A Magical Soundscape: KING COAL

This post is part of a short series where I am sharing some behind the scenes info about the making of KING COAL

An ambisonic recording device built by sound recordist, Billy Wirasnik.

Our sound mix team at Signature Post was led by Alexandra Fehrman (CODA, 2021; Everything Everywhere All at Once, 2022) who supervised the incredible team: re-recording mixer, Tim Hoogenakker; sound designer, Benjamin L. Cook; dialogue editor, Christina Chuyue Wen; and foley services by Post Creations. The sound mix hinged on emphasizing the lush environments captured by our production sound mixer, Billy Wirasnik, who recorded an incredible library of ambisonic nature recordings —birds, crickets, owls, thunder, wind, rain, rivers, creeks, forests— over the course of several years of production. We also worked with breath artist Shodekeh Talifero, who with his own body and voice made the sound of thunder, ocean waves, crickets, wind, whistles, and many other sounds. We recorded his session in a moss-floored, dense forest in the Allegheny Mountains (hats off to associate producer, Clara Haizlett, for finding this perfect outdoor sound studio). His sound art and human breath is used throughout the film as transitions and as a motif to explore the new life the coalfields are embarking upon. Sound, in addition to music, plays a key role in the film’s magical realism.

Hybrid Documentary Films: KING COAL

This post is part of a short series where I am sharing some behind the scenes info about the making of KING COAL

This is a film that blends vérité scenes with imagined scenes where real people, non-actors, were asked to just go about life in front of the cameras. But the scene itself, in the case of the funeral as pictured above, would not have existed without the framework of the film. Other scenes were purely natural, with us filming live events but with two young girls —dancers with coal family connections that we cast— just being kids in the moment. It was a constant recalibration and humbling experience to dream big, fail massively, and then get back up the next day and try again. This type of filmmaking required everyone on our team to think on their toes about how to best capture the magic of real life and always ask how this might work in our overall narrative. 

King Coal is whole-heartedly a product of taking creative risks. We filmed this over three years and we were led from shoot to shoot based on reactions and creative impulses of our team and Appalachians we filmed with. Some ideas for shots and scenes came to me as a single image from my imagination, or a memory from childhood that I wanted to recreate. Others were spontaneous ideas that popped into our minds while being immersed in the environments we filmed in. The entire act of filmmaking and creating this film was a call and response between our team and the land and people we were filming. Much credit goes to our small, but mighty, on-the-ground producing team – Diane Becker, Shane Boris, Molly Born, Clara Haizlett, Curren Sheldon, and Elijah Stevens – who took my craziest ideas for scenes like king coal’s funeral, and made them a reality. 

Movies That Inspired: KING COAL

This post is part of a short series where I am sharing some behind the scenes info about the making of KING COAL

I began filming King Coal in 2019, but when COVID-19 kept us at home, I had time to start thinking more about the goals of this film as a piece of cinema, not just from a traditional documentary impact point of view. I sought out films that helped me break open the ways I had been telling stories. Above are some images from films that inspired my thinking behind King Coal. These are films that explore the myths of places, the dreams of children, hauntings and ghosts stories, dance and movement, surreal sound design, use voice-over narration as a guide, feature raw vérité moments, rely on mosaic structures, center children and/or women, employ wardrobe and production design as a form of storytelling, explore Afrofuturism and magical realism, use editing to create new worlds with a single cut, and where metaphors and symbolism are at the center of plot. There are many more films to be listed (“Badlands” by Terrence Malick also comes to mind when writing the voice over narration), but it felt like a very important part of my process to broaden my reference points outside of documentaries. I aimed to tell a story that was felt, but not always seen. That required me to employ cinematic tools I had never used before in vérité filmmaking. 

Read Elaine’s full list of films that inspired thinking in King Coal here.