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Early this year I got a call from Kriota Willberg, choreographer for
the dance troupe Dura Mater. She was looking for a composer to score an
unusual project titled The Bentfootes. She set out to create a history
of American dance told through the quixotic efforts of a fictional
family called the Bentfootes, portraying a series of "found" dances
dating from the Civil War. The producers tell the story in public
television documentary style featuring authoritative historians and
pundits of dance along with re-staged dances from the imagined family's
archive. A plot concerning the last unfortunate Bentfoote descendant
(Nina Hellman) and her self-involved boyfriend (James Urbaniak) ties
the piece together.
Kriota
began the project in 2003, commissioning five composers to score the
historical dances. She developed the pieces in live performances at
Dixon Place in New York City, and then in 2006 shot the film from a
script by Todd Alcott who co-wrote the film Antz. The film was shot on
DV by cinematographers Melissa Guimares and David (Squid) Quinn and
edited on Final Cut Pro by Connor Calista. Cartoonist R. Sikoryak (New
Yorker Magazine, Raw Comics) contributed design of posters and period
publicity materials to the film as well as an animated sequence
commemorating the unfortunate death and afterlife of the mother of
modern dance Isadora Duncan. The overall impression of the Bentoote
family legacy is one of a lineage that might have left a greater stamp
on history had it been blessed with slightly better taste, judgment and
talent.
 Kriota first
contacted me in search of a score for the film. Because the six
featured dances were set in different eras and made by different
composers, we agreed that the score would tie it all together. Says
Kriota, "Earnestness is the new irony, it was really important to me to
find someone who could lean into that Aaron Copeland-like, loving,
documentary format without being smug. The music had to add to the lie
of the story and add to the truth of the story at the same time."
She
asked me to love the Bentfoote family unconditionally. As a member of
an odd family myself, this approach made perfect sense. Though some of
the choreographic efforts in the film are hilarious, such as a square
dance with music by Brian Dewan re-enacting a civil war battle complete
with hangings and amputations, we wanted the dances to succeed or fail
on their own terms.
In considering the sound of the film as a whole, I brought up the
question of sound design. The dances that are the heart of the film
were all shot at the Skirball Center in New York City over five days.
The music for the dancers came from a playback system in the theater
and was present in all of the production sound in a boomy and
reverberant form. Once the original recordings of the dance pieces were
back in the edit, we could not use the production recordings so there
was no sound from the dancers themselves during the dances. We would
have to Foley every step of the dances to supply that critical physical
presence of dancers on the screen. Although this was not Kriota's first
film, she had never done anything that required this additional sound
work, so to simplify things I agreed to handle the sound design in
addition to the score.
I chose to complete the score before beginning the sound design. Music
carries a lot of emotional weight in a film. I hoped that any scenes
with music might mean fewer cleanups on the dialogue. I was scoring
only for interviews and not for dances, so there was no sound design to
interact with the score. I wanted to be sure the score brought warmth
and humanity into the interviews that at times provide backhanded
commentary on the characters, so I worked with real instruments and
avoided MIDI. I recorded the music in Pro Tools, though I could have
used any multi-track recording system. The instruments were tracked one
at a time with guitar typically used as the base track because I feel
most comfortable on that instrument. Piano and acoustic guitar were the
backbone of the arrangements and I wrote themes that had a feel of
Americana to them. I augmented those with acoustic bass, banjo, some
percussion, horns and even a musical saw. I made about fifteen cues
that spanned eras from before the civil war to the 1960's. I roughed in
the horn parts with a sampler and after the cues were approved, swapped
them out for real horns. I was fortunate enough to obtain the services
of Frank London, founding member of the Klezmatics as my entire horn
section. He visited my studio with trumpet, flugelhorn and alto horn
and we spent a wonderful afternoon adding warmth and personality to my
tunes.
 Kriota was
concerned with one cue in particular, which was to underscore a
sequence describing the turbulent 1930's when Josephine Bentfoote
creates an interpretive dance for the workingman. For inspiration,
Kriota directed me to the climactic number "Remember the Forgotten Man"
from Gold Diggers of 1933. I put on my dusty depression hat and created
a piece featuring all of the instruments in my Bentfoote orchestra plus
a beaten-down baritone choir. The plaintive minor key march that plays
under the scenes of labor unrest and exhausted workers trudging to
their thankless factory jobs worked perfectly when we finally got to
hear and see it with Frank's weeping trumpet.
When I mix underscore, I like to listen at the level it will play in
the final mix along with the production sound. I made a quick rough mix
of the production dialogue to play against the music while mixing to
insure that I would not lose anything from my arrangements when all of
the sound is finally together. This has the added benefit of making the
final mix go more quickly as the cues will not fight with the
production sound. I mixed the music cues in stereo and outputted them
as AIFF files to be imported into the final Pro Tools mix session. It
took about a week to write and record the score all told, though the
effort was spread out over a couple of months.
The sound design and edit took about five days. I started by prepping
all of the interviews and production sound in Pro Tools. I split the
tracks and made audio dissolves to smooth them out. I added room tone
where necessary to further blend the tracks and make them play evenly.
The interviews were of varying quality - - some were recorded properly
with a separate sound recorder and others were from the dreaded Mini-DV
camera mic. I edited around any extraneous noises that were in the
sit-down interviews and left all of the B-roll sync sound more or less
as it was. I didn't do any noise reduction at this point, but kept my
efforts at clean up to whatever could be accomplished by editing.
I had been a little concerned about the dances. I thought I would have
to Foley all of them from top to bottom, and they comprise about forty
percent of the film. Kriota offered to attend the session and help. I
thought I might be able to show her some Foley basics and maybe get all
of the footsteps, breathing and fabric sounds recorded in a day if we
were lucky. I figured I would be editing those tracks for a day or two
to make it perfect. Kriota arrived at the session with Beth Simons, one
of the dancers featured in the film. I set up a wooden surface on the
floor and put the two of them on it. I hit record and they danced, what
happened next was a pleasant surprise.
 Since they knew every step of the dances, the session went very
quickly. I pointed one mic on their feet and another at their bodies
for clothing and breathing. I had prepared to deliver to them the gift
of my considerable knowledge of footstep recording but never got to
open my mouth. While listening to the music for the dances on
headphones, they gave amazingly accurate and expressive performances in
one or two takes. Because they had done these dances a hundred times in
rehearsal and performance the grace and heart that they brought to the
recordings was unique and perfect for each dance. All I had to do was
watch them perform. I realized as they worked how much the sound of
movement is about bringing physicality to the screen. If I had tried to
do these moves myself, it would have taken forever and would never have
sounded as good -- not because I don't sound like them, but because I
don't move like them. Use professionals. Get a great result. Go figure.
One dance in the film featured Beth and had no musical accompaniment
but instead used a spoken poem in the style of Walt Whitman. Where
there had previously been no sound at all for the dancing, we now had a
natural sounding track that brought a human presence to the screen that
had been missing before. The sound really helped to put her body into
the movie.
After the Foley session, I split the tracks to match the perspective of
the dancers. I made three sets of Foley tracks, one each for close,
medium and long shots. This would make the mix go more quickly as I
would be able to set the faders higher for close shots and lower for
long shots and just let it go. I also added reverb to the shots, more
for long and less for close, just like real life. Having the tracks
separated also made a simple task of emphasizing a given rustle or step
if the moment called for it. I spent about five hours editing the
tracks and I was ready to mix.
Because the audio had been well prepared, we booked only two days for
the mix. About thirty percent of the film had problem audio with a lot
of ambient camera and room noise in the interviews. I treated these
issues with good old low-tech equalization and filtering to begin with
to remove any low rumble and high end hiss over 10 KHz, and then I put
some more high tech gadgets on it. I used Cedar noise reduction in some
scenes and plug-ins from the Waves Restoration Bundle for others. Since
all digital noise reducers add artifacts to the sound I used a light
touch in applying the processors and varied my approach on differing
interviews to avoid having one type of noise reduction continue for too
long and thus draw attention to itself. This approach means that I left
some of the scenes a bit noisy to avoid making them sound robotized but
we felt they were playing well at the end of the day. Though we mixed
to picture on a large screen, I mixed in stereo for video at a low
volume level as we were making this version for festival submissions.
We wanted to be sure that the film would play well among the many
entries that film festivals receive. I outputted the final mix as a
pair of stereo AIFF files for subsequent import and on lining in Final
Cut Pro. After the film makes it into some festivals, we will revisit
the mix at theater playback levels for touch up before showing it to an
audience.
Now Kriota is off to the magical land of submissions, which will go out
on DVD and Mini-DV. The first wave of targets will be dance festivals
everywhere. With dances that range from poorly conceived yet
brilliantly executed to just plain goofy, this film speaks to creative
people who never made it big but found riches in the simple act of
making art. Says one of the commentators in the Bentfootes, "They say
that an artist stands on the shoulders of giants, well, sometimes an
artist stands on the shoulders of lesser stature..."
This film is a funny and warm tribute to those creative people. Here's
wishing us all luck in the coming months as The Bentfootes makes its
way out into the world.
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Carmen Borgia is the head of audio services for DuArt Film & Video
in New York City. He oversees a post production sound department that
provides mixing, sound design, restoration, transfer and printmastering.
His department caters to independent projects in all formats from mono
optical up to digital 5.1.
Editor’s note: If anyone has any
questions, please submit them to
cborgia@duart.com. Carmen will do his best to answer your queries.
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Scoring
The Bentfootes