Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1524863
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S 155 mics, which presented a consistent challenge, because narratively most of the audio in Immortality would have been boomed, given it's supposed to be "lost film footage" made between the 1960s and 1990s. Chris: Right. Especially in the historic footage. When you say that you get three or four tracks synced to video, did you get a QuickTime file and you had to strip the audio out of it? Kevin: The other challenge was not having an AAF or the full audio regions. All of our file management was done on frame.io, which is great for most video projects, but when you're essentially doing 300 separate short films each with their own subfolders and such, it gets to be pretty clunky. I do recall having to click through, looking for full production audio takes on a few occasions, but I tried to avoid doing so as much as possible since it was so cumbersome to do so! Chris: Did they do multiple takes of those single long takes? Kevin: Yes, I would receive turnovers in a drip feed, because Sam would have to go through the footage and pick which take would be used for each scene. In a few cases, I worked on shots before the in and out frames had been locked, so it was the correct content, but just with extra head and tails. Every scene that's supposed to be on a film set, of which there's quite a lot, had a real-life shooting slate followed by a fictional in-universe slate that the player can see in the game, so that certainly was a bit mind-bending to watch, even if I didn't need to reference any of the slate information. Because the fictional slates are all part of the narrative, the scene and take number would be scripted, and have no relation to the real-life scene and take numbers. It makes sense on paper, but when you hear it, it really scrambles the brain! Chris: So you didn't have to process or edit everything they shot. Kevin: Correct. Chris: Did you try to finish a segment first and then mix it before you moved on to the next segment? Kevin: Yeah, I think my background doing YouTube videos on tight turnarounds sort of formatted my brain to feel at home managing "full post sound" passes in bite- sized chunks one after another. If each shot was a puzzle, it'd be like solving it and then moving on to the next one, looping back for notes passes as needed. Each shot had a mix that needed to be approved, so it made the most sense to turn those around at a similar pace to how fast new shots kept rolling in. It was simultaneous dialogue editing, sound design, and mixing all at once. There was also no reason to stop at a "halfway point," as the majority of shots needed to go through a half-dozen plugins to achieve the retro audio sound, and needed to be presented that way for feedback— so that necesstiated mixing while editing anyways. Chris: That meant that you picked a segment, a clip that you're going to work on. You worked on it until it was completed until you could send it to the producer and say, is this what you want? Then he'd say, yes, no. Then you do it again. What were your deliverables? Did you mix it down to a stereo track, a mono track, or a 5.1? Kevin: The majority was delivered in mono, per keeping with the fiction of the footage being old film dailies and candid behind-the-scenes footage. In regards to notes, Sam the director reviewed all the material directly, so the communication was direct and smooth in that regard. We differentiated between the archival film footage and the supernatural scenes by presenting the latter in stereo. In these clips, we're seeing an alternate reality play out in front of us, or perhaps it's a "deeper truth," without spoiling too much of the story. These are often from the same camera angles as the archival footage, but presented without the visual and audio age filtering, and at a higher frame rate. The idea is that there's a deeper meaning and series of events happening beneath the surface of the game's three fictional films, so when the player uncovers a glimpse into this supernatural reality, we wanted to have an immediate understandable shift in sonic space to reflect that. So this meant disregarding the vintage audio filters and doing a more "conventional cinematic" stereo mix for these sequences. Chris: Especially for the '70s stuff. That was '68, '70. Kevin: At a certain point we get into, I don't know if that's really how it worked, but in Immortality there's a difference between the archival film footage and then the supernatural scenes where we're seeing an alternate reality. So, those were