Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/681510
C A S Q U A R T E R L Y S P R I N G 2 0 1 6 27 One of the Foley artists I had been working with put me in touch with Terry Porter [Aladdin, The Lion King] at Disney. He said, "You have a chance to learn from some of the top guys. My advice is to stay and learn to mix films. If you're any good at it, you can go anywhere in the world." So I took his advice and learned how to film mix, but it was hard, it was hard just to get on a movie. I've got to hand it to Fantasy. They would put me on as a third chair sometimes just to mix Foley or music when all the mixes were going down to two chairs. The mixers there, Mark, David, and Leslie, were really good at showing me the dynamics of a film mix and I found I had a knack for it, but the hardest part was getting on a film. Nobody wanted you on their film because you didn't have experience, but you couldn't get experience without getting on a film. There were definitely some directors who took chances on me like Paul Thomas Anderson, David Fincher, David Lynch, Peter Jackson, and Tim Burton. They were willing to let me mix on their films; they took a chance on me. I'm fortunate that they continue to call me back to work for them. So I kind of got away from recording music and film mixing took over. I'm still very involved in music, though. Pixar will have me come down to the scoring stage if time permits. I'll talk with the recording and mix engineers on films that I will be mixing. I understand the language. I understand how they are laying things out and how best it should be delivered to get the most out of the score. I get music—I still have it in my blood. What kind of prep do you do for a mix like this? I have learned over the years that pre-dubs are so important. I balance so much and clean stuff out so that I don't have to weed through stuff during the final mix. It allows us to be focused on making more creative decisions and it makes the final mix so much more fun. I'm pre-dubbing sound effects against temp dialogue or already pre-dubbed dialogue and music. I'm already looking at transitions, wondering how do we get from here to there, does the picture do it and how can the sound help sup- port that transition. Transitions are some of the most difficult areas to get right. I try to get the mix shaped pretty well before the director comes in for the start of the final. That gives them a chance to give their overall idea for a scene and ideas for the transitions. It's great to get to the point with a director where they have that level of confidence in you. I think that's just looking at a movie and trying to get inside the director's head. They usually will give me a good indication of what they are going for, what's the scene about, the emotional content that you're trying to pull out. Is it comedy, is it sadness, is it heart- felt, etc.? Inside Out was a lot of fun like that. The story line was ridiculously good. You can watch it over and over again and keep getting new things out of it. My main goal was to not screw that up and support it. What elements were mixing on the stage and how long was the mix? I was mixing sound effects and music. Tom Johnson was mixing dialogue and Foley. We've been doing that routine for a while and it seems to work pretty well. Having all the movement and dialogue together seems to work best whether it's live action or animation because Tom knows when ADR is coming in and out. He knows how much cloth and Foley to add, what feels good to him, and I don't have to worry about that. I'm focusing on things like whether we need to keep the backgrounds up when the score comes in, do we have the right sound effect here, is it going to play with the music? What is the music doing, what elements are helping or hurting the story. I have a lot of fun doing it, but it's a lot of work, don't get me wrong! The final mix on Inside Out, which is a 95-minute film, was about five weeks or so and the pre-dubs were about 20 or so days on the FX side. You've mixed a lot of live-action films. How does animation differ for you technically and creatively? Do you have a preference for animation or live action? I would have to say for me, no, it really doesn't differ. I also really do not have a preference for animation or live action, they are films, we are storytelling. The sound team is prepping the same whether it's animation or live action. They're doing all the Foley, all the sound effects. They're editing all of the dialogue, sometimes replacing it all with ADR. The sound team covers everything and edits everything. The big difference with live action is noise and production effects in the dialogue tracks. The nice thing about animation is that you don't have to deal with on-set or location recordings. The production mixers of live-action films have an extremely hard task at times with try- ing to get useable dialogue. With fans going, lighting, traffic, planes flying by, ocean, or who knows what. I approach both types of films the same way and that's mostly looking at what the director is trying to do, looking at what the story is about. You want to follow the characters and you want your audience to be invested in it. How much involvement do you have with the film before the mix? I was quite involved before the mix. Not as much as Ren [Klyce] and Shannon [Mills] were, but they would call me and Ren would play things for me. I would see Pete [Docter] from time to time and we would talk about it because the sound in the movie was an extremely big deal to him and the movie itself. Especially the areas like the memory balls and the world inside Riley's head and outside. The big question was to figure out how we make the audience feel the difference between inside her head and out. We had to do that sonically as well as visually, and a lot of that was up to Ren and Shannon to come up with. They really nailed it and it helped my job. I also talked with Michael Giacchino [composer] before the mix. Steve Davis, the music editor, would send me two track mixes of the score so I would get familiar with it and really learn what parts make up the score. I think it's important to hear what the parts are doing so we don't lose those parts when we add sound effects, dialogue, etc. Michael is great, he is listening to the dialogue and following the dynamic of the story when writing and orchestrating. I know Michael was involved pretty early on and Pixar usually brings their composers on pretty early. I think Ren would send him sound effects/sound design for certain areas of the film so they could work together.