With Sylvie’s Love, director Eugene Ashe tells a love story between Sylvie (Tessa Thompson) and Robert (Nnamdi Asomugha) that sweeps through time and, most importantly, music. Set in 1950s Harlem, jazz is as big of a character as any in the film. Prior to the holidays, I sat down the film’s sound editors, Jessie Anne Spence and Darren Maynard, and talked about the process of creating the film’s unique sounds. Sylvie’s Love is now available to stream on Amazon Prime Video.
Thank you, first of all, for taking the time to speak with me and The Nerd Daily!
Maynard: “No worries at all! It’s a pleasure!
Congratulations on the film! I imagine it must be very exciting to have a film that was part of a special crop of Christmas day releases?
Maynard: “It’s great! It’s sort of good timing having this upbeat, fun film for everybody to watch [during] this time of year, after everything going on. So, it’s really good! Looking forward to checking [the film] out again.”
Definitely! Before we talk about the film, I wonder if you both might be able to talk about how you became sound editors?
Spence: “I think my story is kind of the same as a lot of other people, with the exception that I came into sound editing pretty late in life. I’m forty-two right now, and I still feel like I’m a baby in the industry, considering I started when I was about thirty-five. So, I think most of us started with music, right? I always make the joke [that] we’re all failed musicians! (laughs) Which isn’t true for all of us! It’s just my little self-deprecating humour. But I was into writing a lot of electronic music and Logic and live stuff and [Avid] Pro Tools. And accidentally, one day, I had a roommate who was a producer—and I had a small home studio—and he just came flying in one day and was like, ‘I have an actor coming in and you’re going to be recording ADR now!’ And I was like, ‘What’s ADR? I don’t understand!’ So, I had about half an hour to figure out what ADR was!”
Maynard: “It’s funny you say failed musician because that’s part of my story as well, I guess! I grew up playing music from about eight or nine years old. And my two brothers were also playing music, and, eventually, at some point in high school, we started recording practices onto tape cassettes. And [at the point] where you’re finishing high school and you don’t know what to do, I decided to take up an audio engineering course in Australia. I did that for a couple of years, but the whole time, I always had music as the focus—I wanted to be the rockstar and travel the world! (Spence laughs) And then I realized that wasn’t super likely, so I decided [to become an engineer], you know, recording music and mixing music. So, I went down the audio engineer route, and after studying in Australia, I moved to Wellington, New Zealand, worked at a music studio there for a number of years, and then sort of paralleled into post-production. I started as a foley artist and foley editor—”
Spence: “Oh, I didn’t know that about you! That’s fascinating!”
Maynard: “Yeah: it was a small studio in Wellington, and there was only a couple of us there, so—”
Spence: “So, you did your own foley?”
Maynard: “Pretty much did our own foley!”
Spence: “Oh, that’s fun!”
Maynard: “Yeah, it was so good! Learning a bit of ADR as well and then getting into sound effects editing…and I guess, around that point, I was doing more post-production than music.”
How did Sylvie’s Love come into both of your laps?
Spence: “Oh, man, that was more than a year ago, right?”
Maynard: “Oh, yeah!”
Spence: “It’s funny because we were doing a little Zoom call [to prep for the interview], and we were all kind of just like: God, that seems so long ago! Because it was before all of this [pandemic] madness happened. So, it’s been over a year.”
Maynard: “I’d been lucky to get work at King Soundworks, and I guess timing worked out, and I was able to jump aboard this film as a sound effects editor and re-recording mixer and just being involved with the whole process along the way. And yeah: it’s been a great process, getting to work with Eugene and Nnamdi.”
I understand that the process was very collaborative with Eugene and Nnamdi. I wonder if you could talk about what that was like?
Spence: “It started in the spotting sessions—do you know what a spotting session is, or do you need a refresher?”
I think I do need a refresher! (laughs)
Spence: “It’s basically when the design, music, and dialogue people all sit down with production [and] director, and you basically sit in a room, watch a movie together—of course, this is pre-COVID, so I’m sure we were all pretty cozy—and you just play through the movie. And if there’s a sound effect they want specifically, they’ll stop the movie and talk about it, or if there’s ADR they need—do you know what ADR is?”
That one I do know!
Spence: “Yeah, so if there’s ADR in there, they’ll talk about it. You basically watch the movie with everybody and throw ideas around and get an idea of what they want to hear on the final mix-stage.”
I assume, then, the sound is different from the music? In that the processes of capturing and creating each are slightly similar but also slightly different?
Spence: “Basically, what we do at our facility is we split [the project] into dialogue and sound effects. For music, that goes to a whole different facility. But it all comes together on the mix stage, and you have the dialogue and music mixer and the sound effects mixer—so, two [people] on the stage.”
Maynard: “And during the spotting sessions, you do talk through and figure out what scenes are driven by music and which are a little more dramatic and intimate, and you get an idea of how you’re shaping the scenes with dialogue, effects, and music, and [ultimately] which ones are going to be the focus.
One of the film’s biggest aspects is 50s and 60s jazz, and I heard that you played each instruments’ separate tracks in order to capture the sound of the era?
Spence: “That was a mix-stage thing!”
Maynard: “It’s pretty standard when you’re recording the score or the music for it that you’ll get individual instruments and play them live. You’ll get the horns [for example] or the drum kit separately and the vocals separately. And we were able to bring all of those music tracks—all individually—playing together, and the other re-recording mixer Jonathan was mixing music, and he was able to mix it live into the spaces [of each scene] in order to sort of try and recreate the sound that would have been there on set.”
What advice would you to give to someone interested in getting into the sound field of filmmaking?
Maynard: “One thing I try to focus on is recording sounds. It doesn’t have to be a high-tech, expensive recorder, but that [along with] paying attention to sounds around you is one thing in particular to post-productions and sound-effects, more so. And just paying attention to sound effects around you, trying to record as much as you can, even if at the time it doesn’t feel like it’s going to be that interesting, you may never know when you’ll need it.”
Spence: “I feel like one of the hardest things when you’re a beginner in this field is to actually know how to listen! I find—[adding to] what Darren said—if you go out and record stuff you hear and then edit it down, and play it back, it just opens your eyes to so many new things. And also: try everything!”
