CAS Quarterly

I was watching the "Transformation" episode (Season 2, Ep. 4) and one of the cuts goes from the huge sound of Te Fiti [the mountain lady in Moana (2016)] to Pinocchio waking up as a human [Pinocchio (1940)]. The thing is, even though it went from a Dolby Atmos source to a mono source, there wasn't anything sonically "missing"—and I'm listening for the "missing" as a mixer! David: That goes with what we were saying earlier about being true to the original. A lot of making the transitions work was planning the tails and having handles on things. Shannon gave me plenty so that I could tailor it as needed once we got into the mix. I also used some reverb to help those transitions not be so obvious. However, we did have a mandate from the studio to protect the sound of those earlier lms. We could have certainly done as has been done before where mono lms are up-mixed to 5.1, but that was not the mission in this case. Shannon: We tried to stay true to all of the lms. So, we didn't want to tone down something like Moana that's very modern with a very lush mix and we didn't want to amp up something like Pinocchio and make it into some sort of different lm than it was. Something I also noticed was the use of perspective. When dialogue is present in a project, it's not uncommon to keep the focus on the center where the dialogue is. Here, since there isn't dialogue or music, the space comes across as a little more "real" with the use of perspective. Was this approach something you two spoke about? Shannon: I provided some things to help with the panning and the lack of dialogue. You try to ll the space, but not over ll it. I know David also did a lot of panning tricks. David: Shannon provided the foundation so sounds that were moving [on screen] would be moving and I might enhance it or change it or alter it— normal things we do when mixing. Once you go down that perspective road, you have to gure out how much you're going to do because you could be establishing it for one cut, but the next cut might not really feel like it needs it or it might feel too much. You're looking at the big picture. You don't want something distracting or that's out of the Zen mission. Shannon, with the elements that needed to be recreated, since they're from older films, were you taking the approach to how those sounds would have been created back in their day? Shannon: I'll give an example. In "Transformation," which you mentioned earlier, there was a particular scene from Brother Bear where we didn't have the original effects stem on its own, all we had was the effects with music, so a lot of that had to be recreated. Using David Bess' guide of just the effects and music, I tried to sort of recreate the effects using the Jimmy MacDonald library and other things that we had available. Did you have to hold yourself back a little, given the access to so many sounds and so many cleanly recorded sounds? Shannon: Well, it would be really easy to go crazy with that, and you know, try to get creative. But I didn't want to go too far in that direction because, again, we wanted to keep it true to the original lm. And on David's end as well, we didn't want to have, say, Pinocchio's sounds spinning all around in all the available speakers. " THE CONCEPT OF ZENIMATION IS IT'S A MINDFUL SPACE. IT'S ABOUT HONORING THE VISUAL AND SONIC ARTISTS. " –DAVID FLUHR CAS CREATED AND EDITED BY David Bess SOUND DESIGNER Shannon Mills SKYWALKER SOUND SOUND EFFECTS EDITOR Cameron Barker SKYWALKER SOUND RE-RECORDING MIXER David E. Fluhr CAS EXECUTIVE PRODUCER Amy Astley HEAD OF POST PRODUCTION Bérénice Robinson DIGITAL IMAGING MANAGER Robert H. Bagley POST PRODUCTION COORDINATOR Alyse Gellis MEDIA EDITORIAL SUPPORT ENGINEERS Gabriel Stewart, Lutzner Rodriguez RE-RECORDING MIX TECHNICIAN Eric Flickinger GRAPHIC DESIGN Erin Ong ZENIMATION CREDITS

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