The Telephone Game
I was the sound designer for Jason Schumacher's unique, scriptless film. It features a host of talented actors and actresses who improvise a story about putting on a play.
The Telephone Game Official Site
Here's the teaser trailer:
Sound Designing The Telephone Game
Jason Schumacher and I somehow managed to attend the same high school, work at the same cable access station, and still completely avoid each other for at least seven years. But on that fateful day we finally met, Jason found out that I dabbled in audio production. Little did I know that his simple request to remove some air conditioner hum from a scene would turn into mixing and sound designing all 105 minutes of The Telephone Game.
When Jason pitched the film to me, he must have known that I'm a complete sucker for descriptors like "psychological," "weird," and "trippy." I'd never sound designed a feature film, and it sounded like a fun experiment. I was a little skeptical about this "improvised comedy," until I saw the ridiculously talented and funny actors Jason wrangled into the film. I was excited to be Jason's first test-screening guinea pig; in his entire two years of editing, he had kept all the footage carefully concealed in the Schumacher vault (a hard drive named "Big Poppa").
Coming into the project with an almost finished video edit, I'm sure I had a very different perspective than Jason and the rest of the cast and crew. Whereas they started from scratch with the raw ingredients of a story, I saw a fully formed universe as it was being pulled out of the oven. Now it just needed some frosting! (Sidenote: I've never baked a cake in my life, but that won't stop me from using bad metaphors here).
My first gargantuan task was the dialogue mixing. Since the film was shot almost entirely on one camera, Jason had to weave a bunch of different takes together to create the illusion that each scene was one continuous take. Not an easy feat, especially with the improvisation factor. My job was to support this illusion by making the dialogue in each scene seamless from cut to cut, so that each conversation sounded completely natural. It's amazing how much visual cutting and trickery we as film audiences don't even notice if the sound is smooth and believable.
Once the dialogue was set to go, it was time to add in sound effects. At times it was just as tedious as dialogue mixing (you don't even want to know how many hours I spent on footsteps), but this phase was much more fun. While much of the film has a naturalistic feel, Jason was all for getting as creative as possible with the sound design. Marco's brain, lovely as it may be, is also kind of a scary place. So whenever we're inside his head, I tried to create an equally surreal soundscape. Marco and Zelphia's rehearsals also had such a surreal quality, I wanted them to occupy a different mental space than the rest of the on-stage scenes. In each of these rehearsal scenes, we hear progressively more wind, sirens, and drilling from the mines of this "Jupitarian" moon. For audio nerds, these are some of the few scenes mixed in stereo.
The most rewarding part of my job was editing the film's music. Along with Matt Curney's moving score, we were able to use experimental orchestral music from Casey T. Anderson and pop songs from the band Spencer McGillicutty. I chopped, blended, and pasted their music wherever I could possibly fit it in. The film wouldn't be anywhere near what it is without these talented composers. From the film's score, to "The Brain," to Haley Chamberlain Nelson's stunning performance of "Stardust," the music is really the icing on the cake.
