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The final Barco Auro-3D 11.1 mix for Oz the Great and Powerful was completed at The Dub Stage. 28 the Formosa Group (http://formosagroup. com) on the Lot in West Hollywood, and Jeff Haboush, re-recording mixer at Technicolor Sound (www.technicolor.com) at Paramount in Hollywood, recently completed work on Metallica: Through the Never, a Picturehouse film that recently opened in theaters. Metallica: Through the Never was mixed at Technicolor Sound on Stage 2. Technicolor Sound's stages are set up for multiple mixing formats, including IMAX, Atmos, 7.1, 5.1, and more. That worked out well for Haboush. He was able to mix every format they needed on the same stage. Haboush notes this film was mixed in 7.1, 5.1, IMAX, and Atmos. They also did a 7.1 near field, a 5.1 near field, and an Lt-Rt near-field mix for home theater use. "We pretty much covered every sound format you can think of," says Haboush. "We gave hand-crafted, special attention to each version, paying attention to the different formats' features, like the low end of the IMAX, and the multiple speaker setup of Atmos." Metallica: Through the Never is not a traditional concert film. There is a storyline that runs concurrent with the band's performances. The scenes cut from the concert into another world where different events are happening. One of Mangini's challenges for the sound design was finding an elegant way to transition between the concerts and the narrative sections of the story. This was particularly challenging on the song "Cyanide," which plays in the middle of the film. Mangini says, "They do a lot of kinetic editing between the narrative and the song 'Cyanide,' where we're literally inter-cutting every two or three seconds. We're in and out and in and out, and we didn't want that to be jumpy or jerky. We spent a great deal of time massaging those transitions so you couldn't tell the difference between the mob and the crowd at the concert, because we were insinuating that they are both the same thing." Thanks to the forethought of Greg Fidelman, the music producer/recording engineer for Metallica, Mangini had pristine, multichan- Post • October 2013 nel recordings of the crowds, as well as sounds of the pyrotechnics, and the band on stage. Fidelman hung 18 mics from the ceilings of the various arenas where Metallica performed for the film. "He did an exceptional job of capturing the audience," says Mangini. "Right off the bat, we had a beautiful surround sound field of the actual audience in sync with the band." Mangini notes the mics at the back of the arena were delayed 120 milliseconds from the source signal. To fix this, he augmented every moment of the crowd sounds with a different audience track. If the delays were working against what was happening on stage, Mangini built an alternate track that he could go to. He ended up recreating two hours worth of audiences. Fortunately, he had a lot of material to worth with. "I went through all those concert recordings, which was 14 hours, and found sections, in between sets, where the camera crew was setting up. In those sections, I had ten to fifteen minutes of audience reactions, 18 channels worth. That gave me everything I needed, from cheers, to chants, and shout outs, and also whistles. I built 350 cues worth of real audience from the real venues." Mangini took those 18 mics and mixed them down to 7.1 masters and cut those as sound effects. They worked seamlessly with the sync material. Mangini adds, "All of my crowd recordings are very honest and authentic to the concerts. They weren't library sounds." In addition to creating authentic crowd sounds, Mangini also created authentic sound design elements using the band's performances. He took interesting snippets from the isolated tracks, which were recorded during the concerts, and repurposed them to be transitional sounds. Mangini explains, "They gave me all the source material of the band during concerts. As I was combing through this material, I realized that I have this huge library of amazingly-recorded stuff. There's got to be a way that I can take a guitar or a bass drum or a bass guitar, or even James Hetfield's vocals and twist it. And that is in fact what I did. You'd never know what it was by itself, but it was this interesting, distorted, reverbed, boomy sound, and I used that as the stingers and transition sounds. I felt that there was this sort of honesty to them because they weren't disassociated from the band. It was all of their actual sounds." Haboush and the audio post team mixed the film virtually so they could change the spread of the elements to work in the different formats. They started with the 7.1 mix. Once that was approved, they used that as www.postmagazine.com the basis for all the other mixes. To take advantage of the Atmos format in particular, Haboush points to a concert scene that has airplanes flying overhead, and machine guns that shoot lasers. "Visually you see those laser lights with the machine gun sound effects. With Atmos, I was able to follow those sounds with the panning, and put things in the ceiling. I took some of the airplane sounds and flew them around." Another place Atmos came in handy was during the "Cyanide" section. In the middle of a mob attack, in the middle of a concert, the scene cuts to the inside of a shopping mall. Mangini created a humorous moment by having the band's music stop, and the mob sounds stop, so the only sound the audience hears is muzak being piped through a small speaker overhead. "In Dolby Atmos it's directly above your head," Mangini says, "like a little futzed speaker with 'Holiday for Strings' playing. The band just loved it. They loved that sense of humor and knowing that they don't take themselves that seriously." Haboush's challenge in the mix was bal- Through the Never re-recording mixer Haboush. ancing the levels of the sound effects against a high-powered, high-density music track. "Integrating the sound effects with the concert footage was tricky," he notes. "This movie is all about Metallica, but there is a story that is being told along with it. You're going back and forth from the arena concert to the narrative sections of the film, where the main character is dealing with all the mayhem and craziness that he comes across." Haboush worked closely with Fidelman and re-recording mixer Rick Klein, who handled the music mix on the film, to strike the perfect balance. "Fidelman was in the trenches with us from minute one," says Haboush. "He drove the mix. He knows what the band likes; he knows what the band wants to hear. He's really responsible for the balances that were chosen in the movie." continued on page 44