Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1532181
26 C I N E M O N T A G E F E A T U R E an editor and you're building towards a sto- ry." Then I had the luxury of having two of the best visual effects vendors in the world, ILM and Framestore. Pablo Helman was my visual effects supervisor and Ed W. Marsh was my visual effects editor who guided me and taught me. Of course, the music side of it was also another big part. It's great that I've worked on films like "In The Heights" and "Tick, Tick… Boom!", but here I'm editing a mu- sical number, "Defying Gravity," in which Elphaba sings while flying on a broomstick. I'm doing things at a different scale. I have two incredible performers who can also sing live, and I have a superb sound mixer in Simon Hayes, who did "Les Misérables" and can capture live vocals. Marquis: This is my 10th project with Jon. I've done six movies, including the Justin Bieber "Believe" live concert tour he directed, as well as the movie documentary about the tour, and a handful of commer- cials. I've worked with him for 10+ years and it's been fantastic. I forget we've spent that much time together and done so many varied projects. This has been one of the best experiences that I've had on a movie. This one by far is Jon in his prime. It's the type of storytelling where he is in the zone, and it shows across all the different crafts. Nugent Title: I think Jon has made a conscious decision to make projects that matter, that put good things into the world, which makes the work so gratifying. Every- body on the film is putting their all into it. You can see it on a day-to-day basis. Every- body's working at the top of their game and feels strongly about it. I started last September, so it'll be just over a year when we wrap up all our mastering and deliverables. We've been in post-sound on film one for about a year, which is a little longer than typical. Obvi- ously, strike issues extended our schedule a little bit. I had my first talks with Simon Hayes during pre-production, and Myron was talking to us about the film long before they were shooting, so it's been in our lives for a while. CineMontage: Could you talk a little about the unique ways you collaborated with various department heads for this particular project? Kerstein: Besides the visual effects work, we needed to f igure out how the music editor's temp mix could work both with and between songs, because Jon likes to start and stop songs a lot. He likes to build out a score — John Williams meets "Harry Potter" meets "Les Mis" meets "Sound of Music" meets "Gone With The Wind." I needed a musical editing team to help me find the tone, so I brought them in very early to temp the movie completely before Jon even saw it. I wanted him to have something that felt like a complete movie before he even started. We needed to avoid anything that could destroy the rhythm of a scene and take an audience out of it because of one false move in the choice of the lyrics or how we mixed something. At the same time, we needed to discover how to keep the audience feeling euphoric or sad. These complex connec- tions between the music and editorial were more important than on any other project I've worked on. Marquis: Even though it was a lot of work, it flowed smoothly from the page and how it was shot. From the sound perspec- tive, the way Myron and Jon worked the cut made everything creatively come together pretty seamlessly. It was a joy the whole time because of that. It wasn't like we were trying to put a square peg in a round hole. Everything fit from the beginning, and it was all about making the story better. I filled a few postproduction roles in this film. I'm a supervising sound editor along with Nancy. I'm in charge of the sound design of the movie, as well as being the effects re-recording mixer, and Nancy han- dles all the dialogue and ADR. We work with Andy Nelson, who handles the dialogue and music when we're mixing. Jon wants to be surrounded by talented people and people who share a vision, but there's a much deeper connection than that. We're all friends; it feels almost like a family. Myron was adamant about us having a presence at the picture department, and so we had rooms set up over there. We'd do mixes over there. We'd have all our sound meetings in and out of our rooms there. I could pop next door to talk to Jack (Dolman, music editor) about a music cue, or I could bounce into Myron's room to say, "Hey, when you were talking about this thing, did you mean this?" as opposed to sending endless emails and texts and things like that. Face-to-face communica- Nancy Nugent Title. John Marquis. P H OT O : J AY C L E N D E N I N P H OT O : J AY C L E N D E N I N