Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1500716
but also with the layers and selection of sounds that were part of each sequence. A lot of boundaries were broken in terms of sound placement and processing to achieve Brett's idea and vision. There were no bad ideas, Paul and David recall. According to Paul, the mix of the songs from the multitracks was performed from taste and feeling rather than referring to the original mixes. It took him a couple of weeks to get to a point where he considered them ready for comments. While Paul was working on the music, which is present during most of the film, David and Brett sat in the studio and went through all the FX. This allowed David to get to know the director and to understand what he was after and what he was trying to achieve. "Things were shaped as they were being felt," David recalls. But because of the way the film was envisioned, both the FX and music were needed to play together to properly assess the progress with each element. So, they would get premixes to play everything in context, a process helped by being in the same building. "It was an evolutionary process. Nobody knew exactly where we were heading from the beginning, but this path was discovered throughout the process," David shares. Jens had learned so much from working on previous projects with Paul. Knowing the way Paul likes things in his sessions and how he approaches the mixes helped him prepare for Moonage Daydream. He did some processing and shaping of the sounds, even trying some reverbs on the singing and crowds during the editorial process to prepare them for the final mix while preserving enough flexibility. Jens comes from a music background and has a philosophy that the sound editorial team can always overlap in service boundaries are usually broken and emotions are intensified. Brett Morgen, the director, had been working on the film with a very small team for a few years before the sound team jumped in. He wanted an incredibly immersive experience, like a ride at a theme park. None of the sound team members had met Brett before, but he had an experimental mix of a section of the film where he was pursuing immersion and experimentation. At that time, somebody suggested he watch Bohemian Rhapsody in IMAX. By listening to that film's Live Aid sequence, he knew what could be done with the sound. So, he then contacted Paul Massey and got him involved in the film. Paul put together the team with supervising sound editors Nina Hartstone and John Warhurst, Jens Rosenlund Petersen, the rest of the editorial team in London, and, obviously, David Giammarco. The whole sound post-production process for the film was spread over about a year, beginning with long and intense spotting sessions with Brett, Nina, and John. Brett had spent so long working on how he envisioned the film that it allowed the team to work with a locked cut. He was very aware of every music cut and piece of dialogue, and was open to ideas and changes that would benefit the film. Subsequently, David and Paul had around three weeks for premixing and preparation and around five weeks for the final mix. The mix was a process of experimenting until the very end and was continuously evolving, they said. Audio was approached as a big interwoven dissolve. Effects, music, and even dialogue were interlaced with each other, sometimes to a point where the viewer can't tell the difference between them. The goal was to make the mix very immersive, not only in sound panning and location, L-R: Jens Rosenlund Petersen, David Giammarco CAS, and Paul Massey CAS