Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1401019
38 I m ps e . o rg —you know, coming up with the creative approach. We defi nitely didn't want to, as you said, "modernize" ... when the original intent was not that at all. They didn't have the technology at that time, so we kept it very much as it was. So I would use an Academy Curve, and keep it fairly mono-based. The trick was getting in and out of that, so that it wouldn't suddenly feel very diff erent (when transitioning to a newer clip). But we wanted to keep the original spirit of the director's intent, of the original material. So having the original library, Shannon's expertise in enhancing some of the things we couldn't get —and then mixing it all together and trying to make it feel organic. SL: Shannon, I imagine that's a little intimidating, creating a lot of material that didn't exist originally, because of either the sparse amount of sound they used—or if the only sound e ects track available for the scene was married to music. SM: It IS a little intimidating! Defi nitely! Luckily, we had access to the Jimmy Macdonald library, which has been restored and made digital. That was a very handy thing to have with us to recreate some of this stuff . SL: I imagine you also had to go in and add Foley where there was none before. Who performed that for you? SM: That was mostly John Roesch. And some of it was library, because we were trying to make it not sound too modern. So sometimes we would pull from pre-recorded Foley from a diff erent era. Try to sneak it in there. And a lot of our own recordings. Like, you were saying, for Bambi, there wasn't any Foley at all for most of those scenes. We kind of had to start from scratch for those. DF: Having John Roesch involved… his legacy goes back quite a number of years with us. And is still with us to this day. His sonic footprint is still with it. SL: Oh yeah. I remember some of the masterful things that he did on Beauty and the Beast. Lumiere's fl ame throughout the fi lm was John Roesch performing it—by just blowing on a microphone. DF: The fi lms are music-driven, and there's sometimes nothing in the sound eff ects. Like Bambi just has fi re, and a gunshot! That's pretty early on, but it's evolved now to the point where it's not like that at all. It's very sophisticated. But yeah, when you strip away some of these big music moments, which are also so many of the emotional moments that David chose, it required Shannon's hand to give it life again. AA: I had a little bit of an internal "purist's" debate! Like, is this okay? Here's where we landed with that. We were so fortunate to have Disney Animation sound greats in Shannon Mills and David Fluhr. With Shannon, who had done the sound design on Big Hero 6, just did it for Raya and the Last Dragon, and currently The Lion King © Disney