Vanessa Theme Ament - Divergent Tracks: How Three Film Communities Revolutionized Digital Film Sound

Divergent Tracks

Divergent Tracks

How Three Film Communities Revolutionized Digital Film Sound

Vanessa Theme Ament

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC

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First published in the United States of America 2021

Copyright Vanessa Theme Ament, 2021

For legal purposes the constitute an extension of this copyright page.

Cover design: Namkwan Cho

Cover image Miramax Films/Photofest

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ament, Vanessa Theme, author.

Title: Divergent tracks / Vanessa Ament.

Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. |

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021000586 (print) | LCCN 2021000587 (ebook) |

ISBN 9781501359224 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501359217 (ebook) |

ISBN 9781501359200 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Sound motion picturesHistory. | SoundRecording and reproducingHistory. | Motion picturesSound effectsHistory.

Classification: LCC PN1995.7 .A46 2021 (print) | LCC PN1995.7 (ebook) |

DDC 791.4302/4dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021000586

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021000587

ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-5922-4

ePDF: 978-1-5013-5920-0

eBook: 978-1-5013-5921-7

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Contents

This book tells the story of how three creative artistsa bass player, a documentarian, and a young animatorwho had become innovative sound editors for film, collaborated with their sound film professionals to design award-winning soundtracks during a critical decade in film soundthe 1990s. As movie sound was beginning the awkward transition from editing on magnetic film to utilizing nascent computerized systems, Skip Lievsay in New York, Pat Jackson in the San Francisco Bay Area, and David Stone in Hollywood supervised three critical films that illustrate the technological disruption as a creative challenge particular to the aesthetics, workflows, and political economies of their specific film communities.

Lievsay, a musician turned New York sound editor, found his artistic choices somewhat limited by analog editing practices, and chose to leap to digital editing to allow more creative control over his sound design. Jackson, a public television and documentary professional in San Francisco, began working with Walter Murch, and through the more fluid filmmaking practices of the Bay Area navigated multiple digital sound technologies to create masterful sound design. Stone, an animator who transitioned to sound editing, stumbled into a labyrinth of various digital technologies that did not interface but were massaged into a cohesive and expansively artful sound design.

These three sound professionals, from three culturally unique film communities, along with their colleagues, collaborated on award-winning sound for their films while adapting the technologies to their specific needs.

My method for such an undertaking requires a deep dive into industrial ethnography in film sound. As I was in postproduction sound for several decades prior to writing my first book, The Foley Grail (2009), I have a particular expertise in the culture of the film sound professional. It is with this past experienceas one who was in and of the culturethat I bring to sound studies a different perspective, and one that I hope assists in disabusing, once and for all, the notion that sound professionals are technological workers. It is my purpose, more than giving reportage about the technological transition, to shed light on exactly what makes these professionals creative artists.