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 157 all done with plugins in Pro Tools. And the production audio was recorded with modern microphones to begin with, so our source was already different from the actual period. So while reference was invaluable—I'd YouTube a lot of scenes from movies to try to reaquaint my ear with specific eras and how certain things would sound through that technology - a lot of it came down to subjective taste and tweaking things by ear until it just felt right. Chris: You work here at home? How do you monitor? Kevin: Just headphones. Chris: Do you have a particular style? Kevin: I use the the Sony MDR- 7506s, which have been around for over thirty years, so funnily enough they're "period appropriate" for at least one of Immortality's films. They're what I used at film school, and my ears have just gotten accustomed to them over the years. I often get asked by younger sound editors how I monitor at home, and I'm honest about working with headphones only, but I make a point of not actually recommending it as an ideal workflow. It's just how I ended up by circumstance, where I was turning around YouTube work on headphones—which is fair, since that's a pretty accurate monitoring baseline for that platform—and as I kept working as an editor, it's just what's stuck for me idiosyncratically, where I have a workflow where I can predict the results well enough. I did finally have an issue come up last year, where I sent backgrounds to a mixer and he caught a low thump that kept coming up in one file well below 100 Hertz; he thought it was his daughter knocking on the mix room door! But other than that, it's worked out. Chris: Okay. Where were we? You're delivering a mono file. Kevin: Yeah, for the majority of the scenes. And I would also deliver a reversed version of each file, which was needed for the footage rewind function to perform correctly in the game. I had a separate Pro Tools session where I'd just import final mixes and render in the reverse and export it, which helped me do housekeeping and keep redundant render files from piling up in all my editing sessions. Chris: So you didn't sync that to picture at all? Kevin: Correct. Once we were locked, I would deliver two WAV files for each shot, no video files. Chris: What was your timeframe, how long did this take you to do? Kevin: Our schedule was initially more aggressive in terms of turnaround, and as a freelancer juggling multiple projects, I was pretty concerned about getting swamped and falling behind. I had my second editor Diana Cha on the project at the outset, but as the pace fell off-schedule and the gaps between shot deliverables Diana Cha, dialogue editor, and Kevin Senzaki, audio director—winners of the 70th Annual MPSE Golden Reel Awards Game Dialogue/ADR for Immortality (2022).