Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/681510
22 S P R I N G 2 0 1 6 C A S Q U A R T E R L Y T his year's CAS Award for Outstanding Achievement in Sound Mixing for Animated Motion Pictures went to Disney Pixar's Inside Out, which also won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film of the year. Inside Out is the story of a young girl's emotions personified as they conflict over moving to a new city and attending a new school. The mix- ing crew, consisting of Doc Kane (original dialogue mixer), Mary Jo Lang CAS (Foley mixer), Joel Iwataki (scoring mixer), Tom Johnson (re-recording mixer), and Michael Semanick (re- recording mixer), are no strangers to animated films. They are some of the best in the business and it's easy to hear why. Doc Kane: Original Dialogue Mixer In addition to winning for Inside Out, Doc was also awarded the CAS Career Achievement Award at this year's ceremony. Find out more about Doc in his interview with fellow ADR mixer Jesse Dodd CAS in the Winter 2016 CAS Quarterly. How long does the recording take for a film like Inside Out and did you have a lot of the actors recording together? From the time we start to the time it comes out, is normally a little more than two years. We did a lot of sessions with two actors at a time. We had Phyllis Smith (Sadness) and Amy Poehler (Joy) working together probably 90 percent of the time, which was just fantastic. We also had Amy and Bill Hader (Fear) working together as well and that was so much fun. We are so lucky; we get to watch something the public never gets to see. It was like watching our own personal Saturday Night Live skit. They were really terrific. The actors that we work with on these animated movies are so good and gracious and they just give it their all. When we started it, I was worried about the difference in level from Amy Poehler to Phyllis Smith. Phyllis was so soft and Amy was so loud and in a higher range, but it was amazing how well it balanced out. We checked the baffling to make sure it was working out, but again it's important to get the technical stuff out of the way of the performance. We do a lot of tests before the actors come in. Do the actors rehearse together before you start the dialogue sessions? They'll get the script before we start recording to have some time to prepare, but we record all the rehearsals here. We record everything. We have my Pro Tools system and then a backup system that rolls all day long. And then Jeannette Browning, my stage recordist, rolls her systems as well. At the end of the session, we consolidate each mic to its own track so Jeannette can do that from her system and we leave the original recordings untouched on my system. Jeannette came aboard when we switched from 24-track analog to Pro Tools. She's a really great editor and her skills allow me to focus on the talent and not Pro Tools. What analog format were you using before switching to Pro Tools? We were using 24-track 2-inch, but I started on 3-channel mag and mag really sounded great. Then, one day, management came in and said, "Hey, we're getting a 4-track mag machine" and we were so excited. Then we got a 6-track mag machine and we thought it couldn't possibly get any better than this. We could record six channels of magnetic tape without overwriting the takes! Then the music folks suggested we use a 24-track 2-inch machine with SMPTE timecode to lock to video. When we switched to that, the heavens just opened up. I got so fast with the workflow of the 24-track machine. The console I had at the time was built specifically for ADR and I could put takes together on the fly during a playback because the faders were half the throw of normal faders and stacked with channels 1-12 and 13-24 above it. When we made the upgrade to Pro Tools, that all changed, so Steve Bose, our chief engineer, built a monitor section that would work with Pro Tools and, basically, designed a new console from the ground up. The beauty of this console is that I don't have to go into Pro Tools for anything. I can make custom headphone mixes with the push of a button and bypass any latency from Pro Tools. What is the setup like for recording animation dialogue? Everything we record for animation is always two tracks. The U-87 is our main mic and the Brauner VM1, which is a tube mic, is our secondary mic. We record both separately as an option for editorial. Vince Caro, who does the recordings at Pixar, recommended the Brauner because it can take a little more SPL than the U-87. Sometimes the 87 will snap a little but the Brauner is such a close match EQ-wise that we can just drop in a piece of the Brauner track in place of the 87 and it blends in beautifully. Do you use any compression in your record path? Just a little bit. Just enough to not hear the compression and save the recording from any distortion. It just keeps it from going over—even if the talent really jumps on the mic. MOTION PICTURES ANIMATED INSIDE OUT by Shaun Cunningham CAS