Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1504940
26 FA L L 2 0 2 3 I C A S Q U A R T E R L Y L-R: Scoring mixer Bruce Botnick with re-recording mixer Michael Babcock CAS was brought in to do an expanded version of the soundtrack album in 2011. Through piecing together things that Paramount had and things Jerry had, I had everything I needed to assemble the expanded score and the unused early alternate cues and all of that in two-channel stereo. But [for] the releasing, it was suggested to me to go ahead and transfer the multitrack and remix it because I'd get a much better result. "Bruce Botnick said he would be up for that provided that I was working on it, and I said I would be up for it provided he was working on it. The two of us worked together, and he was able to bring to it his vast tribal knowledge about working with Jerry for 25 years. It was a very big operation that took several months to get done. But in my mind, I felt that it was a good thing to do a high-resolution capture of the multitrack because then we would have that all ready. Every so often, there were meetings, and we would go to Paramount, we'd talk about it, and they would try to get it together and it would fizzle. That Viacom split was a big sticking point and just finding the money and who was going to pay for it. "The intellectual property belonged to CBS. The film rights were Paramount's. So, once we had what I call the 'fal-tor-pan' and everything was back under one roof [with the Viacom re-merger], it became much more viable. [Fal-tor-pan was the Vulcan ritual used in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock to re-merge Spock's mind and body after being separated.] Had we done it in 2012, we'd probably just be stuck with a 7.1 mix and 2K resolution. "The fact that it took another decade pushed us into 4K, HD, and Atmos. This is pretty new because, at the time we transferred it, Bruce's idea was to take the multitrack, go over to 20th Century Fox where it was recorded, do his mix, and put monitors out on the stage and record with microphones to get real surround. Later on, he said, no, [because] he's got a surround plugin that included an [impulse response] sample of the Fox stage acoustics. We were only talking 7.1. Then Atmos came on the scene and Bruce started being on the cutting edge of working with Atmos music and his stuff that he did for the Doors albums. Everything is just phenomenal, it sounds like you're in the room with them. "He was using Star Trek as a test to see what he could do, and we were blessed with things like the Blaster Beam being discreet on its own track, and we had the synthesizers discreet. The Blaster Beam is a very powerful component, and it was a fulfillment of what Craig Huxley (who performed the beam) expressed that Jerry wanted; the whole thing to be a battle between the beam and the orchestra. We were actually able to fulfill that directive using the Atmos format." Craig Huxley had been a child actor who appeared in two episodes of the original series, then went on to become a musician who patented some refinements on the original Blaster Beam and performed it in several movie scores. Matessino continued, "Bruce was really able to play with it and, suddenly, especially for a movie where the music plays such an important role and is so prominent, it just was miraculous to be able to work with that. And you have the music, the dominance, and the power because it comes to the forefront so much in the movie. But the better quality you have, the more engaging it's going to be and the more you will sense just how cinematic the thing is and how much you want to be in a big space watching it. I've noticed [this] at the screenings we've had, the CAS screening and where the Dolby people were there. If you're working on movies now, if you're working on new films, people don't really get to hear a score like this anymore. "Everybody came away just completely blown away by how great the music was. But having that ability to get the music so clear and to really feel the room with it, allowed us to go farther with the dialogue and visual effects because, if we were just stuck with the original mix of the music, we could not have the dialogue and the effects be clearer than the music was. But we had the very high ceiling now with the music, so we could take everything else as far as we wanted, and we really were not restrained. It was an Atmos mix crossbred with [something like] a 1960's roadshow, where we really wanted to be really cinematic