Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/51295
Audio for Indies getting a great result in a short amount of time." MAN ON A LEDGE Re-recording mixer Greg Rus- sell, is a new hire at Technicolor's new sound facility at Paramount Studios (www.technicolor.com/en/ hi/theatrical/sound-post-produc- tion). He worked with fellow re- recording mixer, Jeffrey Haboush, on the Summit Entertainment film Man on a Ledge. The film was mixed at Sony Pictures Post (www. sonypicturespost.com), in the Kim Some of the Man on a Ledge audio team: (L-R) Jeffrey J. Haboush, Jim Jenson and Greg P. Russell. used an AMS Neve DFC Gemini. He also incorporated an Avid D-Command for the effects busing. "Give me three months to mix a film and I'd still want more time. Time is something I'm used to running out of. One challenge, from a mixing point of view, was to get the dialogue to a point where every single line was clear and of the quality it needed to be for a feature film mix." To save time during the final mix, Rhodes did a lot of pre-mixing and busing out of Pro Tools. By doing more in the box mixing, he was able to keep on schedule. "For indie films, you're up against the clock. You don't have as much time as you'd like. Luckily we had very well-recorded dialogue so that helped a lot. You don't have the chance to do ADR, or stuff like that. The challenge is Novak Theatre. Just one day after completing a four- month mix on Transformers 3, Greg Russell started to mix Man on a Ledge for producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura. This was Russell's last mix at Sony Pictures Post before making his move to Technicolor. "It's an indie film that happens to be made by one of the big- gest Hollywood producers on the planet right now, Lorenzo di Bonaventura, and his expectations, certainly from a creative standpoint for sound, were to give every bit of effort that we would give to a main stream Hollywood film." With a seasoned Hollywood post pro- duction crew, Man on a Ledge was a collabo- ration of top talent. "Lorenzo assembled a wonderful film, edited by Kevin Stitt, who did X-Men, Cloverfield and Lethal Weapon 4. He's a big editor," says Russell. "Then you have Jon Johnson, who is an acad- emy award-winner for U-571, and his team working on the sound design. Then you get me to mix the movie togeth- er with Jeff Haboush, and we've gotten a lot of Oscar nominations. I've mixed the Transformers films for Loren- zo, and last year I did Salt. So Lorenzo assembled, for this indie movie, a really state-of- the-art crew." Having only a handful of people at the helm, the approval process for Man on a Ledge was much quicker than on the studio-backed films Russell mixed for di Bonaventura in the past. Even though they were on a strict schedule, Russell, and co-mixer Haboush, were still able to try different ideas because they were present- ing them to a small group. "This was about making the movie Lorenzo was looking 40 Post • January 2012 www.postmagazine.com for," explains Russell. "He didn't have a studio telling him what movie to make. Creatively, Lorenzo wanted to make an exciting, indie- yet-mainstream kind of hybrid movie. We had the freedom to execute the movie he wished to make. Lorenzo, Asger Leth the director, and Mark Vahradian, another pro- ducer on the film, were the guys we played the movie back for, and got approval from. There was a lot of trust." Being able to collaborate as a small group, everyone involved added a new creative ele- ment. "We got to play with this film and do what we love to do, and in the end everyone brought wonderful things to the table," says Russell. "It was a great collaborating environ- ment because everyone felt like they could contribute. That's one of the strongest aspects of indie filmmaking. The people involved feel that they're important, that their voice is relevant, that their ideas are relevant. It's in that collaboration that allows you unique filmmaking." A large part of the film takes place on the ledge of a high-rise building in New York City, where the main character, Nick Cassidy, is holding a simultaneous conversation with a police psychologist and his brother, who is perpetrating a heist to obtain a diamond that Cassidy was falsely accused of stealing. Their conversations are extremely vital to the film's plot. Despite the problematic location, the production dialogue was relatively clean. The biggest issue was caused by buffeting wind, which Russell was able to use to his advan- tage. "We utilized the wind to give us a contrasting texture to work with, other than just the city sounds. That was a nice idea by Jon Johnson, the sound designer, to use some low-end, chesty wind, when we are up on the ledge. The wind is a big player." Using wind sounds was also a way for Rus- sell to shift perspective from being up on the ledge, to down on the ground with the crowd. Close to the crowd, the wind is very minimal, and the sound of the crowd is prominent. As the perspective shifts back to the ledge, the crowd becomes more distant and reverber- ant, as their sound is reflected off the buildings. "We want to create that realism and that sense of space. When he's up high, the reflec- tions of the crowd noise bounce off the build- ings and give you the sense of how far away he is from them. The sense of space can really be dramatically enhanced with sound." To create the building reflections, Russell used the Lexicon 480L reverb, as well as reverb units from TC Electronic. Man on a Ledge has a wide dynamic range, from a massive train crash down to the fear- infused breathing of the police psychologist as she steps out onto the ledge. Playing with the continued on page 47