By Patrick Birk

Re-recording mixer Skip Lievsay and supervising sound editor are highly regarded members of the audio post world. Bologna has worked on many notable projects, including The Hunt, Marriage Story and Fahrenheit 451. Lievsay, who has an Oscar for his work on Gravity, counts Roma, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Uncut Gems, Lady Bird and No Country for Old Men among his many impressive credits. The two teamed up to bring director Shaka King’s vision to life and tell the story of Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya) in Judas and the Black Messiah, which was released on DVD and Blu-ray this month.

Skip Lievsay and his furry friend

Judas and the Black Messiah tells the story of the FBI’s infiltration of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party. Hampton becomes a target of the US government, and the FBI co-opts car thief Bill O’Neal (LaKeith Stanfield) to assist them in destroying the Panthers from the inside.

Here, Lievsay and Bologna talk about the collaboration — which took place on dub Stage A at Warner Bros. Post Production Services in New York City — the film and more…

Rich, can you talk about your collaboration with Skip?
Bologna: Skip mixed the dialog, ADR and music, and I mixed the sound effects, Foley, backgrounds and group ADR.

Before mixing Judas and the Black Messiah, I edited and supervised the sound editorial crew in New York, working mostly remotely with director Shaka King and picture editor Kristan Sprague for several months. Skip and I then spent a week or so predubbing the film separately. Since Skip was coming at things with fresh eyes and ears as well as his vast experience and insight, having worked on pivotal films like Malcom X and Do the Right Thing. He provided instrumental guidance into what scenes required special attention and where we should focus our energy. The collaboration was a true joy.

In a story that is so dependent on the speeches of Fred Hampton, how did you go about treating the dialogue?
Lievsay: Throughout the movie, we had high-quality recordings for every line. We had a little bit of ADR in some places, but in general, we had a boom and a lav track on every line. In some of the bigger scenes, like the “I Am a Revolutionary” event, we had a lot of tracks, with several microphones for Daniel and several microphones for the audience.

Rich Bologna

For the most part that speech was done live. He spoke directly to the audience, and the audience responded live in the recording. So we had this really fantastic interplay between the character and a real audience. We just had to add reverb or EQ to make it match better.

Then we had the digging-in part of the job, which was finding all the good crowd reactions and filling out a complete set. We just had to do some sorting, since some of the different angles didn’t match; sometimes the crowd didn’t respond the same way, not loud enough or too loud. So we had to make a consistent audience track for that scene. Those things together are a fantastic document of that event.

Bologna: There were a couple of instances when Skip put some cool microphone-type futzes on certain speeches. And I think Shaka was very sensitive about that stuff. He ended up pulling away from that very realistic approach because I think it may have stepped on the sheer power of Daniel Kaluuya’s performance. I do think Shaka took an unadulterated approach to some of those Fred Hampton speeches because he wanted it to come through really clear and powerfully.

Would you say you broke the fourth wall a little bit by not processing speech realistically?
Lievsay: Dialogue presented in many dramatic films portrays the talking very directly without regard to whether the performer is in an extreme close-up or across the room. It’s not differentiated in terms of perspective and reverberation. The track is consistent by choice. This approach is illustrated well by British dramas, such as The Crown.

On this film, and most films that I have mixed, we chose a presentation that places the performances in a space. Distance from the camera perspective is accentuated by adding reverb or drying it up. This presentation is more consistent with the reality of reverberation in each location design of the production.

We didn’t go wild on the “I Am a Revolutionary” scene, where it was crucial to have a consistent sound for Fred Hampton and to give a consistency to the speech so the audience in a movie theater could believe that they’re in the auditorium with the speech as well. In that case, you don’t want to have that kind of documentary, across-the-room change of perspective, because then you become a watcher instead of a participant. I think you grant the audience access when it’s closer and dryer. At the same time, audiences who are inclined to a certain realism get pushed back when they don’t feel changes of perspective. My particular approach is to have a dry sound and a reverberant sound, which I use two types of reverb for. Then I change the perspective by changing the balance between the dry sound and the reverberant sound.

You have to have taste, which I hope I do, but also you really have to be careful to choose the reverb sounds wisely so that it doesn’t become a distraction or make the dialogue harder to hear or comprehend.

A lot of times that’s a problem with lower levels of discussion. It’s not a problem when people are speaking loudly and clearly, but it’s a problem when actors are having a discourse; sometimes there’s a mumbling thing that happens. Then a reverb can just be an added problem. That’s why I like to keep it separate, so that during the mix, we can change that at any point, we can change that balance.

Do you have a specific method for dealing with soft lines of dialogue?
Lievsay: I usually start by looking for a hard line, like a plant or a boom microphone. Most production mixers like to record a boom when they can, as long as the shot’s not too wide. In this movie, I believe we had a boom and lavs for every line. Once you sync them up with VocAlign or something like that, you can play them together without having phase cancellation.

From my experience, the boom mic will have a little more reverb and sound a little more natural. The lav is generally very bass-y and off-axis, and oftentimes it’s also covered by costumes. So you can filter the lav mic so it sounds like the boom mic. That’s my general approach: Try to get it to sound like a boom, and that way you can mix and match. So if the boom mic becomes noisy or muddy, then you can substitute the lav for that. But, in general, it’s a mix.

What are the reverbs you like to blend for perspective shifts?
Lievsay: I like to use Altiverb — I make a recording, then I’ll take a copy of the track and find what I think is a suitable reverb setting in Altiverb. Then I AudioSuite a copy, so I make a mono, reverb-only copy. Then I take a traditional send and return and use that as an on-the-fly reverb for everything. So I can add a little bit of room sweetener, like a stereo reverb, to all the talking or all the sound that’s happening to give it a little more high-fidelity sensation. I use ReVibe for that one, generally, and pan in the stereo to glue the voice to the center of the action.

I always tell people, if you have something beautiful happening that you’ve invested a lot of time in, print it. Put that in your session, put it next to the units. If something happens, like the director doesn’t like one component, you can reactivate the plugins and follow your trail back. But if you have a printed version, 99% of the time filmmakers say, “That sounds great. Can you make it a little louder?” That’s your fix. Changing the volume of a printed version is really simple.

Bologna: I did that in the refinery shootout, with a Soundtoys EchoBoy flammy delay that I would put on the guns because they’re surrounded by metal, and I wanted to get a cool slappy echo. But I know that line of plugins is notoriously weird with automation. So I would just print all the echoed, delayed responses and then just have them as separate stereo audio files.

Lievsay: I even use EchoBoy for my exterior patches. Exterior reverbs are the hardest thing to come by these days, and EchoBoy is pretty good for that.

Were there any scenes with more complex reverb setups? If so, how did you organize them?
Lievsay: I only did that in a couple of scenes where I had a foreground and a background, like in the shootout at the Black Panthers’ headquarters. We had an exterior street sound and an up-in-building sound. Then for the “I Am a Revolutionary” scene, I had several reverbs going, which were a combination of Altiverb, stereo Altiverbs for the whole audience and then ReVibe. I think I had two ReVibe pairs there for the audience and then for Fred Hampton’s speech as well.

How did you make the violence in this film feel so visceral?
Bologna: I’m glad that you give it that adjective. I wanted it to feel like a big movie, which it is, but also not be like the super-stylized, over-the-top violence that I think we’re all used to seeing from big Hollywood movies. The clearest example, and I think where we were most successful in giving it that kind of terrifying real-world impact, is the last shootout, where Fred is assassinated. The other shootouts have music and, I think, rightfully so. They’re cinematic approaches. But the last thing has no music, and really it does scare the shit out of you because you’re in that room, and it’s happening to you. And you don’t know where the task force is. I wanted it to feel kind of chaotic, to put you into the Panthers mindset of like, “What is going on? We are being ripped apart.”

Shaka didn’t want to lead by the hand, and music sometimes can do that, where you’re emotionally directed by the music — instead, it’s just pretty stark. The hardest thing for me to see in this movie is Deb’s face while she’s hearing Fred being murdered behind her. That did have some music at some point, and it had a stylized thing, and we just stripped everything out. It’s incredibly powerful, and it’s terrifying. We didn’t want to go crazy, but we wanted it to feel immersive and big. I think we got there in the end.

What was it like collaborating with Shaka King?
Bologna: I knew Shaka from a couple of Sundances ago, and we had kept in touch and hung out. I was thrilled that he was making this movie, and I came on pretty early in the process. In fact, I came on the week the lockdown happened.

I ended up working from home. It was cumbersome in the sense that we had to improvise and figure out the pipeline and workflows, but I think we benefited from the fact that we got a lot more time, which I love. The movie was supposed to originally come out in August of last year instead of 2021.

Shaka had a laundry list of things that he sent me initially from the picture edit. Just workaday-type things I was expecting, like, “Hey, can you give us big gun sounds for the shootouts?” But it was really just little things that they couldn’t really pull together in the picture edit that were bugging him.

I had my initial list and knocked those out, and then, to Shaka’s credit, he let us run with it. Because he has a strong appreciation for sound and music, he really trusted us to do our thing. For the most part, he was totally on board with a lot of the decisions. And because we started early enough, I was feeding the picture department bounces, so they were quickly incorporating those elements into the edit, which is always great because if they get used to our sound without temp effects and temp music, it’s just the way the movie is, and then we can really fine-tune stuff.

Shaka was very open, and he has a very specific sensibility. Since we started early, we learned what this movie’s sound design was naturally. For example, early on we tried some really stylized things — initially we had a lot more of this inner turmoil thing with Bill’s character. That had a naturally stylized sound design element to it. I think it just fought with the way the movie should be. So we ended up, both on the picture and the sound side, naturally kind of pulling back from any of that super-stylized stuff.

Shaka is a really smart and collaborative guy, and he would always be interested in my two cents on whatever edit iteration we were at. It felt like we were all part of the team. By the time we got to Skip and re-dubbing, things were pretty ironed out on the sound side; there weren’t any big surprises, and we just focused on fine-tuning and making it sound great.

Lievsay: It was a joy to have my two wing men, Rich and Shaka, have such a fully fleshed out soundtrack before we started, then to be able to go through the movie with both of them and work on the things that made the movie as good as it can be. Which, after all, should be the primary mission at all times — getting the filmmaker to be in their happy place, so they can relax and enjoy their own film. Usually that involves solving a handful of problems particular to the film, which nobody wants to talk about.

In this film, the shootout at the Black Panther headquarters and the “I Am a Revolutionary” scenes were problems in that a lot of elements had to be organized, which then had to be set up and mixed properly to everyone’s satisfaction. Until that got done, there were still going to be problems. I’ve had a lot of luck in my career as an editor/mixer going head-on with those things, really embracing those hard things right at the beginning. Because there’s less hot in the process until those problems are dealt with.

If you can save all of your time and your energy for making stylistic choices with the director, then you’re really doing a great service to the project. So you really are getting into that zone where the things that you’re spending your time on are making the film better. Sometimes it’s a delicate thing: It might not seem like the film is better, but the filmmaker feels that it’s more like what they want. I really believe you have to let go and let that be the thing that’s important.

I heard this quote from a press secretary the other day, “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” I love that idea. What else is there? Why wouldn’t we want to be doing that?

Bologna: That completely applies to this film. The technical challenges of the “I Am A Revolutionary” scene were pretty ironed out, to the point that Skip will joke and say the only note that Shaka had for us was to say, “Wow.” He could just kick back and watch it.

I will say that Shaka is even into the nitpicky granular stuff that we do, like he would be fine sitting behind Skip predubbing and EQing dialogue and me getting the Foley ready. I think he’s jazzed by the whole process. It’s great to work with guys like that.

Lievsay: It is a pleasure to work on a movie that’s about something that’s very important, particularly at this time. Sadly, it’s been important as long as I’ve been alive. You could say that for everyone alive right now. Yet amazingly, not a whole lot of progress is being made. I was born in 1953. A lot has changed since then, but it doesn’t feel like we’re getting that much closer to the ultimate goal.

Bologna: It almost seems like this movie is instructive, like people are gravitating toward it. People need some sort of a roadmap, and I think Fred Hampton was a very powerful, enlightened guy. His message and what he was talking about is super-relevant to the moment that we’re living through. I’m very proud that I got to be a part of that and to work with such great people like Skip and Shaka.

At one point, Skip and I were outside on a break, and Skip was basically like, “I hope this is the first of many gigs that we’re working for somebody besides just a white guy.” I hope it’s a trend that continues because there’s a lot of power behind these messages, and people like Shaka are well-suited to bring them to the fore.

Patrick Birk is a musician, sound engineer and post pro at Silver Sound, a boutique sound house based in New York City. He releases original material under the moniker Carmine Vates. Check out his recently released single, Virginia.