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[ Cont.from 25 ] OSCAR PICKS animators discussing the light and how to make it look realistic on film. It was a whole catalog of problems." Those problems were ultimately solved by a team headed by visual effects pioneer Douglas Trumbull (2001: A Space Odyssey) at 'Skunkworks,' based in Austin, along with effects from Prime Focus VFX, Double Negative. One Of Us, Method Studios, Evil Eye Pictures and others. Image processing was by Lowry Digital. Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol features some stunning visual effects work by ILM, including scenes set at the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building, located in Dubai, and sand storms. All the work was supervised by ILM veteran John Knoll, Oscar-winner for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. Addi- tional effects work was done by Fuel VFX. And Trans- formers: Dark of the Moon featured an army of VFX artists and technicians from Legend 3D, ILM, Digital Domain, Prime Focus and several other companies. Digital Domain also helped bring Real Steel's robots to life. Erik Nash was the studio's VFX supervisor. SOUND DESIGN, MIXING AND SCORES As with visual effects, Oscar has usually gone for the most splashy in the sound design and mixing categories — last year's big winner was Inception — and likely contenders include Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, showcasing sound design by Gary Rydstrom, along with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows and Transformers: Dark of the Moon, with The Descendants, War Horse, J. Edgar, Carnage, The Ides of March and Hugo also pos- sibly in the running. But it's not just the big live-action films that show- case sound. Ironically, retro silent film The Artist relies on an inspired score by Ludovic Bource, recorded at the Bijloke Studio in Brussels with 80 musicians from the Flanders Philharmonic. "It was a wonderful experi- ence for me, and now I want to do another silent film," he says. "It was just so magical." 2011 was a busy year for Spanish composer Alber- to Iglesias; first, he scored Pedrwwwo Almodovar's The Skin I Live In, a crazy modern opera stuffed full of sex, murder, rape, revenge — and plastic surgery, along with serious themes about the nature of identity and creation. Then he switched gears and scored the bleak spy thriller Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (both were done at Air Studios, London). Stephen Griffiths and Andy Shel- ley were the supervising sound editors, and Howard Bargroff and Doug Cooper were the re-recording mixers on the film at De Lane Lea. Sound also played a "key role" in Gnomeo and Juliet, the garden-gnomes-meet-Shakespeare mash-up, reports director/co-writer Kelly Asbury. "We had this great score by Elton John, but we were still surprised just how big and crucial a role all the sound work played in creating this totally believable world. Glenn Freemantle and his team worked diligently during our post production in London to contribute a sound that perfectly captures the heightened reality that these gnomes live in." AUDIO FOR INDIES [ Cont.from 40 ] dynamics of a film is always a fun challenge for Russell. "I'm a big fan of dynamics. I'm a big fan of contracting the sound down to something very small and then exploding and expanding a sound field. Playing with that dynamic range throughout a movie is always challenging and no different for this movie. It's about making really nice choices throughout the movie so we can be intimate when necessary and then hit you over the head with something very dynamic." Russell mixed the film on a Harrison MPC4-D con- sole. For the opening scene, he relied on the Harrison's sub-harmonic synthesizer plug-in to add low-end to the click-clack of a subway train. "We start out with the sound of a subway train that fades up, and it has a lot of low-end on the rhythmic click-clack sound of the train. So you have this very low-end rumble coming up out of black to reveal him coming up out of the subway. You feel this low-end presence rumbling up to the reveal of the city, and I thought this was clever. That was one of Lorenzo's notes, right from the beginning, is to have more low-end as we come up into the shot." The film was mixed in 5.1, and Russell believes that it is a very immersive experience. In particular, he used the surround channels for the wind sounds to help put the audience up on the ledge too. "Spatially speaking, it's a nice, big, open soundscape. There were some great opportunities in the movie to play with the sound. Going in, they said, 'Well, it's an indie movie so there's not a lot happening. It's a guy on a ledge.' In reality, it's so much more than that." FOR ELLEN Ian Stynes is chief audio engineer/re-recording mixer at Great City Productions (www.greatcityprod. com) in New York. He recently mixed the independent film For Ellen, which is premiering at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah this later this month. The landscape in For Ellen is very bleak, and the soundscape reflects that. Stynes wanted to immerse the audience in the environment and in the emotion of the main character. "It's a story about an indie rocker who has to face decisions he's made in his life. It's set in a very stark, cold environment, which reflects his inner emotional turmoil. As the movie progresses, he gets more and more sucked into this environment, so we really tried to build the soundscape around that idea." Wide shots were frequently used throughout the film to put the audience in the environment. During these wide shots, Stynes used the advantage of a 5.1 set-up to put different mono ambiences in different speakers at the same time. This added depth and texture to the soundscape, as well as made the envi- ronment sound bigger. "The director and producer were definitely up for exploring unconventional ways of making the mix bigger," explains Stynes. "They were into exploring the 5.1 soundscape, so we played with putting things in the rear speakers and moving things around." Another way of making the sound big was to immerse the audience in music. "There are many moments in this film where the music takes over. It'll slowly come up and then take over and get huge. That happens a lot. It's sort of a theme in the movie." Director/writer/producer So Yong Kim and pro- ducer Bradley Rust Gray, were very focused on sound from the beginning. To save time during the mix, they recorded and cataloged ambiences, footsteps and other unique sounds while on set. These location sounds were essential to having an efficient audio post session. "A lot of indie filmmakers don't think about sound until the end, and then it's our job to rebuild the sound from scratch," says Stynes. "In this case, So and Brad were great because all through the filming they were thinking, 'We're going to need footsteps of Paul, the main character, outside the motel with his boots on. And then we're going to need footsteps of him in the bar when he's dancing around.' They recorded him right after the scene, without any other sound, to get all the movement. They were kind of doing the Foley as they went along. I think a lot of indie filmmakers should take a page from their book, because it may take a little more time when they're recording the scenes, but in the long run, it saves them a ton of time and money in post production." For the dialogue, Kim and Gray did the initial dia- logue edit themselves. According to Stynes, a lot of leg work was already done, such as finding alternate takes and inserting the correct ambience or room tone into the edit. "If one take didn't work, they would go through and find another take themselves. They know the film so well that it was easy for them," says Stynes. With the initial dialogue edit built, Stynes's job was to clean up the tracks. For noise reduction, he used the Waves Restoration Bundle and the WNS Noise Sup- pression plug-in. After the tracks were clean, he then added compression. "With this movie my approach was to really watch a lot of older movies and try to get into bringing a certain amount of warmth back into the mix. I used a lot of compression and a lot of older compressor simulators, like the EMI RS124, which is an Abbey Road compressor simulator. I really tried to warm up the dialogue. That was the biggest thing for me." Stynes finished the 5.1 mix in two weeks using an Avid ICON D-Control with Pro Tools HD Native. For final EQ and compression, he used several Waves plug- ins, including the EQ3, L360 Surround Limiter, L3 Multi- maximizer, H-Comp, Renaissance Compressor, the Restoration Bundle and Q10. He also used the Aphex Aural Exciter plug-in, Audio Ease's Altiverb and Speaker- phone plug-ins and the Decapitator plug-in by Sound- Toys. "I actually put the SoundToys Decapitator on my dialogue bus very lightly," he says. "It's a really warm setting. It sounds like old analog gear. It's kind of fun." Mixing an independent film gave Stynes the oppor- tunity to push boundaries and stray from conventional straightforward mixing techniques. In working closely with Kim and Gray, Stynes says, "The challenge was to see how far you can take their vision with all these new and unique sounds. They had a real vision of where they wanted to go with it. And it was not a typical way of thinking about sound. It was fun to take that idea and realize it. Often filmmakers just want it to be a very conventional straight ahead mix. With So and Brad, I was able to try new things and see what we could do." www.postmagazine.com Post • January 2012 47