Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1279181
56 I M PS E . O R G they have a director wanting him to work on this film he is doing. Craig asked what the film was about, to which they said, it's about Nathanial Anthony Ayers and Steve Lopez. Thinking this was a prank, Craig dug in deeper only to find this was very real and it was The Soloist, directed by Joe Wright. Joe had specifically requested that he would like the people that did the sound for No Country for Old Men, as well as There Will Be Blood. So Craig and Chris Scarabosio (who lived around the corner from him in San Rafael) got the calls. This started a long relationship with Joe Wright that has lead to Craig flying out to London to take part in other films with Joe such as Hanna, Anna Karenina, and Darkest Hour. In 2013, Joe Wright invited Craig to work on his play in London, A Season in the Congo. Armed with a script, a 19-channel PA system, a small mixing board, and a laptop, Craig got to work designing sounds, along with Tom Gibbons to be manually triggered throughout the play. Once again, Craig found himself in a world he didn't know but was fast to learn. It started out that the play would have some sounds here and there at key moments but it eventually turned into a full soundtrack from beginning to end. Craig achieved this by making 7.1 mixes to be placed in the cue software designed for live playback. Naturally, the 7.1 Pro Tools files had no correlation to the speaker configuration in the auditorium so Craig and Tom needed to work out a system to map the channels to what they wanted. Another innovative step Craig took along the way was to incorporate the Foley props directly into his sound effects tracks so that they were pre-dubbed as one group. This was born over years of watching Foley getting turned down or off if it wasn't working with a particular sound or group of sounds. It was not common to have sound effects and Foley combined this way but the result is without question a more cohesive sound effects track. Back in 2009, Craig had moved back to Vancouver with his family which caused some difficulties with locking in projects considering he was not based in Los Angeles. This didn't hold Craig back as he was already used to travelling to wherever he is needed for the job. Over the next eight years, Craig continued to bounce between the various universes he nurtured along the way. To name a few titles: X-Men: First Class, Elysium, X-Men Apocalypse, Chappie, Hail, Caesar!, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, and Roma. In 2019, Craig worked on a Canadian-based and crewed film, Red Snow with his friend Vince Renaud, again coming back to an old relationship that was formed over a decade ago at Beckett Productions. Craig's two most recent films, Joe Wright's The Woman in the Window and Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch, were mixed at Abbey Road, where incidentally, Craig did not bring his portable setup along and mixed with the Avid S6. What's funny is someone else on the crew was using a Wacom pad as they had been turned on to it by Craig. After hearing all these stories from Craig's career, it really shows the importance of being personable in this industry. While we are individuals putting in the hours honing our crafts, it's the helping hand of others that push us forward along the way. For Craig, this was Paul Sharpe and Jacqueline Cristianini for starting him off on the post-sound path, John and Nancy Ross for taking a chance on a Canadian, John Larsen for always having his team's back, and Skip Lievsay for giving credit where it's due. After 15 years of travel back-and-forth to nurture his career, Craig Berkey has finally settled down back home in Canada at the center of his universe, his family. A Season in the Congo (2013). At the mix of The Woman in the Window (2020). It's this strong commitment to family, as well as Craig 's honest opinions on the creative decisions on the dub stage that landed him the next film from Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life.