Filmmaking: Orion Pictures/Amazon MGM Studios' <I>Nickel Boys</I>
December 9, 2024

Filmmaking: Orion Pictures/Amazon MGM Studios' Nickel Boys

Nickel Boys, from Orion Pictures/Amazon MGM Studios, is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead. The story was inspired by real-life events, and chronicles the friendship between two black teenagers, who become wards of a juvenile reformatory in Florida. 
 
Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson play Elwood and Turner, whose close bond helps sustain their hope, even as truths unfold around them at the Nickel Academy. The film was directed by RaMell Ross (Hale County This Morning, This Evening) and shot by cinematographer Jomo Fray. Additional credits include  editor Nicholas Monsour, composers Scott Alario and Alex Somers, supervising sound editors/re-recording mixers Daniel Timmons and Tony Volante, and sound mixer Mark LeBlanc.
 


Here, a number of the creatives involved in the filmmaking process share their experience. 
 
Cinematographer Jomo Fray
 
"To capture this involved unlearning a lot of the ways I have always approached filmmaking," he explains. "Building a first-person perspective in the ways the director RaMell Ross was looking for involved a lot of conversation to try and build an image that had a certain sentience to it. RaMell wasn’t after a POV movie as much as a camera perspective that had an extremely heightened sense of subjectivity to it — an image that was intrinsically tied to a real body navigating a - at often times - hostile environment. The challenge was an exciting one! The film involved balancing both an incredibly technically demanding approach as well as creating space for a more poetic and organic image to emerge. To capture the perspective, we used a host of different camera rigs, many of which had to be fashioned from scratch by our grip team. Along with those we also used a Snorricam rig and the Libra Mini remote head to create other distinct looks from their point of view."
 


Fray shot with Sony's Venice camera, noting that its modularity and the Panavision VA prime lenses helped to create a feeling of volume and space. 
 
"There is a scene later in the movie where Hattie, played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, is visiting Elwood to deliver some disappointing news," he explains. "In the scene, I was operating the camera as Elwood, and as Hattie was starting to deliver the news, my gaze, rather, the gaze of the camera, drifted away. I feel like it is often hard to maintain eye contact when someone is delivering news that you know is hard for them to say. As the camera drifts away, Aunjanue hits the table and says. 'Look at me Elwood!' It was this incredible moment where I was forced to look back at her. The line between performer and cinematographer broke down in that moment. I, as the character, had to respond to my scene partner. It really felt so alive! I think it was in that moment both RaMell and I felt what may be special about this camera language. The image itself was inside of the scene and because of that it could be affected directly by the world in which it was placed."
 
Editor Nicholas Monsour
 
"As the editor of Nickel Boys, it was my role to work with RaMell on selecting the material, finding the right structure and pace, building a rough version of the music and sound edit, as well as assisting in the researching and selecting of the archival visual and audio material we incorporated into the film," he reveals. "From pre-production through the end of the edit, the heads of departments and post production crew worked together closely and non-hierarchically to generate creative approaches to the film’s construction and present them to RaMell." Monsour edited the film primarily in New York on a networked Avid project.


 
"But I began during production cutting the dailies remotely in Los Angeles using a laptop and Jump Desktop," he notes. "We also utilized Premiere as a way for RaMell to continue to explore and experiment with the archival material while he was traveling." Deep collaboration, he adds, was the norm throughout the process.
 
"I think everyone on the team felt we contributed something substantial to most scenes in the film. Among the most important scenes to get right is when Elwood meets Turner for the first time at Nickel. After many experiments in how to approach that scene, I finally tried playing the scene from Elwood’s point of view and then again in Turner’s, which — despite being the most unconventional approach — made the most intuitive emotional sense for how we wanted the audience to interpret that moment."
 
Composers Alex Somers and Scott Alario
 
"For the music in Nickel Boys, Scott and I were drawn towards instruments and equipment that left room or chance," Somers reveals. "We were seeking imperfection and ways to be surprised and to stay curious. We recorded a children’s choir. We made tape loops of our piano playing. We ran sounds into tape delays and spring reverbs. And we incorporated field recordings into the tapestry of the music. It was a very open playground of experimentation all led by our director RaMell Ross’ outsider instincts. RaMell pushed us to go inward and make sounds that felt true and visceral to us. He encouraged us to not be tethered to the visual reality, but to build our own inner realities through music. Making this music was a colorful and amazing experience for us that we will always feel grateful for."
 

Photo (L-R) Alex Somers and Scott Alario

The composers point to one specific scene that stands out - it being Elwood’s arrival to Nickel Academy. The music they scored for this uneasy moment is a simple two-note figure repeating on a Wurlitzer. 
 
"The two notes carry a haunting quality as they oscillate in half steps," Somers notes. "As Elwood’s internal panic mounts, we introduce a spattering of percussion and stretching brass. The percussion is tap-dancing slowed way down to create a kind of cerebral tapping that is very unnerving. With very little, the music compels the scene forward with intensity and an otherworldly feeling cast over the arrival at this horrible place we will soon come to know."
 


Supervising Sound Editor/Re-recording Mixer Tony Volante
Dan Timmons, Co-Sound Supervisor/Re-recording Mixer
 
According to Tony Volante, the sound team created the final Dolby Atmos mix on Stage A at Harbor Pictures in New York City.
 
"Dan and I had previously worked together on RaMell's Academy Award-nominated documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, and with RaMell’s passion for original sound design, we were looking forward to another amazing collaboration. What made this specific project special was RaMell’s choice to shoot Nickel Boys predominantly in first-person perspective. This would bring the soundscape to the forefront of the primary characters' emotional storytelling. There were numerous discussions with RaMell about how to generate concepts for presenting the first person-perspective artistically and authentically through sound. Throughout most of the film it is quite obvious visually the viewer is in first person, but there are a number of exceptional moments when as the viewer, you think you’re not in first person until midway through a scene, when the sound moves with the camera, catching every detail, and you realize you are the camera. These sonic transitions greatly enhance the POV experience. By creating a specific dialogue sound in the mix for the camera’s voice through added ADR breathing and unique dialogue treatment, the viewer is immersed in the world in front of and 360 degrees around the camera. Moments like these are what keeps pulling the viewer back to the first person POV."
 


Creating a sound perspective that would accurately and entertainingly portray the first-person point of view was one of the feature's unique challenges for the dialogue mix. 
 
"Initially, I began mixing the POV voice mono/center while panning the other dialogue and world around it," Volante shares. "This sounded quite nice, but wasn't really different from how I usually approach a traditional film mix. For Nickel Boys, we knew we wanted the first-person POV to have a unique sound relative to the rest of the dialogue in the film. The POV voice needed its own 'space' that separated it from the film slightly, but also subtle enough not to distract the viewer/listener out of the film. The concept was to pull the voice slightly off the screen and hover it within the camera/viewer position."
 
To begin the process, Volante started by creating a wider soundscape for the POV voice while monitoring in Atmos. 
 
"This sounded good in Atmos, but down mixes did not capture the dialogue effect accurately," he notes. "It wasn’t going to be possible to do completely separate first-person dialogue treatments for all the different mix formats, so I wanted to absolutely make sure the stereo mix would accurately portray the POV."
 
To come up with the POV sound, he made the decision to monitor in stereo with his Neumann NDH20 headphones. 
 
"I find that when mixing with headphones, I can more accurately hear the spatial differences — the proper amount of reverb and stereo imaging — that sometimes get masked within the mixing room’s acoustics," he explains. "I experimented with various plug-in image settings to discover which ones sounded best. After listening to how these would upmix in 5.1 and Atmos, I would then use the one that also translated the best across all formats. I found this approach of hearing how the effect translated from stereo to up mix rather than the more traditional approach of starting big and checking how it ends up down mixed in stereo, a much better and ultimately more accurate workflow."
 
Dialogue editor Michael Odmark created a set of tracks containing all the first-person POV dialogue. This allowed for a customized spatial treatment during the mix for those particular clips. 
 
"It was clear early on in the process that the POV clips needed to start as a stereo image before adding any additional treatment," says Volante. "I added a slight stereo spread plug-in to the chain of these clips, followed by an upmix plug-in to spread the dialogue to multiple channels, including the surround channels. Some scenes needed a little extra spatial enhancement, so I added a reverb send for the POV that was used sparingly for an enhanced 3D 'in your head' effect."
 


Despite having an immersive configuration that worked for most of the film, Volante still needed to make minor tweaks throughout the mix depending on location or quality of the voice recording.
 
"We had asked the production sound mixer Mark LeBlanc to record some production sound with a stereo MSmicrophone during shooting," he recalls. "There are many moments in the film where the stereo/MS recording’s were used to enhance the spatial environments and capture a natural stereo spread of the background voices at Nickel Academy, further enhancing the POV perspective."
 
Volante's love for panning was well applied in this film, making it what he calls a "dream" project to work on.
 
"Enriching the first-person POV with panning was crucial. All dialogue in the film was panned to accurately portray the POV. Even the slightest off-center image dialogue is panned, following the characters throughout the scene."
 


Dan Timmons used a similar technique for sound effects and Foley mixing, panning not only hard effects and Foley, but also unconventionally shifting the background pan viewpoint to enhance the POV camera motions and capturing every detail. 
 
"Dan’s sound design during the White House punishment scene is a highlight of immersing the viewer into Ellwood’s POV without visually seeing his beating, but using only sound to convey the brutal whipping, while black & white archival footage is being shown," Volante explains. "Source music also played an important role in portraying the first-person POV. Special care in panning was used throughout on the music tracks playing out of a radio or from a record player. Panning was, needless to say, very active during this mix."
 
The dynamic score by Scott Alario and Alex Somers was delivered in stereo stems.
 
"For music, especially for a movie like this, I prefer stereo stems to 5.1 stems, since I can be more precise with the panning and channel placement," Volante explains. "I like catching movement on-screen and panning components in time with the score. Using the stereo stems, I was able to create spatial movement inside scenes, which further enhanced the sensory experience of the first-person POV."