Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1521562
26 S U M M E R 2 0 2 4 I C A S Q U A R T E R L Y Foley mixer Randy K. Singer CAS at the controls great job and covered everything with multiple layers. Then it's just pre-mixing, pre-mixing, pre-mixing!" The lead Foley mixer in the movie was Randy Singer CAS, who has worked on close to 400 feature films and thousands of hours of television and hundreds of hours of games. He started back in 1982 as a second-generation sound person. When he was going to college, an opportunity came up to work at a sound house, recalling, "I had an interest in sound because my father was a sound editor." Randy got an opportunity to work at a sound facility in Burbank doing mostly TV series and some features. He then began carrying units between dub stages and editing rooms, as well as building units, which is splicing 35mm soundtracks into the reels to get them ready for the mix stage, which got Randy interested in the transfer process. "We would have everything labeled in trim boxes in massive sound libraries so we could find and transfer the sounds requested by the editors. I became a librarian, so I really knew the library. I started transferring 35mm film and then I would do dailies from ¼-inch Nagra to 35mm film. Later, 24-track two-inch tape was available and allowed us to have more flexibility with sound—and it kept evolving. I'm blessed that I was able to make the transition from analog to digital and get a good understanding of it." After working in transfer for some years, Randy had an interest in mixing and, at the time, the facility he was working for built a mix stage. He had the opportunity to start working on some Saturday-morning cartoons like Inspector Gadget, getting some mixing time and building experience while developing good relationships and a good reputation. Then he moved to another facility as a dubbing recordist, where he learned the full spectrum of audio and different facets of it, giving him an edge moving forward. After mixing some ADR and Foley, he really liked the creative environment and collaboration of Foley. For him, Foley is one of the most exciting things in film sound because of the human element of physically picking up and moving things around to make sounds in sync to picture. It is the collaboration between the Foley artists and the mixer. "The beautiful thing about Foley is that we can be creative with it. We have thousands of different props and objects on the stage that all have a purpose to make sounds." Randy got involved with this project thanks to his good relationship with sound supervisor Geoffrey G. Rubay, as they had worked together on many projects. Randy's Foley artists on this project were Jeffery Wilhoit and Dylan Wilhoit. "We were able to collaborate with a synergy to create a beautiful soundtrack for the film. We all have such extensive experience and an understanding of telling a story with sound that it makes coming to work every day a pleasure." Since this is a music- and FX-intense movie, Randy and his Foley team needed to understand the contribution of Foley and the opportunities in each moment of the timeline to effectively add to the storytelling, keeping in mind the role of other sound elements like FX, dialogue, and music. "The thing with animation is there's no production track. So, it's always a little bit more challenging in my experience because you have nothing to play against. We must be in tight collaboration with the sound supervisor to know what the surfaces are because, oftentimes, we get things that aren't quite rendered yet. So, a good, cohesive relationship with your team is invaluable. Sometimes the creative opinions become like magic, and we might create things that we never thought we could ever come up with. We [also] bring an organic feel to it." However, one of the challenges they had to overcome in this movie was working with temp picture references, as renders are constantly updated. Spider-Man; Across the Spider-Verse is a very high-energy and visually captivating movie. For Randy and his team, it's an experience like everything in that film, and they tried to always immerse the sounds into the reality of the movie. "For example, when they're in the wood tower and the dad climbs up and they're looking over the city, that's a dialogue scene. We're very sensitive to the wood creaks on the tower and the hands on the wood." They came up with the sound of the spider web hitting the light post or the metal or the side of the building, by using elements like quarter-inch tape and pom-poms processed