Sound Designer Michael F. Bates discusses creating the soundscape for Sorority, both on set and in post-production.
What drew you to the project?
I had seen Soror, the short film that Sorority is based on, at the London Short Film Festival back in 2015 and was really impressed with it. A couple of years later I ended up doing the sound post for a short that James directed called Great Dane and really enjoyed working with him. We had a similar sense of humour (very important when you’re stuck in a darkened room together for many weeks) and similar tastes in film and sound, so when he asked me to work on Sorority I jumped at the chance.
Reading the script I was really excited, the way that James was clearly thinking about how sound and story would work together was exactly the sort of thing you hope to see as a sound designer.
You were often onset during certain scenes. What effect did this have on your work in post?
Being involved from pre-production and being on set made post easier, more creative and less about problem solving than it could have been for a micro-budget feature shot mostly under the Heathrow flight path!
Production sound mixer Mark Andrews and I met a couple of times during pre-production to plan how we’d work together and I also attended a production meeting so I could have some input on what needed to be considered for sound during production.
Being on set meant I was given access to all the locations and we ended up with over three hundred recordings made before, during and after production that formed the Sorority sound library. These ranged from recordings of planes, ambiences of the woods, the beach at Hengistbury Head, footsteps, doors and the crowd at the party. The party scene is a really good example of how this forward thinking attitude to sound during production really helped. Recording that crowd in post would have been totally doable, but expensive and time consuming. Instead the 1st AD sent the crew for a tea break and Mark, Mirko Simoni (1st Assistant Sound) and I spent 15 minutes with the extras recording them talking, shouting and moving, all in the same space the scene was shot so that it all matches in really well with the dialogue recorded there.
Having all those recordings made cutting the sound for each scene really quick and creative, as for every location I had recordings from those spaces as a starting point to build from and could work from there on refining the different tones and moods scenes required rather than just hunting for material. I think having this defined palette of sounds helped as well to give the film a cohesive overall sound.
Being involved during production also meant we were able to start the post sound process on scenes while production was ongoing. There was one particularly noisy location that James was concerned about so editor Monika Radwanska cut together an assembly of the scene in question right after it was shot and then passed it to me. I was then able to bring an edited and mixed version of the scene to set a couple of days later to play to James so that he could be confident that the scene would work despite the loud environment it was shot in.
It’s worth saying that none of this would have been possible without the support of the whole crew, particularly Lorenzo Levrini the DP and Jonny Pickup the 1st AD. They were so supportive and really anything we asked for they did their utmost to make happen.
Explain the overall feel of the Sorority soundscape.
Naturalistic whilst still being cinematic. We present the environments the characters live in with all the noise and detail that their world has, but keep things wide and immersive playing off the visual style that James and Lorenzo established.
The more stylised moments are played mostly with just composer Derek Kirkup’s score, which is really beautiful and helps give us those breathing spaces away from the planes and city sounds.