Sylvain Bellemare: “Sound is a great teamwork”

Who would have thought that sound management was a great teamwork in building a feature film?

Sylvain Bellemare, who won the Oscar for Best Sound Editing Sunday with his work on the film Arrival by Denis Villeneuve, said it loudly on the stage of the Dolby Theater, his statuette in his hand. And yesterday at the end of the afternoon, he insisted again on this dimension in a telephone interview with La Presse .

“We went to bed late that night. But all this is very simple in my mind, said the winner in a playful voice. For us, for all the participants, the sound is a great work of a team made up of very talented people. If there’s one thing I mean, it’s that one. This is fundamental! ”

For Arrival , the originality and quality of the sound editing are part of the creation of a universe of sounds entirely natural, explained Mr. Bellemare when asked to describe his biggest challenge of the film.

“This desire to have natural sounds required a lot of recordings,” he said. For example, to give the sound of radio communications, we have actually recorded sounds of audio devices and not used plug-ins already manufactured. ”

“We also recorded rock and ice movements to create the movement sounds of the ship.”

“We also went to the deep forests of New Zealand to catch the song of a rare bird whose name escapes me,” he adds.

With Arrival , he completed his biggest career project. “Normally, in a big Quebec production, we can be seven or eight people maximum in the sound team. For Arrival , I had about forty people under my responsibility. I was a bit like the conductor. ”

A memorable evening … for more than one reason

Mr. Bellemare and his wife were still in the Dolby Theater room when the controversy surrounding the awarding of the Oscar for best film broke out. “I first thought it was another production by Jimmy Kimmel, which was very good,” he said. It’s a big blunder. But in the end, I’m very happy for Moonlight, which is a film with finesse. ”

Early in the evening, Arrival was a finalist in eight categories. Mr. Bellemare, who celebrated his 49th birthday a few days ago, is the only one of the team to have left with an Oscar. Two weeks earlier, this one and his colleagues Claude La Haye and Bernard Gariépy Strobl had won the BAFTA (the British Oscars) for the best overall sound.

He does not yet know what these prices will change in his career. For the moment, he is returning to Montreal today to resume work on the feature Radius by Caroline Labrèche and Steeve Leonard.

What is sound editing?

Guy Desjardins, a teacher for thirty years and now a member of the Trebas Institute, explains that sound editing is not only a film-related work, but a video document that also includes a digital audio dimension.

“The sound editing involves replacing and adding all the necessary sounds to support an image. In the cinema, about 90% of the sounds we hear were not recorded during the shoot. ”

He takes as an example a scene captured in a restaurant with two main actors. “The dialogues of the two actors are recorded during the filming,” says Mr. Desjardins. But everything else is added: the exchanges between extras, the sounds of the kitchen, the ventilation or a utensil falling to the ground. ”

If there is a happier Sunday night winner than Mr. Bellemare today, it is probably his colleague Kevin O’Connell who won an Oscar for sound mixing, which consists of adjusting the level Of each sound element in the surround sound of a work.

Why? Because Mr. O’Connell was a finalist at 20 (!) Times at the Academy Awards without ever winning. The British newspaper The Guardian even called it “the most unlucky in the history of the Academy Awards”.

The wind will have turned in his favor Sunday night when he was rewarded for his work on Mel Gibson’s feature film Hacksaw Ridge . “This is the biggest sensation of all my life,” said the successful Oscar winner in receiving his trophy.