Tuesday, October 29, 2013

JFK: The Final Hours - The Soundscape

JFK: The Final Hours will be airing soon on National Geographic Channel (November 8th).

[Via press release from National Geographic Channel] "To help in bringing JFK's last day to life, the creative team behind JFK: The Final Hours restored an extraordinary color film, shot by a professional White House film crew that documented JFK's movements during his final day. By stripping off the original, now unusable audio, and converting the footage to high definition, this restored film is a haunting, immersive experience for viewers."

Before it airs I wanted to share a couple of my experiences on working with this restored footage and building the soundscape -

SFX & Research: Studying history at the University of Oregon finally paid off for me! In all seriousness though, it was important to maintain the accuracy as much as possible with the period of the documentary and that was true with the sound effects. As the Assistant Sound Editor, one of my tasks was to research what models Air Force One, the police officer's bikes and JFK's limousine were at the time so that we would work with appropriate material from our effects libraries.


Backgrounds: There were quite a lot of crowd BGs needed for this documentary. At many points JFK is being greeted by crowds at various airports or giving speeches to an audience. I was lucky that in my first week working on the project, the Portland Rose Festival was going on and I was able to go and record some great crowd ambiences to use.

Field recording at the Grand Floral Parade.

Foley: I was having a conversation with Sound Designer David Hughes about wanting to try a technique that I heard about Lon Bender's team using on The Hunger Games for making the outside Foley more organic. David was all for it and we put some quicktime clips onto an iPad to perform clapping and various other Foley elements in sync with the picture. It saved a ton of time by just having to nudge these recordings a bit instead of editing individual things in. In particular I liked the clapping, it really added some great material to play along with the wild clapping in the BGs.




That's it for now, but I'll see about updating the blog further after the documentary airs. Overall, it was an absolute pleasure to work with everyone involved on this project!

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