Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1122868
It's one of my favorite projects that I've ever done. I loved working on it, and I love the people involved. TYSON LOZENSKY: Scoring Mixer Well for me, the early stages of the project are mainly about receiving deliverables and files and getting them to my boss Marco Beltrami, who was the composer. In the beginning, it was mainly him meeting with Jimmy and Chai and talking about their ideas and vision for the project. From there, they would do the spotting session where they picked where they want cues and what sort of feelings they would like to evoke from them and they were off to the races with writing. During the writing process, I would mainly be the middle person sending new cues to production, etc., and other times they would go through the music editor on the project, Jim Schultz. It was a bit different for me actually, as we don't really work with documentaries much. It's mostly motion pictures which are often fiction, so something about the honesty and personal nature of this project I really clung to throughout the process. There were times when it was just him on the rock with his thoughts and we tried to make the music a bit closer and more personal. However, there were other times with the big sweeping shots of the mountain where we really were able to get big with the horns and strings and it was just a lot of fun. Once they got the score in good shape and it came time for the recording, that was when I really came into play as the scoring engineer and mixer. For Free Solo, we did the recording at our studio here, and we did some solo piano/organ recordings, three sessions of strings with varying sized groups, and then one session with brass. By doing it at our studio here, and recording the strings and brass separate, we were able to control the dynamics a bit more than we would have if they were all together, and it ultimately gave me more control when it came to the mix. After the recordings were all completed, I would go through and tighten up performances and make edits and then begin the mixing. For me, it is sort of all part of the same process so I am doing some of the mixing aspects while I am editing and setting up, etc. During the mix, we were using the dialogue to shape things around as that was the main focus but there were moments such as the final climb where we really wanted to make a grand moment and had a lot of fun sort of shaping those. For me, I found this project extremely inspiring as I had been going through my own life stuff and this sort of just gave me a second wind and came at a good time in my life where I needed to be reminded that anyone is capable of extraordinary things. What I did would not have been possible without the rest of the amazing music team and just a few people to note were the composers Marco Beltrami and Brandon Roberts and music editor Jim Schultz. I still cannot believe what he accomplished and am truly blessed to have been a part of what will for years to come be a very special movie for many people. DAVID BOULTON: ADR Mixer David also won this year for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel in the TV Series One Hour category. Read more about him and his work in that "Meet the Winners" article. JOANA NIZA BRAGA: Foley Mixer I work in-house at a Lisbon-based studio (Loudness Films) and usually we work on in-house projects where we can reach any of the filmmakers involved and discuss the project easily with no fuss. It's really nice to record Foley knowing that the mixer, director, and others involved are in the studio next door. In the past few years, I was fortunate to be involved in several projects from the US and one of the main issues was to get the "feeling" that was asked in each project by only talking by email or Skype. We always had a coordinator that worked as our bridge between the United States and Portugal and had to understand this "remote way" of working that we were not so used to (many are, I bet). When Free Solo arrived at our studio, we had a brief talk with our coordinator who told us what the supervising sound editor Deborah Wallach wanted. While watching the movie, we clearly understood what was missing—The Mountain. That was our main goal. We needed to recreate all Alex's interactions with the mountain in order to make the audience feel that they were all there with him. A very cool thing about the project was the fact that this was a documentary feature film that was being treated, let's say, as a fiction feature film. I'm saying this because I've seen a lot of documentaries here that had horrible sound conditions and the (reduced) sound work was more forgiven because the filmmakers would treat them like "guerrilla films" and that's it. As if there was no other way to improve the sound. The better the sound, the better the experience, right? Free Solo had a super- challenging shooting location and the film was always handled with care and that's one of the biggest reasons for its success. Oh and I can't forget the fact that the film had this amazing mixing team headed by Tom Fleischman CAS. It's awesome and a dream come true to know that I was part of such a great team.