CAS Quarterly

C A S Q U A R T E R L Y I FA L L 2 0 2 1 21 David: With those recreations, I would mix in the spirit of those original releases—not going too wide, almost Academy Curve, A/B-ing against the original to retain the spirit of the original mix. What was the approach to session layout with all the different source formats? Shannon: We had so many different formats in one session. Some of those movies are really old and some of them are really new. We had everything from Atmos to mono and we had many different track layouts that we had to weave between. David: We built everything for the biggest version so that we didn't have to add tracks. We had 25 stem tracks which included Atmos, 7.1, 5.1, LCRS— because they were original 4-track mags that had been digitized for features like Beauty and the Beast—along with stereo and mono. Then we had A FX, B FX, and C FX—just like with a typical movie pre-dub—where each of those would be 16 stereo and 16 mono. We also had two sets of backgrounds, each consisting of 20 stereos and four monos. And on my end, I also had reverbs and VCA's for each food group that I could spill out as needed. Shannon, did you make some editing choices with the mix in mind? Shannon: Sure. Depending on where David Bess made the cut, a section might go from mono to LCR to 7.1 back to mono. So, there were a lot of cases where I would enhance some of the big key moments so that David could keep them sounding similar and help the transitions. David, were you given a directive on how to approach the mix? David: You know, the concept of Zenimation is it's a mindful space. It's about honoring the visual and sonic artists and taking out all the dialogue and music and just presenting it. So, part of the challenge was that we could technically get to all these elements but, man, sometimes they would not be so pleasant to listen to, maybe grinding or grating a little bit. What I was sort of focused on was the smoothness of it and Shannon provided me these beautiful layouts that enabled us to kind of ow with each episode and to blend things so that it was still Zen, so to speak. Early in my mixing days, when I was working on live action, I did a project for director Billy Friedkin. He came into the room and said, "We're all like good doctors here. First, do no harm." That phrase stuck with me and is a pillar of my mix approach. To me, it means don't automatically reach for the eq and start tweaking and turning knobs. Just because you have something available, that doesn't mean you should use it. ORIGINAL SOUND DESIGN BY Richard L. Anderson, Lon E. Bender, Odin Benitez, Mike Chock, Robert O. Cook, Louis L. Edemann, Cameron Frankley, Richard C. Franklin, Jr., Mark Mangini, Tim Nielsen, Gary Rydstrom, C.O. Sly eld, Dave Stone, and Addison Teague ZENIMATION CREDITS BROTHER BEAR (2003) TANGLED (2010) MOANA (2016) LITTLE MERMAID (1989) WRECK-IT-RALPH (2012) FROZEN 2 (2019)

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