Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/964731
www.postmagazine.com 30 POST APRIL 2018 starred in The Greatest Showman) walks through a packed subway station and misses her train. She waits alone on the platform for the next one to ar- rive. A lady appears and sets a Walmart box on the ground. Settle walks over to it, opens the box, and climbs in. She's magically transported to the hallway of a middle school, which leads to an auditorium where a young girl is standing on a stage in front of a microphone. The crowd of children jeers at her; they laugh and boo. Settle whispers to the girl who then finds her courage and belts out her song. That scene transitions to Settle singing on-stage in front of an enthusiastic crowd in a large theater. "The spot has a great anti-bullying message and it was my favorite spot out of the three in the campaign that they played during the Oscars," notes Freer. During the dreamlike sequence where Settle visits the young girl on-stage, Freer was able to use the surround field to make the audience feel as though they're on-stage, too. "We put the crowd sounds of the kids booing and bullying more up front so that it felt more in your face, like you're right there with the girl. The impact felt bigger," says Freer. When the full music track kicks in, Freer was able to spread the music stems into the surrounds, to envelop the viewer in the sound. For those big crowd effects, "I had that up front to match the perspective of the singer," says Freer. "The crowds really come through in the 5.1 mix." LUCK Y POST Award-winning mixer Scottie Richardson at Lucky Post in Dallas, TX (www.lucky-post.com) says that hearing commercials broadcast in 5.1 surround is becoming more common. "It used to be that the receiver would toggle back and forth between 5.1 and stereo for every other commercial because the show I was watching was broadcast in 5.1 and only a handful of the commercials were in 5.1. Now, I feel like the 5.1 commercials are always there. But if you don't have a 5.1 receiver on your end, then the mix deflects to the stereo Lt/Rt," he says. "The scary thing (and it's always been this way) is that you never know what a person has at his or her house, speaker-wise. If they do have a 5.1 setup, you don't know if it's set up correctly," says Richardson. So when mixing in 5.1, he uses the surrounds just to open up the mix by adding some ambience into the rears or splashing the music back there. "I don't do any trickery where the sound is spinning around the room. In the commercial world, there isn't Hollywood-style mixing all the time. Those projects do come along once in a while, but often times it's Eleven's Ben Freer used Waves M360 Surround Manager & Mixdown for The Box. Lucky Post mixed Choctaw Casino's spot in 5.1.