Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1500716
32 S U M M E R 2 0 2 3 I C A S Q U A R T E R L Y MOTION PICTURES – DOCUMENTARY MOONAGE DAYDREAM by DANIEL VASQUEZ V. CAS Moonage Daydream is a vivid experience crafted through montages of images, dialogue, sound effects, and, of course, David Bowe's musical legacy. It's a cinematic experience, a ride through exhilarating and delirious emotions and sensations, an epiphany on the perception of life and of Bowie's expression through art. It's a film that took creative and technical risks to achieve the director's idea of telling the story of David Bowie and is a journey across his musical legacy. The film conveys a powerful mix that granted re-recording mixers Paul Massey CAS and David Giammarco CAS and ADR mixer Jens Rosenlund Petersen the award for Outstanding Achievement in Sound Mixing for Motion Pictures - Documentary at the 59th CAS Awards. I had the opportunity to meet with them to talk about their background and the exceptional work they did on this film. Paul Massey CAS is an acclaimed mixer who received the CAS Career Achievement Award in 2022 for his outstanding trajectory and career in sound mixing. His background is in music and, during his teenage years, attended the Royal Academy of Music in England. Around 1978, he started working in music engineering in Toronto, recording all kinds of bands and scores with orchestras, allowing him to get to know the people, the gear, and the principal studios in the recording industry at the time. While living in Canada, he slowly drifted to sound for motion picture through mixing for television, IMAX, and touring with bands, recording live performances on the road and then mixing them to picture. He continued working mainly in music until the late 1980s when he moved to Los Angeles. Since then, his work has been mainly in film and he shares, "My favorite genre is music-based films." [See the Spring 2022 CAS Quarterly for our Career Achievement Award recipient interview with Paul, available here https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1451070-spring-2022/19 Paul's mixing partner for about the last 15 years is David Giammarco CAS. David is an experienced and award- winning re-recording mixer from Canada, where he began his career in the editorial department, later moving to California where he continued doing some editing and then shifted into sound supervision and mixing. Jens Rosenlund Petersen is a dialogue editor and ADR mixer from Denmark, currently working in London, United Kingdom. Over the last few years, he has been actively involved with doing ADR and group recordings. Wearing different hats within the sound team gives him the opportunity to contribute to the stories from different perspectives. Recording crowds is one of his favorite things to do for films, and he has been developing some techniques over the past few years of doing it for different projects. Paul, David, and Jens truly enjoy working on documentaries because of the way directors approach the storytelling. However, they never thought of Moonage Daydream as a documentary but as more of a feature film about David Bowie from his own point of view, as told by Brett Morgen, the director. According to Paul, it's categorized as a documentary about Bowie's life and career, but it's really a cinematic experience all the way through, and that's how it was approached by those involved in the creative process. Jens adds that, for him, documentaries tell stories as feature films do, and in this case, Moonage Daydream also reminded him of art installations, where MEET THE WINNERS Event photos courtesy of Alex J. Berliner/ABImages