Amadeus, he only had one microphone and a two-channel Nagra to solve a three-minute sequence shot with six actors. The production team cut nine roads around the palace in Paris where they were shooting. They chose that palace for its visual and acoustic aesthetics and all together they defended it from the external noise of the 80s.

It is clear that nowadays we do not at all need such an exhaustive external control of the locations because digital technology allows us to do many things which were impossible before. But, what have we achieved thanks to this ease? To the detriment of what? Sometimes I get the impression that, riding the wave of the miracle of technology, we have allowed ourselves to be carried along by a false sensation of ease, that everything can be arranged, but which on the contrary creates apathy and a generalized lack of emotion.

 

At what moment does the sound engineer come into this process?

It depends on many factors. Normally, the sound engineer comes in when the technical team is formed and it depends on the relationship of trust with the director whether you read the script before or after.

 

Do you visit the locations prior to a shoot?

Yes. The general trend is that they invite you to follow a technical route to see and listen to the locations chosen one week before beginning to shoot. This option subtly invites you to adapt to a pre-established situation with very little room for manoeuvre.

Fortunately, there are also producers and directors interested in the sound as much as in the image. In these cases, the visit to locations is used to choose the sound as an added value and to discover the problems that may affect the shoot with sufficient time to seek solutions.

 

Do have the power to say: "not this location"?

It is not a power. It is your job to warn about the virtues and the problems inherent in each place. It is simply discovering it and warning. Knowing what it offers us, what it gives us and what each place wants in exchange. Sometimes, the written sequence is incompatible with the place chosen. Everything has a solution if you are aware of the existence of a problem on time.

 

You work in in close collaboration with the boom operator. What does their work consist of and how do you relate to this figure?

The boom operators are the key element of any direct sound team. They are aware of the shadows, of the reflections of voices, of the direction of the sound and of the links that these forms have with their own body. A boom operator is a ninja dancer. They allow people with skills acquired over many years, capable of ensuring the best position of the microphone above the actor’s mouth in a field full of mines: direct lights, physical obstacles… We work with microphones which are so directional that placing them off-axis with the mouth means that the sound capture is useless in terms of quality and comprehensibility. It is easy for this to occur without experience with a boom extended more than 5 m. The boom operator also has to be brave and prudent; they must be able to go unnoticed, not to produce shadows which give them away, to anticipate problems and to have a good time! It is therefore a difficult job, poorly valued and which is learnt through experience; there is no way to learn by studying or reading. It is a true trade. In the same way that you choose the best microphones, you choose the boom operator who knows their work best and, of course, with whom you have a relationship of complicity in which, without words, you know how to react. I am lucky to have worked with Iñaki Díez for more than 14 years. And this is an immense added value for my work. It is fair to say that I love to incorporate new people who teach us other ways of solving problems and allow us to avoid inertia.

 

Are there other people or factors which intervene in the sound of a film and that you have to take into account?

Numerous acoustic, physical and psychological factors intervene in direct sound. There are spaces which have such a long resonance that it is impossible to understand the words, spaces which are idyllic visually but which conceal noises which do not correspond to the image, spaces which are only useful for two hours on 12-hour shoots… In actual fact, the sound depends on good relations with all the departments which make a film possible: make-up, costumes, art, photography, production, direction. Films involve teamwork and we need each other. The sound is not just made by you with the boom operator. It is the result of collective creative work.

 

The voices of the actors are also important for the sound. What should a good actor’s voice be like for a sound engineer?

Rather than a good voice, I focus on the forms of speaking. Voices and forms which are so porous that they are in contact with what they conceal, with what they really want to say. What does sorrow or fear sound like? Maybe in an apparently very happy way. The actor’s voice is the first miracle of the sound engineer, where everything begins: the rhythm, the prosody, the mystery, the precision.

 

Do the sound editor and the sound engineer interact? Do they work together?

Yes. They are two jobs which have to go hand in hand. It is a two-way path. We talk, between the director and the members of the sound team, with the aim of going in the same direction.

 

Do you think that we work with sound in the same way here as in other countries?

No. I think that each country, or rather each film industry, has its own codes and sound inertias. France, the inventor of direct cinema, thinks and records the sound like an element connected to the cinematographic style, the space and point of view and of listening. This means that what in the US is simple and synchronous, voices in the foreground and the sensation of dubbing, with very important exceptions such as the Coen brothers or Coppola, in France and England is not at all like that.

Often the voice of the actor is not as important as the description of the space which contains it. They are two different ways of listening.

I believe that the main mission of sound in the US is for the film to always be useful, that is to be audible and visible in all the settings: in a car, on a mobile, on a laptop. That you can listen to the film without good speakers to the detriment of all the subtle details that also form part of the soundtrack: the noises, the silences, the voices recorded at different distances, … European films consider all the elements which form the soundtrack, beyond the music, as one more code of the cinematographic language. Each change in the position of the sound in space is a sign from someone who wants and expects an active response from the spectator. The weakness of this cinema is its main virtue. You cannot see it on a mobile or on a computer!! It forces you to go to the cinema.

You can see many present-day films on a plane without the need to listen to them, just reading the subtitles. This is today’s sound film. The sound transcribes the words; it is a decorative element of the image; it makes the illusion of continuity between shots credible but little else.

France, England and the US developed their own techniques, styles and forms. I do not believe that either Spain or Catalonia have defended their own, identitary sound criterion, beyond the addition of dubbing.

 

Isn’t it a shame that the more interesting projects are scarcer?

Auteur cinema is not recognized by the industry. There is a sort of divorce, I don’t know whether voluntary or involuntary, but it does exist. We are living in a political and economic time in which value and importance are taken from everything connected to culture. Culture is suspicious because it is culture. It is only defended if it is an object of consumption. Slowly, they are getting rid of a trained audience, capable of thinking, of listening and of reading between the lines, with a critical attitude towards what they are presented with. These skills do not appear to be useful or necessary today.

It is interesting to see how the new audiovisual platforms affect both the content and the form of their films and series. We are already making customized products. There are people with so much talent and films under their arm which will never be made because they do not respond to a clear demand for entertainment. The producers are also choked. It is more difficult than ever to produce “unique” films. A lot of scary movies are made, and paradoxically it is scary to make films for adults.

Now I remember a documentary, Cien niños esperando un tren (One hundred children waiting for a train). It is filmed in the 60s in a small mining town in Chile. One day a filmmaker arrives who wants to teach filmmaking to the children. They fit out the only public space of the town, the church. The priest agrees; the first miracle. They take out the altar and the virgin, and they hang up a sheet as the screen and begin the classes for children from 6 to 14 years old. They learn filmmaking with cardboard machines, cutting out frames, and they see "The 400 blows", films by Godard or Truffaut, films which many adults would not see now. Fortunately, here and now some important actions are taking place, such as the project Cinema en curso. Educational projects for children to be able to learn to think, through films.

 

You also work as a teacher. Do you believe that the work of a sound engineer has a future?

I don’t know. I do not believe in jobs with a future. If you’re interested and you like listening, it is a very good place to be able to observe the world.

The future we need to combat is job instability in general. If someone thinks that being a sound engineer, a plumber or a juggler is a way of having a secure job, forget it. The world is no longer a secure place.

 

 

 

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