Continuing its long association with the world’s best independent films, Alchemy Post Sound provided Foley sound services for nine films screening at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. They include three films participating in the festival’s prestigious U.S. Dramatic Competition and two included in its Premieres track.
The Climb, director Michael Angelo Covino’s engaging debut feature, centers on the complex friendship between two men, Michael and Kyle, played by Covino and real-life friend Kyle Martin. For its Foley team from Alchemy Post Sound (working under supervising sound editor/re-recording mixer Ryan Billia), The Climb posed unique creative and technical challenges. Its first act centers on a bike ride that Michael and Kyle take in France prior to Kyle’s wedding. As the two men ascend a long hill, Michael makes a stunning admission regarding his friend’s fiancé. The results are disastrous with the men ultimately becoming involved in a violent confrontation with a passing motorist. Adding to the tension, the whole scene is captured in a single, intricately choreographed Steadicam shot.
Alchemy Post Sound put on its tap shoes (and a whole lot more) to create the Foley sound for Fosse/Verdon, FX’s critically acclaimed limited series about choreographer Bob Fosse (Sam Rockwell) and his collaborator and wife, the singer/dancer Gwen Verdon (Michelle Williams). Working under the direction of supervising sound editors Daniel Timmons and Tony Volante, Foley artist Leslie Bloome and his team performed and recorded hundreds of custom sound effects to support the show’s sultry dance sequences and add realistic ambience to its historic settings.
Award-winning Foley artist Leslie Bloome is performing his distinctive craft live as part of special Halloween screenings of The Unsilent Picture at Philipsburg Manor in Sleepy Hollow, New York. Bloome is using an assortment of props and tools to create live sound effects to accompany the spooky black and white film, based on a Washington Irving short story. Directed by Alex Harvey and starring Tony Award-winning actor Bill Irwin, The Unsilent Picture, which also features live musical accompaniment, screens through October 31.
Slice, currently in international release from A24, is a quirky comedy/horror tale centering on a neighborhood pizza parlor that doubles as “a gateway to hell.” For Steve Giammaria, of Sound Lounge’s Film + Television division, who acted as both supervising sound editor and re-recording mixer, Slice offered an opportunity to indulge both his sense of humor and taste for the macabre.
Alchemy Post Sound has added a second Foley stage to its facility in New York. The new space is designed to complement the company’s original Foley stage with a live sound environment meant to enhance the production of interior effects that can benefit from natural ambiance. The new stage will also enable Alchemy to boost production, allowing two Foley teams to work simultaneously.
The animated series Welcome to the Wayne recently debuted on Nickelodeon, becoming the network’s first original series to move from digital to broadcast. The series launched in 2014 as a series of shorts on Nick App and Nick.com. Created by Billy Lopez, the show centers on two 10-year-old boys living in a Manhattan high-rise, dubbed The Wayne, where they are involved in all manner of wild adventures.
Alchemy Post Sound provided Foley effects for Good Time, the new thriller from directors Benny and Josh Safdie, supporting its action, vivid imagery and dark humor with creative sound. Working under the direction of supervising sound editor Ryan M. Price, MPSE, and re-recording mixer Evan Mangiamele, the Alchemy team (consisting of Foley artists Leslie Bloome and Joanna Fang and Foley mixers Ryan Collison and Nicholas Seaman) produced a vast assortment of custom sounds in preparing the film for festival screenings.
One of the most distinctive aspects of writer-director Kenneth Lonergan’s new drama Manchester by the Sea is the quality of its sound design. “Making a quiet movie is hard, because, as a sound designer, you want to infuse every scene with something more than dialogue,” said supervising sound editor/re-recording mixer Jacob Ribicoff. “But you have to resist that temptation and keep it quiet and let the performances speak for themselves.”
When Two Worlds Collide, winner of the World Cinema documentary prize for Best First Feature at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, focuses on the alarming and sad conflict between indigenous people of the Peruvian rainforest and corporations bent on exploiting the region through mining, drilling and clear cutting.
