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C A S Q U A R T E R L Y I W I N T E R 2 0 2 2 55 "It's like luck is really actually being ready when opportunity strikes. I was just determined to be ready." –David Fluhr CAS up the next evening. As David remembers, "I was not really happy with that assignment." Jerry asked him how it went, "and I said, 'fine,' you know, I was trying to be cool." Jerry then said, "You probably know the console pretty well by now, right? Because I have a show next week that I can't do that you're ready to do." So, David got a break and began to mix a documentary series for KCET called The Infinite Voyage. "It's like luck is really actually being ready when opportunity strikes. I was just determined to be ready." Revisiting I think another great way to learn is to look back on old projects, so I was eager to ask Larry what he remembered from his time working on Swingers (1996). He replied, "It was supposed to be a temp mix, it was a three-day mix. We did our best to make it as good as we could, knowing they would come back for the final. Then we got invited to the screening, and immediately I [thought], 'Wait, this is our temp mix!' It was certainly good enough, and it was a valuable lesson. Even though there was some guerrilla filmmaking, and some run-and-gun style recording of audio, it almost lends itself well to the project. The style of the film is almost cinema verité and, you know, it's really all about the story." One of Larry's fondest memories of that time was hanging out with Jon Favreau on the stage. "I would use this expression, 'I'm gonna put it in the room.' And he was like 'What does that mean?' and I was like, 'Oh, you know, put reverb on it to make it sound more realistic.' So, he just kept throwing it willy-nilly in conversations, 'Larry, are we putting that in the room? Let's put that in the room.' He's such a good guy. That was a gratifying experience." I asked Tom to think back to an older mix of his, and he thought Scorsese's 2010 film Shutter Island was one he was proud of that kind of fell under the radar. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio as a US marshal investigating the disap- pearance of a murderer who escaped from a hospital for the criminally insane, Tom was able to use all sorts of sound tricks to help the film play like a surrealistic nightmare. "I just love the tone of that movie," Tom said. "There were several sequences that were very difficult. The sequence where he climbs down the cliff, there was a ton of detail there. It was the ocean noise, the Foley, his hands on the rocks, and then those squealing rats. Then, inside the cave during the conversation with Patricia Clarkson, there was that fire going, and every lick of flame was an issue." With another scene inside Ward C, Tom recalls, "With the ambi- ence in there, Marty was very particu- lar. He only wanted to hear certain drips. You see all this water dripping, but you don't hear anything. They were trying to give this impression that things weren't as they seem. Through the whole movie, every scene had something like that in it." For David, staying on the forefront of R&D and innovation has been the through line of his career. In the 1990's at Larson Sound, David saw that Dolby Surround and LtRt were becoming big in theaters. "I wanted to incorporate it into the stereo world of television. So, I developed the workflow, I wrote it all down on paper, then I contacted Coach at Dolby, he was one of their main technicians at the time, and I ran it all by him. Then, Rick Larson gave me time on the stage to figure out how to do Dolby Surround with stems for TV and make it actually work." Fast- forward to 2013, David was preparing for his first Atmos mix on the movie Frozen. "When Atmos came around, people were mixing in 5.1 and then spending two weeks afterward up-mixing to Atmos. Disney felt it was untenable. So, unless we can figure out a way to do the main mix and all of the down conversions in an efficient manner, we aren't going to embrace the format." Disney gave David six months on Stage A by himself with Bryan Pennington and others from Dolby to R&D the process. "They gave me the opportunity to figure out object-based mixing and the console workflow. There were a lot of bugs, things would crash, the panners and Eucon interfaces had issues. But we had Avid and Dolby with us the whole time." These advancements come through real collaboration. "It's about not staying stagnant," and he reminds us, "we still need specialists." Evolving While mixing as a storytelling device has remained unchanged, certainly a lot has evolved over the years. For Larry, "I was always interested in trying to improve the quality of the production track. Over time, three mixers have shrunk to two, and now