Recording for Steven Soderbergh is always fun. he doesn't usually make movies that require tons of sound effects and design, but there is often one or two elements that require special attention. here, i am recording NASCAR race car maneuvers for Steven's new film Logan Lucky. as part of the film's climax, we needed to hear our hero being overtaken by another car. originally, i had gone out to Atlanta Motor Speedway during production to record what they were doing. luckily, my work-pal Rich Rutherford was doing the precision driving for our hero, as well as a good old-fashioned stunt or two. it's not always the best time to try to record, during stunt rehearsals, but thankfully when Rich saw me running up to his car with a mic rig, he already knew what i wanted to do. within two minutes i had the rig installed and locked down while Rich was checking his email... or whatever he does between takes ;-) ...so i was able to capture exactly what they were doing. trouble was, in order to coordinate the maneuvers with camera direction, they ended up doing them at about 50 MPH, with the camera under-cranked. it turned out looking plenty exciting, but it sounded slow and boring. later in post-production, supervising sound editor Larry Blake and i had to scheme about how to try again and get it to be more exciting. it was just a matter of getting another opportunity on the track. our consutant at NASCAR was able to hook us up with NBC, who had their own NASCAR vehicle for camera work from the track-level, even within the pack. John Fasal and i bolted out to Phoenix for a Sprint Cup race where we could mic up the NBC car and send it out for laps. we ended up getting very good onboard driving sounds that were very useful, but the elusive 'passing and overtaking' sounds really didn't register, as the car we were rigged to was so loud in itself, you can't really distunguish the other cars in the pack. i had another theory, and Larry liked it. i realized that we needed track time somewhere with just one NASCAR vehicle overtaking us, whjle we are in a very quiet vehicle, so all you really hear is the roaring engine of the car passing us and jockeying into our lane just ahead of us. eventually we found such an opportunity for solo track time at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, which i just love for many reasons, one of them being i can drive there with all the gear i want, as opposed to flying with limited gear due to cost and weight limits. we used a pace car which was relatively quiet to record onboard, while the awesome folks at the Richard Petty RPDE team arranged to do the maneuvers around us with one of their NASCAR cars. this is just a quick take i managed to grab on video, out of numerous attempts to get it right. Larry reports that it worked great! i had to miss the screening while i was away on another picture... i'm hoping to see and hear it this weekend now that i'm home.
