New York City’s Goldcrest supplied picture and sound post production for the Disney+ documentary series On Pointe. Senior colorist Evan Anthony performed final color grading, and re-recording mixer Bob Chefalas prepared the final mix for the six-part series, directed by Larissa Bills. A behind-the-scenes look at aspiring dancers pursuing their dream, the show follows students from the prestigious School of American Ballet as they prepare for potential roles in the New York City Ballet’s production of George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker.
Shot over the course of nearly a year at SAB, the series presents an inspiring, unadulterated view of the highs and lows experienced by aspiring dancers. Bills, who earned a DGA Award nomination for her work, recorded classes in progress, interviewed instructors in their offices and followed students through their daily routines around New York City. “We captured everything in real time and operated run-and-gun,” Bills recalls. “If we were shooting a rehearsal, we didn’t have the luxury of asking, ‘Hey, can you do that over because we’d like a different angle.’”
Bills and her two cinematographers, Vanessa Carr and Nick Midwig, employed minimal crew and mostly relied on hand-held cameras. That kept the production nimble and able work in small spaces without becoming a distraction to the dance students or their teachers. “My goal was to be as unobtrusive as possible,” Bills says. “Small crews, small cameras, small rigging.”
Evan Anthony
That light-on-its-feet style of the production led to challenges during editorial and post. Bills credits editor Jennifer McGarrity and her crew for a masterful job in forming the raw material into tight narratives that capture the emotional journey experienced by the dancers in an authentic manner.
Picture finishing at Goldcrest Post spanned several weeks as Bills and Anthony worked to create visual consistency among material shot over a period of months with diverse gear and under varying conditions. “In most cases, we shot with available light, so color temperatures were all over the place,” notes Bills. “And yet, Evan was able to seamlessly match every shot … day or night, interior or exterior, sunny skies or cloudy. We achieved a beautiful uniformity among scenes inside the school, and a colorful, high-contrast look for the Nutcracker performance footage.”
Scenes of dance classes required special attention. The rooms were cavernous, with white walls, ceilings and floors. Dancers, too, were often dressed in white. As a result, the raw footage tended toward monochromatic. During grading sessions, Bills and Anthony explored ways to make the material more visually rich without seeming artificially manipulated. “Larissa wanted it to look real,” recalls Anthony, who performed the work in one of Goldcrest’s grading theaters with Blackmagic’s DaVinci Resolve. “It should feel natural, like you’re standing in the room with the dancers. Still, we wanted to give it a cinematic quality, so we applied a film treatment, adding a small amount of texture and grain. That gave it depth of field.”
Production sound was also recorded on the fly. Recordists Michael Jones and Sean O’Neil went to great lengths to capture field recordings in environments that were often plagued by background noise. “It’s a school, so there was always a lot of activity,” Bills recalls. “Piano accompaniments and other music were happening all the time. We had teachers speaking and students responding. Plus, everyone was wearing a leotard, so they were difficult to mic. On occasion, we were able to put a lav on a teacher or accompanist, but for everything else, we had to boom.”
Bills says that supervising sound editor Michael Suarez, Chefalas and the rest of the post sound team did an incredible job in turning Jones and O’Neil’s raw field recordings into a clean soundtrack while retaining their natural, in-the-moment quality. “It was incredibly important to capture the ambience of the school through the music, the voices and the footfalls,” Bills says. “Something as subtle as the squeak of a shoe makes a difference in terms of giving the audience a high-end, theatrical experience.”
Chefalas, who mixed the series in one of Goldcrest’s four sound theaters, says the soundtrack is unusually dense for a documentary. Production sound was augmented by digital and Foley sound effects to support feet, clothing and myriad other details. Music recorded during classes at the school and performances of The Nutcracker at Lincoln Center were supplemented by original music and licensed tracks provided by composer/music supervisor Jonathan Zalben.
As Anthony did with the visuals, Chefalas had to achieve consistency from disparate sound elements, often recorded under difficult circumstances. Background noise from traffic and air conditioning systems had to be removed. Dialogue recorded from varying vantage points had to be smoothed out. Transitions between music that was recorded live and from external sources had to be made seamless.
Bob Chefalas
For Chefalas, it was mostly a process of elimination. “My instinct was to use a light touch,” he says. “In the show, a teacher compares a ballet dancer to a cat; when a cat lands on the ground, you hardly hear it. When dancers jump and move, it’s smooth and gentle. We treated the soundtrack the same way. When we added Foley to enhance a dancer’s movement, it sounds smooth, fluid and delicate. The establishing shots and the backgrounds have the same graceful quality.”
Bills notes that having both sound and picture finishing located at Goldcrest was a huge advantage. The director could leave Anthony’s grading theater and join Chefalas on the mix stage by walking down two flights of stairs. Sound and picture data could be exchanged between the two rooms in minutes. “I loved working with Evan and Bob,” she says. “Sound and picture were both layered, complex processes, and the work we did at Goldcrest made for a more interesting show. The average viewer won’t be aware of all the effort and creativity that went into it — and that’s how it should be — but it made a tremendous a difference.”
