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18 S P R I N G 2 0 1 6 C A S Q U A R T E R L Y C anada can sometimes seem like such a different film community than Hollywood. I am always curious of peoples' stories on how they got their start in this cir- cus of an industry. Chris shares: "I started my sound career in Winnipeg. At the beginning of my final year of high school, I started working at a radio station, first on the FM side as a board operator running the jazz show on Sunday mornings. A short time later, the AM side hired me to do midnight to 6 a.m. on weekends, as well as editing and transferring commercials from 2-track tape to carts for the booths. A few months into working there, I began producing a weekly radio show called the Basement Tapes, which featured interviews with local bands and included live performances in studio. All of which I recorded, edited, and mixed down onto two track reels to be supplied for air. It was nice to start with a grease pencil and razor blade. From there, I expanded into live sound, which included folk and jazz festivals. Finally, on the advice of my brother, I moved out to Vancouver and pursued sound in the world of film. That was 20 years ago. Where did the time go?" I was curious of what Chris is up to currently as well as how he spends his off time. "I have just finished working on War for the Planet of the Apes, followed by the Pirates of the Caribbean reshoots. I like the free- dom that being a production sound mixer provides and as such, try to keep my work to about seven months a year. That gives me a great work/life balance. When I'm not working, most of my time is spent at home on Salt Spring Island in the Gulf Islands off the coast of BC—just a short floatplane trip from Vancouver. It's a beautiful place to call home with an enormous amount of musicians and artists. Time to call some up and sink back into my first love, music!" Chris offered up some final thoughts in regard to his experi- ence and his peers. "I would like to add that sometimes on a project, the right alchemy arises where the team is not only strong but thorough and passionate from beginning to end. I could not be more delighted to have such an amazing post team take what we cap- tured and add their incredible talents to the mix. What Jon Taylor, Frank Montaño, Randy Thom, and the sound army of post technicians were able to achieve in crafting a subtle yet powerful finished product is some- thing I will be eternally grateful for and will inspire me in my future work." Jon Taylor CAS and Frank Montaño: Re-recording Mixers Speaking of the "sound army in post," I sat down for lunch with Jon Taylor. He and his partner, Frank Montaño, worked as two-of-the-three re- recording mixers. They work together at Universal Pictures StudioPost. Jon Taylor remarks: "I knew that this was going to be the toughest film I've ever worked on. And I knew it because you're basically creating sound for Alejandro. After reading the script and talking to Alejandro, I knew that it was going to be immersive—meaning that everything is panned. I got a hold of the production tracks very early on so I would have a better idea of how much ADR was going to be necessary. And not ADR because of recording—but ADR because of separation. [With music], Alejandro for the most part, knows what he wants and, even though it's incredibly complex, usually it's not really wide. It's "He knows what it is," you know? This had probably twice as much music as I thought it would. And you don't really remember much music in this film, but there's a lot more in this than there usually is. The reason for that was he never wanted nature to disappear. So there were a lot of spaces in the music to make sure that nature continues." An interesting question to examine is the idea of how authen- tically "dirty" the film feels while appearing so visually stun- ning. "Nature was the most important thing in this film. Alejandro said that from the very beginning. It was like you always want to feel like you're there immersed in nature. And as beautiful as it may be sometimes, it's powerful and scary and frightening at other times. His movies are powerful. They're moving in a way that gives you a real harsh sense of reality. That's very important for him to make his audience members feel like they're just slightly uncomfortable. And, absolutely, it's a beautifully shot film. And the grunge, the distortion, the height—everything hitting almost the microphone to make it sound dirty was very important. Even in the dialogue. We didn't clean any of the tracks. There's nothing taken out. We try to leave it very raw. When someone yells, you know it! And in a theater calibrated at 85 dB SPL, it sounds like a barking dog almost and it's sup- posed to sort of put you on your toes. "The music, in a lot of cases, these beautiful strings—may also be distorted to never give you a sense of real beauty. You know, there's always a contrast with the picture. The harsh- ness is truly Alejandro's reality. It's really just about making sure everybody else understands that it has to be dirty. We started dirty. We started and then Alejandro comes in, he says, "It's too clean, too pristine. Let's really dirty it up." And he's not a random guy at all. Everything is precision. He picks up on things that are too clean. So I've distorted the ADR on this movie more than I've ever distorted. I mean, literally, just distorted, crunched, saturated. But he'll pick up on Foley things. If it has a real nice, pretty high end, he'll call it out and he'll say, 'That doesn't belong.' Incredibly keen ear. Because he only goes from feel. Only, you know, emotion, what moves him. The quality of the sound will either make him feel good or feel bad." This film was to be mastered in Atmos right off the bat. Frank Montaño points out he used his rig to capture for this format: "The atmospheres for The Revenant were a main character thoughout. It was man versus nature at all times. The cin- ematography was brilliantly done, which allowed us the dra- matic license to really create an immersive final mix." Jon Taylor and I talked in detail about immersion and how they went about it. Jon Taylor CAS and Frank Montaño: Re-recording mixer Jon Taylor CAS Re-recording mixer Frank A. Montaño