Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1335892
54 I M PS E . O R G talked through the various formats and settled on 5.1 for a couple of reasons. As much as we all love Dolby Atmos, it was pretty clear during the pandemic that the majority of our viewers would be watching at home and that stereo and 5.1 would be the predominant playback environments, so why not just make a really robust 5.1 mix and a carefully constructed 2.0 from the 5.1 stems vs. spending the extra time wrangling three formats. The other reason is that I had just finished mixing I'm Your Woman (also for Amazon) with Julian Slater over at Sony, and we mixed that film in 5.1. It was the first time in quite a while that both of us had mixed in 5.1 as the trend is now Atmos or 7.1, and we were reminded of just how great 5.1 can sound. I'm Your Woman is also a period piece and the simplicity of a 5.1 mix seemed to fit well with the period nature of the film. I don't think Miami suffers at all from being a non-Atmos mix, and if given the choice to do it all again, I would settle on 5.1 as the preferred format for this film. One of the biggest challenges in the mix besides all of the obvious and typical challenges was working with the score—solo improvisational piano which was recorded live to picture and masterfully edited by Louie Schultz. The piano was recorded over several sessions while we were final mixing, and in many cases, we would have to play the piano that had been recorded the night before against everything else on stage in order to inform further refinements that would then be recorded again the next evening, rinse and repeat. So we got the score a little later in the process than I would have liked, but that's OK. The next challenge was getting it to sit in the mix against some very dense moments like the fights. I play piano, and I mix a fair bit of music still for fun and so I have a lot of plug-ins in my toolkit that are more music-oriented, including compressors and eq's that faithfully recreate vintage gear. I ended up leaning on Plugin Alliance's eq and compression from Lindell and Shadow Hills to shape the piano. I try to keep things simple while mixing, an exercise in subtraction rather than addition, clearing out things that we don't need to tell our story rather than throwing everything up on the screen. We have some very dense and loud moments and some whisper quiet moments where every little detail gets to shine, and I think we were able to craft a dynamic mix that holds up well both in the theater and at home. Finally, I'd just like to thank everyone on my team for their tireless contributions, and to thank Regina and the producers for having us along for this incredible ride. I wanted nothing more than to do right by these four men and their legacies, and to do right by Regina, and I couldn't have done it without the help of everyone mentioned here. We are a community of artists working together to bring voice to important issues, and the satisfaction comes in knowing that we all gave our everything in the pursuit of that voice. I hope you enjoy One Night in Miami as much as we enjoyed making it.