Features

James Demer & The DemerBox

by Richard Lightstone CAS AMPS

You are probably asking yourself, “What is a DemerBox?” I didn’t know either until someone (I forgot who) told me about this outstanding portable speaker built into a small Pelican case. I bought one in May of 2012 for a feature I was about to start. It sounded great, had long battery life, you could send audio to it directly via a cable or Bluetooth and if an actor stomped on it in the wheel well of a picture vehicle, it was virtually indestructible. Oh, and once you put the bass-port plug in—it’s waterproof too.

My DemerBox is still going strong almost eight years later. I have been following its creator, James Demer, and we finally met in September 2014 at the Maine Media Workshops in Rockport, Maine. At that time, James was living in Portland and I asked him to speak to my class on Sound Mixing. James made his living as a busy Reality, Documentary, News, and Feature mixer.

James was always a tinkerer. “I built my first speaker out of a shoebox when I was twelve, and never lost the passion. I was buying audio amplifier boards and putting them together with wood enclosures for speakers. One day, I took a Pelican 1300 case, cut some holes in it, and slapped a pair of Fostex three-inch drivers and tuned it up with a port and it sounded really good. A lot of my crewmember friends on the feature film I was on, Winter’s Bone, asked, ‘Oh, that’s awesome, can you make one for me?’ Being a bit of an entrepreneur, I thought what a great side hustle.”

James worked eleven seasons on Survivor and the crewmembers would buy DemerBoxes. “They’d use them hard and break them, and then tell me what to fix. Then I’d come back with a new and improved model.”

James explains, “We launched a Kickstarter in the fall of 2014, and fulfilled the orders in the spring of 2015. Kickstarter allowed us the ability to open some injection molds, which we had made in the US. We went from thermoforming our own cards with a homemade vacuum machine and a heat lamp to having real injection molded parts to hold the speakers, the circuit board, and the battery inside the box.

James teamed up with Jayson Lobozzo, a cameraman, where they figured out the port plug addition that allows a user to put a plug in the porthole; you lose a little bass, but it’s fully waterproof. The Kickstarter also allowed a new design where everything is incorporated in the lid and the electronics are all protected. From an assembly standpoint, it’s a lot easier to manufacture by attaching the lid to the case.

James continues, “We started manufacturing in Portland, Maine, which is where I’m from. It started in my basement and then I rented a workshop in downtown Portland. Zac Brown of the Zac Brown Band had purchased a DemerBox late in 2016, and he sent me an email and asked, ‘Hey, this thing’s awesome. What are you guys doing? Why don’t you come down to Georgia, I’ll put some money into the operation and we’ll see what we can do.’”

James moved in July 2017 to Peachtree City, Georgia, outside of Atlanta, and set up shop. “Sales are very good, we grew sixteen hundred percent in 2018; it was pretty crazy. We had one order alone for four thousand units. Because we manufacture everything in the United States, we’re very hands on with our product, we can customize for corporate clients. That four thousand unit order was for Jimmy John’s Sandwich Shop’s annual convention where they gave a DemerBox to each one of their store owners and managers.”

James posits, “We’re partners with Zac Brown and Troy Link, an investor in DemerBox, who owns Jack Link’s, a beef jerky company. Jack Link’s is the largest packaged meats company in the world. They do $1.2 billion in revenue annually. So, between Zac’s celebrity and his connections and Troy Link’s guidance, I feel like we’ve hit the jackpot down here in Georgia.”

When it came time to find a new injection molding company, they were able to find one a little bit closer to home from the one they used in Minnesota. There were four or five to choose from in Georgia.

James explains, “We found one that’s just up the road and get exceptional service. You just can’t find that in Maine. The population’s too small.”

DemerBox just did a three hundred unit giveaway with the USO with their branded logo on it. The USO is America’s oldest military nonprofit that gives back to the servicemen and women. The DemerBoxes are for those who are deployed overseas who needed a speaker that they can’t break.

The product has a Class D amplifier chip rated at twenty watts per channel made by Maxim. It’s limited closer to ten watts per channel so to not blow the speakers. It’s been measured at 96DB output at three feet.

James continues, “You can fill a small room. We have updated the DemerBox, calling it the DB2, with two speakers and we’ve revamped the circuit board and the switches with a battery indicator, so now you know when your battery’s getting low. You can pair multiple boxes via Bluetooth. We’ve added digital signal processing (DSP) so we have better high frequencies.”

They are about to launch a redesign of the original mono DemerBox, the DB1. It’s rated at eighty percent of the volume of the larger DB2 even though it’s half the size. The DemerBox has multiple uses, for example at Video Village, if everyone doesn’t want to be on headsets or in the client van, they can listen to the audio that’s being transmitted from the picture vehicle.

James says, “The easy way is to make our product in China. There’s a reason that no other portable speaker manufacturer is making their product in the United States. It’s a commitment, but it’s something that both Zac and I share, and we’re employing Americans who are working hard, and are skilled, and really care about our brand.”

The company is so successful that James Demer has given up sound mixing doing this full time and is home for his wife and older daughter.

James concludes, “It’s definitely nice to not live out of a suitcase.”

(A tutorial for those without half a century in the business, and a few with)

by Jim Tanenbaum CAS​

IT’S OKAY TO LIE TO THE DIRECTOR … REALLY

In my UCLA classes, “Set Politics & Protocol” occupy more than 20% of the class time. No matter how good of a mixer you are, if there is an adversary relationship between Sound and Camera, it may be difficult or impossible to get good sound. Ditto for all the other departments.

Unfortunately, some directors make bad calls when asked to judge sound on the set. In the first place, most directors want to listen to the production track most of the time, but they don’t want to be encumbered more than absolutely necessary. Thus, the ubiquity of lightweight foam-padded open-air headphones. Getting most directors to wear even moderately-isolating closed-cup headphones is a losing battle. (On the rare occasion when they do, they often leave their dominant ear free.) Even worse, some young “mixers” no longer have learned how to mix anything, and simply crack all the pots open halfway through the entire take for the “scratch mix.” This results in many directors accepting an excessive amount of reverb and/or ambience mixed in with the (hopefully) clean dialog track iso as “normal,” so when there is a real problem of too much background or other undesirable noises in the production dialog, they are almost never aware of it.

Therefore, when I know there is a problem that makes the production track unusable, I have learned not to let the director (or producer) simply listen to it over my highly-isolating headphones because the lack of ambient bleed makes the track sound “better” to them. Invariably they will say: “That’s okay—we’ll fix it in post.” Some examples:

1. Excessive generator (or other localized-source) noise. Instead of letting the director hear it as it really is, I will have my boom op surreptitiously cue the mike toward the genny or other source, or open my slate mike, or otherwise degrade the mike’s signal so even a deaf director will know it’s no good.

2. Excessive room reverb. This is more difficult for the director to perceive because the human brain has dedicated echo-reducing circuits that operate subconsciously whenever stereo input from both ears is available. Listening normally doesn’t reveal the hollowness, so when the director does hear it in your headphones, their first reaction is: “There’s something wrong with your mike—look, it’s much closer to the actors than I am right now.” Teaching him or her Acoustics 101 before the first take is not an option. And even if it was, there won’t be time to pad all the off-camera walls, floor, and ceiling.

This is where your pre-production homework comes in. If you found out that this particular director always covers every line of dialog in closer shots, simply don’t bring up the issue at all. If Murphy’s Law intervenes and they don’t, ask for wild lines of the uncovered dialog. If the director objects, just say: It’s needed to match the covered dialog.” IMPORTANT: If you say anything with enough authority and certainty, most people will accept it without question (even if it’s wrong). Yes, there’s a slight risk that this procedure might fail, but risk-taking comes with the job. Remember: The most important thing experience teaches you is what you can get away with.

On the other hand, your research may reveal that this director doesn’t cover everything, and/or lets the actors improvise every take (in which case you may have much more serious problems to deal with). Now is when your location scouting pays off. Being aware of the parallel hard walls, no carpets on the floor, etc., you will have brought along a pile of sound blankets and your own mounting rigs (an extendable painter’s pole and a 6’ 1”x2” wood batten clamped in it at a right angle, will allow you to quickly jam one edge of the blanket against the ceiling, several inches to a foot away from the wall for maximum effectiveness). Also, you will have scoped out places to hide close-in plant mikes (remember that mounting them on a large hard surface eliminates any sound reflections from it—the Boundary-Layer Technique). And you will have short cardioid and super/hyper-cardioid mikes for low ceilings if they are present (remember that interference-tube shotgun mikes are not a good choice for reverberant spaces).

3. Excessive shoe or prop noises. Some directors, particularly older ones, understand the real reason for quieting these sounds: the regular cadence of heel clicks will be disrupted by intercutting between angles and takes, and they need to be replaced with uniformly-spaced Foley. The timing of noisy prop action may not match exactly from wide shot to close-up. Explaining all this takes time, and often exceeds the director’s attention span. This is another example of something you take care of ahead of time, without bothering the director. Should they ask, just give them the shortest, simplest, believable answer—whether it is accurate, or even remotely true, is irrelevant.

4. There are esthetic considerations that are beyond the pay grade of some directors. Here is a chance for the production mixer to make a significant contribution to the picture, but often in spite of, rather than because of, the director. However, this should never be done to the detriment of the integrity of the project, as can occur if the production mixer’s artistic judgment is faulty. To protect against this, it is necessary to preserve the original characteristics of the sound by recording it on a separate iso track. Of course, if the director is knowledgeable, and approachable, then she or he should be consulted in advance and advised of the proposed approach, if they’re not, then don’t mention it.

Do we hear dialog through a closed window? Whether or not we will in the final mix, I always record it as well as possible from inside, not just from the outside.

Perspective or neutral sound? This question is dependent on whether or not a boom mike is in use. And with today’s ubiquitous multi-track recorders, the on-set decisions required to mix two actors at different distances from the camera down to a mono Nagra are thankfully no longer needed. Whenever I can, I try to get the boom in as closely as possible when using radios, and iso it. In post, the boom track can be pulled up (advanced in time) and added to the radios to give them the appropriate perspective. (Unfortunately, this would be overkill for most TV productions and documentaries, as well as not usually having the “luxury” of a second boom op.)

In spite of all the advances in DSP (Digital Signal Processing), it is still important to fight for room tone and wild lines, recorded with the mike in the position used for the master. Resist the 1st AD saying: “We’ll get it later,” because later never comes, or if it does, the birds have stopped or the frogs have started. Room tone and wild lines need to be recorded as soon as possible, with all the set lighting on. If you have a good rapport with the director (and the producer), they can override a pushy AD. If not, saying: It will save lots of time and money in post,” usually works. On one show, we had a flock of very noisy birds (common grackles) with unusual, harsh, grating, distracting, and distinctive vocalizations. There was no way to keep them out of the dialog. This time, it was a sharp director who initiated the request for “bird tone,” but the AD, and the need to change locations before losing the light prevented it. Since the director insisted, I told the producer I would work Sunday (our only day off on location). The editor said that the bird ambience was the only thing that prevented a major scene from being looped. (Then it was cut.)

No matter how talented and conscientious you are, ADR will happen at some point. You can help to improve the results by making a note of the mike(s) used in each shot, and their position. This, combined with your room tone, will be almost as good as wild lines recorded on the set.

IT’S OKAY TO LIE TO THE ACTORS … REALLY

1. Actors are justifiably annoyed by having to wear a radio mike, but there are ways to minimize this. Some examples:
a.With a director who stages shots that are impossible to boom, or makes last-minutes changes in blocking so that the original lighting for the boom now will throw shadows all over the set, the best procedure is to simply wire everyone every day. If you can establish this at the beginning of the shoot, as new actors come to the set you can just tell them that this is the way the production company does things. (Of course, I try to get the boom in if I possibly can, no matter how far away it has to be.)
b. Sometimes, after a shot, an actor seeing the boom complains about having to wear a radio mike. Rather than explaining about the director’s changing his mind, and the intricacies of booming, I simply lie: “We couldn’t reach your first few lines coming through the door with the boom—I had to use your radio mike for them.”

2. Getting some actors to “speak up” is one of the most difficult jobs I have. For starters, I need to have a conversation about this with the director as soon as I meet him/her. The worst is a director who likes “method” actors—they SHOUT without warning, or whisper. I have found that there is little I can do to disabuse a director of this notion, so I have to look to hardware solutions (or clairvoyance). I did a show, Moving, with Richard Pryor, who never said the same thing once, or in the same place. I used a Nagra IV-STC with a 20dB offset between channels for boomed shots, and when I had to, I mounted two radio mikes on him with their gains also offset 20dB. I did develop a sort of faux-clairvoyance, when he would take a deep breath I knew he would be about to shout (most times), and a short quiet pause before delivering a line meant a lower level (sometimes).

Regardless of how the director wants to handle getting the actors to “speak up,” I have found that it is usually best to let her or him handle it, because if the actor is having a bad day, I won’t be yelled at by them on the set. However, I sometimes manage to establish a rapport with an actor, and can unobtrusively communicate directly with them. But if the director finds out…

IT’S NOT OKAY TO LIE ABOUT YOURSELF

Time and time again, I’ve seen someone who “padded” their credits get caught out on a shoot—you never know who else may have worked on that show.

In the ’80s, my girlfriend was a script supervisor, and she was working on another feature and swapping stories when their mixer said he mixed Blow Out. She knew I did that film, not in the least because I had flown her to Philly to stay with me. When she told him I mixed it, he explained, “Oh, I boomed that show.” “No,” she replied, “Rimas Tumasonis boomed it.” “Embarrassed, he quickly said, “Yeah, Rimas is a great guy, I use him all the time,” and avoided her for the rest of the entire shoot.

The mixer involved wasn’t a newbie, and had about as many credits as I did, though lacking the two “bigger” shows I had done, and didn’t really need to lie about his resumé. This story got spread around, and I’m sure it didn’t help his reputation.

NEWSFLASH: As if lying about working on shows you didn’t isn’t bad enough: I was just researching IMDb and happened to check the crew listing on a movie I recorded about 35 years ago. I found the cable person listed as the boom operator, and the real boom op listed as “sound assistant (uncredited).” I’m sure this was not the original IMDb crew listing. I was flabbergasted—the nerve of that a…hole. I got out my DVD of the show and watched the credits—neither of them had credits as anything. Since IMDb still also lists the orginal cable person as “sound assistant (uncredited),” I assume he edited the webpage and replaced the boom op’s name with his own, and sloppily forgot to remove his correct credit as assistant. After finding out about this change, I checked the crew listing for another show I had used him on and saw that he had altered his credit to be a “Boom Operator” too. I immediately submitted corrections to IMDb—who promptly declined them because they were “unable to verify my contribution.” I am credited as the mixer on both shows, and stated in my submissions that I had proof (call sheets), so I will pursue this matter further.

Just because you tell the truth, doesn’t mean you always have to tell the whole truth. If you’ve done only a couple of features, you can talk about how the challenges of working on documentaries (or whatever else you’ve recorded) help you when mixing features, commercials, and music videos (or whatever else you’ve worked on). But if confronted directly, admit the true number. There are other tricks like not starting your invoice numbers with “00001.”

Be careful about accepting jobs you don’t know how to do, figuring that you’ll learn before production starts. If you’re told that there will be a lot of telephone conversations involving hard-wired phones and you know that prop houses rent a gadget that two phones can plug into and when one handset is lifted the other phone will ring and when it is picked up both phones will function normally, don’t think you’re home free. I got such a show, and already had my own CO (Central Office) simulator. I even rigged a lav on the off-camera phone so I could get a clean track of the off-camera actor.

But as soon as the director heard the first rehearsal, he wanted to hear it “like it sounds on the telephone.” Now what would you do? If you tried to connect a line-level input to the phone line (assuming you happened to have an RJ-45 modular phone plug splitter in your kit), you would find that the two sides of the conversation were greatly unbalanced in level. Furthermore, the telephone DC loop-voltage component can cause distortion in both transformer and active-input electronics.

Since I was experienced with telephone circuitry, I also had a battery-operated hybrid phone patch (and the necessary adapter cables) so I immediately plugged it in and had control of the send and receive levels, and a happy director.

THE SECRET TO PERFECT PRODUCTION SOUND

The secret is… there is no secret. There is no one thing that will always produce a perfect sound recording. But there are lots of individual things that will produce big improvements in the quality of the sound you record.

1. 90% of recording good production sound is having the right microphone in the right place. However, learning which microphone to use, and how to boom correctly, or hide (“plant”) microphones on the set, or install radio mikes on the talent, takes many hundreds of hours of actually listening to various mikes in various situations, so I can’t explain that here. Especially when starting out, a good, experienced boom operator is an absolute necessity. I would give them part, most, or even all of my salary to augment their pay on some of the low-budget exploitation films I cut my ears on.

2. 9% of recording good sound is the control of extraneous/unwanted noises. There are three main problem areas: 1. ambient sounds; 2. noise made by equipment (e.g., cameras, lights, and dollies); and 3. noise made by sets, props, and wardrobe (e.g., creaky floors, footsteps, dish and glassware rattles, and clothing rustle). I can help you with that, but in another article.

3. 1% of recording good sound is twiddling the knobs on your gear. Again, fodder for another article. (Well, not necessarily these exact three percentages, but you get the idea.)

NO JOB IS TOO SMALL FOR ME

Some feature-movie mixers consider it “beneath them” to work on TV movies, commercials, documentaries, reality shows, etc. I work on any kind of show I can get, because there are various advantages, including a certain “cross-fertilization” that occurs, which improves my abilities on all the other production types.

1. I learn certain “quick ’n’ dirty” procedures are applicable to any shoot, e.g., a gel rattling in the wind can be quickly stopped by stretching a bungee cord (or two in series) across it and wedging a plastic drinking cup between them. (But check for any shadows it might throw on the set.)

2. Less-critical projects allow for “experimenting.” If I encounter a problem when I’m on a major feature, and I know a method to solve it that will produce “good-enough” sound, I can’t afford to take a chance trying something new that might provide better sound, but also might fail and require ADR. On a documentary, even such a “failure” will still be acceptable—and if the method succeeds, I know I can use it on features the next time.

3. More than once, someone I worked for on a non-feature job, or an el-cheapo exploitation film, has gotten me on a “big” show.

4. Some of these shoots turn out to be much more interesting and/or fun than I anticipated. On the reality show, The Jim Henson Creature Shop Challenge, I acquired a new girlfriend.

5. Most of them require much more physical activity than just sitting at my cart hour after hour, and help me keep in shape. Although I’m a senior citizen, I’m not an invalid, and can still run around with a 35-pound kit bag strapped to my chest. (Also from the The Jim Henson shoot.)

6. Even internet movies and shorts produced with extremely-low budgets now can be completely “professional,” with camera cranes and full lighting/grip packages. They often provide the opportunity to work from a bag throughout, although I do bring a chair for the long dialog scenes that aren’t walk-and-talk.
 

I’M ALMOST OUT OF TAPE, I MEAN MEMORY CARD SPACE

Finally, returning to my initial comment, what is required of sound is not accuracy, but believability. “Verisimilitude trumps veracity” as I am fond of telling my students. And what is “believable” changes from generation to generation, or even more rapidly. When “moving pictures” were first shown in public, a black-and-white film of an approaching locomotive caused a panic in the audience. Now, they know better.
 
When it comes to sound, there are changes in believability, too. Until fairly recently, most movies were boomed, and perspective sound was the norm. The proximity effect of directional mikes helped to heighten this effect.

Then radio mikes were developed, and soon evolved to be practical—and then ubiquitous. Now, close-miked sound is gradually becoming the new normal. The Laws of Physics have been superseded, too—at least for movies—and now thunder is simultaneous with lightning, the sound of aerial fireworks with the flash, etc.

There is another new development—several related ones, actually. Movie theaters have changed, and not for the better. In the “good old days,” they showed only one picture at a time, and were reasonably quiet. Today, multiplexes abound, and you can hear the audio from theaters on either side of yours, not to mention the sound of most of the audience eating popcorn and talking. In some theaters, outside traffic noise intrudes, and even the HVAC systems are not silenced properly. This increase in the noise floor has forced the projectionists to raise the volume of the sound track, either making the loudest portions too loud, or compressing the dynamic range excessively, or both.

As a result, the re-recording mixers have to adjust the release tracks to have the softest sounds above the noise floor of the theater, and then compress them so the loudest levels won’t be above whatever maximum the local authorities have ordained. The new HDR (High Dynamic Range) standards can work for the picture, but not the sound in these venues. As mentioned earlier, you can ride the gain manually during production and produce a track that will have an acceptable dynamic range, but what that range is to be is continually changing.

PLAY IT FORWARD

I was very lucky to have my very first day’s recorded ¼-inch tape sent to Lee Strosnider’s transfer house. He realized that the problems were not caused by my incompetence, but rather by defective rental equipment and incorrect instructions in its use. He kindly rented me his own gear, and taught me enough to get started, so I could bootstrap myself up from there. That was the beginning of a 45-year mentoring, which soon became mutual. Many others also helped me along, and eventually I was able to return the favor (though in many cases only Karmically because by then, those people were mixing in more heavenly locations than I was).

Beginning in 1988, I taught sound part-time at UCLA for 25 years, until the department suffered a mission drift and became more interested in making money than having the students learn anything. I’ve also taught at USC, Art Center of Design, LACC, and many other venues.

But my mentoring is not completely altruistic—I learn from my students as well. Many years ago, I got a panicked call from a newbie on a ShotMaker camera car who was having a mysterious static problem. After half an hour of remote investigating and experimenting over the phone, we found the trouble was caused by the truck’s electronics package located behind the passenger seat, where the excess mike cable had been coiled on its way to the towed picture car. The very next week, I found myself in exactly the same situation, thanks to my crew who had rigged the cables via the same route. I took me only ten seconds to correct the problem.

There are many other advantages to disseminating knowledge. In 1984, when Nagra released their first timecode recorder, the IV-STC, the manual that came with it was primitive and not particularly useful, especially to a user that had no familiarity with timecode. When I complained, I was told: “If you don’t like our manual, write one yourself.” With the help of the late Manfred Klemme, the Hollywood Nagra rep, we produced a thin tome that I titled Using Timecode in the Reel World. It was an instant hit (not in the least because it was free), but the IV-STC customers wanted even more information, particularly about timecode in general. I did most of the work on the Second Edition of UTCitRW, with Manfred providing the printing and distribution. At that point, he had no more time to spare for this enterprise, so I took over completely with the vastly-enlarged Third Edition, and sold it for $29.95. The cost didn’t discourage the purchasers, and I netted over $5,000 in the following years, until timecode was so well-known that the book was no longer needed. I also wrote articles for Mix magazine.

Now that I was a “published author,” as well as a “university professor,” new doors opened for me, and in 1995 I was invited to Japan to present a technical paper at an international symposium on production recording (InterBEE95).

More recently, in 2010 and 2011, I was sent to China to sell American-made sound gear to Chinese mixers, and since I had worked on the last three years of Avatar, I was a celebrity, as well as an authority. Everywhere I went, women wanted to have their picture taken with me. (And other things, but I’m monogamous.)

In 2012, I went to Viet Nam to train audio engineers for VTV, the state-run TV network, and was paid $17,075 plus expenses for the 6-week trip. (I would have gone for free, but I didn’t tell them that.)

I’m not being sexist—there are large numbers of women in scientific, technical, medical, and managerial positions in Viet Nam.

At present, I continue to mentor by taking phone calls from other mixers, giving advice and feedback to equipment manufacturers, and writing articles for Production Sound & Video magazine.

THAT’S A WRAP

To wrap up, in the early ’80s, if I remember correctly, I got a call for an interview for a low- budget feature. Thanks to a production office screw-up, another production mixer arrived at the same time. The secretary was embarrassed, but there was no problem—it was Bruce Bisenz, with whom I was on friendly terms.

I got in to see the director first. Soon after the interview started, he told me that he didn’t want “good sound,” and explained: “I’m tired of the re-recording mixers messing up my sound. I want the background sounds, birds, traffic, stuff like that, mixed in with the dialog so they can’t change it from the way I want it.”

This was against everything I had learned so far, because not only could unexpectedly-low level dialog not be pulled up without increasing the ambient sounds, and thus calling attention to the change, but many backgrounds, like traffic, were unpredictable, and could suddenly drown out an otherwise wonderful performance. I had recently bought a new Nagra IV-S recorder (2-track/stereo, but before timecode) and politely suggested that I could record the ambient sounds separately from the dialog, so he could adjust the relative levels to his liking later, and then mix them together before giving the mono track to the editor.

“Thanks, but no thanks. Don’t call us—we’ll call you,” was his reply, though more judiciously put.

I think Bruce overheard all this, and told the director exactly what he wanted to hear, because when I ran across him somewhat later, he told me he got the job. Then the project folded.

Text and pictures ©2019 by James Tanenbaum CAS, all rights reserved.

The Comeback: Recovering From Rotator Cuff Surgery

by Bryan Cahill

Act 1:

“Mr. Cahill,
Unfortunately, your MRI shows you have a full tear of your supraspinatus tendon, along with a partial tear of your biceps tendon. Please schedule an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon as soon as possible.”

Crap! I had a pretty good notion even before the diagnosis with the way my shoulder was feeling but I was hoping for the best. The diagnosis clearly doesn’t sound good. But, what does it mean? Time for a little exposition.

The supraspinatus is part of the rotator cuff of the shoulder. A supraspinatus tear is a tear or rupture of the tendon of the supraspinatus muscle. I get opinions from two surgeons. Both tell me the only option for a full tear is surgery as the humerus bone will start pushing upward past the shoulder joint which is not very funny (Dad joke). Like it or not, I’m heading to surgery.

So, this is my story and everyone else’s will be a little or even a lot different. I’m hoping that sharing my experiences here might be helpful to others facing similar situations to my own.

Cut To: The surgeon refers me to a pain management physician. This is new to me but it seems quite common now to have someone on the team who only deals with post-op pain. My surgeon confidently states that with the pain management physician, my recovery process should be relatively painless. How wrong he is! Even so, you’ll want to make sure you have all your prescriptions at home, ready to use once you’ve had your surgery.  

The surgeon’s office sells me a cold therapy system to ease pain and swelling. Later, I find that I could have paid a lot less by shopping online. They also sell me a sling that I will be wearing most of the time, including while I sleep for the first four weeks.

My surgeon also recommends a Rengenten implant made from sterilized bovine tendon. Smith Nephew, maker of the implant, claims that it accelerates the healing process over traditional surgery by six weeks, allowing patients to begin physical therapy almost immediately. The implant costs $3,000 and is not currently covered by our insurance. I felt the benefit of being able to boom six weeks earlier outweighed the cost and opt for the implant.

I am advised not to push, pull, or lift anything weighing over a pound for the first six weeks following surgery! I’ll also need loose-fitting shirts that open in the front as it will be impossible to pull a shirt over my head for quite a while.  

The simplest tasks can become incredibly complicated especially if the affected shoulder is on your dominant side (I was fortunate to have torn my non-dominant cuff). I’ll need a lot of help from wife and kids after surgery. Post-surgery sleeping will take place either propped up in bed or in a recliner. I buy the ugliest recliner in the world off of Craig’s List and put it out for bulky item pickup when I no longer need it.

Most sources will tell you that driving isn’t recommended for the first few weeks after surgery. My surgeon told me driving was fine, but I won’t be driving with my hands at ten and two as the repaired shoulder won’t allow my left hand to get to “ten” for many weeks.

Act 2:

I go under the knife on March 1, 2019. My surgeon finds not only the torn supraspinatus and biceps tendon, but also a torn subscapularis along with tendinosis, and bursitis in the joint. Two anchors are screwed in my shoulder to hold the repaired tendons in place. The surgeon finishes the job on my biceps tendon, cutting it loose, and reattaching it to one of the anchors with sutures that look like thin, braided nylon rope. The other two tendons are also reattached in a similar fashion.

How could my shoulder have gotten so messed up? Rotator cuff tears often occur from wear and tear of the tendon over time. The likelihood of such injuries increases with age and from performing work overhead. Does this remind you of any boom ops you know?

After only a few hours in an outpatient surgical facility, I am sent stumbling to my car so that my wife can drive me home. Now, I’m no greenhorn when it comes to pain. I have been riding and falling off of motorcycles for more than forty years. When I decide to do something, I go all in.  I’ve had more broken bones, stitches, sprains, compressed vertebrae, etc., than I can count. And, this surgery is an arthroscopy. Little incisions should equal little pain, right?  

The pain management doctor prescribes a cornucopia of medications, including Lyrica, Tzanidine, Tramadol, hydrocodone, and 600mg Ibuprofen. Even armed with my own little pharmacy of meds, I constantly fantasize about cutting my arm off for the first six weeks. I’m also icing hours every day. I add topical, over-the-counter remedies like Aspercreme, arnica, and then CBD oil to the mix but still have intense stabbing omnipresent pain from my neck to my elbow.  

Sleeping propped up, with my arm on a pillow, in the recliner, or on the couch is almost impossible. I pace the house at all hours of the night moving from one spot to another and getting about two hours of sleep on average. After the first week, I lay off the hydrocodone because I return to driving the morning school carpool. I steer by holding the wheel with my repaired arm resting on my legs at six and my other arm at noon. After dropping off the kids, I work an eight-hour day at Loyola Marymount University, go to physical therapy twice a week, and exercise twice daily at home. I quite frankly don’t know how long I can keep it up.  

According to one surgeon, the recovery goal with rotator cuff surgery is to get ten percent better every month. Even when surgery and rehabilitation are successful, the repair is prone to re-injury up to twelve months following the procedure.

My physical therapy (PT) begins less than a week after surgery. This is where the hard work begins. It seems that once I feel comfortable and capable of properly doing any of the exercises, I’m given something new, harder, and more painful to do.  

The worst part of PT though is the manipulation by the therapist. My surgeon and my physical therapist both refer to the repair as “tight.” Knowing how I use my shoulders, my surgeon took extra care to make sure everything was very firmly held in place. This is apparently better for the long-term prognosis but it makes regaining mobility that much more difficult.

Every time I’m about to have a post-op exam with my surgeon, my therapist worries that we’re not making enough progress and really goes to town on my shoulder. She is constantly pushing the limits of my range of motion in all directions and trying to get the joint to move a little further with every appointment. I feel like a roasted chicken having a wing torn off.  

There are many days where I leave PT in greater pain then when I came in and I wonder if the surgical repair has somehow been damaged. On top of the appointments, it now takes four hours to get through the exercises I do at home twice a day. So, I split them doing half in the morning and half at night. The gains are often incremental and the pain so great that it is hard to stay positive.

Finally, six weeks after surgery and quite suddenly, the pain lets up enough so that I’m sleeping four hours a night and I want to keep my arm. Although it may not seem like it, this is a huge step forward. I can burn the sling and start thinking about things other than how badly I hurt.

Act 3:

A montage spanning the next four and a half months. I continue to do PT, exercise at home, lots of low fives with the PT staff, pain decreases, strength, and range of motion increase to the point where I sprint up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art with a Bill Conti theme blaring. Okay, it is not that dramatic but, on July 29, less than five months after surgery, my surgeon removes all limitations and tells me I can start booming again.  

My first opportunity comes on August 5; five months and four days after surgery. I take the Airframe loaned to me by Levitate Technologies to day play on the BET series Twenties, with Von Varga mixing and Yervant Hagopian on utility duties.

Although there aren’t any particularly hard setups on this day, the Airframe gives me a little more confidence in returning to boom work. It provides lift assist and doesn’t restrict my motion in any way. Comfortable, light and slim, I use it all day with ease.   

Epilogue:

On Thursday, Sept. 12, 2019, I bring the loaner Airframe out to Chris Walmer on the set of Schooled at Sony Studios, along with some prototype “cassettes” that offer even more lift. He tells me he used it for some ten-minute take the following day and that it “worked great.”  

I believe it is possible that exoskeletons like this might not only help prevent injury but also get people like me back to work sooner after an injury or even save the careers of experienced boom operators who previously might have gone on permanent disability.

Every day, I am still icing, stretching, and exercising. Getting to where I am now has been an arduous journey but it feels great to be back on set!

Mixing Live Singing Vocals on Cats Part 1

by Simon Hayes AMPS CAS

As I drove into Leavesden Studios in London, UK, to meet Tom Hooper to discuss his next project Cats, I knew that the film was going to be a huge challenge having seen the stage show. I hoped the conversation we were about to have would present possibilities to deliver a first-class soundtrack. I was aware that Tom wanted to record the vocals live but I’d also had conversations with various people involved in the project who thought it just wouldn’t be possible to go completely live due to the frenetic choreography and the difficulty our performers would have singing and dancing for the length of a film industry day.

The first question I asked Tom was, “Is it your intention to shoot the film with completely live sound?” He looked at me quizzically and with a wry smile he replied, “Of course, that’s why you’re here.” He moved swiftly into explaining his vision and how we were going to shoot the film, and the details of what he wanted to achieve visually and sonically. It was early on in the proceedings, and at this point the DP had not been chosen. As I listened intently, Tom told me about the VFX tests he had been doing which involved a new process that hadn’t been used before. We would shoot completely live action on the set, with actors who could sing and dance, and then in post, the actors would have fur added to them and become cats, whilst completely retaining their body movements and, most importantly, their facial expressions.

Tom and I spoke about the audience and how cinemagoers judge performance and the leap of faith they must have to trust what they are seeing and hearing on screen. Tom’s position in filmmaking has always been that audiences instinctively believe performances if the dialog is original and recorded on set. We spoke about how this is deeply rooted in human subconscious and is instinctively part of our fight or flight mechanism that has been one of the keys to our species survival. When we were hunter-gatherers, human beings had to assess every interaction by reading facial expressions and listening to the tone of voices; did a stranger want to steal from us, kill us, or collaborate in a helpful manner?

We do not switch off this subconscious assessment when we walk into a movie theatre to watch a film. We look at the actor’s facial expressions and listen to the tone of dialog and we instinctively wonder whether we trust what we are experiencing. Is the lip sync perfect? Does the dialog inflection match the facial expression? Is there an acoustic in the vocal that does not match the location of the actor we are watching on screen? All of these questions are being asked at a deep base level by every moviegoer. With this in mind, Tom continued to explain that the VFX process would be presenting audiences with something they had not seen before, human “cats.” Having the performers sing live throughout the film was one of the main strategies Tom had for helping the audience immerse themselves in the narrative.

As our conversation continued, I was getting more important information from Tom that would affect my pitch in how to capture the live singing. Tom explained that he wanted to showcase modern and exciting choreography that would involve break dancing, street dance, and parkour (free running, a dynamic, and explosive style based around gymnastic movements), as well as more classical styles like ballet. Up to this point, I had thought that due to the fur being painted onto the bodies in post, and the actors wearing mo-cap suits, it would be an ideal opportunity to place lavaliers on the body in vision, and that they would not have the usual clothing rustle. This workflow would not need to be signed off by the VFX team as they were adding a layer of fur anyway. Tom described the dancing tests he was excited about, and the type of rolling, tumbling, and break dancing the choreography would contain. I quickly realized I had to come up with a better strategy. Mics on the chest/solar plexus would be prone to getting impacted by the dance moves, and secondly, the excessive head movements of the style of choreography Tom favored, would mean the actors’ vocals would be going off axis regularly.  

The first idea I pitched was using DPA ‘cheek’ mics on miniature booms that attach to the performers’ ears. Looking back now, I was extremely fortunate that Tom didn’t want to use this process, citing the fact that even though the VFX would paint fur onto the actors’ faces, the fur was going to be translucent so facial expressions could be retained underneath. Tom felt the cheek mics would need to be digitally removed before the fur could be added. He wasn’t concerned by the financial impact; Tom’s concern was potentially losing valuable facial expressions from around the mouth during the mic-removal process.

I had to think fast and come up with another idea. Fortuitously, my idea was actually going to provide our film with higher quality, richer vocals than the cheek mics. I asked whether I could attach a DPA lavalier to the forehead of each actor. I have always known this is a better position than the cheek for capturing high-quality vocals but I had never done an A/B comparison. This workflow was not my first pitch because it is notoriously difficult to stick lav’s to the forehead for a whole day without them losing adhesion, especially in a place where humans perspire, coupled with the fact the actors would be dancing all day in very high-energy routines. In my mind, this would result in re-sticks, lost takes, and actors with sore skin on their foreheads within a week.

Tom said, “Simon, there is so much expression in the forehead that I really don’t want to jeopardize.” I explained that this really was the only option if he wanted a guarantee under these very difficult conditions that I would deliver vocals that would not require any ADR.

Now we were negotiating. There are few things that make Tom Hooper happier than a negotiation, especially one that will creatively benefit his film. “How good will the quality of sound be if we put the mics on the forehead?” he asked. “Absolutely brilliant, Tom, it will be perfect and the greatest benefit will be that the singing will never go off mic, and most importantly for music vocals, the perspective won’t change when you cut from wide to mid to tight and back again.” This resonated with Tom, as we found this out while testing on Les Miserables.

Spoken dialog in films benefits from the perspective of the mic matching the camera angle, but with singing, any change in perspective, rather than helping the audience believe the performance, creates the opposite effect, drawing attention to the picture-editing process in an extremely uncomfortable, jolting manner.

This makes sense; when was the last time you heard any type of singing accompanied by music that has anything but a close perspective whether it be pop, rock, jazz, country, or blues?
Tom fixed me with a serious stare and asked, “If we put the mics on the forehead, will they sound as good as a close boom?” I replied, “Yes, I believe they will, because they will actually be closer than a boom could get and we will NEVER get caught unprepared by a sudden head turn. More importantly, I’m assuming we are going to cover this film with multiple cameras shooting wide, mid and tight at the same time to capture a perfect performance from all angles?”

“Yes, of course,” Tom replied, “and the sets are important to me. We are not shooting on green screens, and the cameras will often be handheld and frenetic so I’m not sure painting booms out is a viable option.” I responded, “I’m assuming from what you’ve described about the look of the film, your DP will probably use a lot of hard spotlights to achieve that.” Tom smiled, “Yes, that’s for sure. It seems we are certainly going to need to use the radio mics to achieve this; how can we make them work?”

Great, we were at a stage of the negotiation where I knew I had presented my case convincingly enough for Tom to help me find an answer to mic placement. “How about this compromise, Simon,” Tom said, “you keep the mics clear of the lower fifty percent of the forehead directly above the eyebrows where most of the facial expression inhabits, but you can have the upper fifty percent, below the hairline.” I answered, “We’ll get perfect vocals!” A big grin broke across Tom Hooper’s face; he reached out to shake my hand and said, “We’ve got a deal.”

Now, all I had to do was work out how to attach the mics and make sure the actors could perform and hear the music, keeping the vocals clean while collaborating with the Music Department. Most importantly, I had Tom Hooper’s support for my workflow; the first big hurdle had been crossed.

My next port of call was a meeting with my old friends, Supervising Sound & Music Editor John Warhurst and Music Supervisor Becky Bentham. John had worked on Les Miserables and was booked for Cats, along with Becky, who I have done many musicals, starting with Mamma Mia! more than ten years ago. They are both strong allies and we have a shorthand with each other. We completely trust one another and have a very strong relationship. The first part of our agenda was the team. We agreed that that there would be no demarcation between Sound and Music departments on Cats. This collaborative methodology had been extremely successful on Les Miserables and we agreed our team would be called Sound/Music. John and myself would head up that team on set every day with all the team members taking instruction from us, with support from Becky on the set and in an office at Leavesden Studios where we were shooting the entire movie.

Tom’s vision, along with Eve Stewart, his Production Designer, was that all the sets would be three times bigger than reality (doors, tables, chairs—everything!) because cats are about three times smaller than humans. We were fortunate that the entire film would be shot on soundstages with zero location work.

My next discussion with John and Becky was about Pro Tools operators. We had been very fortunate to work with a brilliant operator on Les Miz who has since retired and moved into another career. Becky has helped me find absolutely outstanding Pro Tools operators throughout my musical career and I really trust her judgment. She has her finger on the pulse of what is happening in the music industry and who are the best technicians, as she is based at Abbey Road Studios where she works closely with their staff and freelancers. Becky is also very aware of an important point: not every good music editor is the correct fit for Pro Tools work on films. Music editors in the music industry can work at a speed that is somewhat less pressurized than a film set. Every decision is based around music, whereas on a film set, the priorities are the camera and the visual image. To expand on that, a Pro Tools operator working on a film musical has to be extremely fast, quick thinking, and realize that no one is going to wait. With this in mind, we discussed her recommendations and I quizzed her on their personalities, technical expertise and whether they would be able to work in a highly pressurized environment for more than three months, twelve hours per day. We kept coming back ’round to the same name—Victor Chaga.

I met Victor the next day. He is a Russian who moved to LA as a young composer looking for his big break. He instantly struck me as being made of the right stuff as he had the emotionless confidence I associate with many Russians, coupled with the desire to provide excellent service I associate with American culture. When I interview music editors for a position on my team, I always ask how they would react to a number of precise extreme scenarios on set. I was confident we had found our guy!

The hiring of a first-class music editor/Pro Tools operator was incredibly important on Cats, because the whole film is driven by tempo—unlike Les Miserables, where tempo could be manipulated and sometimes ignored in favor of performance. The rhythmic dance routines of Cats meant that we needed to be able to drift in and out of pre-recorded playback tracks and live piano constantly. Tom still wanted to use the live keyboard whenever possible to allow the actors the opportunity to play with timing and let their emotional performance take priority. This was mainly between the songs or in small breaks in the tempo. Victor would be playing his Pro Tools rig as if it was a musical instrument, accompanying its own highly creative ‘dance’ with the live keyboard player, so the two instruments could immerse the actors and support them in their performance.

Everyone involved in Cats, from Tom Hooper and Producers Debra Hayward and Ben Howarth, and Executive Producers Eric Fellner and Tim Bevan from Working Title, to Andy Blankenbuehler our Choreographer, kept expressing how dynamic the choreography was, and how loud the music needed to be for the actors to dance to. I needed to find a way to get more volume to the actors than would be possible using the ‘earwigs’ and induction loops we had used on Les Miserables.

It became obvious to me that for the extreme SPL’s that some of our performers would require, we needed to use personal ‘in-ear’ monitors that would be custom-molded to the performer’s ear canals. I already had a great relationship with Puretone who supply all of my musicals with custom- molded earwigs and also supply many rock performers and musicians with custom personal in-ear monitors to use on stage. They’d actually just supplied the same product on my last film, Danny Boyle’s Yesterday for the star, Himesh Patel.

I decided that Cats needed a completely new strategy for IEM’s and that my production sound mix for Tom Hooper and his editor, Melanie Oliver, would not always be suitable for the performers to listen to as we were shooting. I really wanted them to feel supported. I also knew that many of the cast came from a music industry background and would expect a personal mix in their IEM’s, something a front-of-house mixer would usually provide for them on stage. I have been working with my 2nd Unit Sound Mixer, Tom Barrow, on a number of films now. Tom’s former career was working in a music recording studio as an engineer, so it seemed to make complete sense that he should join our team as the Cats IEM mixer.

I explained to production that hiring Tom Barrow would be an additional expense that they were not anticipating, but that Tom Hooper’s expectation would be difficult to achieve without having a huge Outside Broadcast (OB) truck parked at each stage if they didn’t take my advice. I explained to Working Title that if they wanted me to stay ‘small’ enough to not require the expense of OB trucks. they had to accept that Cats was completely unique and would require a large Sound/Music team, potentially larger than any previous film ever shot. Luckily, my relationship with Eric Fellner and Tim Bevan at Working Title and their Head of Production, Sarah-Jane Wright, goes back fifteen years over multiple films. They told me they trusted me and would facilitate whatever I needed to support Tom Hooper’s vision. Of course, they did let me know they were not expecting any ADR, so the pressure was on! Their Unit Production Managers, Jo Burn and Nick Fulton, were also incredibly supportive throughout.

I decided to hand the IEM workflow and process over to Tom Barrow as I prioritized the vocal recordings and the rest of the music workflow.

We were actually creating a world for our performers to inhabit that would sonically block them off from outside voices and sounds with their IEM’s. Our cast was given the choice of wearing a single IEM or a pair. Many of our cast come from a music industry background so most preferred to use a pair. This meant that the IEM mixer had to become a conduit for all the information and effectively provide a comms mix,  alongside the dedicated mixes for the performers in order for them to communicate with each other, or for the director, 1st AD, keyboard player, music producers, and Pro Tools op to communicate with the cast.

At this point, it was fourteen weeks out from principal photography and it was becoming clear that I was spending many hours of the day working on telephone calls or meetings. I needed to start splitting the workload if we were to achieve this monumental task and be ready to shoot. To provide support and creative input, I needed my longtime key 1st assistant sound (UK term for boom operator) to start work. Arthur Fenn has worked on every single one of my fifty-eight movies. We have a collaborative approach and I consider Arthur to be one of the best boom op’s in the world. The industry has changed over the last fifteen years with large, multi-camera VFX movies becoming the norm. Arthur has, in turn, become a radio mic expert. His skill is collaborating with the actors. He has an engaging personality, an easy rapport, and a fearlessness that quickly means he is considered in much the same way a personal costumier would be with the cast. He also collaborates very closely with the Costume Department from the beginning and creates a strong working relationship with that team. I approached production and explained that it was time for both myself and Arthur to be hired full time, fourteen weeks out. That would be the requirement if they wanted us to be ready on time. They agreed and I sat down and brainstormed with Arthur regarding how we could attach the mics to the cast’s foreheads.

Arthur strongly advised against trying to stick the mics on their foreheads for the reasons mentioned previously. When told about the IEM’s the cast would be using, he expressed his concern about the practicalities of so many cables being unattached and pulling on the mics and IEM’s during explosive choreography, so we came up with a plan. It was born out of the knowledge that some puppeteers have used tennis players’ ‘sweat bands,’ so we started discussing that strategy and that led to ‘lav straps’ which are a relatively new product that actors wear around their chests. Arthur said, “What we need is a lav strap for the head which keeps the cables tidy, can be washed overnight if necessary, and can also double as a sweat band which could be helpful to the performers.” This is where our strong relationship with Simon Bysshe of URSA straps came in. We have known Simon since he was a young trainee who did a film with us, and when his company URSA was in its embryonic stages during Guardians of the Galaxy, Arthur and myself did a lot of work with him on product development. We also tested his prototype straps on set. I sent Arthur off to meet Simon and together, they came up with a design for the bespoke Cats mic and IEM head strap system.

Arthur and I went to watch a choreography rehearsal to get a feel for the movements and to start to consider where we would rig the mic transmitter and IEM receiver packs. The choreography team had continually expressed concern to production that the performers may get injured if they landed on a pack. Tom Hooper had called me into a meeting to ask that we use the very smallest packs available.

We arrived at the rehearsal with a bunch of different generic URSA straps (thigh, ankle, waist, etc.) and two wireless packs. We had a couple of hours with one of the dance performers who tried different positions on his body, and then showed us lots of different dance movements from ballet, tap, street, gymnastics, and break dancing to represent the diversity of our cast’s routines. The choreography team tried to assess which positions were best. It quickly became clear that there wasn’t “a best position,”  and that our workflow for each performer throughout the film would depend on the unique movement they would be doing in the scene or shot. This meant that every performer would need to let us know how they would like to be rigged each day, and sometimes on a shot-to-shot basis, to avoid the packs restricting their movement or causing the risk of injury. We had the usual options of ankle, thigh, and waist but we also developed a shoulder/chest strap with URSA that was used for a large percentage of the film. This kind of ‘holster’ strap, with choices of where the packs were placed—whether that be pec, armpit, or shoulder area—very rarely made contact with the ground. At the end of this test, Tom Hooper arrived and asked the performer, “Can you dance unrestricted wearing these packs?” His reply was “Yes,” and Tom turned to Arthur and myself and said, “Great work, let’s keep moving forward. We have some news from VFX that I need to discuss, so let’s meet tomorrow.”

The next morning, Arthur and myself attended a VFX meeting set up by Tom Hooper’s producer, Debra Hayward, and Producer/1st AD Ben Howarth, Executive Producer Jo Burn, and UPM Nick Fulton. Tom Hooper’s Costume Designer, Paco Delgado, and members of his team were present as well.

The VFX team explained that they would be recording each performer’s body movements using a box the size of a small hard drive attached to the performer’s body, linked to tracking markers (tiny buttons) in key points on the body. The big question production wanted answered was, “How big is this box, and who is going to rig the performers?”

The VFX Department explained that they needed the hard drive capture boxes attached because it would not be technically possible to capture that many different performances by radio link as that technology simply didn’t exist. The movements of each performer would be recorded on the hard drives, which would all be jammed to timecode, and at the end of each day, the information from each hard drive would be downloaded.

The VFX team needed help to implement rigging the actors. Generally, VFX teams don’t rig and de-rig actors. The whole process was becoming extremely unique as there would be elements of costume on some cast, but many of the chorus would simply wear a motion-capture suit. Rigging them with sound and vfx equipment would be the most time-consuming task. Another factor that had become clear in the last few days was the number of cast: about fifty in EVERY shot!

I suggested that we needed to forget about standard film industry workflow and protocol, and treat the film as a unique entity. I explained that it would not be possible for fifty performers to go through Costume, then Sound, then VFX before coming to set every morning. Tom Hooper wouldn’t get his cast until lunchtime! I said that it would be counterproductive having the Costume Department dressing the cast in mo-cap suits, then having the cast undress to have sound equipment strapped to them. I suggested that my sound team could rig the actors with the vfx and sound equipment, with VFX present during the process to technically assist and troubleshoot their equipment.

We started talking about the amount of time to do the rigging, and the number of people that we would require. It became clear that we needed to throw a large team at the issue to enable the fifty cast to be on the set within an hour of arrival at the studio. After much discussion, we decided that Arthur Fenn, 1st AS, would head up a team of sound “suit techs,” which became our team on Cats.

Five 3rd assistant sound people would work each morning and evening rigging and de-rigging the cast under Arthur’s instruction, each with a costume dresser and a VFX technician as a three-person team. They would dress a single cast member, then move onto the next. We would try wherever possible to keep the same three-person team working with the same actors each day so they could develop a relationship with the actor to help them feel comfortable and supported. When the cast were dressed, the five suit techs would come to the set and join the rest of the Sound Department. They would stand by to troubleshoot ‘their cast,’ moving packs around depending on the dance routine or movement. They were on call to make sure their actors were comfortable, in the same way a personal costume dresser would be on a ‘normal’ film set.

I cannot stress enough how much time/management coordination went into this process with Arthur and his team of suit techs, using Excel spreadsheets to work out the daily timings and strategy based on the next day’s advanced call sheet. It really was a tour de force in organization. The other really helpful factor was that our suit techs had experience working on ‘normal’ films and had radio mic’d actors before, so they were arriving on Cats with a skill set already in place.

Arthur also coordinated with the VFX team and URSA’s Simon Bysshe. Simon was working full time on making unique URSA STRAP solutions for Cats, that included custom-sized straps to attach the VFX hard drive packs to the bodies of the performers. Everything was coming together but we still had a lot of preparation to do.

I sat down with John Warhurst, Supervising Sound/Music Editor, Melanie Oliver, Picture Editor, and her 1st Assistant, Alex Anstey, and discussed the fifty cast members. Tom Hooper and Working Title did not want to go down the route of using an OB truck outside the stages, as Tom wanted to be able to move fast from stage to stage. I was also concerned that if I was based off the set in a truck, I would be creatively divorced from proceedings on the set. I feel that the closer I can be in proximity to the director, the more supportive I can be and positively influence the recording of the performance on the set. I can’t stress this point enough.

We continued by talking about how many tracks the Avid could ingest, and how many tracks I felt I could actually mix on the set successfully. I invited my other 1st Assistant Sound, Robin Johnson, into the conversation. Robin has another diverse skill set that complements Arthur and me, and is a reason he has been with us on our journey since 1998, joining us on our second movie. Robin is our technical genius, qualified as a scientist and an absolutely first-class audio engineer, computer expert (Mac & PC) and, of course, boom operator. I asked Robin to come up with some frequency plans to try and determine how many radio frequencies we could get reliably working together on one stage, bearing in mind the additional frequencies that would be necessary for IEM’s and comm’s, as well as the radio mics.

When we started looking at our planned workflow, we needed a little more than fifty frequencies to work in close proximity on one stage. The most radio mics we could assign to actor vocals was twenty-four. After breaking down the script in conversations with Tom Hooper and the music team, we knew that eighteen soloists would need mic’ing every day as they were key cast members that would sing solos. The rest of the cast would sing the chorus. When I spoke to Tom Hooper about my plan to only mic twenty-four of the cast, he was unconcerned. He explained that the chorus had been cast primarily for their extraordinary and diverse dancing ability. Tom did not feel we needed all of them mic’d because of the time it would take to get fifty performers wired, as well as the fact that many of them were not singers but dancers.

We worked out a plan. Eighteen soloists would always be mic’d and the other six radio mics would be assigned on a day-by-day basis to the strongest singers in the chorus. This was based on which song we were shooting and how to support the soloists on those tracks with the exact mix of baritones, altos, tenors, etc. The decision on whom to mic was made by the Vocal Coach, Fiona McDougal, and our two Keyboard Players, James Taylor and Mark Aspinall. They were very adept at working out exactly where to place the six ‘floating’ radio mics on a scene-to-scene basis, as they knew the cast’s voices, their strengths, weaknesses, and how they could be played to enhance the backing vocals. Phew—we only had to run twenty-four radio mics EVERY scene, EVERY day!

Our next step was how to deliver those twenty-four tracks to Editorial daily.

I had been waiting for the Zaxcom Deva 24 to arrive specifically for Cats. Glenn Sanders and Roger Patel at Everything Audio, the UK Zaxcom distributor, managed to get me a very early machine to use on the additional photography we were doing on Aladdin, right before we filmed Cats. Being able to use the Deva 24 for a few weeks before bringing it onto Cats was very important to me. I found it very similar to my Deva 16 in the usual Zaxcom style. I am a firm believer in making Production Sound Mixing as intuitive as possible. I believe the equipment is only there to help and support the creative process of the director and sound mixer. The equipment I am using is no different than the instrument a musician plays. It would be unthinkable for any musician to play a new instrument before the most creatively complex and demanding concert of their career. I decided that track count would not decide which recorder and mixer panel I would use. I was going to have to use a second recorder because of the high track count; this was going to be the highest track count I had recorded and mixed in my career, with an extremely diverse group of vocalists, all with different styles and levels.

I wanted to give myself the best chance of capturing every subtlety and nuance of the performances, with the most appropriate gain structure. In order to give myself the best chance of delivering this, I decided to stick to equipment I had been using for years, but make it more expansive. I was already using a custom-built twelve-channel Audio Developments AD149 desk. Their previous largest was ten channels. The company MD Tom Cryan had made my twelve-channel specifically for me. Of course, like all reliable production sound mixers, I had a spare built at the same time, just in case I was in some far-flung location and had a failure. It soon became apparent to me, however, that if I linked the two mixers together to deliver twenty-four tracks, I would not have a spare if there were a failure. My mixers were unique and we would be completely reliant on them for Cats. I made the decision to task Audio Developments to build another two from scratch, so I had complete peace of mind that if the unthinkable happened on set and both mixers died or developed faults, I could swap them out and the shoot could continue.

The next decision was recorders. I decided, with Editorial’s permission, to link together the Zaxcom Deva 24 with my Zaxcom Deva 16. This would give me access to forty tracks. I would then create two mixes for Picture Editorial, allowing them to expand on choruses if they wanted to by using both mixes in the Avid. Mix Track 1 contained a mix of the first twelve ISO tracks, and Mix Track 2 contained a mix of ISO tracks thirteen through twenty-four. We assigned the first twelve ISO tracks to our key cast members who would be in every scene. When we had a guest star in the cast for a specific song or two, we would decide the most appropriate workflow. I would also try to keep the actors with the highest amount of solo singing on the first twelve ISO tracks and Mix 1, with Mix 2 being a ‘supporting’ mix, which could be added or subtracted by Melanie Oliver, the Picture Editor.

This suited Melanie because it gave her creative control over the ‘size’ of the sound in the Avid, without giving her and her team the additional workload of having to dig into the ISO tracks to rebuild the mix. Of course, all the ISO tracks were ingested into the Avid so Picture Editorial had access to them, but the plan was for Editorial to only work off the two mixes whenever possible.

We then took the conversation into the musical side of the production sound recording. We had two elements as discussed earlier: The electronic keyboard would be used wherever possible in links between songs to give the actors more freedom to explore tempo, so they could play with their performances.

Pro Tools playback of temp mixes digitally orchestrated.

The keyboard and Pro Tools would need to weave in and out of each other so the actors did not hear a shift in tone between the two accompaniments in their IEM’s. This would be achieved by careful gain matching. We also learned early on in rehearsals that the best strategy to achieve this perfect blend was to have the keyboard player play along with the Pro Tools playback. It worked because when we went from free form keyboard to playback, it was not obvious to the cast, because they could still hear the keyboard.

The keyboard players, James and Mark, were actually ‘performers’ in Cats, just a different kind. They were not on screen, instead spending twelve hours a day in a soundproofed booth we had built, with large LCD screens to view all the camera angles, such was their creative input on the set. The irony being that both the expressive keyboard playing and the Pro Tools playback were simply temporary. It would all be discarded when Cats was fully orchestrated in post production, but what remained was the emotion they helped the cast achieve.

I decided adding the musical element to the two vocal mix tracks would be counterproductive. Melanie would need two tracks of vocal mixes that would give her control over the size of the sound, and a mono keyboard/Pro Tools track.

At this point, there were two vocal mix tracks, twenty-four vocal ISO tracks, and the mono music on track twenty-seven. Melanie would have the ability of manipulating the volume of the keyboard/Pro Tools playback against the vocal mixes, as per her own and Tom Hooper’s instinct, on the Avid. She would also have the stereo ‘bounce backs’ of the temp Pro Tools orchestrated tracks, timecode locked so she could utilize this as she finished cutting a scene.

The ‘mono mix’ of keyboard and pre-recorded temp track was on Victor Chaga’s Pro Tools cart and it was his responsibility to keep it gain matched and send it direct to my Deva 16. Victor also sent it to Tom Barrow the IEM mixer at the same time so he could use it to create his individual IEM mixes for the cast, along with the vocals.
I sent Tom all of my ISO tracks as well, so he could creatively provide each actor with what they wanted and work each character’s gain in the IEM mixes. This gave Tom far more ability to support the cast than if he had simply been working with my production sound vocal mixes. It was invaluable to have Tom Barrow giving the cast what they needed to hear on a shot-by-shot basis so I could concentrate on what Post Production needed, and ultimately provide the highest quality vocals for the finished film.

Now onto timecode.

We were using an Ambient Master Clock on the sound cart, generating time of day TC that locked together sound recording, digital cameras, and VFX. Each Pro Tools temp song had its own unique timecode, so Picture Editorial could quickly drop the on-set music ISO and sync up the stereo temp version of the song in the Avid quickly and efficiently. The playback timecode fed directly from Pro Tools was recorded on audio track twenty-eight of my Deva 16. The Pro Tools playback timecode was also fed to the Lighting Desk so that lighting cues and moves could be triggered, ensuring that the complex lighting signature of each beat in the song would be frame accurate on every take we filmed.

We were now twelve weeks out from principal photography and I decided that the workload was growing too quickly for Arthur and myself to deal with on our own. After another meeting with production, I made a case for more of our Sound Department to start work full time at Leavesden Studios. Working Title and Tom Hooper were receptive to the idea after I explained the technical complexity of what we were all embarking on. This was the point where the performers were moving from their rehearsal studios to begin rehearsing on the actual sets we would be shooting on. This was very important for the choreography because the sets were three times larger than reality. My main point was that making the performers feel comfortable and supported by the process was absolutely paramount to them being able to give their best performances when we were shooting.

Up until this point, they had been rehearsing with keyboard and playback coming out of a small PA system operated by the vhoreography team, and vocals had not been a priority. Our cast was a mixture of film actors, theatre actors, musical theatre performers, ballerinas, and rock/pop/R&B vocalists. I felt it was incredibly important to introduce them to the workflow of singing and dancing with the TX/RX packs and hearing themselves in their IEM’s, to help them achieve the perfect balance of vocal and music for their own particular needs. We did not give everyone a completely unique custom mix, as this would have meant twenty-four separate IEM mixes. Instead, we tried to group performers together, based on their taste and the range in which they sing. Some of our main cast were able to have a completely personal mix, especially if that was what they were used to from performing on stage, but most cast were given a choice of a set few mixes.

We also decided that giving all fifty cast personal IEM molds with receivers was cost-prohibitive, so chorus members twenty-five through fifty were fitted with personal molded ‘earwigs’ being fed audio from an induction loop. This was the way we did Les Miserables, so we knew it worked well although at a lower SPL than the IEM’s. We didn’t put vocals into the loop, only the music playback, to help us get more volume for the beat of the music out of the earwigs. This section of the chorus was not being radio mic’d and were primarily incredible dancers rather than vocalists. We felt it would not hamper their performance in any way and they generally worked with only one earwig so they could hear the music to keep them in time; their other ear was open so they could hear the live singing on the set.

In rehearsals, this whole process had been auditioned and fine-tuned. As I said to the producers, if we do not spend twelve weeks rehearsing the workflow, we would waste time on a very tight schedule due to cast availability when we started shooting. I explained that if a performer has a sound problem, it could easily suck up a half-hour working out exactly what blend they want in their IEM. It would be terrible if that happened with a whole crew standing by, waiting to shoot on a very exacting daily schedule.

On our first couple of rehearsal days, that was exactly what happened. The producers present were shocked at how much time it took sorting out the performer’s IEM mixes, instead of rehearsing the choreography. They realized just how important their decision was bringing the Sound/Music team in twelve weeks out.

I also expressed that creatively I really needed to get a feel for the way the songs were being performed, and the dynamic range each vocalist used. I think because our visual colleagues don’t “see” sound, it is often assumed that dialog/vocals are just simply captured by a mic and that there is no need for a gain structure.

One of my biggest responsibilities and the core of my job were ensuring the vocals were captured as richly and perfectly as possible and that meant understanding the volumes our vocalists would use. I started to get familiar with which performers had huge dynamic range and which were the softer singers. I started taking notes and feeding that information to Arthur on where I wanted the gain settings to be on the Lectrosonics SMb transmitter packs.

I am a great believer in recording full dynamic range and I don’t like hitting the internal limiters in TX packs, even on loud pieces. The limiters in the transmitters cannot be completely turned off so I like to set them so that on a vocalist’s loudest part, the limiter is not engaged. Each performer was given their own unique gain setting on their TX, which would change from song to song dependent on the kind of performance they were giving. When I first heard Jennifer Hudson and Taylor Swift sing, I was shocked at their dynamic range and the way they used their voices. In order to capture their vocals in the purest way possible, I had to ask them to wear two radio packs with two DPA 4061 Core mics. The mics were rigged next to each other in their headbands but the TX packs were given two different gain settings that varied by about 6db. This gave me the best chance of capturing the lowest level pieces of their performances with perfect signal to noise, and the very highest SPL parts of their performances without hitting the TX limiters. Taylor and Jennifer were both assigned two tracks on the Deva with notes made for the Music Department regarding the track designation. Taylor and Jennifer were very supportive of this workflow and understood exactly why we were doing it this way after Arthur and myself explained the process to them. Tom Hooper asked, “Why are they wearing two mics?” and when I explained it to him he exclaimed, “That’s genius!” That is how excited Tom gets about capturing live performances. He is incredibly enthused by the process.

Another thing that came about in the rehearsal period was that our Keyboard Players, James and Mark, asked for a click track into their ears. Even though they were allowing the performers to have the freedom to express themselves when they were not locked to a playback track, they wanted to have a tempo guide for the next song when we moved into playback. John Warhurst, Supervising Sound/Music Editor, told me it would be incredibly helpful for him while he was editing to have access to that click. It was generated on Pro Tools and fed directly to my Deva ISO track twenty-nine. Phew! We were up to twenty-nine tracks of my forty tracks available.

The opportunity to use booms to capture the performances would be rare, due to the hard lighting style DP Chris Ross was using, alongside the huge sets and multiple cameras. However, we needed to be ready for any opportunities that would arise. We decided to use Schoeps Super CMITS, which are a very good match for the DPA lavs. The Super CMITS provide us with two AES 42 tracks from each mic, processed and unprocessed, so Nina the Dialog Editor could choose which track was more effective in post for any vocals where we used the booms.

There were no inputs for the boom mics on the AD149 mixers; they were already full with the twenty-four radio mics. However, the Zaxcom Deva 24 could take their signal on its AES 42 inputs. I would rarely use the booms in the mix so it made sense to keep them completely in the digital domain, which was a huge step forward in sound quality. This resulted in another four tracks assigned to the Deva 24, our total track count was now up to thirty-three.

In the end, we rarely used the booms apart from capturing the clapperboards. The radio mics sounded great, and the spotlights didn’t allow booms to get close, so we prioritized the mics that sounded best for the project and they were the head worn DPA’s. There are a few sporadic boomed pieces of dialog in the film and a few spot FX, but ninety-five percent of Cats was recorded on the DPA lavaliers.

One question that kept coming up since my first meeting with Tom Hooper, and in multiple meetings with the producers and Working Title Films, was how was I going to deal with the footfall from such dynamic choreography? This had not been resolved when we started rehearsing. I recorded a camera test and used that to start negotiating with the performers and with Tom. Up until this point, the cast had been rehearsing in whatever shoes they felt comfortable dancing in, knowing that their feet would generally become cats’ paws in VFX. After the test shoot, I played Tom the recording and told him we needed to rethink this protocol.

Tom was adamant that he did not want to do anything that limited his cast’s ability to dance in the most extreme way their skills allowed. Many of the cast were professional dancers. Tom was concerned that if someone got injured due to wearing inappropriate footwear, it jeopardized shooting and could damage the performers’ future career.

We had a frank and honest conversation as I explained my issue. Also present was the brilliant Paco Delgado, the Costume Designer. If any performer opted for heavier footwear than they actually needed, it would be contributing to making the live vocals poorer. It would be counterproductive to go through the fantastically difficult, energy-sapping process of recording the vocals live, only to find out footsteps had ruined the recordings and having to go into ADR to fix it.

High heel shoes treated to remove footfalls with safety for the dance
It was decided that each performer would have three levels of footwear and they would choose whatever they needed that was appropriate for a particular scene or dance move. I was very lucky that many of the cast had classical ballet training even if they were now street-style dancers, and were generally happy to perform in bare feet or ballet shoes unless a particular move or song demanded more support on their feet.

The three choices for the performers were bare feet, ballet shoes, or a type of shoe Paco and his team found that was halfway between a ballet shoe and a trainer and were designed for parkour (free running). The footwear was always near the set and available at all times. If Arthur saw a performer wearing heavier footwear than he thought a particular piece of choreography required, we would ask them if they could change shoes or go bare foot. Most of the time, they would realize they had forgotten that they were wearing parkour shoes and change them immediately.

This was a very productive process and it removed approximately seventy percent of the heavier footfalls from the live-recorded vocals than we would have otherwise encountered. There were a couple of dancers whose moves were so extreme, they had to wear trainers, and sometimes a character would be in high heels for a song; we took care of this the same way we would any other film, and treated the soles as much as we could while still keeping them safe for the performer.

Our soundproofed keyboard booths were first developed on Les Miserables. We needed to put a keyboard into a ply box that was on castor wheels and soundproofed, so we would not hear the noise of the electric keyboard being played on set. It worked successfully, but on Cats we wanted to go bigger and better. One of the discussions with production was about the complexity of our Sound/Music technical workflow and how quickly the equipment could be moved from stage to stage. Right now it was two production sound carts, two IEM mixing carts, one Pro Tools cart, and a keyboard booth, all linked together by a myriad of cables in the analog, digital, Dante, and MADI domains.

Unfortunately, because of artist availability and time constraints, there were many days in the schedule where we had to move stages. We were asked to look at where we could save time within our workflow, and one of the ways was to have construction build three keyboard booths, all containing a keyboard, flat-screen monitors, Midas mixers and the cables pre-rigged. The booths would be leap-frogged to the next stage by a swing gang on a telehandler or forklift truck to enable us to move from stage to stage and have a fully rigged booth waiting for us.

Our stage moves would still take us three hours for Sound/Music to be able to be ready to shoot. These moves were generally timed to coincide with our one-hour lunch break, which we would work through, and then by the time that stage was lit and cameras were ready, we were all in the same ballpark. The important factor was there was no way for the performers to rehearse until we were ready. They could block a dance routine with the choreographers counting out a rhythm verbally, but until the keyboard, Pro Tools, IEM’s, and radio mics were rigged, our cast could not hear any music, or each other, so the whole show was extremely reliant on our team being ready.

The three booths we had built for Cats were made of double-skinned ply with an eight-inch cavity in the walls, ceiling, and floor. We had construction spray expanding foam inside the cavity. The interiors and exteriors of the booths were lined with rubber-backed carpets. This meant they were completely soundproofed from interior noise escaping, and they were also soundproofed from exterior noise penetrating the interior. Our Keyboard Players, James Taylor and Mark Aspinall, had complete privacy.

I have already mentioned that James and Mark were actually performers on Cats, such was their creative collaboration and support they gave the cast. Not only were they playing the keyboards, they could also give verbal counts for anyone who needed them, directly into the cast IEM feeds. On many songs, Fiona McDougal, the cast Vocal Coach, was also inside the keyboard booth using a Shure SM58 mic, harmonizing or singing along to support the cast in their IEM’s during a scene. Fiona also did this when rehearsing with them for weeks in prep. It was an amazing sight to behold.

It was important to have two keyboard players, as we needed one to be present while filming a scene and the other rehearsing with a performer on a different stage due to artist availability and a very compressed shooting schedule. They would rehearse with Fiona, a keyboard player, and one of the choreography team. It was a very finely tuned machine and a tour de force of planning and scheduling.

John Warhurst and Victor Chaga devised the fantastic idea of using a foot pedal to trigger Pro Tools playback. This meant the keyboard players were ‘playing’ Pro Tools just like another musical instrument! Whichever keyboard player rehearsed, a song with a key performer would be the same person who played keyboard on that number when we shot it. This was extremely important as they had built up a rapport and understanding with that actor. We wanted to give the performers as much creative support as possible during their physically demanding experience of dancing and singing live. Victor made sure the playback cues were lined up so the keyboard player could trigger multiple cues and weave in and out of Pro Tools playback and live keyboard playing multiple times within a take. This was an extremely creative collaboration between the Sound/Music team and the cast.

Each one of us became part of a band ‘playing’ our own ‘instrument’ that would become an organic and intrinsic part of the piece. It was an incredible collaboration of which I am so proud to have been a part.

The Cats Sound Crew

Simon Hayes, Production Sound Mixer
John Warhurst, Supervising Music and Sound Editor
Becky Bentham, Music Supervisor
David Wilson, Music Producer
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 A. 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

Editor’s note: “Mixing Live Singing Vocals on Cats Part 2”
continues in the winter edition of Production Sound & Video.

Creative Arts Emmy Sound Mixing Winners 2019

Outstanding Sound Mixing for a Comedy or Drama Series (One Hour)

Game of Thrones “The Long Night”
Winners:
Onnalee Blank CAS, Mathew Waters CAS,
Simon Kerr, Danny Crowley, Ronan Hill CAS

Production Sound Team:​ Guillaume Beauron, Andrew McNeill, Jonathan Riddell,
Sean O’Toole, Andrew McArthur, Joe Furness

Outstanding Sound Mixing for a Comedy or Drama Series (Half-Hour) and Animation

Barry “ronny/lily”
Winners:
Elmo Ponsdomenech CAS, Jason “Frenchie” Gaya,
Aaron Hasson, Benjamin Patrick CAS

Production Sound Team: Jacques Pienaar, Corey Woods, Kraig Kishi,
Scott Harber, Christopher Walmer, Erik Altstadt, Srdjan Popovic, Dan Lipe

Outstanding Sound Mixing for a Limited Series or a Movie

Chernobyl “1:23:45”
Winners:
Stuart Hilliker, Vincent Piponnier

Production Sound Team: Nicolas Fejoz, Margaux Peyre​

Outstanding Sound Mixing for Nonfiction Programming (Single- or Multi-Camera)

Free Solo
Winners:
Tom Fleischman CAS, Ric Schnupp, Tyson Lozensky, Jim Hurst

Outstanding Sound Mixing for a Variety Series or Special

Aretha! A Grammy Celebration for the Queen of Soul
Winners:
Paul Wittman, Josh Morton, Paul Sandweiss, Kristian Pedregon, Christian Schrader, Michael Parker, Patrick Baltzell

Production Sound Team: Juan Pablo Velasco, Ric Teller, Tom Banghart,
Michael Faustino, Ray Lindsey

Names in bold are Local 695 members