12 minute read
COVER FEATURE
CRAFTING MOONAGE
DAYDREAM’S AURAL UNIVERSE
Not merely a new music documentary, but a bonafide cinematic event, Brett Morgen’s Moonage Daydream is an immersive deep dive into David Bowie’s creative consciousness. Andy Price speaks to sound designers John Warhust and Nina Hartstone to learn more about their work on this sensory experience.
Idon’t know where I’m going, but I promise it won’t be boring,” David Bowie once said. Now, over 6 years since his death, Bowie’s legacy continues to inspire astounding work. Moonage Daydream, the incredible career-spanning film from acclaimed documentarian Brett Morgen, is a prime example. Assembled via spruced up archive material, multitrack stems from Bowie’s unrivalled back catalogue and some mind-blowing sound design, the film tells David’s story via his own words, coupled with never-before seen footage to build out dazzling sequences – augmented by some truly out of this world sound design
Key to the sound design choices made throughout the film were John Warhurst and Nina Hartstone, winners of the Academy Award for Best Sound Editing for their work on 2018’s Bohemian Rhapsody. Personally sought by Morgen to expand the size of the film’s sound for IMAX, we spoke to the pair about being involved in such a huge project.
Brett Morgen and the cast of Moonage Daydeam on the red carpet.
AMI: Hi John, Hi Nina, firstly, how did you become involved in the Moonage Daydream project?
John: What happened was there was a section that is no longer in the film. It was concert footage from the Station to Station era. Brett did a sort of temp mix of what he wanted it to be in IMAX. When he got to the IMAX theatre, it didn’t sound anything like what he imagined in his head.
It was actually the projectionist at the theatre who said to Brett (as an example of how to do it), ‘have you ever seen Bohemian Rhapsody?’ He played Brett the Live Aid section of that film, which we had mixed for IMAX. He then gave Brett the name of Paul Massey the mixer, as well as our names. So Brett got in touch with us.
AMI: Did the project appeal to you from the get-go? And were you big Bowie fans?
Nina: Of course everyone knows and kind of loves Bowie, I’m in my fifties so he was a part of my growing up, a bit like Queen was. I’m more of a Bowie 80s girl really. I found it absolutely fascinating to have the chance to have that deep dive into Bowie’s head and listen to a lot of his early music. It got me into him to be honest. Particularly his philosophical ideas. He was so before his time. So many of his thoughts are really appropriate in this day and age.
AMI: We imagine there was a lot of archive curation time - sorting and sifting through the mountains of archive material. How long did that process take?
John: So a lot of that had happened before we got involved, it was almost a locked cut before we started. Brett had limited finances so didn’t want to start each process until he was sure he was ready I guess.
One of the first things that happened was that we had a spotting session with him. It was an opportunity to meet and chat to Brett. It was during the pandemic so we did it on Evercast. Normally we have a spotting session and sit down for an afternoon and scoot through the film, talking about scenes. It normally takes two or three-hours, So we had a two hour session set-up, but after two hours we hadn’t even got five minutes into the movie.
But, the thing was, Brett told us later that those sessions were a chance for him to hear what we thought of the film. It started up a very in-depth, detailed discussion, sometimes about the overall sound concepts. During this wide-ranging conversation we were allowed to share thoughts and perspectives. There were like nine of these sessions to get through the whole film.
Nina: In terms of the archive material, Brett shared so much of it with us, as well as the stems of the music. So we began pouring through it. There was some fascinating stuff – snatches of conversations from backstage or between takes in recording studios, and crowd noises from different stages of his career. We were trying to understand every part of Bowie’s journey.
John: It’s the same for any artist, they have some fans that go with them, but in the 1980s Bowie attracted a new type of audience. These audiences changed over time, so we had to kind of track that and make sure the crowd noise wasn’t just random, but appropriate for each era.
AMI: What was the principal technology you used for most sound design tasks? Did you work within Pro Tools?
John: Yeah, I mean it’s pretty much a given that the entire industry works on Pro Tools. From the theatres that we mix in to the editing software that we use, to the music studios that we’re working with as well. It’s definitely the most advanced software for this type of work.
Nina: I use iZotope’s RX for everything, especially for cleaning up all the archive material from years back. There’s massive amounts of varying quality. Trying to get as much out of those recordings as possible. It’s not the most exciting or glamorous thing to talk about, but I used that a fair bit. We also used Sound Particles to try and create bigger and more immersive sounds.
John: There was a lot of Altiverb in there too, I’m also a big fan of the Universal Audio UAD software. Then there’s the classic Serato pitch and time that’s always a winner for speeding up and slowing down. Mainly a lot of reverbs and manipulation elements.
Paul Massey and Dave Giammarco mixed it for IMAX, and they did a hell of a lot of work making it sound huge. They used a lot more reverbs. There’s also straightforward mixing going on where they just panned things to areas of the room.
AMI: There were so many amazing, memorable parts of the film, one part I really loved was the re-arranged Sound and Vision clip. How were those song re-arrangment calls made?
John: There were so many things in the multitracks that surprised us. Tony Visconti was a big part of it. He was delving into his archive and sending us multitracks, all the original recordings and mix stems. Once you start to peel back some of that stuff you start to realise what’s actually packaged into it.
For example, on Ashes to Ashes, David’s talking all the way through it. Once I discovered the talking track that’s now all I can hear everytime I hear the song. A lot of those mash-ups were overseen by Brett, then it was just taken to another level or we moved elements around.
We incorporated pieces of Bowie into the sound design as well. One of the themes you hear threaded throughout the movie is made from the train-like synth tracks from Station to Station, there’s the countdown from Space Oddity near the start, and when there’s Metropolis-esque shots of a city after the Messiah has arrived there’s all these choral
chants, well they’re the backing vocals from Move On. It was taking parts of Bowie’s back catalogue and making it so there wasn’t any delineation between sound design and his music. The whole thing worked together as a unit.
That’s one of the things we talked about a lot, about composition. It all needed to come from the same unified source – Bowie’s music. We kept that as the core of everything. That was a lot of fun, obviously.
AMI: Which aspects of the film were the trickiest to get right, and did you work on any sequences that got left on the cutting room floor?
Nina: Oh, a huge one!
John: Well, we probably shouldn’t say too much as it might see the light of day in the near future. But yeah, there were some big things we did. One sequence we did a lot of work on…
Nina: It’s often difficult when working in sound design. You try some things and they work, try other things and they don’t, but then other approaches springboard you to new ideas. That was some of the great fun of the collaboration with Brett, trying things out and then being led down other paths. This was certainly one of the most creative endeavours I’ve ever been part of. It was very freeing.
AMI: So Brett gave you a lot of leeway?
Nina: Yeah, definitely. All bets were off. We could try anything, it didn’t have to link to the picture. We were describing not just visuals and sometimes not even visuals, but often we might have been trying to describe the feeling or sensation of being a Bowie fan, or what was going through Bowie’s head. It gave you an awful lot of capacity to go as far as you wanted creatively. Brett was always encouraging of that.
John: [To Nina] Do you remember when we were in one of the spotting sessions and he said to us ‘we could put whatever sounds we want, wherever we want, and the fact that we’ve put it there, makes it correct’? I remembered this idea from studying contemporary music – that if someone intended a sound to be music, then the listener has to accept it as music.
One of the things I learned about Brett is that he loves sounds that have wood in them. So you’ll hear throughout the film the sound of a tenpin bowling ball rolling down a bowling alley and then whacking down the ten pins, or the sound of a wooden rollercoaster clunkily, creakily going up the tracks then being released. These sounds are very musical in themselves. Because it wasn’t connected to the image, they took on a much greater role of being a musical score – alongside Bowie’s music of course.
Bowie might be describing ideas like ‘chaos’, so we’d naturally look for sounds that had this type of tension/release arc to them. You can create a build or a release. The sound design really started to take over the film.
Nina: Brett’s a very 360 degree thinker. He really wants the viewer to feel everything that existed in that moment *outside* of the image that we’re not looking at. Brett doesn’t see it as just the cinematic screen. He wants the audience to stand in the middle of it and have a 360 experience of it.
John: I think Brett saw this as almost one of the projects of his career. He did say how important this film is as a piece of work that he’d always wanted to do. He spent five years of his life in total piecing together all these millions and millions of assets in the archive, finding not only the bits he wanted to use, but assembling the story of them.
AMI: What are some of your favourite moments in the film?
Nina: I love the Cracked Actor sequence, it goes completely chaotic. I didn’t know the song until I started working on the film and now I love it. I got really into that. There’s so much energy in there. There’s so many different layers. I think every time you watch it your ear zones into different aspects of it.
John: For me it’s the beginning, the first ‘reel’ of the film essentially where it goes from the fairground ride of the intro with Hallo Spaceboy, then we arrive into what Brett would call ‘Bowie’s church’, with a silent audience as Bowie arrives on stage, then we go into that medley of songs which finishes with All the Young Dudes, then back into space. I just love how it’s assembled. It was such fun working on that section.
I sort of felt that by the time we got to the end of reel one we were exhausted! It was a lot of work and we were constantly fiddling with that intro to make it as awesome as it could possibly be.
AMI: It’s a struggle to think of anything comparable to this documentary, it really feels more akin to putting on a record than just watching a typically factual-based documentary
John: When I first started working on it people asked ‘what is it, like a Bowie biopic?’ The best way I could describe it was being akin to a Bowie ‘installation’ really. Also, other documentaries have loads of talking head interviews. There’s none of that, it’s all in Bowie’s own words. You could do it if he was still alive because you could interview them. But the fact that we made this posthumously is quite a feat. For me that was the brilliance of it. It didn’t feel like a documentary.
Nina: That helps to make you feel less like you’re on the outside looking in. Those documentaries have a sort of glass between yourself and the subject. Brett was very much keen on placing us inside Bowie’s brain, experiencing the world through Bowie’s perspective.
AMI: It seems like the film has been really well received, are you happy with the response it’s been getting?
Nina: Oh it’s well deserved, there was a lot of hard work to make this. Having spoken to Brett at the beginning and understanding that he was looking to make a Bowie experience, I think he’s definitely achieved that.
John: When we first started working on it we weren’t sure how long it would be in IMAX for, so there was a bit of uncertainty on that front. We weren’t sure if it would go streaming on Amazon within a week. So we were a bit concerned that people would only experience it on TV. But the fact that it’s come out so wide is great. If you want to see this, I think it deserves to be seen on the biggest screen possible. It’s not the same on your TV or iPad. It’s brilliant that it’s gone out so widely on IMAX.
I’m especially pleased for Brett with all the positive reviews, he’s put a huge chunk of his life into the project and I’m extremely grateful that we got to be a part of it.
