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The Challenge of Capturing the First Breath
For a production sound mixer working on a typical production, four months might encompass the length of the entire shoot. On "Avatar: Fire and Ash," production sound mixer Julian Howarth spent four months finding the best way to record a single sound: the first breath of air taken by actors as they emerged from the surface after spending minutes underwater.
"The director said, ‘This is a really important part of the drama. It’s something we have to capture,’" Howarth explained, highlighting that one of the key challenges of his job on both "Fire and Ash" and its predecessor, "Avatar: The Way of Water," was figuring out how to capture performances recorded in a 30-foot deep water tank.
"Drama is not just what people say, it’s what’s felt, and it’s breath, and it’s emotion," Howarth said. Part of the emotion in the underwater scenes came from the sense of relief the actors expressed when they came to the surface after holding their breath. "That first intake of air confirms that you’re alive after the trepidation of being underwater."
The problem with properly capturing that moment of release and relief was that the microphones built into the actors’ helmets didn’t work properly under the shooting conditions. "The pressure of the water at 30-foot depth collapsed the microphone diaphragm," Howarth said. "By the time it reached the surface, it took two minutes for the air to equalize, similar to your eardrum when you go diving. So you didn’t really get a clear signal when they came to the surface."
To address the issue, Howarth collaborated with the design and engineering departments to redesign and rebuild the microphones. "We spent four months taking apart the microphones we had," Howarth said. "We added additional diaphragms and layers of diaphragms to try and reduce the pressure on the microphone capsule at the end."
The end result was a microphone that could clearly get across the emotion in the breath that Cameron was looking for — just one of many instances on the "Avatar" films where Howarth had to work with departments outside of what one would typically think of as the purview of the production sound mixer.
Overlapping Departments and Creative Solutions
"You’re always overlapping, and you really gain a lot of respect for what everybody does," Howarth said, noting that he collaborated particularly closely with the design and prop departments, as when they worked together to create a working oxygen mask for Spider (Jack Champion).
"We built one that worked and provided oxygen," Howarth said. "I had a comm system in it, so he could speak and we could record him untethered underwater. We spent six months researching and developing that to make sure it would work, and then we did tests with the stunt department. They’d take it underwater, bring it back up, and we’d make alterations."
While the water scenes created some of Howarth’s biggest challenges, the scenes on dry land didn’t exactly let him off the hook. The performance capture technology used for the "Avatar" movies, in which the performances were shot with an array of cameras that would allow Cameron to make his choices about composition, camera movement, and coverage later in the process, meant Howarth had to record dozens of actors at once with the awareness that if Cameron was happy with a particular take, every angle and every performance might be derived from that one shot.
"You have to get everything," Howarth said. "On a regular film, you’re following the camera and everything is dictated by where the camera moves are, and the actors have to repeat that performance 20 times. Here, if they do it once, Jim’s got it in every shot, and that means I have to be on top of it at all times because you don’t want to miss that performance. What gets recorded on that stage goes all the way through the editorial process, through visual effects, through rendering to the final mix and final product. And we’re pumping 24 to 36 tracks through the pipeline every day."
Immersing Actors in the World of Pandora
For Howarth, however, it all starts and ends with the actors, and he sees his job as not only protecting their work but providing an atmosphere in which they can flourish. That meant that, on the set of "Fire and Ash," he played music and sound effects both over speakers and in the actors’ earpieces in an effort to fully immerse them in the fantasy world of Pandora.
"The actors are not dressed in costume, and they’re not in a forest," Howarth said. "We have to try to help put them in that environment."
Letting the performances drive the movie meant recording Zoe Saldaña’s singing live on set rather than having her lip sync to a pre-record, a decision that led to one of the movie’s most powerful moments. "When she sings that song, she’s remembering a son that just passed and playing with twine," Howarth said. "Just doing that can affect how she’s going to be singing." Howarth recorded Saldaña singing the song live with the expectation that it would require some additional recording or adjustment, but composer Simon Franglen called him with great news after listening to the track.
"Simon said, ‘This is going all the way through, there’s no need for a studio,’" Howarth said. "‘We’ll get the orchestra to record, but Zoe’s performance stays in it.’ And that’s just a testament to how much better it is to record on stage where the actor is still in that emotional state, instead of going to London to sit in a studio and record it. What Zoe sang on set is what’s on Simon’s album, and I’m really proud of that."
A Testament to Perfectionism
Howarth is proud of the film as a whole, too, and attributes its impact to the high demands Cameron places on himself and his cast and crew. "With Jim’s striving for exactness, you have to go the long way around," Howarth said. "It’s going to be difficult because there are no steps you can skip to get to the end product. We always say there’s the easy way to do things and the Jim way, but that’s the way it’s got to be."