Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1314046
C A S Q U A R T E R L Y I FA L L 2 0 2 0 21 there were only two of us in the studio, they were in Prague, the composer was, and they were already signing off on mixes I had sent them and making comments on the work. So, I decided to, you know, finish, and they were very happy with that situation. But, yeah, we've been doing that for a long time! That hasn't changed in this period of time. Dennis Sands: Yeah, the remote thing has been going on for some time. [In 2013-14], I worked on a TV miniseries called Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. The interesting thing is the composer, Alan Silvestri, lives in Carmel and the orchestrator, Mark Graham, recorded it in England. They sent the files to me and I mixed it in my studio in Santa Barbara, and I sent the mixes to the music editor in Los Angeles where they dubbed it. And, none of us ever saw one another. Never. And, I thought, "You know, wow, this is actually kind of cool." Actually, for the last Avengers movie, we'd gone to England to record about the first 25 percent of the score. There was so much score, like two and half hours of score in that movie—which must have been about two hours and thirty-three minutes long! Anyway, after that [and because of the schedule], the rest of it was done remotely. So, we'd go to Disney, sit on their dub stage, and would … Source Connect. We literally heard this lovely 5.1 mix live. And you have some visual communication and audio communication, of course, with the stage back-and-forth all live and it was great! And, same deal, I got the files and mixed it in my studio. Most recently, I did a score after the lockdown, and you know that's a whole other conversation about how setups have changed with the distancing of musicians, and how to set rooms … and, we're kind of committed now to striping because it's the only way that you can do all of this. CT: What's striping? Could you describe that? It's nothing to do with tape, right? DS: Ha, no, it's recording [the orchestra by] section separately. So, you know, strings, and maybe harp in one [music] pass, woodwinds separately, and brass, percussion, and so on. It's essentially a collection of recorded channels, with each section separate. [But back to Avengers], we did it with a system called Clear View. It allows you to see or to hear a really beautiful sounding stereo mix in sync with picture via a regular browser. It's really efficient and it just worked beautifully. And, we had a Zoom meeting going and you communicate back-and-forth. It's really cool, and it really worked well! So, you know, that's kind of the world we're in now. The nice thing is that the technology, as it evolves, makes this [distancing] requirement easier and easier. CT: So, Simon, you've actually been doing some work during lockdown with an orchestra remotely. How's that been going? Simon Franglen: Well, I've got three scores that I'm currently [composing], all with different processes. I just finished one in Vienna, which was available. Vienna is now up to 75 players [per session] because Austria did lockdown properly [insert eye wink]. And, there they had the string players with a one meter fifty gap between them, about five feet, and everybody had individual stands instead of sharing. So, you get these longer lines of violins, violin 2's, violas, and they are also separated farther out [from the conductor and the main microphones]. I had 50 strings for this thing and some Scoring mixer Tommy Vicari CAS Scoring mixer Dennis Sands CAS Composer Simon Franglen