Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1436283
42 I m ps e . o rg door; standing by herself against it, her emotions and the situation all closing in on her. We went to these sequences in ADR and added in breath so every time that she's against the door we are with her breathing. The mixing challenge there was to make these moments feel natural so that audiences are just subtly aware of it, feeling more than thinking about the perspective and subtext. We initially mixed the movie during the deepest days of COVID in the summer 2020. I watched it in September and I took my own notes. I felt like we had solved many of the puzzles, but there were a few left that could be improved to land more decisively. I sent my notes to Rebecca and she concurred. She told me to stay tuned. Lo and behold, a few more months go by, and I find out that the film received the Dolby Atmos grant for Sundance. There was our opportunity to go back in and do some more mixing and solve the remaining puzzles! With that grant, I was also able to use the directional overhead sound to enhance Irene's POV—like when her kids are playing upstairs, I was able to literally put that stomping on her ceiling above the audience, a great Atmos perk! One of the final puzzles we cracked was Irene's tea party POV scene toward the end where she suddenly, deliberately drops the tea set. The goal was for us as viewers to be riding with her acute anxiety in that moment and feel what leads her to that action. We see close- ups of her holding this beautiful porcelain China tea set. She's incredibly nervous, she's shaking, she has to present herself calmly as a hostess to this gathering of folks, gliding through, effortlessly serving tea. Most of the people in her life who have fueled her turmoil, including Clare and her husband, are there. So our question was, how do we pull this off to feel like we're with her emotionally, in her mind? It was a choreography that took us a while to map out. Our solution was to make her voice and actions louder than life. Like, if you're anxious, you hear your own voice as more strident and noisier than you want it to be; everything is off and you're too loud. To do that, we made the people around her, the ones she is serving right next to her, sound abnormally low and quiet, while at the same time raising her speaking, breathing, and movement. As she moves through the rooms, her breathing becomes more pronounced. She eventually winds up in the room where Clare is sitting with Irene's husband in a window seat, talking to each other in a friendly, intimate way. Her friend Felise calls out to her, she seems far away. She then walks up, stands next to Irene, and starts talking to her as Irene struggles to absorb what she is seeing between Clare and her husband. It was a matter of honing in on all those small elements—like Felise's footsteps getting louder as she approaches Irene, or the tea set rattling as Irene walks with it. The At the outset, we discussed what might be important sounds, urban/industrial vs. natural—trac, elevated subways, car horns, etc. And because it is set in the late '20s in New York City, there was a lot of building and construction. –Jacob Ribicoff