Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1530210
32 PRODUCTION SOUND & VIDEO – Winter 2025 In those early meetings. we devised the music strategy for Wicked. Rather than look at an overall workflow for the entire film, we looked at each number and how best to deliver that song while considering each unique challenge it presented. There was quite a lot of concern from everyone about footfall noise the choreography would have, as there were so many cast members dancing in many of the numbers. As the meetings progressed, we arrived at a road map that would be our starting point throughout the movie. If the actors wanted to sing live, we would support them and implement that on all solo lines. We would also assess each chorus and try to capture them live too, but we were aware that often the choruses were occurring at the same time as big dance numbers, so we were prepared to use pre-records. In solo vocals, there is emotion and character in the voice, which is golden, and should absolutely be preserved and delivered to the cinema audiences. The solos contain the original breathing patterns and vocal efforts of the actor which will match exactly what their character was doing physically as they sang. However, when the whole cast joined in the choruses, there would more likely be choreography footfall, and unlike our main cast members. there was no guarantee that hundreds of chorus members would be accomplished singers. We found out that often the choruses benefited from being sung live with some footfall and non-singers singing as it added to a sense of rawness and reality that is hard to achieve in pre-records. A great example of this is "No one mourns the Wicked" where all the villagers join in singing with the cast. We developed a process for capturing those big live choruses with hundreds of background artists. After feedback from Music Associate Ben Holder, who ran the rehearsals, we would decide who were the best singers and they would be assigned the seventy-five earwigs. We would then surround the set with subwoofers so that anyone not wearing an earwig could stay in tempo with the music. The thumper track would be removed in sound post. We were able to get some wonderful huge vocal performances within the acoustics of the sets that added a reality that is incredibly difficult to reproduce with a loop group in post. We were getting hundreds of villagers singing for real with all the raw emotion and effort in their voices. The really big chorus's like "No one mourns the Wicked" reminded me of a football chant: It was beautiful but also a bit frightening hearing that many people singing with such gusto and emotion. On that sequence, we were using thirty-six kilowatts of subwoofers playing the thumper rhythm. It was quite unprecedented! Jon Chu was really supportive of another workflow, allowing us to do a sound FX pass of the environmental noise we had tried to minimise, so that if Jon, Andy Nelson, John Marquis, and Nancy Nugent Title decided in the final mix, they would like to hear more of that set ambience, they had an FX track to reintroduce to the clean live vocals. We achieved this with earwigs on the smaller numbers and added thumper tracks to the bigger set pieces to be able to deliver 'sync choreography' FX. In case any of our actors did not want to sing a particular number live, or their vocal cords got tired during the working day, we would have a pre-record for them to lip sync to. As part of this insurance policy, I also suggested a workflow which Wicked custom-built Pro Tools cart alongside production sound cart Reducing footfall