Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1543098
32 PRODUCTION SOUND & VIDEO – Spring 2026 On Day Two, we kept the two DPA 4061's on each actor, exactly as before. But now, on top of that, Arthur and Robin Johnson came back into play with the CMD 42 booms. Because the balcony extension gave everyone so much more space, the booms could be in the air above the Steadicam, often coming down to hairline distance in the tightest close-ups. In wide or moving shots, they might be at twelve inches; in the key emotional moments, they were almost in line with the actors' foreheads. What made this day special for me was watching Arthur and Robin turn the act of booming into choreography. They did not simply stand "on their" actor all day. They were constantly trading responsibilities. Sometimes Arthur would be on Ari, sometimes on Cynthia. Sometimes they would swap mid-take as the geometry of the shot changed. Behind the cart, I was keeping meticulous notes of these swaps so that later, Robin and Nancy would know, for any given beat, which boom was favouring which performer. All of this built toward the final duet section, where the girls are standing incredibly close to each other, nose to nose, singing harmonies that are already at the deepest emotional level without anyone adding reverb or score. Initially, I considered simplifying the situation. With the actors that close, it is very tempting to say, "Let's just put one central boom between them and let that take over." A single mic would certainly have picked up both voices beautifully. Instead, I asked Arthur and Robin to play their booms so that the capsules were an inch apart in the air, one very slightly favouring Ari, the other very slightly favouring Cynthia. The microphone mounts were almost touching! The tracks we now had: • Boom A: CMD 42, MK41, focussed a touch more to one actor • Boom B: an identical chain, but with that tiny emphasis on the other actor The reason that matters is that when the harmonies lock and the girls' voices start to intertwine, there will always be phrases where one is fractionally softer or rolled off because of the angle of the head or the emotional delivery. Combine that with the four DPA's and you have six world-class microphones covering two world-class voices in the most important duet of the film. "For Good" as One Performance: Nancy and Robin with a Singular Dialog and Vocal Editorial Collaboration If you go right back to the start of "For Good," it begins life as dialog with moments of spontaneous song. By the end, the two characters are in full vocal flight. For editorial, that raises a philosophical question: Where does "dialog editing" stop and "music editing" begin? On Wicked: For Good, the answer is that there is no dividing line, and on "For Good" in particular, that is where the partnership between Nancy Nugent-Title and Robin Baynton became something very special. They approached "For Good" as one continuous performance. They worked together and treated the scene as a single piece of acting that just happens to move through different kinds of vocal delivery. The result is that you can watch "For Good" and never once feel that the mix has "stepped onto a stage." The words that are spoken and the notes that are sung feel like they were born in the same breath, in the same place. From my perspective as the Production Mixer, this is the payoff for all the choices we made on set: double-miking, half-inch boom spacing, Silent Wind, leaves only in frame, puddles mopped as soon as they are not needed. The Cost of Truth: Collaboration Versus Lip-Sync When people ask why we bother to go to these lengths to capture live vocals, I often talk about the creative cost of ADR compared to the financial cost of VFX paint-out. With live vocals, you ask a lot more of the crew. You ask Special Effects to move their machinery outside and invent a unique Silent Wind system for the movie. You ask Art and Props to constantly lay and remove leaves and puddles. You ask Costume to find ways to hide two transmitters on each principal without compromising comfort or silhouette. You ask VFX to budget for the removal of visible mics and IEM's, not as a last-minute fix but as a planned, creative choice to preserve performance. You ask Camera to coordinate with you on every pass. You ask your Boom Operators to learn choreography as complex as the dance numbers. You ask your Second Assistant to live in a world where every leaf and every droplet of water is a potential threat to the mix. All so that when Ari and Cynthia stand on that balcony and sing "Because I Knew You," the voices you hear are what they gave you in the moment, not a clean, polished replica assembled later in an ADR booth. There are two ways to spend money and effort in a musical: • You can spend it on ADR and studio time, and accept the creative compromises that come with actors trying to reinhabit a moment they lived months earlier. • Or you can spend it on VFX paint-out, quiet floors, Silent Wind, double-miking, extended balconies, and custom IEM's to carry the original performance all the way to the screen. On Wicked: For Good, we chose the second route. The Keyboard, the Playback, and the Tears Earlier, I talked about the way we wove live keyboard with playback across the film. On "For Good," those decisions were laser-targeted to the emotional structure of the song.