CAS Quarterly

Spring 2023

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30 S P R I N G 2 0 2 3 I C A S Q U A R T E R L Y A Peek Inside Score Mixing West Side Story (2021) Coming off a great interview for the Winter 2023 CAS Quarterly with masterful scoring mixer Shawn Murphy, I wanted to pick his brain about working on the sole musical nominated in last year's CAS Awards "Live Action" category, West Side Story. Following are some excerpts from our discussion. What was it like working on the updated West Side Story? It was obviously a huge gift to be able to work on a project like that. Especially with Steven [Spielberg] and his people, who are all just absolutely the best. Where did the recording take place? The recording was done initially in New York. It would have all been done in New York had it not been for the pandemic. We were down to one final group of sessions which was due to take place in March of 2020. The week before, we were going to travel to New York [but we] all went home and stayed home, in our case, for about three months. We were really fortunate, in terms of our production, to get back to work in mid-to-late June. We did our pickup sessions in July and August in Los Angeles with a different orchestra, on a different stage, and with COVID spacing. The challenge was to integrate that material with the on-camera performances. I can imagine it was challenging to match— kind of like matching ADR to production dialogue. We have this material from New York, all of which had been recorded and mixed all in one. Now we're doing [overdubs] with the LA Philharmonic at Fox with space settings that had to match because a lot of it was intercut, so that was a challenge. b y D a v i d B o n d e l e v i t c h C A S M P S E

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