I saw this cue mark multiple times in the Mank (2020) movie:
What's the significance of "cue marks" in the movie?
Movies & TV Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for movie and TV enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this communityI saw this cue mark multiple times in the Mank (2020) movie:
What's the significance of "cue marks" in the movie?
Mark Harris (Vulture): The film looks and sounds like something created in the studio era.
David Fincher: Ren Klyce, who is the sound designer, and I started talking years ago about how we wanted to make this feel like it was found in the UCLA archives — or in Martin Scorsese’s basement on its way to restoration. Everything has been compressed and made to sound like the 1940s. The music has been recorded with older microphones so it has a sort of sizzle and wheeze around the edges — you get it from strings, but you mostly get it from brass. What you’re hearing is a revival house — an old theater playing a movie. It’s funny because I’ve played it for some people who ask, “What is going on with the sound? It’s so warm.” And I respond, “Well, what you mean when you say ‘warm’ is, it sounds like an old movie. It sounds analog.” We went three weeks over schedule on the mix trying to figure out how to split that atom. [Visually,] our notion was we’re going to shoot super-high resolution and then we’re going to degrade it. So we took most everything and softened it to an absurd extent to try to match the look of the era. We probably lost two-thirds of the resolution in order to make it have the same feel, and then we put in little scratches and digs and cigarette burns.
Mark Harris (Vulture): I noticed you put in reel-change circles.
David Fincher: Yes, and we made the soundtrack pop like it does when you do a reel changeover. It’s one of the most comforting sounds in my life. They’re so little that they’re very difficult to hear until you hear them. It has what we ended up calling patina, these tiny little pops and crackles that happen, and they’re very beautiful.