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wasn't an exercise in futility. "We had to try it out to see what worked and what didn't," says Albrechtsen. "It ended up being a film where the soundscape is very minimal in some places and quite multilayered and wide-ranging in others. It's a very dynamic sonic experience." The interviews are an integral part of the story so Greenfield always used a production sound recordist to capture them. That's not typically the case with documentaries. Time and budget con- straints often equate to utilizing a skeleton crew. But Greenfield wanted to get the best sound pos- sible, to have every word be distinct and intelligi- ble, says Albrechtsen. "The interviews were done by different recordists and my dialogue editor Jacques Pedersen did a really nice job with those. Pete [Horner] excelled at the dialogue mixing, getting everything tucked in and making sure that the many words in the film really shined and were as clear as possible," he says. Horner mixed Generation Wealth in 5.1 surround on Skywalker's Stanley Kubrick Stage using an Avid S6 console. Albrechtsen was on-hand with a Pro Tools rig to supply any sound effects fixes and updates as the mix progressed and evolved. Albrechtsen constructed his sound design around composer Jeff Beal's score, so changes to a music cue meant changes to Albrechtsen's sounds. "A lot of my sounds I pitched tonally to fit with the music or I cut them to rhythmically fit with the score. There are places in the film where the sounds are more like textures and echoes than obvious sound effects and this worked well with Jeff's richly textured music. This is why it was a pleasure to mix with Pete [Horner] as he has the same kind of musical approach to sound design as I do. In the end, it almost felt like one big piece of music with peaks and valleys —the sound effects add their own moods, melodies and rhythms." THE BALLAD OF LEFTY BROWN A24 Films takes audiences back to the dusty west in their drama The Ballad of Lefty Brown, starring Bill Pullman as Lefty Brown, a side- kick-turned-frontman who seeks to avenge the death of his longtime frontier buddy Edward Johnson (played by Peter Fonda). The film opens during a rainstorm outside on the street across from a busy saloon. The audi- ence hears patrons inside talking and laughing while a piano player hammers away at the keys. A fight breaks out and there's a gunshot. The piano stops. People scream. There's clatter and chaos and breaking glass. A man stumbles out the door and falls dead on the muddy street. It's not often that the sound alone gets to tell the story, and it's even rarer that a sound-story opens a film. But that's the bold choice that director Jared Moshe made. Supervising sound editor/sound designer Bryan Parker — now a part of Formosa Group (www.formosagroup.com), understood the importance of this storytelling moment and made sure the sonic details painted a clear mental picture. "There was a bit of pressure there to get the audience's attention. We had the opportunity to set up the first 40 percent of the story entirely through sound, which wasn't supported by the visuals at all," he says. Parker notes that there was no production sound for that exterior scene since the on-set rain sounded too heavy. After he and his team (sound effects editors Paul Knox and Cesar Davila- Irizarry) built a properly sized storm, they turned their attention to inside the saloon. They created the crowd sound from a mix of library effects and loop group. The challenge there was turning the party crowd into a panicked one, and that's where the loop group proved invaluable. "There's a tran- sition moment when people start to take notice that something is happening, and that doesn't happen all at once. You can't have constant walla Ley Brown director Moshe liked big gun sounds. The mix for Generation Wealth was completed at Skywalker Sound. Bryan Parker Parker says he and his team had the chance to set up the first 40 percent of the story through sound.