Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1512183
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S 129 a special pressure on that film? The sound team was also quite international, how did you set up the team and work with people around the globe? Did you mix in the US? RTY: Snowpiercer was not a project that I joined in from the beginning. It was a project produced by director Park Chan-wook's production company and during pre-production, the plan was to do the audio post-production in the US or the UK The production company contacted me after filming in the Czech Republic. Due to the lack of budget for post-production, I asked if I could work on the sound at Live Tone in Korea. At the time, I didn't consider working on Snowpiercer and had set up for another project in the time period they wanted, so there was no crew in my studio to prepare the work on this movie. I urgently had to set everything up for the sound work of this movie. First, my crew worked on dialogue editing, backgrounds, train sounds and Foley recordings, and I needed a sound designer and sound effects editor to work on effects for more than four months, so I collaborated with Dave Whitehead in New Zealand as a sound designer and as he also had some schedule issues, I also brought in Dave's friend Tim Nielsen from Skywalker Sound. I also collaborated on the sound effects with Sung Rok Choi, a former student of mine and part of the crew at my studio, and he moved to the United States to work on the sound of the movie. For ADR, we recorded actors' lines in a remote recording using Source- Connect for about three weeks at a studio in Santa Monica. The composer was Marco Beltrami, who works in Los Angeles, but the production company said we had to go to LA because he couldn't come to Korea for the final mixing. I did the premixes on my own mix stage on a DFC console and asked the production company to rent a mix stage that has console automation compatible like WB or Fox for final mixing in LA, but due to budget issues, they rented a Technicolor mix stage at Paramount Studios and we had to record premixed sound in as many stems as possible with the use of a System 5 console, which is incompatible with automation, wasting about a week to make it. Stupid. Bong has been mixing with me for a long time and I always mix everything by myself, so he didn't understand the system in which two mixers in Hollywood mix dialogue, music and sound effects separately and canceled a two-week rental reservation and checking only music for a week. So the final mix work was not done there and we finished the mix at my stage after returning to Korea. The most burdensome thing about this project was that the management of a complex global crew and the indecisiveness of the production company made it all so difficult, much more difficult than the actual sound work. PA: The film sounds great, though. The train is almost like a character in itself. How did you work with the sound of the train? RTY: First, I needed to build a wide variety of train sound libraries to design train sound. Since it is an environment where various train sounds cannot be recorded in Korea, I asked Rob Nokes again to build a train sound library, and I also got hold of all kinds of train sound recordings made in Europe which were later turned into the Trains library I mentioned from Boom Library. With these libraries, I designed the sound of the train from the tail compartment to the engine room. I designed the sound of a train passing through the Yekaterina Railway Bridge by recording the sound of a high-speed train passing under the railway bridge on the big Han River in Seoul. The train's engine room was designed by Dave with a sound design concept like a living creature, and there are also sound elements designed using the voice of a male choir, or by drilling a bowling ball and planting a microphone to roll the ball. The sound of the train crossing fast in the first scene was designed by mixing animal sounds of monkeys and lions to express the train being alive. PA: I really enjoyed Okja which was so surprising and inventive. How did you create the sound of the animal Okja? It really felt alive and emotional. RTY: Okja's super pig sound design was also a collaboration with Dave Whitehead. He mainly recorded the Kunekune pig sound in New Zealand and designed it by using several large mammals. Okja is a female and a super pig with a very introverted and timid personality. Bong recommended that I recorded Lee Jung-eun—who would later play the housekeeper in Parasite— imitating pig sounds and breathing, and I designed and used this in a scene where she communicated emotionally with the heroine Mija. PA: Parasite was of a worldwide hit and of course a big, four-time Oscar winner. What's your favorite memory of your work on that film? RTY: The most memorable work was probably the Dolby Atmos mixing. We spent a lot of time to express a detailed sense of space and direction with real sounds from