Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1487730
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S I 41 hesitant to tell people how busy I was. I felt bad, a lot of people were out of work, and here I am with 6½ hours of Zack Snyder wonderfulness to work on. Truth to be told, we didn't know about Zack's four-hour cut of Justice League that they greenlit until May 2020. That came out of nowhere while we were working on Army of the Dead. We got sent home on Army of the Dead the second week of March and began working from home. We were really lucky because we'd already had our first temp dub, so the foundation of the soundtrack was already established. I'm old school. I like to work in person with my crew. Some supervisors don't mind if some of their crew work from home or at a different facility. I had most of our rooms in one hallway, and I like to be able to go from room to room and work with the sound editors whether it's dialog, Foley, sound design, and interact and collaborate with my crew. I know some supervisors like to privately download the editor's session and start moving stuff around and changing some of the sounds. I like to work with the people who put the reel together and we make it a collaborative, creative adventure. Luckily, we had already built a foundation getting to our first director's cut temp mix. So only because of that did I feel comfortable finishing the film from home, because now, my paradigm of working directly with my crew is at least on hold. That was a huge adjustment for me and my crew. It was a lot harder to communicate, but it ended up working out really well. The only one attached to our Formosa server is our assistant Brad Sokol. He was the only conduit for things going to and coming from our editors. He would get the turnovers from the cutting room, put it on the server, distribute it to all the editors through Aspera, and then the editors would Aspera stuff back to Brad, and he would put it on the server. I would get sessions to review, give my notes, and then review the fixes. We did that beginning in March, and we were supposed to be done in August. We didn't start working on Justice League until late July, so we only overlapped for a month. I was on the dub stage for Army of the Dead while we were starting the four-hour Snyder Cut. A lot of Zack Snyder's Justice League was like being an anthropologist, really. It was going and digging up the work that we had originally done in 2016 and 2017. We hadn't prepared all four hours, but we had prepared 2½ hours of that before Zack left the project in 2017 after his director's cut, when his daughter suddenly passed away. Thank God we didn't have to start from scratch on a four-hour Zack Snyder film from home. It was more of an excavation project of going to our server and culling all those sessions from a few years prior. We realized that there was still an hour and a half that we had not touched, so that was created from scratch. Much of the sound design work we did for the Joss Whedon version was still relevant but Zack reworked all the VFX affecting the timing of those sounds, as well as adding new visuals to address sonically. Even though the action set pieces were fairly similar in both versions, there was still a lot of work to do. We started at the end of July of 2020, and then we finished it in February of 2021. Considering that it was four hours, we didn't have that long to work on it. The only complication that came up while trying to finish Zack's Justice League was at the last minute. They ended up wanting to recast and reshoot scenes with the helicopter pilot in Army of the Dead. We had to wait until they shot that material in the winter of 2020. Then we had to go back on the dub stage at Formosa Group as I was finishing Zack Snyder's Justice League at Warner Bros. They needed to update the mix on all the scenes in Army of the Dead with this new actor, so all the reels were affected. In the final month, I was driving back-and- forth between our final mix at Warner Bros. on Justice League to Formosa Group in Hollywood to tend to Army of the Dead. We had some night sessions too at Formosa, just to be able to finish that up. The last month was just nuts. It had been a long haul. We had been working for 15 months straight on 6½ hours of Zack Snyder films. EM: What's the first thing you did after you stepped away from Pro Tools? SH: It's so strange, that's one of the more difficult parts of what we do. The good news is it's feast or famine for me. When you're done with a film, all of a sudden, that 100 miles an hour pace goes down to zero. It's such an adjustment for your brain and your body. Much of my life has been work, work, work! Not having been married with kids, most of my focus has been on my work. I always have plenty of fun when I'm not working, but part of the big transition is, "What do I want to do now after 15 months of intense work?" Fortunately, that was right when the COVID vaccine came out and travel was an option again. One of the first things my fiancée Kris, and I did was to get vaccinated and we went to visit my 86-year-old mom in Florida. Next, we went to visit Kris's two sons in Louisiana and our five grandkids. We had great family time in Louisiana and Florida. Finally, we took some time for just the two of us and went to Exuma in the Bahamas for a nice tropical getaway. EM: Back in the beginning of your career, one of the earliest projects that you worked on was you were a Foley editor on The Empire Strikes Back. What was that like for you? King Leonidas stands tall against the elements in 300. Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.