Dreamgirls:  Integrated Sound and Picture Editing Underscores Musical Filmmaking

"Every facet of this film was congenial and happy," says Virginia Katz, film editor on Dreamgirls, a musical based on the Broadway show that follows a trio of female soul singers who cross over to the pop charts in the early 1960s. "Everyone got along from the get-go. That's Bill [Condon, the director]. He creates an aura from the first day's shoot to the last day's mix - an atmosphere where you can try anything, explore everything."

When an editor starts a conversation this way - during the frantic time just before the wide release of a film she's been working on for a year - you know there's something special going on. This is especially true for Dreamgirls, a film that took on the difficult challenge of bringing a story from Broadway to the big screen.

Produced by DreamWorks and Paramount Pictures, the movie, which stars Jamie Foxx, Beyoncé Knowles, Eddie Murphy, and newcomer Jennifer Hudson, has won critical acclaim and early awards-season buzz for having made the leap successfully.

Katz (Kinsey, Gods and Monsters, Fearless, Alias), music editor Paul Rabjohns (L.A. Confidential, Magnolia), and sound supervisor Richard Yawn (Kinsey, Fearless) attribute the film's achievement in large part to Condon and his pervasive environment of experimentation and the ability to take advantage of it to stretch their own crafts in support of the story and performances. They also laud the flexibility of their editing tools - Macintosh-based Avid Media Composer Adrenaline and Digidesign Pro Tools|HD systems - in helping them to execute their creative ideas. 

In a film like this, the music is the dialogue, and you have to treat it as such."
- Richard Yawn, Sound Supervisor, Dreamgirls

Crossing Over

From the outset, Katz knew that helping Dreamgirls cross over into film would be challenging. "Movie audiences get restless when characters burst out in song for no reason - they're just not used to it. We worked hard to make sure people could follow the thread of the scenes and get from point A to point B without being pulled out [of the story] for any reason," she explains.

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The editing solutions used to address this issue were varied. To bridge the transition between a scene that features the trio performing at a disco during the height of their popularity and the next scene, which shows the group's former lead singer, Effie (played by Jennifer Hudson), during the same moment in time - back in her apartment, Katz made use of the Media Composer Adrenaline system's AniMatte feature. "In the performance scene there's a monitor backstage showing the live performance. We took the image from that monitor and dropped it into the TV screen in Effie's apartment using AniMatte. With the Avid [system] we could experiment with effects on the spot versus having the visual effects artists try them, which would

have been much more expensive," she says.

Other times, sequences are transitioned with sound effects. For example, when moving from a musical number in which Eddie Murphy's character James Thunder Early sings 'Fake Your Way,' sound supervisor Yawn used the note of a trumpet from the closing bars of the song and hung it over into the next scene, where it becomes a doppler car horn going by. "We blended the trumpet with the horn, pitching it in Pro Tools so it naturally segues," he says. Yawn used a similar device and process to pitch the sound of the squeaking brakes of the tour bus to work with the music and tempo of the previous scene. The result gives audiences a subtle but solid link between sequences and scenes.

"With the Avid [Media Composer] Adrenaline system we could experiment with effects on the spot versus having the visual effects artists try them, which would have been much more expensive."
- Virginia Katz, Editor, Dreamgirls

Special Challenges of the Musical Genre

Both Rabjohns and Yawn pointed to the fast and accurate process of sharing picture and sound cuts via OMF files as key in keeping the workflow running at top speed. "Handling of audio back and forth between Pro Tools and Media Composer, the cohesiveness and ability to move quickly and accurately, was very important," says Yawn.

The easy interoperability was particularly helpful for syncing picture and sound within musical performances. For example, Katz cut picture to a pre-recorded soundtrack; however, every time there was a change to either picture or music, she and Rabjohns had to painstakingly sync every frame to ensure precise lip sync for the vocals. "Ginny was cutting picture at 14:1 resolution, so when the shots were at middle distances it was impossible to see what the actors' mouths were doing," explains Rabjohns.

To make sure the vocals were perfectly synced, the team added another step in the post process. "We got a Virtual VTR machine running HD pictures and slaved it to our Pro Tools|HD system. This way we could see the actors' mouths in sharp detail and make the adjustments in Pro Tools before we even got to the dubbing stage." This process resulted in greater creative control as well as less time and money spent on a sound stage. (Editor's Note: Adding an Avid DNxcel card to the Media Composer Adrenaline system provides another option for editing in mastering-quality HD resolutions using the space-efficient Avid DNxHD codec.)

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Rabjohns kept digital processing of the vocal performances to a minimum to preserve natural sound, applying only subtle use of the Serato Pitch n' Time plug-in for the Pro Tools system to help stretch sound during the syncing process. In other parts of the film he had more opportunity to flex his musical muscles. An example of this creative work is a scene in which the Deena character (played by Beyoncé Knowles) is watching a promo of the band's rise over the years. "Bill wanted to take several different songs from the film and turn them into a medley. I pitched all of the songs into the same key and tempo in Pro Tools, edited them and then re-recorded the piano and the bass so it sounded like one band was playing them all," he says.

Because music was such a huge part of Dreamgirls, Rabjohns says that his work was often more similar to that done in a traditional recording studio. Twelve Pro Tools systems were used for the mix - six stage source playback machines for dialogue and effects pre-mixes, four music systems, and two dialogue and effects systems for offline editing. Rabjohns used more MIDI, sampling, and tempo mapping in the Pro Tools system to manipulate music throughout the course of creating

the film, rather than in the final stages only, which is more typical in filmmaking. "We used the Mach5 sampler plug-in a lot to augment, do stings, and add musical 'glisses' to enhance tracks and hit certain moves with the dancers." He adds, "We really pushed Pro Tools to the edge, and it never let us down. Our sessions were massive." By the time they got to the dubbing stage, the mix often had 200 tracks or more.

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The picture editing team had a massive amount of material to handle as well, as Condon shot approximately 1 million feet of film - four cameras on every setup with many angles. This presented Katz with a lot of choices and a need to view them quickly. Like the music editors who adopted processes of their studio musician counterparts to address Dreamgirls, assistant editor Ian Slater used a method common to music video editors to review the footage.

"We added a timecode window when we telecined the negative so we could synchronize all of the clips from one scene and relate them to the playback master. We then used the Media Composer system's Group Clip feature to group every take from every camera and angle into one master group clip with the music playback. It's nothing fancy, but for us it was the most efficient way to get through a massive amount of music-related footage," says Slater.

One musical number alone, "Stepping to the Bad Side," had 200 clips, and it took Katz three days to review them. "If I had to go through each individual bin, I never would have been able to do it." After two days of editing using broad strokes, and another three days of refining the cut, Katz had the scene. "It was an achievement just to get that scene cut," she says. "There were so many ways it could have been done [creatively, to fit with the story line]... The ability to scroll through the footage was absolutely huge."

Katz's Media Composer Adrenaline system was linked to an Avid Unity MediaNetwork shared-storage solution along with two Macintosh-based Media Composer systems

used by editorial assistants. This setup also helped manage the massive amount of material efficiently, providing the entire editing team with simultaneous access to media and cuts in progress. This all Avid workflow also enabled the editing team to easily output files to an Avid DS Nitris system, which was used to conform preview screenings in HD. All editing equipment was supplied and supported by Los Angeles-based Pivotal Post.

Looking Back

With the practical project considerations well in hand, the filmmakers were able to focus on the creative aspects of crafting the film. "A musical presents a different challenge [than other film genres]," says Katz. "It's about trying to get as much across to define who the characters are, even while they're singing. It's less important where you cut and more about showing what they're thinking during the songs." Yawn expresses a similar assessment, "In a film like this, the music is the dialogue, and you have to treat it as such."

Katz, Rabjohns, and Yawn again point to Condon's support of the crew's own ideas as a key factor in its achievement. Says Katz, "Bill never says don't try something. If I want to go some weird way on a scene, I never feel hampered. I think that's why he gets such good results." Yawn says simply, "This was the best experience of my career." That's no faint praise, coming from a pro with more than 100 film and television credits under his belt.

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Both in front of the camera and below the line, the talented team on Dreamgirls, encouraged by a supportive director, proved that a musical can make the leap from Broadway to the big screen successfully - and bring the audience cheering, crying, and stomping along with it. 

Credits: ©2006 DreamWorks LCC and Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.