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12 S P R I N G 2 0 1 7 C A S Q U A R T E R L Y MEET THE WINNERS MOTION PICTURES LIVE ACTION LA LA LAND by Karol Urban CAS MPSE La La Land is an original musical that echoes back to the silver screen days of the past while showing off the beauty of today's Los Angeles, starring Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling. It is a timeless classic story of the trials and spoils of following one's dreams. La La Land inarguably casted a spell over all of Tinseltown, leaving it abuzz this awards season. The movie garnered, among others, six Oscars ® , six Golden Globes, five BAFTAs, and one CAS Award for Outstanding Achievement in Sound Mixing for Motion Pictures – Live Action. The genre leans very heavily on its soundtrack and on the sleight of hand of its mixers to dive in and out of dramatic dialogue into fully expansive dance numbers and intimate heart- felt ballads. The award-winning team consisted of production mixer Steve Morrow CAS, re-recording mixers Andy Nelson CAS and Ai-Ling Lee, scoring mixer Nicholai Baxter, ADR mixer David Betancourt, and Foley mixer James Ashwill. This production, indicative of its genre, has many unique challenges and possible workflows. Nicholai started recording and mixing the music before production even began to ensure significant material would be available for playback. Nicholai expands, "This started with recording as much as possible before we went to set, building the playback sessions for the shoot, managing playback and live recording on set, recording all of the music and vocals in post production, mixing the music for the final dub, and mixing the soundtrack." Nicholai also had the unusual privilege of being present on set for musical num- bers. "On most projects I've worked on in the past, I've been brought on during post production. This can be frustrating as you attempt to fix mistakes that were made on set, or struggle with not having the elements you need from the shoot. You end up applying a lot of bandages. Being involved from the very beginning, we were able to stop com- mon problems at the source. I had the privilege/advantage of being able to record anything on set (as long as it didn't interfere with the shot), record impulse responses of all the actual envi- ronments from the film, and keep a close eye on any potential sync issues or musical performance issues. This made what was already going to be a huge undertaking in post production much more manageable," explains Baxter. Andy Nelson, re-recording mixer, has mixed many musicals that were all playback and others like Les Miserables that were entirely live. He describes La La Land as "one that kind of fell halfway in the middle." For example, the vocals for "Audition" and "City of Stars" were recorded on set while other tunes like "Roommates" had partial-production-recorded vocals and the song on the free- way was completely playback. Morrow explains that, in the opening traffic number, "The singers in the song were not the singers on screen for this one. So our main goal was to play the song out loud up and down the freeway on both sides while still hiding all the speakers and wiring. We put the play- back speakers behind every other car's bumper on the ground on both sides of the freeway. In addition, my boom man, Craig Dollinger, pushed a cart with two powered speakers and a generator on it to follow the main singer and make sure he doesn't have an empty spot." The overall smoothness of the crosses from spoken dra- matic lines to musical numbers was particularly impressive in La La Land. Nelson explains, "The ever problem of musicals is where you go from the spoken word to the songs or playback … obviously where it was a live vocal it was all live anyway, so Production mixer Steven A. Morrow CAS, re-recording mixers Andy Nelson CAS and Ai-Ling Lee, scoring mixer Nicholai Baxter, and ADR mixer David Betancourt