Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1545202
24 S U M M E R 2 0 2 6 I C A S Q U A R T E R L Y story? And where do we want to be utilizing this tool of sound to not just tell the story, but to move people the way that ultimately, emotionally, we want them to be moved? JP: He loves sound. He loves sound in every way. He loves the music, loves the sound effects. He really watches the movie as an audience member, and he wants to feel excited and he knows the power of sound. He understands it. The great thing is that he trusts us. I mean, this is our third or fourth movie with him and we know, more or less, what he's looking for and how big to be whenever he gives those notes. He sees it as a great storytelling tool. AM: Well, he loves music. He's a music guy. I think guys of his generation have come up in that time where they like to push the music a little bit more. Although, having said that, Michael Mann's also constantly pushing the music. Fincher is, too. But Joe's just a wonderful director and a wonderful moviemaker. He really knows how to use music and knows how to help guide the composer to get into what is his vision for the film. DL: Sound is very important to him and it's why his films have good sound. He treats the sound as a character. I think that's as good as it gets to embrace it. Getting those pivotal sounds and hitting it on the head. What was your mixing approach to this film compared to other films that you've worked on? GR: The approach was pretty different because we were given the direction from Joe that he really wanted the soundtrack to have a very unique signature before we even started. We knew that we wanted to explore what that signature was going to feel like and what it was going to sound like early. So, we did a very elaborate temp mix months before the final. They hadn't even shot most of act three; the final race, Abu Dhabi, didn't exist at that point. I'm not even sure that the Vegas scene was in there either. Basically, all the back three of the film were storyboarded when we did that first temp. It wasn't just a temp for the purpose of a preview. It was with the purpose of really trying to figure out what the DNA of the mix was going to be. I think that served us really well. Because we did make some modifications, not just structurally of, oh, for this race, let's not use the music here but let's use the music here. It gave us a better sense early on to figure out where the intensity was working and where it wasn't working and figuring out really thematically where the pieces are going to land in this. It was almost the final, but not quite a final. I know I did some dialogue pre-dubbing preceding the temp because of the complexity of the temp and because of the detail we wanted to give the temp. So, I used some of my budgeted final mix pre-dubbing time for that temp so that we were that much more prepared and we could do that much more exploration with it, which was great. JP: I know we wanted to keep it grounded. And one of my biggest personal preferences was that because I'm such a big fan, I was kind of nervous about representing the sport as best as I could. I've been watching it since I was a kid and the only way I've ever watched it is on TV. So, you know, trying to elevate all these sounds to play in Atmos and IMAX, I was like, "How am I going to do this?" Especially considering the older F1 cars that I'm used to are very high pitched; they sound like mosquitoes almost. And then we are trying to fill the whole theater for about 300 people and put it in IMAX and make it as big as possible. So, for me, that was really one of the things I was worried about the most. Al Nelson, our supervising sound editor and sound designer, went out to a couple races and recorded as much as he could. These cars are really hard to record. You can't put microphones on them because they go overweight. And if you stand on the side of a track, you'll get a sound that lasts three seconds. So, there was a lot of collaboration with F1. What was the production sound planning process going into this show and what microphones and techniques did you use to capture the audio in a way that felt authentic to the environment of the film? GJ: We knew the pit crew headsets would be crucial as multiple scenes played on those. We gave Gwen Whittle the option of the traditional F1 noise-canceling headset mics, then for a more open sound, we rigged DPA 6061's on the boom arms about an inch from the actors' mouths, then dressed the cable down and into a Sound Devices A20. Mark "Gadget" Reed was our Bolero comms engineer, and Yas Marina Circuit, Abu Dhabi