Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/681510
26 S P R I N G 2 0 1 6 C A S Q U A R T E R L Y time they've heard it fleshed out with sounds. We try to get them on the stage to do a cue or two. We get a lot of visitors on the stage because it's a fun thing to watch. It's so accessible and so ridiculous in a way that we're doing this sort of thing. When you're working on a film like Inside Out, do you have lots of coordination with the sound supervisors? Absolutely. Especially on something like Inside Out where it's not so realistic. There are realistic parts and fantasy parts. The realistic stuff we've got a good handle on but the fantasy stuff is very important to have their input on. On Inside Out, it was Ren Klyce and Shannon Mills and they were fantastic. They would send us stems of their FX and we could play our Foley against it and enhance those portions of the film. We spent a lot of time on the memory balls. They were such a big portion of the movie, so it was very important to get that right, espe- cially when Joy and Bing Bong fall into the pit with all the dying memories. They are walking around on them and falling on them, and the balls themselves are disintegrating. So it was a question of what do Ren and Shannon want to hear and how do you do that. What did you use to make the memory ball sounds? We used quite a few things. Thom Brennan, who is one of the best Foley supervisors I've ever worked with, brought us quite a few things. He's so inventive and such a talented guy. He brought us something from Cost Plus that looked like a man- nequin head but made out of glass, and some balls that they put in fishing nets. We tried quite a few things and I really don't know what exactly they ended up using in the mix. We did multiple layers of different elements. I noticed that the memory balls have a distinctly different tone when they are fresh and new versus when they're fading away. It's reflected in the color of the balls and the sound as well. Yes. The supervisors are just amazing and a lot of fun to work with. Ren has a musical background, so he talked a lot about timbre and tone. I think Foley is good to create character, even with footsteps. I think it really adds a dimension to the charac- ter that really rounds them out. It can make them funny, it can make them sad. It's all in the performance and I work with the best in the world. What can I say! What's your record chain like? Do you use much processing on the recording? I don't. I'm old school. I started on mag and 2-inch tape, so processing and plug-ins were never part of my process. I have a great preamp, the Pueblo JR2/2, and the FabFilter Pro Q and that seems to do the trick for me. I like a more natural sound and the room sounds good, so I'm not having to adjust for that at all. What kind of schedule do you have for a film like Inside Out? We have several weeks. Disney is really good about making sure we have enough time to do what we need. Having the directors come by the stage really helps get them on our side as well to get the amount of time we need to get the job done. Although I have to say we are probably covering less than we did when we started doing movies like The Lion King and Aladdin because the sound editors are covering more things with sound effects like ambient background cues. We used to build those elements out a lot more and we aren't being asked to do that as much any- more. I hear that you also teach? Yes, I lecture twice a year at Riverside Community College and also am part of the judging team for their film festival. The students are so excited about film and are just doing such beau- tiful work. It's mind-blowing. I've been doing it for about 10 years and I've noticed that students are doing Foley and experi- menting in their films. It's very rewarding. I also have given a seminar in Helsinki, Finland, at Aalto University, ELO Film School and will be in Stuttgart, Germany, to give a talk at the FMX Conference. What do you see in the future for Foley? Someone recently sent me their doctoral thesis that they did on Foley and one of the things it said was that it adds soul to the image—and I think that's true. I think what we do adds a humanity to what we see on the screen. I think that's something people expect now and appreciate even if they don't know why. Michael Semanick: Re-recording Mixer (Music & Effects) How did you get into mixing? I attended Berklee College of Music in Boston, and was fasci- nated by the Music Production and Engineering Department. The process of trying to capture an artist's performance and learn- ing what you can do in the stu- dio—such as what the Beatles did and how they transformed the way things were recorded. So I went into the program at Berklee. After I graduated, I moved back to the San Francisco Bay area and landed a job at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley. They had a film center upstairs, which was the Saul Zaentz Film Center where they mixed Amadeus and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and a ton of movies. I worked downstairs in the recording studios, recording everything from spoken word to rock bands, R&B to Foley and ADR. People from Los Angeles would come up to Fantasy and eventually, I was offered a job in LA record- ing ADR and Foley. John Nutt, a sound supervisor at Saul Zaentz, didn't want to let me go so he talked the management at Fantasy/Zaentz into offering me an opportunity to learn film mixing if I stayed. I didn't know anything about film mixing, but I was sort of interested in it since I was already doing pre- mixing of the Foley before sending it upstairs to the mixers. I would be learning from David Parker [Fight Club, The Avengers], Mark Berger [Amadeus, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest], and Leslie Shatz [Milk, 12 Years a Slave].