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29 JUL-AUG 14 / CINEMONTAGE important to try to get them as best recorded as we could," McGeary says. "That was basically a Clint Eastwood directive — he wanted that live sound." On the set, each actor playing a member of the group had his own microphone set up by production sound mixer Walt Martin, CAS. The tracks were recorded directly into Pro Tools by production music mixer Tim Boot. Although there were bleeds when the group sang together, the goal was to achieve as much isolation as possible on each vocal track. "As the story starts in the 1960s, goes into the '70s, '80s and '90s, microphones and microphone techniques changed," McGeary adds. "Clint wanted to try to keep it very true to the period." McGeary was present during the shooting of the musical numbers. "Clint and executive producer Rob Lorenz invited me to the set to observe the sync sound and to hear the live production sound he wanted to achieve," he says. But this attention to detail did not alter Eastwood's famous distaste for multiple takes. "Clint is a first-take guy," Lockett explains. "These guys didn't get a whole heck of a lot of takes. That's what makes it even more amazing — they just had to be on." One of Lockett's first tasks was to sift through and sync the tracks, a process that took about a month, and then to create rough mixes for takes that already were chosen by picture editors Joel Cox, ACE, and Gary D. Roach, ACE The team was loath to discard the tracks, even in instances where they were not technically perfect. "The performances were just too good," Lockett says. "You're not going to capture that moment again, and if there were a few technical flaws, we corrected them." McGeary and Lockett relied on iZotope RX3 Advanced to clean out the tracks. Besides, perfection would not be in the spirit of the story. "The movie opens with just Tommy [DeVito]'s quartet: Tommy, his brother on rhythm guitar, Nick on bass, and the drummer," Lockett says. "In those days, it's the beginning. Tommy's voice is not like the perfect Four Seasons voice that we know today. But how many of us when we're starting out are perfect? We maintain that vibe in the film." Many of the songs are performed in very specific venues — ranging from the intimacy of a dinner club to the cavernous space of an arena — and one of the biggest challenges McGeary and Lockett faced was tailoring the quality of the sound to the different environments. Sometimes the perspective of the sound changes within a single scene — for example, if Frankie tosses a microphone over to Nick during a performance. "We're getting all those perspectives, like the voice going away from him," Lockett says. "Everything is very detailed." How we hear the music depends on the angle from which we are seeing it performed — the difference between a close-up of one of the Four Seasons on stage versus a wide shot from the point-of-view of the audience. "Scoring mixer Bobby Fernandez painstakingly pre-mixed all these perspectives for us," Lockett says. "When we cut back to another cast member or the audience, your audio perspective will change." Tommy Lockett. Jersey Boys. Warner Bros. Pictures CineMontage_Jul-Aug_14-4.indd 29 6/18/14 5:44 PM