Trecking through the CONGO
by Ron Judkins
June 1995
by Ron Judkins
June 1995
Few shooting locations on the planet can be more challenging for a production sound mixer than a tropical rain forest. It's wet, even in the dry season. It's hot. And the insects are big and loud, making it difficult to pull clean dialog tracks out of the back grounds.
Nearly half of Paramount Pictures' action-adventure thriller "Congo" involves a trek through the Congolese rain forest (actually shot over 30 days in Costa Rica), with a corporate-sponsored expedition in search of legendary diamonds from the Lost City of Zinj. The trek brings them ultimately to the top of a volcano and a confrontation with fierce, man-killing gorillas that have been bred for centuries to protect the precious stones.
"I must say, this was the most strenuous working situation I've ever been in as far as carrying things in," says production sound mixer Ron Judkins, who last year received two Academy Award nominations for "Jurassic Park" and "Schindler's List", winning for "Jurassic".
"A lot of the locations were over lava and pumice stone. One location - the Irazu volcano - was over 10,000 feet, and several people got sick. The trucks got within about a 10-minute hike, and we set up right on the edge of this extinct, but still hissing crater. The cloud floor was below us, and we had these red tents set up against a blue sky - really beautiful for the first part of the day. Just after lunch, the clouds started rising right through us, like the fog rolling in. The temperature dropped 20 degrees, and within 30 minutes, it was pouring rain. It was dreadful.
"Rain, Judkins says, was the most problematic aspect of the shoot, right up there with the 95-degree temperatures that often created sauna-like conditions. The crew had towels, umbrellas, tarps, hair dryers and compressed air, but it never seemed enough.
"There would be no place outside the truck to set up, and you would have ten people working out of one truck - camera people, video people, stills and sound, all with muddy boots and wet clothing. The truck was so humid inside that we actually had mold growing in our cases. When I put the equipment away at night, we would blow it out with compressed air and towel everything off, then we'd open the case in the morning, and the top cover of the StellaDat and the Sonosax mixer would be fogged. Your heart sinks, because this gear can't live through these conditions forever. But I was amazed at how well the equipment stood up, especially the StellaDat.
"To be honest, Judkins admits, he twice encountered audio dropouts of about two seconds on the StellaDat, both times in full rainstorm, with 90-degree temperatures. After bringing the tapes to Manfred Klemme at Sonosax USA, which now makes and markets the StellaDat, it was determined that the tape itself was so moist that it was sticking to the drum at the beginning of a take. "The interesting thing," Judkins says, "is that both times it happened, the Panavision camera died before the StellaDat.
"There are no sound carts in the jungle, so Judkins, boom operator Bob Jackson, and cable operator Tove Blue carried everything in three modified backpacks. The first held the 6-input Sonosax mixer and a Nagra 4.2. The second normally contained the StellaDat and a Lectrosonics radio mic receiver pack. The third held the transmitter, all the headsets and all the D cells and battery power.
One of the main knocks against portable DAT machines is that they draw a lot of power, but Judkins says that in the redesigned StellaDat, the power needs have dropped considerably. Even on a set, Judkins prefers to use his own power. "Most days, we would also carry in two 26-amp-hour, lead-acid batteries in cases," Judkins says. "They sound big, but they're not. One of them would power the StellaDat for about 12 continuous hours, and the other would power the mixer for about 15 hours. There's also a back you can get for the StellaDat that takes the NP-13 batteries that Sony developed to power those camcorders. The machine will run about an hour on one of those, and I had four of them. When we got into places where we really had to hike far, I would just bring those. Then I would power the machine up for the shot and turn it off for the waiting time. It was a little nerve-wracking; generally, you just let the machine cook all day.
"Despite the logistics of the trek, Judkins was able to use conventional booms more than might be expected. For wider tracking scenes where the actors talked, they were pretty much forced to go with radio mics. And though he prefers to record completely flat, the radio mics forced him to use some "gentle" EQ. "Depending on how acoustically transparent an actor's clothing is and what you have to do to bury and hide the microphones," Judkins explains, "I'll use a little mid- and high- frequency boost to restore sibilance that's lost through the clothing. Basically, I find that it's sibilance that makes the human voice intelligible. I try to do as little EQ as possible, but there are times you have to do some to make the radio mics sound natural.
"Before heading to the jungle, Judkins had been invited to a post-production meeting, one of the first times that had happened in his 15 years in the business. Besides the chance to meet the audio team involved in post, Judkins learned that supervising sound editor Wylie Stateman prefers M-S stereo effects recordings over X-Y, and got an idea of what direction the sound design would take so he could record some effects on location.
After the Costa Rica portion of the shoot was wrapped, Judkins and boom man Jackson stayed three extra days to capture additional ambiences and the sound of howler monkeys, which make a low, throaty growl -likened by producer Kathleen Kennedy to the dinosaurs in "Jurassic"- which Stateman wanted to augment the gorilla vocals. "We almost didn't get them," Judkins says, "because when it's raining they don't make any sound. At the end of three days in Tortuguero National Park, the sun finally broke out at dawn. And the monkeys were so happy that we found about a dozen of them sunning themselves in the tops of the trees - just relaxing and picking at themselves, but not making a whole lot of noise. But then our boat guide took his paddle and slapped the surface of the water, which annoyed them, so they started howling and growling." (Despite Stateman's wishes, he was forced to use a matched pair of Sennheiser MKH-60s in an X-Y pattern after the Neumann M-S failed in the high humidity.)
"We also got some really great ambiences in these jungles - several hours at different times of the day, with parrots calling and all kinds of bird life," he adds. "And there are different kinds of jungles. The jungle at Arinol is a higher-altitude rain forest, and there wasn't much insect life. When we went down to Tortuguero and the lower-altitude jungles, the birds and insects got louder and became this great din, this whine that after a few hours got on your nerves. But the characters in the film trek through different parts of the jungle, and the different sounds create very different moods in the film. This is an action-adventure movie, so I can imagine that when they want to create a real feeling of anxiety, these insects are going to be played loud."
