Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1179544
31 in links between songs to give the actors more freedom to explore tempo, so they could play with their performances. Pro Tools playback of temp mixes digitally orchestrated. The keyboard and Pro Tools would need to weave in and out of each other so the actors did not hear a shift in tone between the two accompaniments in their IEM's. This would be achieved by careful gain matching. We also learned early on in rehearsals that the best strategy to achieve this perfect blend was to have the keyboard player play along with the Pro Tools playback. It worked because when we went from free form keyboard to playback, it was not obvious to the cast, because they could still hear the keyboard. The keyboard players, James and Mark, were actually 'performers' in Cats, just a different kind. They were not on screen, instead spending twelve hours a day in a sound- proofed booth we had built, with large LCD screens to view all the camera angles, such was their creative input on the set. The irony being that both the expressive keyboard play- ing and the Pro Tools playback were simply temporary. It would all be discarded when Cats was fully orchestrated in post production, but what remained was the emotion they helped the cast achieve. I decided adding the musical element to the two vocal mix tracks would be counterproductive. Melanie would need two tracks of vocal mixes that would give her control over the size of the sound, and a mono keyboard/Pro Tools track. At this point, there were two vocal mix tracks, twenty-four vocal ISO tracks, and the mono music on track twenty- seven. Melanie would have the ability of manipulating the volume of the keyboard/Pro Tools playback against the vocal mixes, as per her own and Tom Hooper's instinct, on the Avid. She would also have the stereo 'bounce backs' of the temp Pro Tools orchestrated tracks, timecode locked so she could utilize this as she finished cutting a scene. The 'mono mix' of keyboard and pre-recorded temp track was on Victor Chaga's Pro Tools cart and it was his responsi- bility to keep it gain matched and send it direct to my Deva 16. Victor also sent it to Tom Barrow the IEM mixer at the same time so he could use it to create his individual IEM mixes for the cast, along with the vocals. I sent Tom all of my ISO tracks as well, so he could creative- ly provide each actor with what they wanted and work each character's gain in the IEM mixes. This gave Tom far more ability to support the cast than if he had simply been working with my production sound vocal mixes. It was invaluable to have Tom Barrow giving the cast what they needed to hear on a shot-by-shot basis so I could concentrate on what Post Production needed, and ultimately provide the highest quality vocals for the finished film. Now onto timecode. We were using an Ambient Master Clock on the sound cart, generating time of day TC that locked together sound record- ing, digital cameras, and VFX. Each Pro Tools temp song had its own unique timecode, so Picture Editorial could quickly drop the on-set music ISO and sync up the stereo temp version of the song in the Avid quickly and efficiently. The playback timecode fed directly from Pro Tools was recorded on audio track twenty-eight of my Deva 16. The Pro Tools playback timecode was also fed to the Lighting Desk so that lighting cues and moves could be triggered, ensuring that the complex lighting signature of each beat in the song would be frame accurate on every take we filmed. We were now twelve weeks out from principal photography and I decided that the workload was growing too quickly for Arthur and myself to deal with on our own. After another meeting with production, I made a case for more of our Sound Department to start work full time at Leavesden Studios. Working Title and Tom Hooper were receptive to the Prepping the transmitter frequencies Array of Comm microphones for Director Tom Hooper