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C R A Z Y H E A RT Andrew DeCristofaro is a super vising sound editor at Soundelux (www.soundelux.com) in Hollywood, and his five years there have given him the chance to work on features with varied budgets, including One Hour Photo, Little Miss Sunshine,The Pink Panther and Rumor Has It. At press time DeCristofaro has just completed work on Crazy Heart, a smaller budget film starring Jeff Bridges that had been picked up by Fox Searchlight. Scott Cooper directed the film, which was shot in New Mexico and portrays Bridges as a down-and-out country singer who tries to make a comeback. Maggie Gyllenhaal plays a reporter who discovers the real man behind the music. The film has been getting Oscar buzz. DeCristofaro got involved after the initial edit and mix. The studio picked up the film and wanted to make adjust- ments for its mid-December release. "As the super vising sound editor, I am responsible for ever ything — ever y par t of sound for the film," he explains. "There is a composer, but I'm responsible for ever y other sound getting to the mix stage. Once ever ything is there, including the music, it's my responsibility to help integrate them all with the mixers. "This was incredibly tight. We had no pre-dubs. I've run the gamut of films, from having two stages pre-dubbing for two months, to this type of film. We had to pick our areas precisely, like what we wanted to fix, where we wanted to go back to and re-edit from scratch. But we didn't have any pre-dubs." DeCristofaro estimates that between 50 and 60 percent of the scenes in Crazy Heart were re-cut, particularly dialogue elements. Soundelux is Pro Tools based and its main building specifically accommodates editorial for feature films. Final mix- ing then moves on to another studio, in this case, sister com- pany Todd-AO, also in Hollywood.The entire film was re-mixed there in 5.1. "Fox was fully suppor tive of what we were doing, but they also had budget constraints," he notes. As the supervising sound editor, DeCristofaro will normally deal directly with the director and picture editor. "The picture editor and the director are the cre- ative force," he notes. "We had a first-time director. He knew what he liked, but he would defer to his picture editor to help get what he was looking for." The production dialogue for Crazy Heart required particular attention. "There [are] tricks for what's acceptable and what's not," he says of noisy dialogue. "You want to clean the dialogue but not do damage. It was like they recorded next to a jet engine. We went back to the original production and cut. Our dialogue mixer — Joe Barnett — worked his magic. Joe did an amazing job cleaning up the dialogue and smoothing it out." Despite the tight budget, DeCristofaro says he always finds room for new sound effects and Foley. "I have never not recorded new material," he says of his film work. "We always do that, regardless. We have one of the best libraries in the world and that's fine and works, but each [film] is unique and has differ- ent needs. We always do Foley." Foley, says DeCristofaro, serves two purposes: It creates texture and detail for the film's domestic release, and also plays an important part in selling the film to the foreign market. The film's music is also noteworthy, and buzz in December suggested a possi- ble Oscar nomination in this category. "The music is fantastic," state DeCristofaro. "Jeff Bridges is singing.You watch him up there and listen to him and say, 'I think I bought some of this guy's CDs once.'You believe he is that guy in his skin, singing up there. He's very natural." G . E . D. For the past seven years, re-recording mixer Jason Brennan has worked exclu- sively at Glendale, CA's Mercury Sound Studios (www.mercurysoundstudios.com). He's an effects mixer who focuses on sound effects, backgrounds and Foley, and es- timates that he's worked on over 100 feature-length television programs and films. Mercury is home to two identical mix rooms, both featuring dual-operator Eu- phonix System 5 consoles. In each room, two Digidesign Pro Tools 7.3.1 systems serve as the primary workstations. One runs dialogue and music, the other handles effects and backgrounds. Both have video capabilities that run independently inside of Pro Tools. One system is used to provide imagery to a video projector.The other provides output to a television monitor.The studio also has film projection capabil- ities, but these days, most visuals come in the form of QuickTime files. "Because 35mm is so expensive to produce, nobody is really doing it any- more," says Brennan. "Apple ProRes is a really, really good codec. It's not too CPU-intensive and the picture is really good." Mercury's A stage features three-way JBL speakers, while the B stage is outfit- ted with two-way JBLs."They translate pretty well from each other," says Brennan of the two rooms.The studio also has an ADR/Foley stage. Recently, Brennan worked on a film for Sony and director Cess Silvera titled G.E.D. The comedy centers around three teenage high school dropouts who want to enter a skateboard tournament, only to find out they need diplomas in order to compete. The story follows their return to school and their quest to earn their G.E.D.s. "It was a short turnaround, but it was a lot of fun to work on," he says. "It's a movie about skateboards and in the end, they are in this big warehouse that has all of these ramps. I used the TC Electronic 6000 for my reverb. It's easy to recall different reverbs. I used one for backgrounds and two for effects, and a separate one for Foley. [I was] trying to create an interesting feeling of this large, sor t of warehouse, with these skateboards rolling around that wasn't like a big ware- house sound. I spent a lot of time tweaking the reverb in that different unit to create the feel without it being boom-y and washed out. "[The production sound] required a bit of cleaning up and the dialogue mixer that I was working with, Gary Alexander, did a really amazing job." At press time, G.E.D. was getting ready for print mastering. Brennan also recently finished up a film that he's been working on for three years, on and off. Have Dreams, Will Travel stars Cayden Boyd, Lara Flynn Boyle and Matthew Modine. "We star ted mixing in 2006, and the producers decided they wanted to re-edit it, so they re-edited it and we re-mixed some par ts and added the new stuff," he explains. "Normally for me, once I am on a film, I star t from the beginning of predubs to the end of it. Sometimes they stop and want to do some changes and some editing and I'll go on to something else for a few weeks and then get back on it a bit later." The Pro Tools/Euphonix set-up, and Mercury's identical rooms, allow him to eas- www.postmagazine.com January 2010 • Post 37 Much of the dialogue in Crazy Heart had to be cleaned up by Soundelux.