Mainstream Hollywood has interacted with Christian themes for years, of course, most often resulting in hagiographic blockbusters like The Ten Commandments with a fearsome Charlton Heston. But most of what we know of as Christian cinema is exemplified by films like the Left Behind series. They may not be winning awards for special effects or audio or anything else, but these films are remarkable for wringing every last, cost-effective drop out of an audio workflow process that has been transformed by desktop technology.

Outside the Mainstream

“I guess you could say that Christian film, just like Christian music recording, really takes advantage of digital technology, much more so than the mainstream of music and movies,” says Nick Palladino, a 23-year veteran of sound-for-picture post production, whose base in Nashville has prepared him for the budget pressures of Christian and regionally nuanced films (he was sound supervisor on the frugal and successful Ernest comedy films starring the late Jim Varney). “Nashville’s a secondary post market, so you learn to do a lot with less there.”

That’s the credo of his work on films like The Second Chance, starring Christian music idol Michael W. Smith and directed and co-written by Steve Taylor, another icon in that music genre. “A combination of heavy planning and really leveraging the technology make this work,” he says.”

Shooting for The Second Chance took place in Nashville, mostly centered on a neighborhood church in what can be a rough part of town, bounded by wide boulevards, small side streets and Interstate 40. Nashville has more miles of Federal Interstate highways than any other city, and it sounded like it on the set. “That was the first challenge ‘ 90 percent of the action was filmed within 50 feet of I-40,” Palladino explains. “It was incredibly noisy. The budget let us shut a couple of streets down for a day or two, but there was no stopping the Interstate.”

Palladino prefers Sennheiser MK series shotgun mics on booms for recording production dialog and sound, but ran tests with several wireless systems, hoping to counter the ambient noise. He finally decided on Lectrosonics 411 series digital hybrid microphones with Countryman B-6 elements. Even inside the church, the 35mm cameras were usually not blimped. “They were running SMPTE time code on the camera to keep down the cost in post later. Otherwise it all would have had to have been hand-synced,” he says. Dialog and other production sound was recorded to a DEVA II hard-disc four-track recorder at 48 kHz.

Keeping Up With Ambience

Knowing the ambient noise would pose problems in post, location recordist Steve Grider always took several minutes at the end of each scene with a stereo microphone to record a few seconds of ambience in case it had to be matched during dialog replacement. If the clarity of the dialog was questionable, Grider would get the principal actors to speak their lines one more time. “The problem with the traffic ambience is that it would change in intensity and even pitch at various times during the day,” Palladino recalls. “On the rough cut you’d hear different ambience in every scene even if it they had been shot in the same place.”

These techniques would come in handy when a final cut went to post. The film was digitized and transferred to Final Cut by film editor Matt Sterling. The four tracks of production audio were exported as an OMF2 file and transferred, on a hard drive, to Palladino’s downtown studio, where he loaded it onto a Windows-based Digidesign Pro Tools HD system which works in tandem with his vintage-but-cherished AMS Neve AudioFile workstation. Audio consultant Mike Arnold coordinated the synchronization of the recordings that Grider had done and created a program that allowed Palladino to call alternate takes up to match each scene as needed. “In terms of workflow, it seemed people-intensive rather than tech-intensive,” says Palladino. “But once you’ve set it all up, the work really moves fast when it counts – creatively.”

The dialog had many of the expected problems – words obscured by the ambient noise, muffled words from wireless microphones underneath clothing and so on. “On a big-budget film, you’d call the talent back and loop for days,” says Palladino. “Of course, a big-budget production would also have been able to spend the money on location acoustics, deadening the ambient spaces in the church, for instance.”

Needles in a Dialog Haystack

Palladino eked a little bit of ADR out of the budget, but the lion’s share of dialog repairs came from a painstaking process of finding slivers of dialog or background sound bites from the extras that Grider had recorded on the set and using Pro Tools to slip them around the track and match them to picture. “We’d have to steal a line or a word here and there. It took us most of a month to do that. That’s where digital tricks like cut-and-paste and time slipping really made the difference in keeping us on budget and on schedule. We really wanted to the audio to be great on this film. And it didn’t hurt that the director was a musician, either. But it was also critical that we had good audio resources to turn to in post.”

The AudioFile’s dynamic and filter automation also helped make a small-budget production sound like a big-budget one. “Thank God for automated EQ,” says Palladino. (The Deity is credited often and profusely on Christian films – almost as much as in Grammy acceptance speeches.) Mid-frequency equalization had to be ridden on much of the dialog as it went along – additive and subtractive – to compensate for the inconsistency caused by the ambient production noise and wireless artifacts. “I was riding the EQ by feel and letting the automation do it in playback,” he explains. “And every time you apply EQ in one way, it affects the sound in other ways. For instance, if the line was muffled because the wireless was buried under clothing, I’d have to suck the low-mids out of it, but that would mean I’d simultaneously have to push the highs a bit. You just ride it till it feels right and let the automation store it.”

As sound designer, Palladino turned the low- and low-mid-frequency rumble from the interstate traffic into the film’s subliminal sound design signature, distributing it through a 5.1 audio surroundscape. Palladino’s Nashville home has a 5.1-capable, Pro Tools-equipped studio in the basement where most of the fixes and initial mixes were done.

Ideas at 3 a.m.

“At home, the clock’s not running,” he says. "If I get an idea at 3 a.m. I can run down and do it. I have what I need to work right here, and if I needed an effect, I’d call over to my other studio and they’d post it to me through my FTP site.” In fact, Palladino could often get what he wanted by pointing a stereo microphone out his back door and picking up natural sounds. “I’ve done movie sound both ways – in Hollywood and in Nashville – and it’s amazing what the technology will let you do now. And doing it this way is how a lot of Christian films get made. The difference in the workflow is in the culture as well as in the technology.”

In fact, Palladino reached back to Nashville for sound effects even when he took the post production to New York City for several days to mix, at Photomag, working with mixer Patrick Donahue. (“If this was going direct to DVD, which a lot of Christian films do, I could have done the final mix in my own studio,” he says. The Second Chance was going into theaters, so we wanted to be able to have the right kind of mix environment for that.”) As he fine-tuned the SFX in the mix, he found he needed a very specific effect: the sound of a canvas tent bag and metal tent poles brushing against a leg.

“The sound effect I had wasn’t doing it for me, and I couldn’t find what I needed in the libraries up there,” he says. “So I called my son [Nick Palladino, III, sound effects editor on the film with Phil Gazzel] and asked him to go into the garage, get my tent, hit himself in the leg with it under a microphone, make a WAV file out of it and shoot it up to me in New York via FTP. Otherwise, I would have had to go to a Foley stage in Manhattan, hire an engineer and a Foley artist and do it that way, and that’s the kind of overkill you can have in Hollywood but not on this movie. Thing is, what I got was better than I could have gotten from Foley. It was totally real.”

The dialog got more touch-up in New York. “If the wireless sounded dry, we used some reverb from WAVES Gold and Platinum bundles of plug-ins,” says Palladino. “Very light. We also put it in the rear speakers with the music and it kind of blended in with the ambience.”

Christian films, like other niche genres of cinema, will use technology to become more competitive with mainstream films. “The main difference in the workflow is that the project will stay in each stage of post longer and won’t be worked on by numerous engineers simultaneously,” says Palladino. “But if you put the time and effort into it, the technology lets you get audio that’s as good as most Hollywood films.”

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For more on The Second Chance, view the trailer at Apple.com or visit the film's Web site.