Avid Technology

by James Delhauer

For almost a century, the process of editing film was an entirely mechanical process. The first editors were required to hand-cut reels of celluloid film and stitch them back together in order to create sequences of images. Though this process evolved and became more sophisticated throughout the twentieth century, the advent of modern computers and user interfaces created the opportunity for something new. In 1989, an up-and-coming company known as Avid Technology introduced the Avid/1—the first iteration of their digital nonlinear editing platform. This product represented a paradigm shift for the world of filmmakers and, in less than a decade, it had all but replaced the traditional flatbed editing systems that had preceded it by generations. Today, Avid products are the industry standard in their fields. And while film editing remains the jurisdiction of our brothers and sisters in Local 700, these tools are also of the utmost importance to Local 695 video engineers, whose responsibilities include media playback, on-set chroma keying, off-camera recording, copying files from camera media to external storage devices, backup and redundancy creation, transcoding with or without previously created LUT’s, quality control, and syncing and recording copies for the purpose of dailies creation.

What was introduced as the Avid/1 in 1989 is now known as Media Composer and no piece of software has been used more to edit Hollywood productions. For the first two decades of its product life, the Avid system was developed as a turnkey platform—a self-contained hardware platform designed for the single purpose of running its software as efficiently as possible. These units were costly to acquire and made the Avid workflow inaccessible to many. However, in recent years, this approach has been dropped in favor of standalone modular software distribution.

As Avid Media Composer celebrates its thirtieth birthday this year, it remains the most prolific nonlinear editing platform within our industry.

The current iteration of Media Composer is a series of exclusively of 64-bit applications that are engineered for real-time playback and decoding of footage by assigning different tasks to different computer hardware components. The platform has been optimized for work with Avid’s DNxHD and DNxHR codecs—a series of proprietary lossy capture codecs. In spite of this optimization, the software’s render engine can decode a wide variety of formats beyond these. All of these changes have made Media Composer much more accessible, allowing nearly anyone with a personal computer and an internet connection to explore Hollywood’s industry-standard editing software.

Avid currently distributes this application in three distinct versions, meaning that users can license separate portions of the software so as to save money on unnecessary features.

Media Composer | First is their entry-level edition, which users can download and use for free. Intended for new editors and those looking to explore the Avid ecosystem for the first time, Media Composer | First provides users with all of the basic tools and functionality of a nonlinear editing platform but limits the number of video tracks, audio tracks, effects, plugins, and bins users can use in a single project. It does not support resolutions greater than 1080p high definition and only supports a limited number of output codecs. Despite these limitations, it can be a versatile tool on set. Video engineers and playback assists can take advantage of this free application in order to verify files, play back media for the purposes of quality control, and create basic dailies for producers. At this time, Media Composer | First project files cannot be opened in more advanced versions of Media Composer, though Avid has stated that this ability will be integrated at some point in the future.

Then there is the standard Media Composer license, which is designed primarily for single users and can be customized to suit their needs. This edition of the platform removes the basic limitations seen in Media Composer | First, allowing for productions that shoot at higher resolutions to take advantage of the Avid platform on set. Moreover, without a limit on the number of bins a user can create, 695 engineers can begin the process of project setup and forward their work along to the post-production team, increasing efficiency and narrowing the gap between production and post.

Users requiring advanced features can also license secondary software “options” for Media Composer. The Symphony Option adds functionality for color correction and project mastering. The NewsCutter option contains tools useful for edit to broadcast environments. The ScriptSync Option allows for integration of the screenplay into the editing process. The PhraseFind Option can automatically parse audio files for phonetics, allowing editors to search for clips based on what may have been said near the mics on set. The Production Pack Option includes a host of advanced color grading, audio design, and visual effect plugins. Users can individually decide whether these features are necessary for their needs and license them or not as appropriate.

This edition of Media Composer is primarily distributed via digital download as part of an ongoing subscription. Annual subscriptions can be purchased for $23.99 per month or $239 up front. A monthly subscription is also available for $34.99. However, users who are wary of subscription-based software can purchase a single-user perpetual license for $1,499. Each of the additional software options incurs its own cost as well. Like Media Composer, the Symphony, ScriptSync, and PhraseFind options can all be licensed annually in one lump sum, annually on a monthly basis, or as part of a month-to-month contract. Newscutter and Production pack can only be purchased through one-time payments of $499 and $699 respectively.

Before licensing all of those individual options, users should look to the Cadillac software package from Avid—Media Composer | Ultimate. This bundle, which includes all of the features of the standard Media Composer application and the Symphony, Newscutter, ScriptSync, and PhraseFind options, is a compressive end-to-end post-production platform. It also includes tools and features for multi-user editing and project collaboration, granting users the ability to make real-time reviews and revisions when working in tandem with one another. Media Composer | Ultimate is only available as part of annual or monthly subscriptions. Annual licenses cost $499 for a year with discounts available for multi-year contracts. Customers can also pay $49.99 per month for a one-year license or $74.99 per month on a month-to-month basis.
    
Unlike their competitors, Avid Technology both manufactures and endorses high-end hardware to support their software products. Users can purchase a wide variety of both first-party and third-party breakout boxes, I/O devices, and hardware accelerators that Media Composer can take advantage of in order to increase functionality, improve application stability, and render the most challenging of products. When paired with these products, Media Composer becomes one of the most powerful rendering platforms commercially available. Their advanced storage solutions are also optimized for Media Composer integration, incentivizing productions using Avid NEXIS network-attached servers to take advantage of NEXIS and Media Composer’s paired utility features in order to optimize workflow efficiency. The result is a product that stands well on its own but continues to improve the more you explore the family of products surrounding it.

But when users need to venture outside of the Avid ecosystem, Media Composer has the tools necessary to do it. The current editions of the program support the export of AAF, OMF, and EDL utility files, allowing media and timelines to be sent from the world of Avid into a variety of third-party applications such as DaVinci Resolve, Adobe After Effects, and Pro Tools—Avid’s own digital audio platform.

Unfortunately, Avid’s patchwork software approach can be confusing to new users, especially considering how many different price points there are for licensing. Users must exercise caution and do a fair bit of research in order to make sure they are getting the best price for their needs. It’s also worth noting that while the complete edition of Media Composer | Ultimate has functionality intended for sound design and mixing, no version of Media Composer includes a license for Pro Tools. As Media Composer reshaped the landscape for film editors, Pro Tools reshaped the world of sound and has set the standard for audio production and post-production workflows. Users who also require a comprehensive digital audio workflow solution will be required to purchase two separate licenses.

This stands in sharp contrast to Avid’s principal competitor, Adobe Systems, whose entire Creative Cloud application suite is available in its entirety for $52.99 per month with no need for additional subscriptions or hardware to utilize its core functionality. This puts Media Composer in the somewhat odd position of being both more expensive and less expensive than its rival, depending on what components customers choose to license and which they do not. Moreover, workflows that are reliant on external hardware for acceleration or versatility can be difficult to support on sets in remote locations.

As Avid Media Composer celebrates its thirtieth birthday this year, it remains the most prolific nonlinear editing platform within our industry. More Academy Award-winning films and Emmy Award-winning series are cut on Media Composer than any other system. In spite of this, competitors from Adobe Systems, Apple Inc, and Blackmagic Design have all begun to encroach on its market share. In the coming issues of Production Sound & Video, we will provide spotlights on these products as well so that members can make the most informed decisions when determining which nonlinear editing family is the best investment for them.

Mixing Live Singing Vocals on

CATS Part 2

by Simon Hayes AMPS CAS

As I mentioned in Part 1, the Sound/Music team required fifty-plus frequencies. During prep, due to the complexity of the shoot, a lot of other departments would need frequency real estate, too. A Google document was set up and each department was asked via email to chart what radio equipment and frequencies they wanted to use so we could make sure nothing would step on or interfere with the cast radio mics and IEM’s. This would obviously have been a disaster.

It was eye-opening watching that document grow during prep as each department added their requirements; whether that was focus controls for the Camera Department, iris controls for the DIT, crane comms for the grips, lighting triggers for the electricians and the myriad pieces of equipment the VFX Department were using. It was a miracle none of us had to compromise; luckily, most pieces of equipment were in the 2ghz and 4ghz bands and away from our wireless frequencies. This process was extremely valuable and something I would recommend becoming commonplace on all movie sets.

Two weeks before we started shooting, Tom Hooper came to me with a new request. As planned, he was going to be shooting on three or four cameras at all times and those cameras would be handheld or on Techno cranes. He wanted to be able to communicate with the camera teams and grips, but also be able to hear the program sound of singing and music in the same set of headphones.

When wearing their IEM’s, the actors were in ‘Cats world,’ meaning they could only hear the other performers on radio mics. This meant that Tom and Ben Howarth, 1st AD/Producer, could only talk to the cast if they removed their IEM’s. We needed to give Tom and Ben the ability to talk to the cast, Camera and Grips on separate channels directly into their IEM’s/radio headphone packs. The cast should not be able to hear Tom giving the Camera Operators and Grips instructions, and the Camera crew and Grips didn’t need to hear Tom’s direction to the cast.

We devised an effective and simple system for Tom Hooper and Ben Howarth to use. Ben Jeffes, my brilliant 2nd Assistant Sound, rigged a stand next to Tom’s monitor with different ‘push to talk’ Sennheiser handheld mics. Each mic had the name of the department it was tuned to communicate with and different-colored tape around the handle so it could be recognized in an instant when Tom went to grab it. Tom Barrow, as part of his IEM mixing duties, handled this process adeptly. He was actually mixing Director and Camera crew comms, as well as the cast IEM’s. It was a full workload and the show depended on him getting it right one hundred percent of the time.

The next part of my prep focused on a discussion with production regarding wireless headphones. In the UK, we use Sennheiser EW G3’s instead of Comtek’s. I explained to production that we would need to give each member of the crew a set which was going to be a very large rental hire. This hadn’t been considered and I had to make the case carefully as to why the entire crew needed headphones. I explained that there would not be any music coming out of speakers at any point during the shoot. We used this protocol on Les Misérables and Tom wanted to use it again on Cats and I wholeheartedly agreed. The issue with using speakers is that they are like a comfort blanket for performers; in rehearsals, they get used to singing with music playing out of speakers and then suddenly feel extremely exposed when they have to sing without the acoustic support while shooting/recording in front of two hundred crewmembers.

I made the point that the cast would feel more comfortable if everyone around them was wearing headphones. This didn’t hold much weight with production once they looked at the large rental quote. I told them that unless the crew could hear the music, all they would hear would be the live singing and that wouldn’t allow most of them to do their job properly.

I gave them several examples: “Why do the grips need to hear the music?” If the DP asks them to start a crane move or dolly at a certain point in the song intro, before the singing has started, how will they know what the DP is talking about? “Why would the clapper loaders need to hear the music?” Because they do the dolly jibs. What happens if they have to jib up at a certain point in a dolly move at a certain musical point?  “OK, why would the sparks (electricians) need to hear the music?” Well, they are going to be operating spotlights and programming moving lights that are cued by musical references. At this point, I was starting to get somewhere. Finally, “OK, but stunts, why would they need to hear the music?” They are using wires to fly the cast in some scenes and the moves will be cued by music.

The language of this film IS the music. Each and every person on the crew needs to become completely immersed in it, and the only way to hear the music is through wireless headphones. “OK, how many do we really need? We need a list that only has people absolutely necessary on it.” I replied, “I’ve got the list, here, it’s 130 crewmembers.” That was how we ended up with 130 Sennheiser G3’s with HD25 headphones.

We had an extreme workload and in prep I was always looking for ways of streamlining our tasks. I knew if we took on too many responsibilities as a team, the creative side of our Sound/Music process could potentially be compromised. I constantly try and think about this issue on all the films I mix. I ask myself the question, “Will this help me deliver higher sound quality?” If the answer is no, I either delegate the issue or move it down my priority list.

We had a really incredible discovery as shooting began, which was how perfect the mic position on the forehead was and how fortunate we were that Tom Hooper allowed me to use that placement.

Handing out 130 G3’s and keeping them in batteries daily would have required a crewmember dedicated to that job alone, so it got delegated. I decided to treat them the same way Motorola walkie-talkies are treated on ‘normal’ films. The rule was, if you wanted a set of headphones, they needed to stay with you for the entire length of the shoot. If you lost them, you needed to go and see production and not come to my team or me. We signed out each set and used a label maker to put the crewmembers’ name on both the packs and headphones. We also asked each Head of Department to assign a member of their crew to be the battery change person in their department. We got production to buy rechargeable batteries and a charger for each department. This was one of the best decisions I made to save my crew time. It worked perfectly and another huge time-consuming workload was delegated.

By the time we started shooting, we were one hundred percent ready for the challenge that lay ahead. We had collaborated extensively with each department during our fourteen-week prep period, with twelve of those weeks having our full core Sound/Music team of eighteen!

Simon Hayes, Production Sound Mixer
John Warhurst, Supervising Music and Sound Editor
Marius De Vries, Executive Music Producer
David Wilson, Music Producer
Becky Bentham, Music Supervisor
Arthur Fenn, Key 1st Assistant Sound
Robin Johnson, 1st Assistant Sound & Sound Maintenance Engineer
Tom Barrow, I.E.M. Mixer
Victor Chaga, Pro Tools Music Editor
Mark Aspinall, Music Associate/Keyboard Player
James Taylor, Music Associate/Keyboard Player
Fiona McDougal, Vocal Coach
Ben Jeffes, 2nd Assistant Sound
Taz Fairbanks, 3rd Assistant Sound
Oscar Ginn, 3rd Assistant Sound
Francesca Renda, 3rd Assistant Sound
Ashley Sinani, 3rd Assistant Sound
Kirsty Wright, 3rd Assistant Sound

With a team of this size all working together, we were able to have a huge creative impact on the filmmaking process. I felt fully supported by each and every person on our team. They gave me the freedom to allow me to focus on the creativity necessitated to give justice to the live performances by our cast. There was a very palpable feeling on the set between cast and every crew member that we were all creating the world of Cats, together, and very strong bonds were forged.

Our responsibility was that every department on the film relied on the Sound/Music Department to do their job effectively. It was not just recording the vocals live, but also providing the comms for the whole cast to be able to communicate with each other as they performed. The sets were so large and expansive; often we would have cast members singing solos many tens of meters apart from each other. They needed to be able to hear the other performers for their own cue points, even if they couldn’t see each other. The entire show was such a huge collaboration between actors and filmmakers. We were all working together to make something extraordinary for the cinema audience. Each of us felt a huge sense of responsibility to Tom Hooper and Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber, and wanted to prove that we could create something sensational as a team.

I built a great relationship with the entire cast as I worked with them throughout the shoot to provide them exactly what they needed to sing and dance perfectly take after take. I got to understand their characters and how they would emote, which was paramount for me mixing twenty-four mics, live on every take.

I needed to be precise with my gain structures, requiring an enormous amount of concentration. I was working without compressor/limiters in the chain and any EQ, apart from a 70hz Low Frequency roll-off, to protect the mic from wind during the dance movements. This is how I like to work when recording live singing. It was my aim to provide Sound Post the purest, most perfectly recorded tracks possible. I had to keep my headphones on at all times unless I had to leave my cart to speak to the actors, Tom Hooper or Chris Ross, our wonderful DP. I needed to be constantly aware if any mics had ridden up the forehead by an inch and let Arthur know so he could reset the headband. I had to listen for hits on frequencies or anything out of the ordinary between takes as it would be impossible to troubleshoot once we were filming. If I missed an issue before a take, I would be jeopardizing that actor’s vocals while shooting.

We had a really incredible discovery as shooting began, which was how perfect the mic position on the forehead was and how fortunate we were that Tom Hooper allowed me to use that placement. On the second day, one of our cast had to do a forward roll as part of his choreography while he sang. There was no break in the vocal as he rolled. I was expecting some kind of impact or mic rustle on the first take and potentially the need to do a Wild Track, but the vocal was perfect. There was no change in perspective at all. I put that first take down to luck and expected to hear an impact on take two but the vocal was perfect. The mic never got hit and it was like that again and again.

It doesn’t matter whether someone was spinning on their head during a break dance routine or tumbling like a gymnast, their forehead never touched the ground. We found throughout the shoot that whatever the performers’ choreography required, their mics would never get impacted in that position. It was a fortuitous piece of luck that meant we could record high-quality vocals even when the choreography was frenetic and explosive.

We did have to use a different mic placement strategy for both Laurie Davidson, who plays Mr. Mistoffelees, and Idris Elba who plays Macavity. They wore DPA cheek mics most of the time. This was because they were wearing hats, which we found in rehearsals would touch the forehead mics, causing rustle on their tracks. The cheek mic position was a little more intricate for VFX to remove in post, and required Tom Hooper and our VFX Department to sign off on. I then sent tests of the actors singing to Nina Hartstone, our Dialog Editor, to see if she could EQ the cheek mics to match the forehead mics. Nina confirmed this was the case. We bounced a lot of tracks to her while we were shooting to get her opinion about specific issues or concerns. Nina is an absolutely first-class creative Dialog Editor and a straight talker, so I knew if she was happy, we were doing well.

The feeling I had every day when wrap was called and I could take my headphones off was extraordinary. Never in my career have I had to concentrate so hard for such extended periods of time. I had been in a different world trying to record perfect vocals under enormous pressure of the live moment. I would like to pay tribute to the cast and their unbelievable vocal and physical stamina. Each and every one of our performers put in a super-human and extraordinary effort. They were on camera for twelve hours per day with only one hour of rest at lunch. Witnessing their cheeriness and good humor really humbled the whole crew. They were putting in the same kind of physicality you would expect from Olympic athletes, while performing in character with all of the emotion that entails, and singing live. The amount of breath control they were able to exhibit was unbelievable. All of them loved the live process unconditionally and gave us wonderful, collaborative support in the process.

I must mention two performers who were literally singing solo and dancing in almost every scene, Francesca Hayward, who plays Victoria, and Robbie Fairchild, who plays Munkustrap. Their effort was herculean and I was amazed at how perfectly they could perform day after day, hour after hour with so little downtime.

As I write this article, I am in daily contact with John Warhurst and Nina Hartstone, who are approaching the final mix. I can’t wait to hear the finished project I put my heart and soul into. I feel I grow a little with every film I make as a Production Sound Mixer, but Cats, thanks to Tom Hooper and Working Title, gave me the opportunity to grow a lot. I learned so much about what is achievable when a Sound Department is supported so mightily, and what a tremendous creative impact our craft has when collaborating with cast, crew, and director to produce a live musical.

Victor Chaga, Pro Tools Music Editor
Usually with on-screen musicals, the music and the vocals are recorded in advance. It is common to have the actors mime on set to the playback of the pre-recorded material. My conversation with Simon about the project demonstrated that Cats was going to be anything but conventional.

As you by now know, all of the vocals for this film were to be recorded live on set. An extensive amount of thought and planning has been put in by us in the Music and Sound departments to have the ability to support the actors musically, all the while making absolutely sure they are not time constrained by the music. As conversations continued, we developed a system that allowed us to seamlessly switch between live musicians, pre-recorded multitrack stems, and material recorded live, on set, during previous takes. This allowed us to instantly adapt to the performance in front of the camera and facilitate requests from actors and production.

“It is common to have the actors mime on set to the playback of the pre-recorded material. My conversation with Simon about the project demonstrated that Cats was going to be anything but conventional.”
–VICTOR CHAGA​

My side of the setup consisted of three distinct elements: live piano, a Pro Tools playback system, and a separate record system that was parallel to Simon’s. We really wanted the actors to lead the musical performance and not the other way around. Having live musicians behind the camera, alongside the playback setup, allowed us to provide our cast with the musical support they needed. By using an auxiliary record rig, we could quickly take Simon’s mix of the previous/best take, import it into the playback session and rebuild the pre-recorded material around the favored performance to be ready for playback by the time cameras rolled again.

For any given song, we would come up with a strategy between the Music, Sound, and Choreography departments to accommodate our director and cast. On a scale from completely rigid to completely free, we came up with the following options:

1.     Playback of pre-recorded material
2.     Playback of pre-recorded material with live piano playing on top
3.     Live piano playing along to a click track (metronome) based on a tempo map of the pre-recorded material
4.     Live piano playing freely with the ability to trigger “reference clicks” (four or eight clicks at a decided tempo). This allowed the musicians to follow the actors freely, yet still have a reference for the desired tempo of the music. For example: the pianist could trigger a reference click at the start of a musical phrase to guide the cast to the given tempo, yet quickly let the actors take over and allow them to feel the rest of the phrase, speeding it up or down as they saw fit. It should be noted that most of the time the click track was only heard by the musicians and not the cast.
5.     And finally, the musicians could play completely free, with no interference from myself, following the actors and allowing them complete creative freedom.

At any given point in the track, we could employ and seamlessly switch between any of the above approaches: the intro of the song would be played live, going into playback for the chorus, then back to live piano with reference clicks, and back to stems again … or vice versa!

The more we planned ahead, the more it became apparent that three things were at utmost importance: simplicity, flexibility, and reliability. I needed a rig simple enough to navigate and troubleshoot quickly. It needed to be highly flexible in terms of I/O, mixing, and routing options. We needed a certain level of redundancy, in case anything did, indeed, go wrong. With a film like Cats, that is completely reliant on music, the last thing you want to do is find yourself in a situation where you’re not able to play any … especially if your job description is “Music Playback” … and ESPECIALLY if you’re sitting next to Simon Hayes!

Having a background in designing and building customized writing systems for various Hollywood composers, I’ve had the privilege to test out various interfaces and computer systems in different capacities. I’ve found RME interfaces to be very flexible and reliable in the past, and for this very reason decided to go with the Fireface UFX+ for the box’s versatility and its ability to handle most audio and I/O formats. (Sorry, Tom Barrow! We’ll do Dante on the next one, I promise!)

The UFX+ was one of the integral pieces of the puzzle. Having the standalone features of the interface outside of the DAW, meant I could rely on the Fireface as a safety net. If the DAW or the computer crashed mid take, the UFX+ would still pass the live piano signal to our IEM mixer, Tom Barrow. In certain situations, that could be the difference between saving and ruining a take.

The routing and mixing flexibility of the interface meant I could keep the Pro Tools sessions clean and simple, with the bare minimum set of controls and I/O options, preventing anything from being nudged, reset, or misrouted, and being able to quickly tell if something is amiss. No ambiguity. Using the TotalMix FX software, I could then take these feeds from the keyboard booth and Pro Tools, and distribute them at set levels to Simon, Tom, and my second record rig.

I found the ability to lock the user interface extremely useful. If there were any changes that needed to be made with regards to routing or levels, I had to go through an extra step to make them, and once the user interface was locked, nothing could be nudged or changed accidentally. Having the ability to save and recall snapshots/workspaces meant I could trace our workflow all the way back to day one, if needed. Again, no ambiguity.

The Pro Tools sessions consisted of the following:

1.    Playback LTC (used for synchronization of Simon’s recordings and pre-recorded material in Editorial)
2.    Click (Metronome) track based on the tempo maps of the pre-recorded material
3     Tracks for imported material (Click, Simon’s Vocal Mix, Live Piano, Playback Mx (Music)
4.    A and B rolls for the pre-recorded stems. Having two allowed me to have the flexibility to edit and build transitions between incoming and outgoing songs

On the record side, I had a small laptop rig receiving ADAT streams from the mothership that is the UFX+:

1.    Simon’s Vocal Feed
2.    Live Piano Feed
3.    Playback LTC
4.    Playback Click
5.    Playback Mx (Music)
6.    Live Piano Midi

Each playlist matched the scene and take number of the film, so we could quickly find the recordings of the performances Tom Hooper preferred. Having the two computers networked meant that I could export these playlists directly to the playback machine and save valuable time that would have been spent on copying data to and from transfer drives. This allowed me to quickly import and synchronize the material recorded on set to the playback sessions, or edit said playback sessions to the material recorded on set, all without nagging Simon for the files.

Having this flexibility required a lot of coordination between the Music and Sound departments. “What are we doing next, John?” “Are we listening to live or pre-recorded piano?” “Do we need to feed the lead vocal recorded on the previous take to the rest of the cast on this turnaround so they could find their tone and their pace?” “WHICH VERSION, Marius?!?” “Do we need to add or remove four extra bars to accommodate the new camera move?” “Simon, sir! Would you like to take down both the old pre-recorded backing vocals, and the new live vocals (previously recorded on set) on your ISO’s, or would you just like the ones we’re recording on the next take?” “Tom, could we send the click track to all the cast, please?”

You could see how things could go very wrong very quickly.

“Cats was a very rewarding challenge. I was very impressed with Simon’s output to Editorial and what this level of collaboration, forward planning, and organization can achieve. I ended up mixing up to forty channels into sixteen mix busses, over two separate mixers on the fly, for most of the time.”
–TOM BARROW

We also found that we needed a lot of coordination between the musicians and myself. Having the actors on set and musicians in the keyboard booth meant we were relying on Simon’s mixes, Tom Barrow’s comms and video screens for feedback from each other and the cast. Try putting the musicians from the most rehearsed and cohesive band into separate rooms and ask them to play together. You could imagine that it would be a very challenging task at best and could easily descend into pure chaos at worst. Our pianists and I had barely three weeks to rehearse.

We quickly realized that the transitions between playback material and live piano could be a lot smoother if the musicians had control of the playback material in certain situations. Indeed, after much deliberation and research, we settled on custom-programmed pedals that would control the transport of my Pro Tools sessions from the piano in the keyboard booth. We would agree on what bar they would want to start the playback material on, I would line up the playhead and they would trigger the playback. Sometimes that would happen multiple times during the same take. This was also our go-to procedure for the reference clicks I mentioned earlier. Having worked out this system meant our musicians could check tempos only when and if they needed to, without any unwanted meddling in their performance from the likes of myself.

It was a daunting task when we first started, but it quickly became apparent that Simon, John, and Becky are as incredible at picking the right people for the team as they are at what they do. By the end of the first week of the shoot, our teams had become as tightly woven as the fabric of MADI, Coax, MIDI, and XLR cables that littered the floor of the set. We worked out all the kinks. It was time to hang on for the ride.

This having been my first on-set job, I’m incredibly thankful to Becky for putting me up for it, and Simon for taking me under his wing. However, I’m convinced that none of this would have happened if it wasn’t for our trainee, Jake Elliott, whose vigor, determination, and selfless commitment have kept us fed, warm, full of coffee, nonviolent, and focused on the momentous task that was Tom Hooper’s Cats! Plenty of tea bags for us! Shout out to Jake Elliot!

Tom Barrow, I.E.M. Mixer
When Simon Hayes asked me to be part of the Sound/Music team on Tom Hooper’s Cats, I knew it was going to be uniquely challenging. I also knew from previous experience that Simon’s fastidious and collaborative approach to negotiating would also allow me to concentrate my efforts on the job at hand, so I jumped at it.

We had a large number of radio mics, live musicians, multiple channels of Pro Tools playback, twelve mono IEM feeds, plus a director to artist talkback. Not just that, but it had to be portable and relatively quick to rig. That was for starters. It was going to grow, and it did.

Before thinking about specific pieces of equipment, my first thought was about the general infrastructure of my system, and the first thing that sprang to mind was Dante.  An unfussy setup with incredibly fast and intuitive routing. Sixty-four bidirectional channels on one CAT6 cable all run though unmanaged gigabit switches. Perfect. I’ve been a great advocate of Dante and have been using Focusrite RedNet equipment for several years now, so I was comfortable with Dante’s reliability and confident that it wouldn’t fail at a critical time. Although I knew I’d have to invest in some chunkier CAT6. Amazon would not do!

Luckily, I already had a small footprint mixer with a Dante option. The Midas M32R and thirty-two input stage box. I also had the Focusrite RedNet PCIeR card for interfacing with my computer, so I felt at the time, I had routing and mixing pretty much covered.

The next step was to select a good IEM system. In the end, we settled for the Lectrosonics Duet M2T and M2R system. It’s brilliant and as luck would have it, it’s Dante-ready and works in a frequency band we weren’t already using. Between Arthur Fenn, Simon’s Key 1st Assistant Sound, and Roger Patel of Everything Audio, we tried to find the slimmest body-worn receiver we could, due to the very acrobatic cast already having to wear a lot of other gadgetry. Not the cheapest by a long way, but the audio quality was superb and the flexibility and features in both the transmitters and receivers were excellent. The only problem was that they were brand-new products and there were simply not enough receivers in the UK. However, we have a great relationship with both Roger at Everything Audio and Lectrosonics. They understood what we were doing and got us the equipment we needed. Now with the added use of a TX antenna combiner, a large directional antenna, and a small cart, I could run the transmission system to anywhere on the stage and cover all of Eve’s enormous sets.

Next up was a conversation with our Pro Tools operator, Victor Chaga. I was keen to continue the Dante theme throughout as much as possible, but that was wishful thinking! Victor’s RME interface employed MADI. For a day or two, I thought this was going to be a problem but it actually led me to using the most useful piece of equipment and one which ended up being the key centerpiece of the whole routing system; the Ferrofish A32 Dante. This solved two problems. The first, how do I convert Dante to MADI and back again? There were other units on the market but they were basic and this unit allowed me to do a lot more.

The Ferrofish A32 Dante not only has sixty-four times Dante and MADI, but also thirty-two times ADAT, and thirty-two analog input and outputs, all-in-one 1RU-12v powered unit. What occurred to me was that if I took all of Simon’s radio mic analog direct outputs and put them through the A32, along with any other flavor of audio from Pro Tools and various other sources, I’d have a much better routing matrix than if I ran everything into the Midas directly. So anything musical that went into the cast’s ears, went through that unit first. I could put the audio anywhere I wanted to and in as many duplicate places as possible with just a click on a track pad.

My next consideration was adding the live-music element to the Pro Tools element. I like this part of the system and general concept. Coming from a musical recording studio background, in my opinion there’s an “atmosphere” you record when you have musicians and vocalists bouncing off each other in a live environment. Pro Tools (obviously) cannot feel moods and react to emotion. For those moments, the live musical element was crucial and Pro Tools was great for giving us rigidity in tempo when that was required. When we needed both, I could send a click track from Victor to the musicians.

With all of this, I was running out of channels on the Midas. Although we were the Sound/Music team, the music part of the team still needed to work independently of the Sound Department and they all wanted to hear different things and each other and have private talkback to the cast. They needed their own mixer. One that I could control remotely and have their own mix system that wouldn’t affect anything but their own mix. We ended up using the Behringer X Air 18. A consumer mixer but a Wi-Fi-controlled one. They could have all musical instruments, a feed from Pro Tools, a mix of the cast and their talkback completely independent of everything else and it had enough outputs to feed multiple channels to me. I also added a Behringer P16M, which is the personal mixer system so the keyboard player could create his own mix and save it for each musical number. We ended up duplicating the musical part of my system over three main stages once we had a basic mix set up, so we could just turn up, plug in, test and away.

I had the overall shape of my rig and now it was to the rehearsals. Simon had negotiated extensive rehearsal time with the cast. This was necessary for several reasons, but one important factor was that ear monitors take a bit (a lot) of getting used to for artists. Even in live-music events where these are used regularly, if a musician has never used IEM’s before, they can feel isolating, alien, and distracting. They had to get used to the IEM’s and feel comfortable with them before shoot day one. Most of our cast was even further removed from that world, having come from musical theatre and dance. To make them comfortable and give them an understanding as to what was possible and what wasn’t was very crucial. We needed time to iron out any kinks in our ever-expanding audio system, and create a basic useable mix for the cast and Music Department to monitor.

Onto the shoot. For me, this was an ever-changing and very organic process. In some areas it would change daily, but in others, it had to remain rigid throughout the entire process. My mix of music to Simon had to remain at exactly the correct level so it wouldn’t leap around wildly in amplitude when cut together. I also was unusually tasked with creating a mix for Tom Hooper to monitor whilst we were shooting. Ordinarily, this would be an output from Simon’s mixer, however on Cats, Simon’s mix, although perfect for editorial, was not necessarily what Tom needed to hear. Simon wanted me to EQ, compress, gate, and generally polish and tighten up a live mix for Tom’s headphones which obviously wouldn’t affect Simon’s recording for Editorial and Sound Post, and give something to Tom during the shoot that sounded a little more like the final mix.

Personally speaking, Cats was a very rewarding challenge. I was very impressed with Simon’s output to Editorial and what this level of collaboration, forward planning, and organization can achieve. I ended up mixing up to forty channels into sixteen mix busses, over two separate mixers on the fly, for most of the time. I’ve always enjoyed pushing myself technically and problem solving, and there was certainly plenty of that for me on ‘Cats’. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that however big your mixer is, it could always do with being bigger!

John Warhurst, Supervising Music and Sound Editor
I worked on Les Misérables alongside Simon and Becky, so was very pleased to be invited to meet Tom Hooper and Film Editor Melanie Oliver at Working Title in the summer of 2018, with a view to working on Cats. The film had been green lit and was going to shoot later in the year. I remember wondering before the meeting how it was going to be shot, as it’s a musical that has a lot of choreography. I couldn’t imagine Tom making a musical film that didn’t involve live singing, but I also wondered how it would be done with so many large set pieces, involving many cast singing and dancing simultaneously.

I came out of the meeting with the definite feeling that the final soundtrack of this film would be all about the sound recorded on set. I knew it would be important to go through the schedule with Simon and try and find moments when wild tracks could be recorded. Or any sung parts that might need to be recorded separately to make sure we would be covered in post production. After discussing the track layout with Simon and how many mics he would be recording, I knew it would be an editorial challenge with forty tracks per take. We need to be organized and test workflows right from the start of the shoot to be absolutely certain there weren’t any technical hurdles in post production.

There has been a lot written about Les Misérables, and how it empowered the actors to lead the performance and the music would follow. Each performance could be changed or adapted from take to take with a live pianist following every turn or pause the actor wanted to make. Cats was going to be all of that and more. There were some songs, and some sections of songs that would need to be music playback so the tempo could be rigid for the choreography involving up to forty-two dancers and twenty-four singers. It became further complicated because there were multiple instances within a song where the music would need to be live, and then playback, live, and then playback again.

We were very fortunate in finding Victor Chaga, our Music Playback Operator whose technical abilities are first class. He fitted straight into the team, which is so important on a stressful film set, especially this film set, where nothing would operate without music. It was important that everyone on our team had the right temperament to be able to deal with what can often seem like unreasonable requests within the timeframe expected.

When we started rehearsing, the tricky part was going from live to playback seamlessly. There were two main pianists, James Taylor and Mark Aspinall. Something we learned from Les Misérables was the importance of whoever rehearsed with the actor then transferred to the set. The actor would develop the part with their pianist and then know that same person is on set accompanying them in exactly the same way as it had been rehearsed. Rehearsals were also taking place at the same time as shooting, so there was always a need for at least two pianists.

James and Mark were playing in an acoustically treated booth, without windows, so communication was always going to be an issue. Our first thought was would it be better for Victor to go in the booth with the pianist, like a small theatre pit band so they could have good communication with each other. But there were many more reasons why Victor should stay next to Simon, reasons that might be the difference between the smooth running of the set or not. The first attempts going from live to playback, and back to live again felt glitchy, too random in execution and not musical because of the disconnect. We were concerned; this had to feel musically perfect and seamless one hundred percent of the time. This led to many discussions about how these two things could interface better.

Memories came back of playing in a band as a teenager and our drummer used to have a foot switch to trigger a MIDI sequencer. There’s something about the person playing to match the sequencer if they are the ones that trigger it. We discussed this idea with James and Mark about using a non-latching foot switch, which would start and stop the Pro Tools music playback. They agreed to give it a go and we bought a foot switch with USB extender cables. After the first rehearsal, it became clear this was the way forward, it was instantly more seamless. Victor was able to keep playing back from the right bar number, making sure it had stopped when it should and re-cueing for the next playback. We now had a system we felt could be taken onto the Cats film set. This was improved further by having a second monitor in the keyboard booth that had the Pro Tools bar count window visible to the pianist, so they could have the confidence knowing that if music playback starts at ‘bar 53,’ they could see Pro Tools was cued up and ready to go, whilst playing up to it.

Once we got up and running with the excellent communication system that was so crucial to the smooth operation of the department that Tom Barrow put together, we all felt ready to go on set!

My role was to foresee any issues that might come back at us in post and to stay close to our Director, Choreographer, and 1st AD making sure we always knew where we were going from in the music. Were we going to play back someone’s vocal who wasn’t on set that day? Do we need a vocal or dialect coach? I was employed to work on the film through post production, until final delivery.

I knew I needed to work with my Co-supervising Sound Editor, Nina Hartstone. Her experience and work with dialog is second to none. Although Cats is a musical film and everyone is singing, the way we deal with the audio in a live-sung musical is identical to a dialog film. It’s like dialog editing in soprano, alto, tenor and bass!

Nina Hartstone, Dialog Editor
When John Warhurst first spoke to me about working on Cats, I knew it would be great to work on a musical film with him again, employing some of the same techniques we brought to Bohemian Rhapsody in order to achieve the best possible finished soundtrack. One of the first steps of working on the vocals and dialog of Cats was to assemble the sound to the current picture edit and listen through Simon’s on-set recordings. For the Avid, Simon supplied two mix tracks (12 + 12), and a track of the music, playback, and live.

For sound editorial, we had the fantastic resource of all the ISO tracks. The use of multiple forehead-mounted lav mics, across two sound recorders, locked to the same timecode, provided a wealth of material for Sound Editorial. It allowed for a great deal of flexibility in the decisions of which tracks to favor for any one shot. It was a complex task de-multiplexing the source audio and conforming to the picture edit, but well worth it to have separate recordings, which maintain proximity throughout all the dance moves for every character. It was no small feat for Simon and his team to capture such good recordings for the multiple mics and avoid any kind of distortion, even across extremely dynamic performances. All their work is being used in the final vocal/dialog edit. Many hours have been spent listening through every mic recording across all takes, to compile libraries of breaths and movement from the dancers, clean of main vocal, allowing us to keep the ensemble presence alive during every scene.

In addition to the forehead placement, mics were mounted on the shoes of the lead tap dancer for one of the songs, capturing close and detailed sound for every tap, scrape,  and scuff, which really complements the close camerawork, and has been a fantastic resource throughout the scene. In Editorial, we have created a tap library from the original recordings, utilizing all tap moves clean of singing and enabling us to build a continuous tap-dancing track, perfectly timed to the music, throughout the scene.

With all the vocals, John and I worked very closely safeguarding authenticity and musicality in the performances, ensuring both sync to the lips and the music is always very precise, constantly asking Picture Editorial to roll shot sync for us to achieve this. This movie has amazing dancers and singers performing live and our aim is to create a soundtrack that sounds hyper-real and intense, using all the great recordings from set.

In areas of ensemble singing in Cats, it has been a time-consuming but rewarding task to meticulously edit the tracks for each character to make certain no undesirable noises are magnified across the bank of tracks and ensure they all play together without any phasing issues. For these chorus sections, we also had the benefit of additional Wild Track recordings that Simon and John acquired on set, allowing us to have both great-sounding singing, as well as the authenticity of the sync recordings, which gives us vocals with the movement of the dance.

There will be very little ADR required for this film, but for storytelling reasons, lines need to be added in post production in addition to what was shot. We plan to employ the same techniques to record our ADR as those used on set. The same mics will be mounted on the forehead. Where it would be beneficial for the actor to move around to replicate their performance, they will be wireless and free to mimic their on-set dancing or movements. The most important element of recording lines or vocals in post is to allow as much freedom as possible for the artist to recreate their original performance effectively.

There is still plenty of work to be done, as we are working toward our final mix. All the work by the Sound and Music team has been outstanding, employing innovative techniques and pushing the boundaries of what can be achieved in a musical film to support Tom Hooper achieve his incredible directorial vision. It will be exceptionally rewarding to see and hear it all come together in these final stages!

The Sound of Speed

by Steve Morrow CAS

I was excited to re-live this historical drama about Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) and Ken Miles (Christian Bale) who built a revolutionary race car for the Ford Motor Co. to compete against Enzo Ferrari at the 24 Hours Le Mans in 1966.

We loved working with all those wonderful cars; the hard part being that these vehicles were more than fifty years old. We also had a very tight schedule; it wasn’t one of those films where they had the luxury of time. The script had a large amount of story to tell that they just had to shoot no matter what.

There were a lot of days where we were at the mercy of the schedule, at the race track in the morning racing the cars around when the light was nice and low, and the image looked pretty. Then in the afternoon, we would shoot all the dialog around Pit Row.

That location was at the Agua Dulce Airfield in the desert. In the morning, it’s nice and calm, and then by the afternoon, there are 40- to 50-mile-an-hour winds, visually you can’t really tell the wind is blowing and it was also 110 degrees, so it was just hot and sweaty.

We had to be very careful in the way we radio miked the actors, making sure they were wind-protected, good sounding, but not buried, as they were just wearing T-shirts. Craig Dollinger is my Boom Operator and is terrific at radio miking the talent. We shot with two, three, and four cameras so the radio mics were the rule for the majority of the film. They were Lectrosonics SSM’s with Sanken Cos 11’s.

For any of the sequences in the race cars with Christian, Matt, and Tracy Letts, we were on the Biscuit Rig from Allan Padelford Camera Cars. This is a custom-built drivable process trailer with a very powerful (and noisy) GM 32 valve Northstar engine. We used DPA 60 series lavaliers here, miking both the actors and planting another in the vehicle, allowing us to capture the loud performance dialog and yelling as we traveled the track.

The camera was in the car so I dropped a bag rig with a Sound Devices 633, a couple of Lectrosonics 411 receivers on the seat beside the actor to be as close as possible to avoid any RF spray from the process trailer engine. We’d hit record and let it go as they drove. I piggybacked the audio into the microwave video transmitters so Director James Mangold and everyone else could hear the dialog in Pit Row.

In any scenes where Christian talks to a driver in another car next to him, we had another receiver into the 633, and once the driver was in the frame, maybe ten feet away from the camera, we had reception on his mic for his line. Early on in the schedule, filming the Shelby Cobras, we hard-lined a couple of lav mics for the engine and exhaust into the 633 so we could record the sound of the engine, the car racing around the track, and the actors’ dialog. That was our go-to standard. The picture race cars, the GT40, and the Ferrari did not have their original engines, so we knew that postproduction would later record the authentic cars.

My main cart has two Sound Devices 970’s as master and backup with the Midas 32R and two Lectrosonics Venue 2 receivers. There were several scenes with nine to ten cast, all wired and two boom microphones with the Sennheiser MKH 50 or the 416, a VOG setup for the Director and 1st AD.

The Le Mans Pit Row set in Agua Dulce was built on the airstrip. It was probably four hundred feet long and three stories tall. The race cars would go through the straightaway at about 110 to 120 miles an hour which made it a challenge, sound-wise, to record the dialog scenes, you just do your best and you don’t sweat what you can’t control.

There was no stage work at all; every set was a location. The Ford factory was a set in downtown Los Angeles, built at a warehouse where we had the factory line. Bales’ house was in Altadena. The first race track at the beginning of the film was at Willow Springs, a flat race track in the desert, where Ken Miles (Bale) throws a wrench at his car. The Ferrari factory was the power station up in Pasadena.

The LAX hangar was actually at Ontario Airport with all the planes coming in and taking off. There’s a great scene where Christian is talking to his son about the perfect lap as they sit on tarmac. “Do you see the perfect lap out there, do you feel it?” The sounds of the planes taking off and landing lend to the story, and we were able to actually get very useable tracks. They were not going to hold for sound for planes taking off or landing, because the sun had to be perfect.  

The unveiling of the Ford Mustang where Shelby (Damon) makes the big presentation speech was also filmed at the Ontario Airport. It was extremely windy and the sun was in a hard spot for us to boom, so the wires on the cast saved the day.

Matt Damon and Christian Bale were having a good time, they got along great. Bale was the easiest and one of the nicest people I’ve ever worked with actor-wise. You could do anything you needed. On this one, everybody was having a fun time. James Mangold was happy telling a story that he really wanted to tell. It was just one of those fun movie experiences because it had such an epic feel while you were making it. Phedon Papamichael’s photography was incredible. My team and I enjoyed every dusty minute making it.

by Stuart Wilson, Production Sound Mixer

Sam Mendes sent me a script in June 2018 with the plan to shoot in April 2019. It’s unusual to be asked ten months in advance for a film shoot but it is a measure of Sam’s meticulous planning which was key to the methodology of such an ambitious project.  

The starting point was Sam’s vision for the film. He felt the drama could be best served by playing in one continuous shot.

The film is all about movement—a journey. It’s given us an unusual challenge because the actors travel so far in a single continuous shot. They could be moving over half a mile, talking all the way. In deep trenches or in and out of buildings. The camera sees 360 degrees, while moving around the actors, so equipment and crew have to be hidden away.

I set about working out technically how to achieve Sam’s vision in terms of capturing the sound, the voices, the actors’ performance, without getting in the way of the process.

My first thought was to carry my recorder, documentary  style, and follow in the blind spot behind the camera, but in planning it out shot by shot, it emerged that:

1. I’d be adding another set of unwanted footsteps to the sound
2. It may not always be physically possible so I’d need a Plan B anyway
3. For the whole choreography to work, it was essential that a number of key crew could hear the dialog live, wherever they were stationed and I would need to be able to broadcast the live mix to the Director, Camera Crew, Special FX, Script Supervisor, Video Assist, etc.—who could be half a mile away over a hill.

A documentary approach wasn’t going to work for this one!

The essence of Sam Mendes’ film is the performances. The writing, design, rehearsals and choreography of the cast and the camera are all geared toward those magic moments when the actors perform in front of the camera. There needs to be as few distractions for them as possible and, within the limits of the process, the actors—their characters, have to be given the space to inhabit the drama of their situation. If the technical process might get in the way or limit the actors’ freedom to be in the moment of the drama, then it wouldn’t work for the film.

The sound coverage for the most complex shots became like site-specific installations. We installed antenna networks so we could receive the actors’ microphones continuously over the large areas. We had antennas hidden in sandbags, in trees, in piles of mud on top of the trenches, on munitions boxes, etc. I got the Drapes Department to make us some bags from the same material as the army sandbags and used these, as well as leaves and artificial grass smeared in mud to disguise equipment (speakers, receivers, antennas, etc.). Hundreds of feet of fibre-optic cable were used, which was new to me. It’s great what can be achieved with it, but it’s expensive, fragile, and temperamental. The cable can fail if the connectors are not absolutely clean (not easy when it’s raining and everything is covered in mud!).

We would all be relying on wireless links so I had to establish from the start with the Camera, Video, and RF departments that we would all use the lowest power possible for our transmitters. We concentrated any amplification on the receiver end.

I managed to see most of the locations four months before filming so I could examine what could be beneficial or detrimental to the sound before any construction took place.

This was an exceptionally collaborative production and I was fortunate enough to have previous experience working with key crew; Production Designer Dennis Gassner, DOP Roger Deakins, Camera Operator Peter Cavaciutti, Location Manager Emma Pill, and the Costume Designers Jacqueline Durran & David Crossman, so that all helped enormously. (Trinity camera rig op was Charlie Rizek, who was new to the team.)

In pre-production with the camera team and their rigs, we made some useful improvements to the noise of their gyroscopes and a company called Cobham built us a special fan-less version of their high-powered miniature video transmitter which really made a difference.

I lobbied all departments to prepare to be able to work without electricity so we wouldn’t require the noise of a generator on location.

In the end, we did need one generator for some equipment, but there would not be spare power for nonessentials as I wanted it to be as quiet as possible and that meant keeping it small. We found one which looked promising, it was well-silenced and newly built on the back of a Land Rover 4×4. It was in use on another film when we were in prep so I went to that set to have a listen for myself and chat with the sound mixer there. I concluded that it would be workable as long as we kept it at least one hundred yards from the action and we got it reserved for our dates.

There was a period of rehearsals and “proof of concept” work with camera, sound, and cast which gave us a good dummy-run at achieving the distances we would face for the shoot. We were able to try things out and develop a way of working to suit Sam’s process. Any testing or rehearsal is useful. Even putting lav mics on actors when their costumes are not finalised, you always learn something.

I have to thank Sound Mixer Tim White and Boom Op Peter Davis for stepping in on my behalf to this early rehearsal period and solving a lot of the issues.

We had the luxury of being able to plan. We knew where the camera would be, where the actors would be and could plan where to install and hide the infrastructure to be able to capture the sound and relay the mix to everyone else involved in the elaborate choreography of the piece.

Planning made it all possible but once the sequence starts, it’s like a theatre show and you can’t stop, if something is not as expected that’s where the jazz comes in and it’s a buzz to improvise.

It was important that the cast could feel like they were in the drama as much as possible so crew around the camera had to be minimal and agile. Some of the sound crew wore army uniforms so they could blend into the background when the camera moved around in their direction.

For the drama, we had to feel ‘locked-on’ to the lead characters with a continuous connection. This is principally the dialog and breathing of the actors. The next dimension was to extend beyond the frame into the supporting cast and crowd who all have been given authentic roles within the story. We placed additional microphones on and around the set to capture sound of the other soldiers’ activity and recorded in stereo along the axis of the camera to expand the soundscape out beyond the frame.

There was a section where the camera was rigged on a wire cam. These are often used in sports stadiums with four massive lifting cranes at the corners, computer-controlled winches and generators by each one, to control the movement of the wires. In sports, equipment noise is not much of an issue and this setup was too noisy for us to get clean audio. The providers pointed out that there was no dialog in this five-minute section, so maybe it wasn’t a problem. I had to explain to them that, even though there was no dialog, there was still breathing and there were footsteps over many different surfaces. The breathing was as important as dialog because it conveyed the state of the terrified characters as they ventured into no man’s land.

The breathing was subtle and full of detail, conveying a lot about what our heroes were going through as they inched forward out of the relative safety of the trenches into the exposed landscape of no man’s land, diving into shell holes, stumbling past fallen comrades and on toward the enemy lines The sound of their breath conveys so much and keeps us connected to the characters’ experience.

Breathing is very difficult to recreate in a dubbing studio because the actor is trying to consciously do something which was unconscious at the time. It’s never as convincing as the original performance. We swapped out their generators for the quietest ones they could get and we hired in acoustic barrier sheeting for the winches.

The result was one of my favourite shots of the film, barely a word is spoken, yet it is gripping and the connection with the characters is completely held.

I have to pay tribute to lead actor George MacKay’s as a result of his great collaborative spirit, he didn’t have to replace any of his dialog as all the recordings of his live performance were usable. On one shot we had him wearing four radio mics at the same time or two body-worn recorders when he went down the river and underwater. It’s very difficult to get wireless transmission through water so body-worn recorders were used as well, in case of any wireless dropouts.

We filmed a lot on a location called Salisbury Plain. It’s a huge area of land owned by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) where we’d been given permission to film. It felt like a special opportunity. Hardly anyone lives there. Beautiful rolling countryside that looks the same as it did one hundred years ago. It was quite surreal as if we’d been dropped in the middle of wilderness, as a film crew, free to use it to stage our story.

For sound, it was fantastic and because it’s controlled by the MoD, we were even able to put a ‘no-fly zone’ in place. If there was an aircraft, they’d find out what it was and get it diverted. Come on—for a Sound Mixer—that’s the stuff of dreams!

The only downside is when we could hear live shelling going on in the “impact zone” where the real army were training. We were lucky most of the time and it didn’t impact our sound recording too much.

I had the best crew who made it all run smoothly, six of us full time and eight on the biggest days.

Hugh Sherlock, a former gymnast, equally adept in a choreographed dance with the camera as in using a sewing machine to make transmitter pouches.

Tom Fennell, long-term collaborator and expert in radio mic concealment and costume negotiations.

David Giles, a sound mixer in his own right, ready to back me up and take on the challenge of sending and receiving any audio anywhere.

Tom Wilkin making sure the key crew could hear what they needed to at any point.

Michael Fearon, all-round flexible support assistant.

Rob Piller, Fibre-optic Specialist, and running repairs.

Thomas Dornan, Sound Trainee, ready to have a go at anything with a bright future ahead.

It’s the first time I’ve managed to work with the brilliant Sound Editing team of Oliver Tarney, Rachael Tate, and their crew. They’ve really managed to make the best of the location sound and bring it onto another level with the sound design work. It was a real gift to work with a director that understands the power of sound in performance. In this way, we are party to something one-off and intimate. We tell a precise emotional story and not a general one. Sam pushes everyone to do their best work and that can be hard but when you get there, it’s all worth it. It was a big challenge technically but incredibly rewarding to be part of such a truly collaborative experience.

I used Danish and German microphones, Italian wireless and fibre-optic equipment, a Swiss mixing board, French recorders, British boom poles, and  German headphones—all in all—a very European kit!

Aaton Cantar X3 recorders
Sonosax SX-ST mixing board
Wisycom wireless equipment (plus two Lectrosonics)
DPA & Schoeps microphones
Panamic boom poles
Ultrasone headphones
Clark antenna mast

The Wisycom gear was fantastic. Very well designed and built. Fibre-optical links, high gain antennas. True diversity on every receiver.

An aluminium antenna mast bolted onto the van from a company called Clark Masts was an essential piece of kit, an extra yard of telescopic mast was worth more than adding 250mW to the power output and messing up everyone else’s signals.

An interview with Mark Ulano CAS AMPS

How many films have you done with Quentin Tarantino?
MARK ULANO: Well, it’s a little bit of a hybrid: the first film I did with him was Desperado, a film Robert Rodriguez directed. Quentin had an acting cameo and that’s where we met. The next thing we did together was ‘Dusk Till Dawn, which he wrote, produced, and acted in. And, again, Robert was directing. And that’s where Quentin and I actually really bonded.

It’s a great collaboration.
It’s a cherished partnership. I feel very, very fortunate to have found a good conductor for the orchestra I love playing in, and we enjoy each other’s process, personality, content, and contributions.

How much prep did you have for ‘Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood’?
I consider non-technical inclusion to be part of the prep; I was asked to participate fifteen months before filming began. I had intermittent prep for about two months and the physical, practical prep/tech scouts and all the rest of that, probably about three weeks, maybe four. There are meetings and that’s prep and then there’s actual interaction with all the other departments; Quentin expects his crew to be fully participating and informed about what he intends to create. This time, one aspect of the film was kept under wraps to everyone. It didn’t matter what your status was, head of the studio or an electrician, and that was the ending of the film. That was super, super secret.

That was a surprise to the audience as well.
That was the idea. He was very interested in keeping that unadulterated for people to see and experience the surprise at the end versus having that revealed and out there. Everyone respected that; it was a really nice thing.

In terms of the logistics of the movie, there’s a lot of moving parts and of course, a considerable amount of driving shots. What scenes were the most challenging?
Well, I’ll admit to a bias here: Quentin has an ethic to use the performance that happens on the day in front of the camera, recorded at that moment, in the movie. And he has an absolute devotion to that as a director. If that’s the take he chooses in post production, he has an unblemished history of not doing replacement dialog for reasons that may be intrusive to the scene.

That’s a foundational aspect of working with Quentin. You have to be prepared for that psychologically, that you’re not doing something that’s potentially replaceable or temporary; it just isn’t okay. But over the years, you understand that comes with the caveat that you’re in collaboration and you’re not a non-entity in participation of making the movie.

When there are things that are competing elements, say, in a scene or a shot, something we need for image and something we need for sound and something we need for wardrobe or something we need for sets or whatever and they bump up against each other—it’s not territorial on his set. We say, okay, let’s figure out what’s the best solution to have the most beneficial aspects of those elements survive the collision.

The stereotypical response of “screw sound” or some department being territorially dominant doesn’t apply here. It’s all about serving the project and realizing the director’s intent. So, when you have issues that invade the threshold of connection with the characters, there’s collaboration to work it out.

In this movie, the biggest challenge is the enormous amount of driving work, very often at high speeds on freeways with windows open and actors in unusual postures and positions. I would probably say that was the most technically challenging component of the film. And to always have this caveat in the back of your head, what we do here today; if it’s not good enough to be in the movie, we haven’t gotten it.

My threshold is: Has the audience been interrupted enough by some element that breaks the connection they have believing the character on screen? My guidelines are about connection with the character, the character’s arc within the film, the story arc. These are all driving elements for me. And when I’m engaged with Quentin, I’m in those kinds of conversations.
Everybody in that orchestra is a very accomplished, polished filmmaker; filmmaker is really the key word. We all think in a directorial context: not preemptively directorial but supportively directorial. To exist on Quentin’s set, everyone has to have that kind of intuitive sense of where we are and if there’s a problem, we discuss it: this is an issue, these are possible solutions, we can do this or that.

The solution is creating certain processes and protocols on the set and that was collaboration between my great colleagues, Michael Minkler and Wiley Stateman in post production and myself. We are a triangle producing the sound for Quentin’s movies.

OUATIH has challenges that are relatively contemporary. It’s set in the late ’60s, not present day, but you’re still dealing with twentieth-century elements in the environment. The solution was always having multiple options in play at any given time so that, on the day, the actors were not invaded by external issues. They have the freedom of the set being a period environment in which their characters have to exist. So that’s the idea and on this show the challenges were relatively contemporary.
 
How did you mike the many scenes where Brad Pitt drives the Cadillac?
The permutations of improv is the dominant factor when you’re dealing with performance. But there’s a finite roadmap that’s established by Quentin in his blocking process. He’s profoundly traditional in approach as far as making sure his department heads know the information they need to know how to achieve the scene. There’s a blocking rehearsal between Quentin and the actors. Then there’s a blocking rehearsal for everyone.

After this many years, I can say there’s a good percentage of reliability that that blocking is solid information. All the departments strategize around that, and I use something similar as in still photography—zone coverage. Where is the sphere of dialog going to occur?

I treat all of the sound that’s happening in the frame as each needing its own respect as an element and I’ll know that there’s a certain sort of peripheral range of head turns and head tilts. The harder issues are if you’re doing a combination of free run and tow and also if the actors are actually driving. If you’re going uphill with windows open on a tow vehicle in lowest gears, close and going slow or even speeding, suddenly you have these other potential competing elements of that invading the scene inside the car.

For me it’s a matter of ducking and mixing to the beats in the scene and riding the wave of the dialog’s flow. I don’t subscribe to the theory or the concept that actually what production sound people do now is just go out and collect discreet elements and let somebody else sort it out later. I do a mix. I do a mix on every shot every day for this director and any director, frankly. My mix is something I am creating as the way the performances are going to get to the audience.

The work that we’re creating is the architecture, or the blueprint of how we feel the scene should sound.
I call it the bed but the same idea; we’re laying the bed of this. Now I also know, particularly if I’m working with Quentin, I’m in a long-established, very involved collaboration with the supervising sound editor and the re-recording mixer about these issues. And I know they are going to look very, very strongly toward my mix on the set. I will capture other components and elements discreetly. I think that’s prudent and I think it also allows for creative adjustment after the fact. There’s a strong history of them trusting what we do on set and us trusting what they do in a way that really comes out on top for the director and for the movie project. So we’re really not under siege, you know, or a lonely department, we’re in collaboration with various and experienced filmmakers who love the sound to be as good as the lighting, be as good as the cinematography.

Everyone takes precious care or a position to respect, regard, and include the other elements to Quentin’s scene. Quentin is not someone who’s comfortable with singular departments taking a position that what they do is more important than what they’re integrating with. He wants the whole piece of cloth to come out of that. And every shot’s handmade when you are making it. You’ve got all these artisans doing their special part, like an orchestra—this guy plays oboe, I play drums, you know, but the point is that it’s a piece of music at the end of the day.

Unfortunately, it’s too rare a thing to have that kind of established environment by the director; the director sets the tone. If you don’t get it, you don’t belong there. I don’t mean that meanly, but you know, this is not something that there’s a lot of discussion about, by the way. There’s an enormous amount of evolved non-verbal communication about things. It’s like that. It’s like playing with other musicians. It really is. There’s no other way to describe it, and with a bandleader like Quentin—he gets it, too. Everyone gets it. That’s the miracle of it.

OK, how did you mike the car?
Let me preface with saying like in music, I don’t care if the drummer plays left-handed. I care if he knows, or she knows, what two and four is, how to swing the band and how to, how to make music. So musicians are often very focused on technique, they obsess, as do filmmakers. And long ago, I started to change my earlier philosophy of not being seduced by the fascination with technique and more seduced by the overall outcome. There are times I’m mixing something with many elements, you know, ten, fifteen, twenty elements and if you ask me what I did during the mix, I would have to come back and say, I’m in the flow, I’m in a fluent moment between all those elements, mixing; what makes sense like when playing an instrument.

If I have to stop and think about how I’m going to blend those microphones when I’m doing this scene, it’s too late. I’ve lost the timing connection with the scene. I have to be in flow the way the actors are and where the camera is. The outcome: okay, so in car situations, there’s a blend of different things. It depends on who the actors are and the tonal quality of their voices and their rhythms. Not just in terms of the actors specifically but the characters the actors are creating, because actors will do very different things with different characters. Early on, I try really hard to plug into the framework around the characters that the actors have built in terms of their performance, and mike to that.

In car planting situations, I lean more toward planting omnidirectional lavaliers in different places, sometimes on the character, sometimes overhead. And I started doing this a very long time ago with Sonotrims and Trams, which were revolutionary microphones because they were front-element mikes that allowed you to place them flatly and they also allowed you to get some sort of PZM capacity, giving them a kind of directionality. I use those depending on the acoustics of the vehicle and actors.

My dominant planting mikes these days are: DPA 4061’s and 4071’s, as they have a great capacity for a natural sound, and Sonotrims. Occasionally, I will plant a Schoeps and Sanken hypercardiod, even Countryman mini-cardioids at times. There’s a wide palette of choices in my lavalier kit.

I’ll use the analogy of a lens kit: What’s the right lens for this shot? You could use a 25mm, 50mm, 100mm, or 300mm, and each will have the same frame scale, a waist-up single, but each one of them will be saying something different. I’m like that with microphones. A lot of it’s intuitive and I build from there. I try not to have some pre-set notion about how to approach the scene until I’ve gotten there on the day. You know, no call sheet nor script page is going to tell you what the shot is until you’re in the blocking and you’ve got the actual elements all together at one moment. The idea that we can predetermine often exactly where the lens is going to be, where the actors … you know, it’s just not true. It happens occasionally, but it’s the rarity, not the fundamental way movies are made now.

It comes down to what’s the best solution for this particular moment? This shot, this scene, this character. Where are we in the story, you know? People look at sound and often just see the tools and assess us in a diminished way as “technicians,” just acknowledging the technical side. It implies a lesser creative engagement. My actual life experience is that we have a broad spectrum of inadvertent autonomy in our creativity as production mixers and production sound teams. I don’t mean to in any way exclude the incredible contributions in the department with our boom operators and utility people. I’ve been with Tom Hardig for twenty years; he’s my colleague, friend, and boom operator. My other really great partner for over forty years is Patrushkha Mierzwa, my other boom operator and utility person. These people are profoundly polished in this specialized work and I depend enormously on that.
To sum it up, I really try and understand what’s going on and there will be micro adjustments. I trained with the relentless pressure of decades of one-track, no redundancy on the set, that’s what’s going to dailies. But one of the enormous benefits that we have gained now with nonlinear, file-based multitrack tools in the field, is that we can be diverse in our approach. I can have more than one game plan working simultaneously.

Which is not exactly the same thing as just capturing discreet elements and solving it later. It’s having more than one approach happening simultaneously. That’s a different thing; it may be a subtle difference but I think it’s an important one. What it does for me is that it (figuratively) lets me float in between the raindrops during an actual take. I try not to paint myself into a corner, it’s partially defensive but it’s mostly aesthetic. I’m here to really get an audience to believe in this character at this moment in the story.

That’s my mission, to be supporting the story, to tell the story along with the other crafts in the movies. The magic of movies is that we get to believe in something that’s completely artificial in its fundamental creation, but transcends into something really substantive. Sometimes it can be something very significant socially, culturally, and emotionally. There’s magic to be done. For me, if you have the Chinese definition of luck (preparation and opportunity coming together), your percentages really go up in terms of succeeding with any particular shot or scene.
 
In any given scene, your mix is between an open boom mike, a radio mike on the actor, a plant, etcetera, to use those choices available to make that mix.
Correct. One of the more frequent questions I probably get asked is, “Is it a boom scene or is it a radio mike scene?” Well, it’s one or all of those elements as needed in the execution of the scene. I don’t want you to be able to tell. I’m not dedicated to the classical notion of perspective sound being the single and most significant approach. I had the incredibly good fortune early in my career to do a Robert Altman movie and that style (multitrack) certainly kicked my butt. It turns your head upside-down, but in such a good way because you’re free from some predetermined outcome and approach. For me, it’s about connection. I use those elements but it’s like paints: oils and watercolor, which makes the most sense? That’s the idea, what makes sense. People look at us as technicians, but, in reality, everyone on the movie is technical. Actors are maybe the most technical people on a movie. Day 2 of the movie, they have to do the final scene of the show, day 17, it’s the very first shot of the first scene of the movie. And then on wrap day, it’s the midpoint.

An actor’s got to calibrate the character arc so when the chronology of the movie is actually cut together, it works. I think that’s as technical as anything we have to do with our tools. Yes, our basic tools are plant mikes and hypercardioids and radio mikes and lavaliers and all those, but it’s like a box of lenses. It’s what you do with them that matters.
 
Let’s get into some of the tools. What do you record to?
I’ve been using Zaxcom for a long time, I know their people. I believe it’s important to be connected personally with all the people who make the specialized tools that we use. I just came back from a tour in Germany and France, visiting Cinela and Schoeps. Each tool that we use is excellent in some particular way but not necessarily in every way. For me, Schoeps is a primary key player in my miking. The Sanken CS3E shotgun mikes have been transformative for me as a boom tool. I journeyed from Schoeps to Neumanns, which I love and respect enormously, to the Sanken’s for the practicality that they afford us in the generally acoustically hostile environments that real movies are made in.

They allow us to have zero proximity. They allow us to have seventy percent to eighty percent control in terms of pattern. When someone’s walking on a noisy surface, you flatten out the mike; your boom operator is really painting with sound at that point. The off-axis is profoundly smooth, and the reach of the Sanken CS3E is also very significant, particularly with the proliferation of multiple-camera work over the last couple of decades becoming a dominant versus occasional form. You have a much greater potential with that microphone to be able to make the compromise between the two frames, or more frames than you would with some of the other microphones that are out there.

It’s really conditional to how the scene’s been blocked and what is in the frame. I’m old school. I don’t need to look through a monitor or a viewfinder to know what a 50-millimeter lens does at eight feet. I know what it looks like. I know where the key light is, I know where the fill light is. I know how it’s going to interact dynamically when the camera’s moving through those and I design the sound appropriately with my mix.

Were there a lot of stage sets or was it mostly locations?
There were over one hundred locations, over one hundred speaking parts in the film. The first weeks we were at Universal Studios Western streets of the back lot. It was rebuilt and we shot the ’60s period Western episodic TV stuff, Lancer. We shot the Bounty Law scenes at Melody Ranch. Spawn Ranch was at the Santa Susanna Park and was completely created by the Art Department. The martial arts scene, where Bruce Lee is duking it out with Cliff, looks like a studio lot, but was a high school parking lot in Compton. Many of the locations were the actual places when we could. They locked up Hollywood Boulevard for a week a few times. That was a fundamental component for Quentin’s environments for his actors. He wants to give them as much of the flavor of a place that they’re supposed to be in at the time. It’s old school and you know, they love it, the actors just love it.

DiCaprio’s trailer is where he was rehearsing his scene with his tape recorder. What kind of a set was that?
It was a trailer, no breakaway walls, no breakaway ceilings, nothing. It was small, difficult and crowded with everybody not on camera. You deal with it, you make it happen, you make it work. We know Leo’s rhythm. This is my third movie with Leo and Tom’s second movie with him. You know, you get a sense of who you’re working with and how they telegraph a little bit with very, very, very subtle aspects. What’s he going to do next and where is he going to do it?

Tom used a Schoeps on a GVC angle, so it’s a thumb’s width from the top of the frame and he worked closely with DOP Bob Richardson; we’ve been collaborating on movies since 2002, 2003. Everyone is struggling in a creative but challenging environment. Even though it’s so collaborative and inclusive, it doesn’t mean that it’s easy and you slide by on compromises that are damaging. No, it’s the opposite. If it’s hard, it’s hard. Everybody’s working through the hard together. There’s no blame-seeking missions and there’s no “Sorry, you can’t be there” stuff or “You’re being there creates a problem.”

In regards to that scene he rehearses with his tape recorder, how was that done? Was that all added in post?
No, not at all. We went to Leo’s trailer—Quentin, myself, and Leo—and recorded him both on my main gear for the show and on that recorder, that very recorder. Leo recorded that and he knew when to not speak and to leave the holes. That was all predetermined before we recorded. Then he would play that back on set. He was using it as a practical prop for himself, which is what Quentin needed him to be doing because he’s acting with himself in that moment.

Like the action with the tequila margaritas and all that stuff and he’s rehearsing. He really used the props. So, it was actually kind of great fun. Likewise, the dancing where he’s doing the Hullabaloo show: he’s singing live. We brought in Gary Raymond, the creme de la creme of on-set Pro Tools and playback and Gary did a fantastic job of creating a safe space for Leo to do something he doesn’t usually do, which is sing and dance on camera.

All of the driving sequences have an enormous amount of background radio playing throughout, which is so emblematic of that era. How was that done?
Every movie I’ve done with Quentin, I’ve had the joy and privilege of getting a brown manila envelope packet with his hand-written script. It means—OK, this is the movie that’s coming up in a couple of months, so get ready. This time, because of their intense interest in keeping it under wraps, I received a jump drive with fifty hours of log tapes from LA radio station KHJ.
All music and commercials, all true, live tapes. What does that mean in your knowledge of background stuff? Well, it was a whole separate creative endeavor on the part of Jim Schulz. He had to prepare for Mike Minkler five levels of all of the music that would be in the show; the level that would be what you’d hear over a two-inch cheesy speaker in a 1969 car with the windows open, all the way leveling up to direct remasters, the kind that you’d hear in your head; the psychology of third-person or first-person in that music. Multiple layers of that depending on what was going to be needed in the scene. All of that music was prepared by Jim so that at a moment’s notice in the mix they could draw from that library for what was really the right thing for a particular shot in the scene. Complicated.
 
Did you have to play back any of those tracks in the driving scenes?
I always had the music with me in some form if needed, always. You can do a lot with a Bluetooth speaker and iPod, you know, an iPhone or iPad to do playback from the backseat or from the tow vehicle. We would do things that were more atmospheric. Like Cliff driving back to his trailer from Rick’s house, that type of thing.

I would play music, particularly the Jose Feliciano song, for emotional purposes for the actors. Which goes back to the silent era, you know. There were never really silent movies, all those films had some kind of sound—dialog or music—in some form. The idea that music on the set is a tool for actors, plugging into their characters emotionally, is a very common element on Quentin’s set. I’m charged with a lot of sourcing for music when needed … both for crew morale and for scenes with actors.
 
In the car-to-car shooting, how difficult was that?
Occasionally in those cases where I was using a primary wireless transmission but felt that there was potential risk for damaging a scene, I’d put hard recorders inside the vehicle as well, that would take the same sources and capturing, and I had some recording transmitters as well. Or a special situation for times when somebody is coming from very far to near, like Tex charging back to the ranch from a horse lesson; we put a normal radio mike on Austin and a recording transmitter. I have a range of possibilities and it becomes more focused as we get to the reality of the shot. That’s a better way to describe it.

I have a fairly good remembrance of approach to the scene, what I don’t intellectualize is the minutiae of the performance itself, the timing in the moment. I will remember the architecture of the scene in terms of our approach. That’s really what matters to me because I’m giving an expression of my approach to something and someone else is going to get value out of it. Stay a student of the tools always. Go to seminars about Isotope to learn what is a viable answer when someone asks you on set, “Is that okay? Did we get it? God, there was a giant truck or airplane, that can’t be good!” and you can come back with an educated assessment. It’s your best defense for challenging situations on a film set. Trust your team, surround yourself with people who know more than you, are smarter than you, and better at it than you are so that they can help you support that director and those actors.
 
Anything else you want to add?
Yes. I’ll say this about Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood and it’s one of the reasons I have great admiration and affection for this film: it’s a significant expression about gratitude, acceptance, and love. People don’t necessarily associate those three things when they’re talking about Quentin Tarantino films, but if you dig deeper, you’ll see that they’re actually very deeply woven into all of his films. You know, kabuki violence aside and all the rest of that, a lot of that is humor and his deep, responsible obligation to himself to entertain. He really thinks that if you’re not entertaining, you’re not serving the audience, you’ve blown it.

The idea in this film about the love affair between the two men, the idea of the decline in their personal and professional status as a backdrop to revealing who they are as people … it’s very three-dimensional and not everybody gets that. But for me, this one’s really his love poem and all of our love poems to the making of movies. It’s his Day for Night, if you will. It’s a deep exploration of the love of making movies that infused everything, every day, every shot; we were all very explicitly aware that we’re doing something we love to do. We’re doing it with each other because we love to do it with each other. And we’re doing it for the love of it.

If he got a print and that was it, that’s a great one, he would say, “We’re gonna do another and, and why are we going to do one more?” And the entire crew in unison would come back, “because we love making movies.” It’s really the truth, it’s not an easy thing to find in our work; to be in a place where the director’s comfortable in his own skin, where the content is emotionally significant for many who are engaged in its creation and connects with people at the other end, and the audience got it.

What I admire and appreciate enormously was behind the scenes, without press or paparazzi around, the purity of the process. He achieves an autonomy that’s rare for directors. The studio was supportive and hands-off in a very respectful way. We had what we needed to do the thing we were doing, and we enjoyed doing that every day of that production.
Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood doesn’t fulfill your expectation of a “Quentin Tarantino movie” and yet it is ultimately the epitome of a Quentin Tarantino movie because of that very aspect.

All photos by Andrew Cooper. Courtesy of Sony Pictures

LOCAL 695 OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN SOUND MIXING FOR 2019

On December 10, 2019, the Cinema Audio Society announced the nominees for the 56th Annual CAS Awards for Outstanding Achievement in Sound Mixing for 2019 in seven categories. The winners will be revealed at the 56th Annual CAS Awards Saturday, January 25, 2020, InterContinental Los Angeles Downtown Hotel – Wilshire Grand Ballroom, Los Angeles, California

CAS Award Nominees

Motion Pictures – Live Action

Ford v Ferrari

Nominees: Steven A. Morrow CAS,
Paul Massey CAS, David Giammarco CAS, Tyson Lozensky, David Betancourt,
Richard Duarte
Production Sound Team:
Craig Dollinger, Bryan Mendoza, Richard Bullock Jr.

Joker

Nominees: Tod Maitland CAS, Dean A. Zupancic, Tom Ozanich, Daniel Kresco, Thomas J. O’Connell, Richard Duarte
Production Sound Team:
Michael Scott, Jason Stasium,
Jerry Yuen

Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood

Nominees: Mark Ulano CAS, Michael Minkler CAS,
Christian Minkler CAS, Kyle Rochlin
Production Sound Team:
Tom Hartig, Patrushkha Mierzwa, Jay Golden, Chris Howland CAS, Marlyn Lopez, Veronica Lopez, Gary Raymond and Mauricio Rivas

Rocketman

Nominees: John Hayes, Mike Prestwood Smith, Mathew Collinge, Mark Appleby, Glen Gathard
Production Sound Team: Peter Allen, Emiliyan Appleby, Max Lipscombe, Morris Concas, Andrew Rowe

The Irishman

Nominees: Tod Maitland CAS, Tom Fleischman CAS,
Eugene Gearty, Mark DeSimone CAS, George A. Lara CAS
Production Sound Team:
Jason Friedman-Mendez,
Terence C. McCormack Maitland,
Jason Stasium, Jerry Yuen,
John D’Aquino

Motion Pictures – Animated

Abominable

Nominees: Tighe Sheldon,
Myron Nettinga, Nick Wollage, David Jobe

Frozen II

Nominees: Paul McGrath CAS, David E. Fluhr CAS,
Gabriel Guy CAS,
David Boucher, Greg Hayes,
Doc Kane CAS, Scott Curtis

How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World

Nominees: Tighe Sheldon,
Gary A. Rizzo CAS,
Scott R. Lewis,
Shawn Murphy,
Blake Collins CAS

The Lion King

Nominees:
Ronald Judkins CAS,
Lora Hirschberg,
Christopher Boyes,
Alan Meyerson CAS,
Blake Collins CAS

Toy Story 4

Nominees: Doc Kane CAS, Michael Semanick CAS,
Nathan Nance, David Boucher, Vince Caro CAS, Scott Curtis

Motion Pictures – Documentary

Apollo 11

Nominees: Eric Milano,
Brian Eimer

Echo in the Canyon

Nominees: Chris Jenkins,
Paul Karpinski
Production Sound Team:
John W. Rampey, Robert Reider

Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound

Nominees: David J. Turner,
Tom Myers, Dan Blanck,
Frank Rinella

Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool

Nominees: Gautam Choudhury, Benny Mouthon CAS
Production Sound Team:
Adriano Bravo, Jean-Paul Guirado, Joe McGill, Caleb Mose,
Redd Reynolds, Bill Streeter, Brian Walker

Woodstock: 3 Days That Changed Everything

Nominee: Kevin Peters

Television Series – One Hour

Game of Thrones “The Bells”

Nominees: Ronan Hill CAS, Simon Kerr, Daniel Crowley, Onnalee Blank CAS, Mathew Waters CAS, Brett Voss CAS
Production Sound Team:
Guillaume Beauron, Andrew McArthur, Paul McGuire, Andrew McNeill, Sean O’Toole, Jonathan Riddell, Joe Furness

Peaky Blinders “Mr. Jones”

Nominees: Stu Wright, Nigel Heath, Brad Rees, Jimmy Robertson, Oliver Brierley, Ciaran Smith
Production Sound Team: Alessandro Pascale, Ben Hossle, Joshua Tot Carr, Laura Clough

Stranger Things Chapter Eight: “The Battle of Starcourt”

Nominees: Michael Rayle,
Mark Paterson, William Files,
Hector Carlos Ramirez, Bill Higley CAS, Peter Persuad CAS
Production Sound Team:
Dan Giannattasio, Jenny Elsinger,
James Peterson, Julio Allen,
Nikki Dengel, John Maskew,
Patrick Miceli, Jesse Parker

The Handmaid’s Tale “Heroic”

Nominees: Sylvain Arseneault CAS,
Lou Solakofski, Joe Morrow, Adam Taylor, Andrea Rusch, Kevin Schultz
Production Sound Team:
Michael Kearns, Erik Southey,
Joseph Siracusa, Rob Beal

Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan “Persona Non Grata”

Nominees: Michael Barosky,
Steve Pederson, Daniel Leahy,
Benjamin Darier, Brett Voss CAS
Production Sound Team:
Jorge Adrados, Frank Graziadei,
Jamie Llanos, Cesar Salazar,
Dean Thomas, Karl Wasserman

Television Series – Half-Hour

Barry “ronny/lily”

Nominees: Benjamin A. Patrick CAS, Elmo Ponsdomenech CAS,
Jason “Frenchie” Gaya, Aaron Hasson, John Sanacore CAS
Production Sound Team:
Jacques Pienaar, Corey Woods, Kraig Kishi, Scott Harber,
Christopher Walmer, Erik Altstadt, Srdjan Popovic, Dan Lipe

Fleabag Episode #2.6

Nominees: Christian Bourne,
David Drake, James Gregory
Production Sound Team:
Tom Pallant, Guido Lerner, Josh Ward

Modern Family “A Year of Birthdays”

Nominees: Stephen A. Tibbo CAS,
Dean Okrand CAS, Brian R. Harman CAS, Matt Hovland, David Torres CAS
Production Sound Team:
Srdjan Popovic, William Munroe, Daniel Lipe

Russian Doll “The Way Out”

Nominees: Phil Rosati, Lewis Goldstein, Thomas Ryan, Jerrell Suelto,
Wen Hsuan-Tseng
Production Sound Team:
Chris Fondulas, Bret Scheinfeld,
Patricia Brolsma

Veep Episode 707

Nominees: William MacPherson CAS, John W. Cook II CAS, Bill Freesh CAS, Scott Sheppard, Jesse Dodd CAS,
Mike Marino
Production Sound Team:
Doug Shamburger, Michael Nicastro, Rob Cunningham, Glenn Berkovitz, Matt Taylor

Television Movie or Limited Series

Apollo: Missions to the Moon

Nominee: John Warrin

Chernobyl “1:23:45”

Nominees: Vincent Piponnier, Stuart Hilliker, Gibran Farrah, Philip Clements
Production Sound Team:
Nicolas Fejoz, Margaux Peyre

Deadwood: The Movie

Nominees: Geoffrey Patterson CAS, John W. Cook II CAS,
Bill Freesh CAS
Production Sound Team: Jeffrey A. Humphreys,
Chris Cooper

El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie

Nominees:
Phillip W. Palmer CAS, Larry B. Benjamin CAS, Kevin Valentine,
Chris Navarro CAS, Stacey Michaels CAS
Production Sound Team: Mitchell Gebhard,
Andrew T. Chavez

True Detective “The Great War and Modern Memory”

Nominees:
Geoffrey Patterson CAS, Greg Orloff CAS, Tateum Kohut CAS,
Biff Dawes CAS, Chris Navarro CAS, Nerses Gezalyan
Production Sound Team: Jeffrey A. Humphreys,
Chris Cooper

Television Non-Fiction, Variety, Music Series or Specials

Country Music: Will the Circle Be Unbroken? (1968-1972)

Nominees: Mark Roy,
Dominick Tavella, Chris Chae

David Bowie: Finding Fame

Nominees: Sean O’Neil,
Greg Gettens
Production Sound Team: Ricky Barber, Alberto Battocchi, Nigel Chatters, Martin Evanson, Rob Thomas

Deadliest Catch “Sixty Foot Monster” Episode 1512

Nominees: Bob Bronow CAS
Production Sound Team:
Tom Pieczkolon, Mike Morrell

Formula 1: Drive to Survive: The Next Generation

Nominees: Nick Fry,
Steve Speed, James Evans

Hitsville: The Making of Motown

Nominees: Pete Orlanski, Richard Kondal, Victor Shcheglov
Production Sound Team:
Ben Sortino

CAS Outstanding Product Award Nominees

Production

Lectrosonics, Inc.: D Squared Digital Wireless Mic System
Schoeps Mikrofone: CMC 1 U Miniature Colette Series Amplifier Body
Shure Incorporated: Shure Axient Digital
Sound Devices, LLC: Scorpio
Zaxcom: Nova

Post Production

FabFilter: Pro Q3 Equalizer
iZotope, Inc.: Dialogue Match
Leapwing Audio: DynOne 3
Sound Radix Ltd.: Auto-Align Post
Todd-AO: Absentia DX v2.2.3

Names in Bold are Local 695 members

Don Coufal was undoubtedly a first-class Boom Operator in high demand and was liked by everyone who had the opportunity of working with him. Don’s skill and perfection in his work was renowned. He was a Sound Mixer’s dream, because when Don ran the floor, he would tell you everything you needed to mix great tracks and above all, his microphone positioning was perfect.

One of the longest working relationships Don Coufal had was with Jeff Wexler. They worked together on just about every feature film in Jeff’s long résumé, over forty years together. They were a team, ‘Jeff and Don’ or more like ‘Don and Jeff.’

Don lost his two-year battle with cancer in November. Don bravely chronicled his thoughts, treatment, and prognosis regularly on Facebook. We all followed his posts and replied with incredible support. When we read the awful news, the outpouring of love, grief and condolences was emblematic of how much Don meant to all of us.

On Friday, December 6, there was a Memorial service at the Valley Oaks-Griffin Memorial Park in Westlake Village, followed by a graveside service. An overflow crowd was in attendance, not just those of us from Local 695, but Camera Operators, 1st AD’s, and many many more.

Heartfelt remembrances were delivered by Ronnie Coufal, Don’s younger brother and Jeff Wexler, followed by Forrest Williams, poignantly playing his guitar and singing Willie Nelson’s “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.”

In the twilight glow I see them
Blue eyes cryin’ in the rain
When we kissed goodbye and parted
I knew we’d never meet again
Love is like a dyin’ ember
Only memories remain
Through the ages I’ll remember
Blue eyes cryin’ in the rain
Some day when we meet up yonder
We’ll stroll hand in hand again
In a land that knows no partin’
Blue eyes cryin’ in the rain
Now my hair has turned to silver
All my life I’ve loved in vain
I can see her star in heaven
Blue eyes cryin’ in the rain

Songwriter: Fred Rose

Cameron Crowe
December 5, 2019
“Don is one of the rare people you meet in this world who leads with heart and soul. He’ll lean in and talk with you, eyes always focused on yours, and get right to the epicenter of things. With quiet razor-sharp powers of observation, he’ll tell you what he’s seen or what he’s feeling … and it’s always through the prism of brilliance and empathy. He roots for everybody and everything wonderful in this life, and reflects it back to us with his special smile and that twinkle that lives forever. Miss you and love you brother. Your love and loyalty means the world, and will always be present with us, his friends, his co-workers, and his wonderful family. No need for past tense, Don is with us always. Right now and every day after. We love you brother!“

Don is survived by his ex-wife Lenore Alexander, his two daughters Emma and Libby, as well as his brothers and sisters from Texas.