Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/757053
18 F A L L 2 0 1 6 C A S Q U A R T E R L Y group (BG, FX, SD, Foley). Foley is tough because it's always different and there are so many factors that go into making a great Foley recording, including room size, mic, the Foley artist, even the editorial—so much that it's a whole other discussion. After I do a Foley pass, I go for the sound effects and then finally, the sound design as the sweetener on top. This can vary depending how the FX are delivered and what kind of demands there are for the project. Sometimes you get stuff that is well-balanced and pre- panned and you don't need to do as much to it to for it play great. You and Marti were one of the first adopters of immersive sound. How did you decide that Auro was the format you wanted to work in? We were actually the first in Los Angeles, second in the US behind Skywalker Sound, and third in the world to install Auro-3D; the first obviously being in Belgium where Wilfried Van Baelen designed the format and had it installed at Galaxy Studios. We were looking into immer- sive formats, one of them being imm sound that eventually was acquired by Dolby and became Atmos. Auro seemed to be the leader at the time for our workflow. They were cutting edge and moving things forward logically from the standard 5.1 DCP format. Their tools made a lot of sense and worked well with Pro Tools in comparison to some of the other formats that required external hardware to make it work and were much more complicated at the time. Marti and I really liked a lot of things about Auro, starting with Wilfried, he's just brilliant and a really great guy, and I consider him a friend. We first heard Auro when we went to a demo at one of the first theater installations in Los Angeles. So Marti and I approached Wilfried and expressed our interest in working in the format and helping him to create some good demo material. We've also done some testing and mixing in DTS-X and AuroMax, which is Auro's object-based format (13.1 + Objects). How did you learn to mix in Auro? A lot of it was just hands-on and playing with it and experi- mentation—but it's a pretty logical next step up from 5.1 with the additional five-chan- nel height layer and the Voice of God channel above you. It makes sense to put birds up in the height layer or wind in trees or stuff flying over your head and thunder; things like that. It doesn't always work to keep BG elements 100 percent in either the top or bottom layer, sometimes it works really well to spread sounds between the layers. I didn't feel it was that difficult to learn, it just all made sense and I got a lot of great input from Wilfried on how to exaggerate the use of the format for better effect, which was great. I feel that it's an extension of the storytelling process and increases the emotional impact of the movie, especially when you can pull the music and other elements into the room and wrap them around you. With having six screen channels, how are you using that added space for FX mixing? It all depends. For Foley and standard hard effects like doors, I keep them in the main center channel, which is the lower one. But for something like explosions, I will use all six channels and really open up the clarity and the impact— even for gunshots, if it's appropriate with the visuals. One of the first projects we did in Auro-3D was a huge Indian film, Vishwaroopam, directed by and starring Kamal Haasan that had tons of action and a war scene in Afghanistan. We had helicopters bombing and shooting going to the height channels and the Voice of God and people on the ground going to the lower level and people on rooftops, where I was splitting them between the two height layers and they were all being panned around. It is amazing and really fun to get that clarity and direction, so much more than you can in 5.1. Wilfried was in town when we initially pitched the idea of doing this film in Auro to the director, and we asked them if they could throw togeth- er a trailer for us to mix and experiment with. They were able to do it and prep the sound for it within days and we were able to get our feet wet with the format and provide feedback for the Auro toolset. I was beta testing for Auro by the time we did our second project in Auro, which was a remix of Rise of the Guardians (2012). We had stems and specific elements split out from supervising sound editor Richard King that were good to have for panning overhead. I was giving feedback daily to Auro and they were sending me a new build of the plugin