The Production Process

The Production Process

King Lear: On-Line

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"Nothing can be made of nothing."

In order to familiarize the company with the text, we held a read-through at the very start of the rehearsal process.

Over the past two months, various members of the cast would meet on a regular basis twice a week with Director Matteo Pangallo. At these rehearsals, individual scenes would be worked over and discussed. These rehearsals were held in one of the classrooms in the English building on campus.

The entire process culminated in a week during which the entire play was read-through at once, for continuity and timing. After two of these readings, the company moved into Schaeffer Theater and spent a Sunday evening, from 3:30pm to 11:30pm recording the master cut of the actors' voices. During this recording several takes were required for a few of the scenes. Also, basic sound effects (such as slaps, stumbling, crowd noises, sword fights, etc.) were recorded live with the actors.

After all this hard work, the company enjoyed themselves at a cast party, during which the traditional speeches were given and awards presented.

As the cast goes their separate ways, now, however, the process of post-production is just beginning for our team of engineers....

The master recording of the actors was captured on the Schaeffer stage. The main curtain was lowered to dampen echoes from the house of the theater, and another batten with a teaser was lowered to keep sound from escaping towards the cyclorama at the back of the stage.

Four microphones -- provided by Bates Multimedia Services -- were placed in a circle at center stage and were connected to the sound control booth at the back of the house. While two technicians were on ClearCom headsets on-stage, our chief engineer manned the mixing board in the booth. The medium used to record the actors was three standard recordable Sony minidiscs.

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A Note on Sound-Effects

Over 150 sound-effects were used in the recording of King Lear. Many were foley effects (that is, they were recorded live with the actors). Some of the foley effects include: sword-fights, most crowd noises, slaps, and some chain sounds. Most effects, however, were garnered from the BBC's Sound Effects Library. Director Matteo Pangallo sifted through over 60 CDs of effects and picked out over 200 that he thought might be useful in the recording. Of these 200, over 80 made it into the final version of the recording. Amongst these you will hear: 12 different types of thunder, 4 different types of wind, 3 different types of rain, 12 different atmospheric backgrounds (each accurate to time-of-day and location in England), over 30 different types of footsteps, and 14 different horse sounds. A number of effects are actually not what they seem to be in the recording (for example, the sound of Kent's chains when he is in the stocks is actually silverware being sorted). The number of effects in each scene varies, of course; some have only one or two while others can have up to 30 or even more!

Photos from recording night!

Matt Heffernan (Kent) and Michael Philbrick (technician) watch Colin Simmons (Edmund) mid-speech.

Sanford Freedman (King Lear) and Nate Holt (Gloucester) read along, as Jamal Smith (Edgar) acts.

Michael Philbrick (technician) on the Schaeffer Theater stage with one of the recording microphones.

Michael and Jamal share a laugh, as Nate Holt (Gloucester) carries on with the scene.

Nate and Kevin Weiler (Albany) enjoy themselves in the control room during the recording.

Nate, Michael, and Jamal on stage during the recording.

Some of the foley (live) sound effect props used in the Lear recording sit in the Schaeffer house.

Tahsin Alam (recording engineer) and Matteo Pangallo (director) in the sound control room.





Here's a brief look at the post-production process. Each scene goes through over a dozen editing steps before its finished. A segment of recording that lasts five minutes in the final version can take up to half-an-hour to edit and mix! ------------ 1. All of the sound files on the mini-discs were transferred to the production computer and stored as wav files. They were then burned onto CDs for transfer to the editing computer. (One of the reasons editing takes so long is because the mini-discs record their own track-breaks, which means we need to splice together each of the scenes by hand. Sometimes the track-breaks came in the middle of a sentence, or even a word!) 2. The wav files were then transferred from CD to the editing computer. Using Cool Edit Pro (tm) software. Each scene was spliced together and then put through a 4 step process to clean it up: silences and actor mistakes were cut; ambient noise was filtered (there is still a slight hiss in the background, however); decibel levels were boosted; and atmospherics were added (such as echoes and reverb where appropriate). 3. After splicing, each scene was added to the mixing console. Mixing was done act by act. At this stage, the recording is put through several more steps: timing of the scenes is arranged; volume levels are set (sometimes quieter actors needed a boost and othertimes louder actors needed to be toned down); consistency is checked; inter-scene music is cut and added as needed; and sound effects (that is, those that the actors did not contribue a la foley effects during the actual recording) are included. 4. The final act is stored as a single *wav file and is sent via the Bates network to the production computer where it is burned onto the final CD. Extra copies are burned for distribution and liner notes are added at this point.