Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1314046
34 FA L L 2 0 2 0 I C A S Q U A R T E R L Y moved to Los Angeles and started at Sony. He is also a sound designer, sound supervisor, and re-recording mixer. STEVEN TICKNOR: Will, what were you thinking when everything changed in March and the lockdown started and you still needed to work from home at a high level? Sony had this new technology, the 360 VME, that would allow you to listen in headphones at home and it would be as if you were listening on a big Sony stage. WILL FILES CAS: When the lockdown happened, we were in the middle of working on Ghostbusters: Afterlife and realized we would have to work from home. The only variable was what the editors would listen on at home; headphones, speakers, 5.1 systems. The 360 VME came along at just the right time. It was in Beta at the time, but we realized that we could leverage it so that everyone would work at home, but it was as though we were in the same room together. ST: What was your experience when you first had the headphones on and then took them off and were sitting in the Cary Grant Theatre? WF: I took them off and said, "Please turn off the speakers so I can hear the headphones." Of course, the speakers were off, and I had been listening to the simulation. That was a bit of a shock. ST: Tell me about what you thought when you found out this was integrated software in Pro Tools? WF: That's what it needs to be at this point. No one wants to lug around a big piece of hardware. The idea that you could have headphones and a laptop and have in your ears whatever sound stage you like is pretty amazing. ST: What did you do to make 360 VME work smoothly with Pro Tools? WF: We spend a lot of time developing our mix templates and our sessions tend to be very complex. We wondered how this would work. But the Sony engineers had put a lot of thought into it, so it turned out to be very simple. We just put 360 VME across the master fader in our sessions. We didn't have to change anything fundamentally in our sessions to make it work. ST: The newest version allows you to see panning in the VME software. How does that help you having a visible feedback of what you are doing? WF: Most of the time we mix with our ears, but sometimes it is very useful to have a visual representation of what is actually happening. We gave a lot of feedback to the development team during the Beta stage about sound quality and how it would affect our workflow, and they were very responsive in reacting to our communications. This makes it a much more usable product. Now there is a standalone app-based option, as well as the Pro Tools option. ST: How is this changing your workflow? What are some of the new ideas coming up from you and your crew? WF: We had to pivot quickly during Ghostbusters to working from home after working on the Cary Grant Stage. Everyone had a different environment at home to work in and what we noticed as we went back in for another temp dub on the big stage was how well everything translated. There were no big surprises as would have been the case if we had not all been listening to the same environment in headphones. ST: What do you think the future of this product is and how do you see this changing the way we do our business? WF: The quarantine pandemic has been very interesting, and we can still do our work from home at a high level. The only variable has been the acoustic environment. Even when things get back to "normal," I think people will be working from home more and more on a regular basis. Final mixes will still be done on a big stage, but the majority of the work will be done at home. ST: Can you see this developing into a client, a director sitting at home and judging your work and giving you notes from their safe environment? WF: One of the first things we thought about was how can we leverage this to make a better playback environment for our clients, especially once the quarantine ends? We have to sample their ears in the stage environment. But once that is done, we can send them a mix with that profile baked in, so they don't even have to have the app running on their laptop. ST: What was the adjustment for you and your team once they had the software set up working on Ghostbusters and Venom? –WILL FILES CAS " [IT'S] ALMOST SORT OF A MAGICAL THING, TAKING THIS BIG ROOM AND PUTTING IT IN THIS LITTLE BOX."