Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/202179
Mann and Dzuban are responsible for Insidious: Chapter 2's spooky mix. have a lot of time to do this," says Mann. Mann and Dzuban figured out a workflow that let them reap all the benefits of an Atmos mix, without slowing down the mixing process. Mann says, "Even the people who were hesitant in pursuing the Atmos route, by the end, said they were glad that we did this in Atmos. It was very evident that this was well worth the effort." Accomplishing a monumental mix, in a new format, in a short amount of time requires an all-out effort from everyone involved. Dolby, Euphonix, Technicolor chief engineer Mike Novitch, and head mix-tech Drew Webster worked with Mann and Dzuban to get everything set up. "This is only the second or third thing that has been mixed in Atmos natively," notes Mann. "Many mixers do their 5.1 or 7.1 mix and then go back and do an Atmos pass. They're more locked into their elements at that point. Having all the pieces in our hands from the onset really let us dictate how we wanted it to sound, very specifically, from the get-go. Figuring out the Atmos workflow with Dolby, Euphonix, and the Technicolor engineers was pretty cool. All the different parties coming together to make it happen was an enjoyable collaborative experience." The biggest reward for Dzuban was the playback of the final Atmos mix. He says, "It's during the final playback, just watching everything come together, when you forget all the little battles you felt you had in trying to make everything work. Suddenly you're in this immersive experience and you're like, 'Oh yeah, this is cool.' " Gravity Skip Lievsay is the re-recording mixer who handled the music and dialog for Gravity, a Warner Bros. film that opened in theaters on October 4. The final Dolby Atmos mix was completed at Warner Bros. Post Production on Stage 10 in Burbank, CA (http://wbpostproduction.warnerbros.com). Long before the Atmos mix, Lievsay and 26 Post • October 2013 the post sound team mixed the 7.1 version of Gravity on Stage 1 at De Lane Lea in London, which Warner Bros. had recently taken over. They mixed the film from October to December 2012. At that time, the Atmos system wasn't set up at Warner Bros. Post in Burbank. Once the facility was ready, Lievsay headed to Burbank to create the Atmos mix. During the break between the 7.1 mix and the Atmos mix, supervising sound editor Glenn Freemantle and Niv Adiri, the sound designer and re-recording mixer who handled the sound effects, Foley, and backgrounds in the mix, translated elements of the 7.1 mix done at De Lane Lea into the Atmos format using the Atmos plug-in at Pinewood Studios. Lievsay was able to open those sessions at Warner Bros. in Burbank, giving him a huge head start on the Atmos mix. "We were pretty much ready to play back for the filmmaker when he came and joined us," Lievsay says. "We had a few days to get ready with what we had. Then the producer/ director Alfonso Cuarón came in and we started doing a fairly elaborate Atmos mix that is quite different from the 7.1 version." Lievsay feels the Atmos format works really well for Gravity because the film is very abstract. They approached the sound with the idea that, in space, there is no air, and so there can't be any sound. The majority of the sound is therefore made up of things you could hear while wearing a space suit, like radio communications from other people. There are two kinds of radios in the astronaut's suit. One is what they hear between Houston and the ship, and the other communication is from astronaut to astronaut, which has more of a short wave radio type of sound. On the sound effects side, Lievsay explains, "We established in our heads that if you were touching something, then the sound could be transmitted through the suit and so you'd hear a vibration type-sound. So everything they touch you hear a sound that's modified to sound like it's coming through the suit." For the dialog, Lievsay was able to glue the actor and their voice together, so whether the actor is on screen or off, their voice comes from that exact spot in the theater. "When Sandra is on the left side, you hear her voice coming from there, and George might be floating up around the roof, and you hear his voice coming from up there," Lievsay explains. While this technique is not scientifically accurate, it was certainly more fun. "If you had to do it scientifically, I guess you would need to have all the voices coming from inside a helmet, which would be the whole theater," notes Lievsay. "We felt it was far more fun to have the voices coming from where the www.postmagazine.com actors are, on or off the screen. Atmos was fantastic in its ability to track and pan the voice with the image, and that's really satisfying. It required a lot of patience to get that right. We did that with the sound effects as well." The final major component of the soundtrack is the score. Producer/director Cuarón wanted a non-traditional score that would fill in the gaps created by a lack of sound design — since there is no sound in space. He charged composer Steve Price with the task of figuring out how to make a lavish, big track that didn't sound like an orchestra. Price used a combination of manipulated instruments and computer-generated sounds to fill up the different frequencies that an orchestra would normally provide. Since the score would also fill in the places where there was no sound design, it had to be big and bold, acting as an explosion at times. "We spent a lot of time re-imagining how to get as much movement as we possibly could from the score, to fill in for what the sound effects would typically be doing," says Lievsay. "We tried to make it as fluid as possible. We spent most of our time doing that, both in the original 7.1 mix and the Atmos mix. The idea sounds exotic and crazy, but when you see the film, the music is nearly literal." Lievsay worked closely with music editor Chris Benstead, as well as composer Price, to get the music working they way Cuarón wanted. Since it was a completely virtual mix, Lievsay and Benstead were able to accomplish anything that Cuarón asked for. "Chris worked on the panning and I did the volume. We were four hands doing the work of one person," Lievsay says. Lievsay notes that the Atmos format was ideal for mixing Gravity. "It was a very happy handshake between the ideas of the movie and the Atmos format itself." Of the three sound elements in the film, two of them are essentially mono. The voices are mono, and the sound effects (the touching sounds that come through the space suit) are mono. "Those work really well in the Atmos format because Atmos has the pinpoint accuracy to have the sound coming from a very specific place," notes Lievsay, who feels the music also had an advantage in the Atmos format. "The music is really big and wide and dramatic, and Atmos was able to play back a really big and wide sound. The music was able to fly all around. It pans across the whole room and up on to the roof and inhabits different spaces at the same time. Only Atmos could have done that for our soundtrack." Metallica: throuGh the Never Sound designer Mark Mangini, working for