New York, NY (October 2, 2008)–Award-winning audio house SoundHound and their editorial arm, thePound, provided post production for the documentary, 102 Minutes That Changed America, which premiered Thursday, September 11, 2008 on The History Channel.
The film captures the ‘real time’ experience of September 11, 2001, and was followed by I-Witness to 9/11, an 18-minute documentary featuring interviews with people who contributed footage to the project. The broadcast attracted the second biggest audience ever for the network with 5.2 million viewers.
SoundHound and thePound were awarded the post production job by production company Siskel/Jacobs, Chicago, IL, who were brought on by independent producer Nicole Rittenmeyer.
“We were given a rough cut, which mainly consisted of eye-witness footage and only a few sources of professional clips by journalists who happened to be on the scene that day,” said Lead Editor John Knauer. “Our job was to up-res and conform the film from a multitude of sources to its final full HD format. This included fine-tuning many of the original edits, color-correcting footage from various cameras and the final mix and sound editing.”
With hundreds of different audio sources, from amateur footage to emergency recordings, the audio tracks spanned a dynamic range–from whimpers to explosions to skyscrapers crumbling–that posed a challenge for senior audio mixer Damon Trotta. “The audio ranged from over-modulated screams to video heads dirtied in the debris, to lost tracking causing dropouts and digital clipping, to cameras dropped in a moment of overwhelming shock that lost audio all together, not to mention an excess of other unique sound problems,” Trotta said. “After all the troubleshooting, then the job of making all these audio sources into one congruous, uniform piece began. Add the gravity of the content and it was a sobering task. In the end, we’re all pleased with the final results and proud to have worked on it.”
SoundHound & thePound
www.soundhound.com
