Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1521562
C I N E M A A U D I O S O C I E T Y. O R G 57 went onto The Color Purple for WB in Georgia the week after we completed Weird, so I just had enough time to do the job. BM: The whole score mix was only three days, so it was pretty quick. Zach and Leo have their assistants prep pre-lays for me ahead of time and, for this project, they recorded with the Budapest Session Orchestra. So, once those sessions were completed, I received download links for the orchestra Pro Tools sessions from Budapest. TS: After that initial conversation with Anthony, I was sent a rough cut of the movie so that I could decide if I truly wanted to do it. Within 10 minutes, I knew I had to be part of this film! It was that special, even from a very rough cut. I saw the cut a few times and took some notes, mostly about big music moments and big sound effects moments. There were a few emails about music things but, for the most part, the final mix was where everything truly happened for me. Can you tell us a bit about the production and capturing sound on location? TS: I could tell that there was a lot of challenges during this shoot. Richard absolutely nailed [the production mixing]. The dialogue was clean no matter how complex the scene. I had so much great stuff to work with during the mix that it made it an absolute dream to come to the stage every day. RB: I am a huge Weird Al fan, so I was incredibly honored to be a part of the project. Eric Appel and Al had a clear vision for the film, and we had all of 18 days to shoot it, so every day was very busy with a pretty high page count and often lots of music playback. Al had re-recorded all the songs for the film and provided me with the Pro Tools sessions. He was on set every day and it was great to get to know him—as nice a person as you'll ever meet. My boom operator Tanya Pee and my utility sound technician, Kelly Lewis, both did an amazing job of staying on top of the constantly changing demands and the, often, large cast counts. How complex were the re-recording and ADR sessions? TS: I knew from before the final mix that this was going to be a solo mix. This meant all dialogue, music, and effects were going to go through me. It's the main reason I took such detailed notes from the rough cut. I needed to put myself in the mindset of how to approach such complex scenes and effectively time manage myself to hit our delivery deadline. I had no pre- dubs, so everything would have to be done on the final mix stage. I also only had six days to mix the entire movie, not including a day for final notes and deliverables. Thankfully, my mix tech William Harp was ready with an amazing organization ethic that helped everything run so smooth. I mixed the movie in Atmos, with my session split up into detailed folders, so I could keep track of all the dense sound effects and music. It was a rather complex mix as well, since it included a lot of live performances that needed to feel like they were in the space that they were being performed in. That was my main direction from both Eric Appel and Al Yankovic from the very beginning. They didn't want the performances to feel like a music video. I heavily relied on multiband compression, EQ, and reverbs for the entire mix to balance the crazy amount of music and effects at any given time. BM: For the space at Formosa on Isabel Street in Burbank, the Schoeps CMC 541 and Sanken COS-11 matched production the best. Unfortunately, Al didn't have any ADR since he was just in that single scene in the office. I was excited for Daniel Radcliffe to come in and be able to record ADR with him. He came in and was very nice and very professional, willing to give the director whatever he wanted. I would say the most memorable session was when Tom Lennon came in and they wanted some options for when he was beat up by Al's dad for trying to sell him an accordion. We did a few takes with him writhing and moaning and it wasn't sounding quite right since there's more pressure on your throat and neck when you're laying down, so I re-miked him laying down! We also gave Tom water for him to put in his mouth to simulate choking on his own blood so the editors could grab any bits and pieces they wanted to enhance the scene. TS: Thankfully, since the production audio was so good, we didn't need much ADR in the movie to fix anything. We recorded to add off-screen lines, some efforts for the fight scenes, and random lines here and there to keep things smooth. Brian Magrum ran an incredibly tight ship and provided me with pristine ADR that was incredibly easy to match to production.