Frenzied howling, and more...
In Warhammer 40,000 terms, I’m something of a veteran: over a decade of work, thirty-plus novels, a good enough rep that when it was announced that I’d written the script for the Ultramarines movie, the Warhammer 40,000 community sounded reassured, because I’m a safe pair of hands (thank you for the comments, guys, you’ll make me blush). Funny thing, on the day of the voice records, I felt like a complete newbie.
For a start, it was at Abbey Road Studios in London. Let's just hear that again in italics. Abbey Road Studios. The street outside looked exactly like the classic Beatles album cover. All through the day, we could hear the distant honks of car horns because there is a constant stream of tourist pilgrims waiting to have their picture taken walking across the iconic zebra crossing in fours. It drives the local traffic INSANE.
I got there early because, well, I was eager. I was shown into the studio where the technicians were setting up. It was weird; a lot of the studio space is taken up with vast banks of sound engineering stuff, but the Image Metric guys just spread their own kit up on top of it - screens, cameras, keyboards, all very lightweight. The only thing they needed was Abbey Road’s sound-insulated space. The vast reserves of world famous recording equipment in the studio were redundant. Sound desks had become benches and tables.
There was almost something arcane about the process: the green glow of the backdrop in an otherwise dark space, the fact that the individual key functions of the keyboards they were using had been re-marked with textliners. Any minute now, they’ll be propitiating the Machine Spirit, I thought. I didn’t say this, of course, because I didn’t want to come across a total asshat fanboy.
Anyway, the voice records were spread over several days, and on the day I was able to attend, the actors working were Sean Pertwee, Johnny Harris and John Hurt. I can tell you now that it’s very weird to meet someone famous. Yes, I know you all think I must do that all the time because I’m windswept and interesting, but I don’t, and I doubt I’d ever get used to it. The recognition circuits in your brain go a little screwy. You recognise someone because their face is so familiar to you, and yet, simultaneously, you know you’ve never actually met them.
By the time the little voice at the back of your mind has started to whisper, ”Look. That’s John Hurt. You’re standing in the same room as John Hurt. He’s right there...” you can pretty much forget not coming across as a total asshat fanboy.
The sessions weren’t just about voice recording, of course. If you’ve checked out the stuff on this site about what Image Metrics does, you’ll see that it’s a whole motion capture thing. Sean, John and Johnny were having their faces mapped as they recorded the lines. Though the characters they are playing will look nothing like them, their faces will move with an authentic realism to match their voices. But it’s just the faces: these gentlemen were being required to act with their voices and faces, yet not move their bodies around because that disrupted the camera line. It’s a pretty amazing process and, it’s fair to say, at this nuts-and-bolts production end of things, it’s a very unshowbizzy and comical one. Grown men, grown, famous men, sitting in green-lit booths, looking down the barrel of a camera, and being asked to make any number of strangulated noises of pain and effort, while very serious technical types study the results and say things like, ”Can you give me a bit more frenzied howling, Sean?” without a touch of irony.
Sean Pertwee’s reply to that last request, I am happy to report, was the immortal, ”Frenzied howling? I don’t tend to do frenzied howling.”
It was a very funny day. They got some great material, but it was very funny, and the actors seemed to relish it too. John Hurt was every bit the immaculate professional you might expect him to be. Sean had to make his face suggest the most extreme acrobatic activities. Johnny Harris kept us all in stitches. After one particularly raucous take where it sounded like he’d been smashed about most brutally, he sighed ruefully and wondered out loud over the intercom if he had maybe just ”written myself out of the sequel.” Martyn, the director, compared notes with the producer, Bob. He clicked on the intercom and said ”Johnny? Bob wants this take to sound like you’ve been whacked through the back of the head with a pick.”
”Love you too, Bob,” replied Johnny dryly.
Love this process. I can’t wait to see the results. The day spent watching them at work, and seeing the fine-tuning, tweaking and do-overs they had to do reminded me what a team effort it all was. Back at script stage, I had begun to get paranoid that my comparative lack of experience as a writer of screenplays was causing too many redrafts. It wasn’t that. A movie is a collective enterprise, and everybody just reworks and reworks his or her contribution until it fits the whole. If that means another redraft or another retake, so be it.
From where I was sitting that day, the frenzied howling was spot on.
By Abnett
Коротко: АБнет присутствовал при записи метрики с лиц актеров, что читали свои роли. То есть мы увидим маров с лицами этих всем известных парней.
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