Speaker 1: Old ye is boot. It's show Died.
Speaker 2: People say good money to see this movie. When they
Speaker 2: go out to a theater. They want cold sodas, hot popcorn,
Speaker 2: and no monsters. In the Protection Booth.
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Speaker 4: Fuck you, no, fuck you, no bitch, fuck you, fuck you.
Speaker 3: I don't know what is going on in here, but
Speaker 3: Ray I am forgiving.
Speaker 1: The buck? Are you?
Speaker 3: Where did you learn how to fight like that?
Speaker 1: Prison?
Speaker 3: Hey, folks, welcome to a special episode of The Projection Booth.
Speaker 3: I'm your host, Mike White. On this episode, I'm talking
Speaker 3: with Jeffrey Pitts and Duncan McCrae. They were two people
Speaker 3: behind the sound of They Will Kill You. It is
Speaker 3: a new movie starring as Zazie Beats, and it is
Speaker 3: kind of phasing out from theaters right now. Should be
Speaker 3: on demand pretty darn soon. Had a great time watching
Speaker 3: this in the theater. Wonderful sound mix, and I'm really
Speaker 3: excited for you guys to hear more of how that
Speaker 3: was put together. Got to say, there's a little bit
Speaker 3: of spoilery things in this, so if you don't want
Speaker 3: to twist or turns ruin, please go ahead, turn off
Speaker 3: the show, go watch the movie, come on back. You
Speaker 3: know how this works. Thanks so much for listening, and
Speaker 3: I hope you enjoyed this interview. Jeff I want to
Speaker 3: start with you. Can you tell me a little bit
Speaker 3: about your journey and how you got into working with sound.
Speaker 5: I think all of us generally have a bug for
Speaker 5: audio at some point and then we just follow the
Speaker 5: bread crumbs. And while everybody's story is different, but I'm
Speaker 5: pretty much self taught and moved out here in two
Speaker 5: thousand and six and got a job and doing some
Speaker 5: like technical thing the build computers and did all that
Speaker 5: kind of stuff as well, And so I got a
Speaker 5: job at a studio because I could fix a computer
Speaker 5: problem that they were having.
Speaker 2: So in the interview he was.
Speaker 5: Like, ah, we have this problem with the thing, and
Speaker 5: I was like, oh, I can fix that.
Speaker 2: So I fixed that.
Speaker 5: I got into the studio, and then it turned into
Speaker 5: me editing some stuff on the side, and I remember
Speaker 5: this really crazy movie like something wasn't cut for the movie,
Speaker 5: like a whole the whole movie. There's like a whole
Speaker 5: pass of a prop or something that wasn't cut. So
Speaker 5: I was like, oh, I'll cut it. So I just
Speaker 5: went into the ADR studio and just cut this thing
Speaker 5: that was missing and just send it over to the stage.
Speaker 5: And then from then it was like, oh, okay, keep going.
Speaker 3: Good initiative, You got there, mister Pitts.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I would say that the best thing to do is
Speaker 5: to focus on the foundations of your craft and make
Speaker 5: sure that you're not faking it and then you know
Speaker 5: why you're doing a thing. If you have all those foundations,
Speaker 5: then you're going to be doing well. Might not be successful,
Speaker 5: I think that's a lot of that's luck, but you
Speaker 5: will be doing well and keep practicing That's the thing
Speaker 5: is like, when I wasn't working, I was constantly lifting
Speaker 5: scenes off of DVDs and just cutting.
Speaker 2: Them and doing that.
Speaker 5: I am very scrappy in that way, and it just
Speaker 5: kind of came up and did everything myself.
Speaker 3: Duncan, what's your journey? How'd you get into audio?
Speaker 4: I was born raised in the East Coast of Australia
Speaker 4: and was mostly heavy into music or growing up and
Speaker 4: playing in bands and chasing the rock star dream, I suppose,
Speaker 4: and ended up going to college for audio production, university
Speaker 4: as we would call it back home. And while I
Speaker 4: was there, I had a call from my mother actually,
Speaker 4: who said that one of her great lifelong friends has
Speaker 4: been working at a film studio in Sydney and they
Speaker 4: had a sound room, as she called it, and she
Speaker 4: went ahead and signed me up for two weeks work experience,
Speaker 4: which is like an internship over here in the States
Speaker 4: without my knowing, and then I had to pack my
Speaker 4: stuff for a couple of weeks and went down to Sydney,
Speaker 4: and when I showed up, I realized it was well,
Speaker 4: it actually was the premiere film mixing facility in the country.
Speaker 4: I walked into a ninety six faded net DFC console
Speaker 4: in front of me, and hearing about the catalog of
Speaker 4: films the guys had recently worked on completed, I was
Speaker 4: pretty blown away. I spent a couple of weeks there
Speaker 4: learning a lot from the guys in a new perspective,
Speaker 4: to use a lot of the same fundamentals that we
Speaker 4: have in the music realm, and it really just took
Speaker 4: me away. So I went all in on that, packed
Speaker 4: up my stuff, moved down to Sydney, and yeah, just
Speaker 4: continued at it.
Speaker 3: Wow, what year was that?
Speaker 4: That was the end of twenty ten.
Speaker 3: So by that time Sydney was already kind of a
Speaker 3: hotbed of production and post production work, I imagine.
Speaker 4: Oh absolutely, and for a lot longer before that as well.
Speaker 4: The film that they had more recently completed before I
Speaker 4: got there was Basloman's Australia, for which they put a
Speaker 4: lot of investment into the facility, and Peter Weir was
Speaker 4: recently there also for The Way Back at the time
Speaker 4: of which it turns out flash forward to now and
Speaker 4: one of the mixes on that project is another mixing
Speaker 4: partner of mine in Town.
Speaker 3: He is.
Speaker 4: It's an interesting roundabout kind of way into it.
Speaker 2: It's cool have.
Speaker 3: You guys ever worked on a project together before this one?
Speaker 5: Or oh yeah, yeah, yeah, Duncan, how many projects? Like
Speaker 5: when you first moved here? What project was that when
Speaker 5: you first moved here that you were you were teching
Speaker 5: on something?
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was Mad Max's Fury Road.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but I wasn't on that. I wish I was
Speaker 5: been fun as hell, But I think we did. Do
Speaker 5: we do Death Note together?
Speaker 2: Or was it.
Speaker 5: Maybe we've done a couple of projects together. Duncan's always
Speaker 5: has the best behavior on the stage. He knows exactly
Speaker 5: how to have the room feel. It's brilliant. He's like
Speaker 5: the matre d. He's a great mixer, but he's also
Speaker 5: a great guy. I try to work with dunk In
Speaker 5: as much as I can, and yeah, with a shorthand
Speaker 5: at this point, I'd say he's mixed a couple of
Speaker 5: projects for me, and yeah, and I've cut sound effects
Speaker 5: on some shows that I wasn't even supervising that then mixed.
Speaker 2: So there's been a lot of going back and forth.
Speaker 3: Yeah, when did they bring you guys into a project?
Speaker 3: Are you right there at the inception kind of planning
Speaker 3: things out or.
Speaker 5: It depends, like on this specific on they will kill you.
Speaker 5: I was brought in at the script phase before they
Speaker 5: even shot the movie. Basically they wanted to figure out
Speaker 5: who was going to do the sound at the end
Speaker 5: and during production and stuff like that. I could help
Speaker 5: with some of the some of the stuff they needed
Speaker 5: to do, or I had my own notes about the script,
Speaker 5: so I shared those with Carol and yeah, so that
Speaker 5: was cool coming in that early. I've been on movies
Speaker 5: where it's like, you come on, hey, we need you
Speaker 5: to fix this thing, right, so you're coming in towards
Speaker 5: the end, and I've had stuff where it's everything's in
Speaker 5: the can, we're starting picture editorial right now, and now
Speaker 5: we're going to start to look for somebody to work sound.
Speaker 5: So it depends on the different productions.
Speaker 3: What are some of those notes that you had or
Speaker 3: the early parts of the production.
Speaker 5: When I read a script, I'll read a script with
Speaker 5: a note pad up and I'll just type down things
Speaker 5: as I read, just things that occur to me as
Speaker 5: I read them.
Speaker 4: A good lesson I learned from Jeff when he's working
Speaker 4: through this phase initially on is be honest. Describe your emotion,
Speaker 4: how you're feeling, and how you could either enhance that
Speaker 4: and take it further in that direction. If that is
Speaker 4: the intent of the filmmakers, or even just describing that,
Speaker 4: that how you reacted. If that isn't the intent, how
Speaker 4: you able to steer things in a way that the
Speaker 4: audience can feel what is really intended. And that's a
Speaker 4: strong strength of Jeff.
Speaker 5: So one of the big notes I had on this movie,
Speaker 5: these characters reincarnate or they resurrect, right, So as I
Speaker 5: was reading the script, I was like, it'd be cool
Speaker 5: if they did this agonal breathing, Like when people die,
Speaker 5: they do this agonal breathing in their death phase, right,
Speaker 5: So I thought, oh, that wouldn't it be cool if
Speaker 5: they did the agonal breathing in reverse back out? And
Speaker 5: that was one of the notes. And not to toot
Speaker 5: my own horn, but they shot them gasping for air
Speaker 5: when they resurrected. It became like a sequence, a beat
Speaker 5: for the character, for the characters as they now they're
Speaker 5: gasping for air they when they come back, which kind
Speaker 5: of adds a little bit of realism to this thing
Speaker 5: that's just totally not real. Like these notes, I'd literally
Speaker 5: write at the top, I'm writing this off to finish
Speaker 5: the script, very interesting. I took these notes as I
Speaker 5: read the script. They'll be miss spellings, and because I'm
Speaker 5: just like reading and writing and reading and writing as
Speaker 5: I go through, and I find it to be really important.
Speaker 5: It's almost like the first time you watch a movie
Speaker 5: is so important. I try to zen out as sometimes
Speaker 5: where I like release everything to try to watch a
Speaker 5: movie again for the first time, which is hard to do,
Speaker 5: but I think it's really important to be open, to
Speaker 5: be receptive to changes and things like that.
Speaker 3: Sometimes I think about editing and just how they call
Speaker 3: it the invisible art. Is it more? I want people
Speaker 3: to know that there are good sounds going on here,
Speaker 3: but I also don't want to bring attention to it.
Speaker 2: It depends.
Speaker 5: Sometimes you want sounds that are going to be feel
Speaker 5: so realistic and so perfect that when people watch they
Speaker 5: don't think about it. And then other times you want
Speaker 5: to have something that can happen abruptly or change or
Speaker 5: shift where it shocks them in a certain way that
Speaker 5: might be good or maybe make them just question, what's
Speaker 5: that When the first knife in the first fight scene,
Speaker 5: when your heavy breathing guy like throws that knife and
Speaker 5: we do that this like anime sound on the knife
Speaker 5: flying through, it's like that's just going to stick out,
Speaker 5: like you're either going to that or not, but you're
Speaker 5: gonna be in the moment and you're gonna be like.
Speaker 2: What's going on.
Speaker 5: That's not something that's just going to land in there,
Speaker 5: Like things like I feel like that first fight scene
Speaker 5: does feel very natural, Like it feels like it would
Speaker 5: be like that's how it would be if you're in
Speaker 5: that space and witnessing that happen. So yeah, you just
Speaker 5: really it depends.
Speaker 4: There's a lot of choices that we make as we're mixing,
Speaker 4: is where how much do you want to lead the
Speaker 4: audience into either feeling a certain thing or catching any
Speaker 4: case story points where sometimes the idea behind it is
Speaker 4: that upon a second viewing, you're going to catch these
Speaker 4: things earlier on the character sound of something specific. But
Speaker 4: for example, in our film, they will kill You. An
Speaker 4: early example of that is as Asia is led into
Speaker 4: her room for the first time and she's wheeling her
Speaker 4: suitcase in and bounces across the rug on the floor,
Speaker 4: and we have a different textural hollowness at a certain
Speaker 4: point as the wheel bounces, which is obvious when you
Speaker 4: have seen the film and you're watching it a second
Speaker 4: time through, but not necessarily too much that at the
Speaker 4: beginning you're completely thrown. It's enough taste in there and
Speaker 4: texture to say this is a story point, but more
Speaker 4: to come later.
Speaker 3: There are so many scenes where the sound just amplifies
Speaker 3: everything so well, especially when it comes to like the
Speaker 3: sounds of the knives and just the clanging of those
Speaker 3: that first big battle that they have in the hotel room.
Speaker 3: The way that the camera's moving all around Jeff, you
Speaker 3: mentioned anime, and it just feels like we're we've moved
Speaker 3: almost into a different world, and everything is just so
Speaker 3: heightened with that scene.
Speaker 5: One of the things I wanted to do with the
Speaker 5: film was like pay homage to some of the whole
Speaker 5: styles of kung fu movies or anime. This is all
Speaker 5: like being fed with Carill right, It's like he loves
Speaker 5: that too, he wants that too. And then I thought
Speaker 5: about things like, Okay, what if every scene has its
Speaker 5: own feel, for like how the fights actually feel like
Speaker 5: that first fight feels so realistic, and then the fire
Speaker 5: acccene is a bit surreal, and and then like the
Speaker 5: in the final fight, like I wanted to like shift gears,
Speaker 5: like in the middle of the fight. Wanted to keep
Speaker 5: things dynamic in a way that had these like really
Speaker 5: sudden jarring shifts in the sequences, which I think I
Speaker 5: think we were able to achieve that.
Speaker 3: Jeff, you mentioned coming in pretty early and giving these
Speaker 3: thoughts very early on. They're obviously they're not recording a
Speaker 3: lot of these sounds on the stage, right. You just
Speaker 3: have to build this up completely on your own.
Speaker 5: So I did record all the swords here at my studio,
Speaker 5: and I also have a I have a four track
Speaker 5: task on deck that I ran a ton of sounds
Speaker 5: through and I made. I did a lot of like
Speaker 5: synthetic wooshes. I built, made synthesized a lot of synthetic
Speaker 5: wooshes and stuff like that. Then I just ran them
Speaker 5: through tape like crappy tape too, not the good not
Speaker 5: the good stuff, like this is all the bad stuff,
Speaker 5: and it gives it a flavor. It's really interesting to
Speaker 5: work with that kind of stuff. But anyways, Carell gave
Speaker 5: me a Samurai sword that he had, and he gave
Speaker 5: me the machete, the main machete in the movie. He said,
Speaker 5: be careful with this because it's actually really sharp. This
Speaker 5: is not the They're not swinging this around at anybody.
Speaker 5: This is like when we're doing a close up of
Speaker 5: the miss this is what we're looking at. It's like
Speaker 5: really sharp razor sharp machete and the final scene is
Speaker 5: a butcher knife and or cleaver and then the machete.
Speaker 5: So I had the cleaver and the machete in my
Speaker 5: studio and I'm just beating the machete with my cleaver,
Speaker 5: and by the time I was done with this, the
Speaker 5: cleaver was just like warped and bent and chipped, and
Speaker 5: just I was like, oh my god, we're going to
Speaker 5: throw this away and look at the sword and it's like, not,
Speaker 5: there's no damage at all to this thing. It's like
Speaker 5: some special steal. Like I'm like, this is like a
Speaker 5: legitimate sword. This is like something you'd actually want to
Speaker 5: have in a zombie.
Speaker 2: Invasion or something.
Speaker 3: Was it a hand?
Speaker 5: Great, he makes a machete the only one that'd be
Speaker 5: a good movie, right, everybody else is fighting with the katanas,
Speaker 5: and then you got somebody with the machete.
Speaker 3: And duncan when do you get brought onto the project?
Speaker 3: Also at the beginning.
Speaker 4: Typically my role is historically at the end of the
Speaker 4: filmmaking process as a re recording mixer, but the best
Speaker 4: possible results always come from early collaboration where bringing somebody
Speaker 4: on at the end in a position like nine, we
Speaker 4: have the ability to completely destroy any of the ideas
Speaker 4: that have been laid before us, or enhance them and
Speaker 4: add flavor and add to the storytelling process. It's always
Speaker 4: better if even during or around the time of the
Speaker 4: first spotting sessions, understanding the direction of the filmmakers, adding
Speaker 4: in any of the ideas that we might have because
Speaker 4: we are all collaborators in this and just being an
Speaker 4: ear to bounce ideas off of from Jeff and his
Speaker 4: team and being as involved earlier on as possible has
Speaker 4: always proven to be the best results.
Speaker 5: We do temp mixes for as the process the filmmaking process,
Speaker 5: as the sausage is being made, there's these tempts and
Speaker 5: then testing in tents and then testing and there are
Speaker 5: places there to try out ideas, and I think it's
Speaker 5: important to I don't think you were on every TEMP,
Speaker 5: but I definitely was trying to make an effort to
Speaker 5: have Duncan beyond as many tempts as possible to make
Speaker 5: sure that his imprint is on all of it.
Speaker 4: Scheduling conflicts sometimes catch us out there at those times.
Speaker 4: But those those idea of building milestones or tentp mixes
Speaker 4: that we have are so important to try something, see
Speaker 4: if it worked, resonate with that for a while, and
Speaker 4: then come back later and say, ah, that wasn't the
Speaker 4: right idea or yes, and we can do more with it.
Speaker 4: Let's expand on it and go beyond what we thought
Speaker 4: we could of which we were able to do a
Speaker 4: bit of that in this film.
Speaker 3: What's going to be a little freeing to be in
Speaker 3: this more supernatural milieu and not have to be a
Speaker 3: slave to realism all the time, because I'm sure you
Speaker 3: guys have had to be like, oh no, this wouldn't
Speaker 3: sound like this in real life. I have to turn
Speaker 3: this back or whatever it is, and just really try
Speaker 3: to go for that even if it's not real, to
Speaker 3: give that illusion of realism. But with this, I'm sure
Speaker 3: you can go little nuts.
Speaker 5: It was it was like go nuts in this direction.
Speaker 5: And that's that is. I always see creativity as like
Speaker 5: a forest and like you, let's go back to the machete.
Speaker 2: You literally are hacked.
Speaker 5: You literally hack your way a mile in in one direction,
Speaker 5: and that is where you're at on that project, and
Speaker 5: like another project might be totally in another direction, but
Speaker 5: on this one, it was really cool to record all
Speaker 5: these swords have all these cool fight sounds, like like
Speaker 5: I know how anime sounds are made, but actually sitting
Speaker 5: down and going okay, so we do frequency modulation and
Speaker 5: we're gonna ramp things in this direction like this and
Speaker 5: actually have a whole chain set up so I can
Speaker 5: like throw any sound in there, like me make these
Speaker 5: anime sounds out of it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's super.
Speaker 5: Fun, right, recording stuff onto the tape deck, and then
Speaker 5: the tape deck's got this weird pitch thing, so there's
Speaker 5: like a like towards the end of the sword fight
Speaker 5: with the pig, like the clashes, I just was like
Speaker 5: whipping them up and down in pitch and stuff. And
Speaker 5: when I layered these all together, so liquid chings. That's
Speaker 5: all the way I can describe it. It's just crazy.
Speaker 5: It's just fun to find those things you know that
Speaker 5: you were not like I'm actively going to go for
Speaker 5: this one thing. You know what you're doing, but you're
Speaker 5: not like, Okay, I'm gonna find this weird all these
Speaker 5: different shings that are the same recording then pitched in
Speaker 5: weird ways and then played on top.
Speaker 2: Of each other.
Speaker 5: Oh, that kind of evolved from doing it.
Speaker 3: What's notice that you even have the room to experiment.
Speaker 3: It's not just I want this, Just give me that
Speaker 3: screw off. I don't need any brilliant ideas.
Speaker 2: Nobody ever does that. Everybody I've worked with is let
Speaker 2: me do whatever I want.
Speaker 4: Jeff has an amazing contagious trait of pushing ourselves to
Speaker 4: get the most creative and unique ideas executed as possible
Speaker 4: as well. And that's a brilliant trait to having the
Speaker 4: room with you at all times. So it encourages a
Speaker 4: lot of fun and a lot of laughs when we
Speaker 4: do things, and when we execute something for the first
Speaker 4: time and we stop and we look around the room
Speaker 4: and everyone's cracking up laughing. That may be the right
Speaker 4: thing for that moment. Sometimes that kind of reaction is
Speaker 4: the wrong direction. But we have a really good time.
Speaker 4: We are just pushing these boundaries of hyperrealism at times.
Speaker 5: You have to be bold with some of this stuff.
Speaker 5: In the pig fight, when the pig charges Asia, it
Speaker 5: happened on this main on the stage of the final
Speaker 5: It wasn't even something that was before that. But I
Speaker 5: was like, what if, like we rate when we go
Speaker 5: into what should be the biggest sound moment, right because
Speaker 5: he charges in its huge and then he's king all this.
Speaker 5: I said, what if we take it on and make
Speaker 5: it mono and then make it really thin sounding and
Speaker 5: like for just it's three or four hits before and
Speaker 5: then three or four hits where it just felt like
Speaker 5: old school kung fu, like just very old school mono,
Speaker 5: and then he kicks her and then it goes back
Speaker 5: out and then his tentacles fly around the room and
Speaker 5: it's it's like the contrasting is like one of the
Speaker 5: things that I really loved about this project is like
Speaker 5: going from that mono all the way back out to
Speaker 5: at most right.
Speaker 3: This might be a really silly question, but when it
Speaker 3: comes to all these fights and everything, we're talking about
Speaker 3: the sounds of the swords and everything, where are all
Speaker 3: of the human sounds coming from? Because obviously there's a
Speaker 3: lot of grunting and a lot of screams and these things.
Speaker 3: I again all post I reckon.
Speaker 5: You'd be surprised. I think a lot of that was
Speaker 5: production sound. We did do adr passes for everybody for
Speaker 5: efforts and things like that, But I think that was
Speaker 5: probably the one that mattered the most in because the
Speaker 5: fire acccene had these huge music but even there, like
Speaker 5: when the guys oh no, no, no, no, no, like,
Speaker 5: all that stuff is all part of that's all part
Speaker 5: of it.
Speaker 4: Shout out to the actors for jumping into character like that.
Speaker 4: If you've stood in front of a microphone in a dead,
Speaker 4: silent room and tried to create or recreate efforts from
Speaker 4: a fight is challenging to do, especially in a believable way.
Speaker 4: So getting really physical with that sort of stuff has
Speaker 4: huge benefit and pays off. And at least kinds do that.
Speaker 3: Are they like throwing themselves around?
Speaker 4: Jeff can talk more about what they were doing in
Speaker 4: the room, but I know the result was just it
Speaker 4: felt really authentic to it.
Speaker 5: We had an idea for the pig, went through the
Speaker 5: most variation of anything in this in the process, and
Speaker 5: it was really notice It was kind of like, what
Speaker 5: do we want it to be? Do we want to
Speaker 5: be a funny pig? We want it to be mean pig? Like,
Speaker 5: how what's the best way to do this thing? It
Speaker 5: was an exploration for everybody on the film. One of
Speaker 5: the things that we did was is we mixed in,
Speaker 5: gave it this Okay, there's souls inside of it, so
Speaker 5: like it it will just scream at you and it'll
Speaker 5: just be like the screams of just agonizing souls just
Speaker 5: yelling at you. And we brought somebody in for group
Speaker 5: and we had her scream like it's it's like that
Speaker 5: kind of screaming isn't something you can just do without
Speaker 5: damaging your stuff. You have to like, really, you're gonna
Speaker 5: damage your stuff, So bring her in. She says she
Speaker 5: can do it, okay, and we have her do it
Speaker 5: and it's just like blood curdling screams and it turned
Speaker 5: into I think she did it for fifteen twenty minutes.
Speaker 5: So it was like the rest of our day must
Speaker 5: have been like two or three days must have been
Speaker 5: gone after that.
Speaker 2: But I appreciate the work.
Speaker 3: Jeff, you're talking about working with the music too. What's
Speaker 3: your relationship when it comes to the music and how
Speaker 3: that changes. You're talking about temp tracks. I'm sure it's
Speaker 3: not the final bed as you're working on this thing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, the music does change. We had a music editor,
Speaker 5: an exceptional music editor, Louis who was on this, and
Speaker 5: he was doing stuff like taking tracks and then mixed,
Speaker 5: like adding like more music into those tracks and stuff,
Speaker 5: which was really cool. I haven't seen that from a
Speaker 5: music editor before. But like for the fire Act scene,
Speaker 5: for instance, we switched through key songs there like three times,
Speaker 5: and then the little fight before the pig was on
Speaker 5: what's her name's head that also went through much like
Speaker 5: different music, and the UK defines how like the frequencies
Speaker 5: that it takes is going to change how your stuff sounds,
Speaker 5: so you might make different decisions based on what the
Speaker 5: music is, which definitely happened.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you can't say necessarily I will just swap out
Speaker 4: this piece of music to something else and move on.
Speaker 4: It results in a million other changes that we make
Speaker 4: on the fly as we go, particularly when we initially
Speaker 4: build a scene and we're listening to each other's material,
Speaker 4: where we're choosing the most impactful way to play a
Speaker 4: certain sound, whether that's get out of the way because
Speaker 4: the music's doing its thing and in the higher end
Speaker 4: so we can occupy the lower end and pack a
Speaker 4: big punch there, or vice versa as well. There could
Speaker 4: be an opening in different areas and the higher frequency
Speaker 4: range that we try to target, even if the sound
Speaker 4: isn't necessarily a sword chine or something like that. And
Speaker 4: then when you swap that out from let's say a
Speaker 4: dance track to a rock and roll track, they occupy
Speaker 4: completely different ranges of frequencies. So we got to look
Speaker 4: at every moment and step through it to make sure that, yeah,
Speaker 4: it's still providing that same impact that we needed in
Speaker 4: the beginning.
Speaker 3: The apartment building itself is a character in this film
Speaker 3: because it's not all action all the time, but how
Speaker 3: do you kind of like bring the actual space to
Speaker 3: life because there's some bad things going on at this place.
Speaker 5: The different floors had different sounds based on where you
Speaker 5: were in the building. One of the things that we
Speaker 5: really wanted was like when you first came into the
Speaker 5: building and you first walked through the servant area, that
Speaker 5: it felt international. So we wanted like different languages accumulating.
Speaker 5: I don't know how noticeable that is in the final mix,
Speaker 5: but it was like we wanted it to feel like
Speaker 5: all of this is going together because people say, oh,
Speaker 5: Patricia's our cuts Irish just sounds weird, and I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 5: but she's been in this building with these people for
Speaker 5: hundred years. Wouldn't your accent get weird after one hundred
Speaker 5: years of sitting with all these different people, Like you
Speaker 5: probably can speak Portuguese, Italian, French, like you probably can
Speaker 5: do everything at this point. Yeah, and then like obviously,
Speaker 5: like on the top floor, it's like Dante's infer This
Speaker 5: was the direction from the director was like it's like
Speaker 5: Dante's Inferno but cold, so like we did everything, but
Speaker 5: that was actually hard because it was like we had to, like, like,
Speaker 5: you can't just have all these static backgrounds to just
Speaker 5: play constantly, so you have to kind of like modulate
Speaker 5: those things and make them feel like they're constantly changing.
Speaker 5: Put the ear not to be static.
Speaker 3: Basically, I find that I have a completely different experience
Speaker 3: if I just listened to a movie rather than listen
Speaker 3: and watch. Do you guys just close your eyes a
Speaker 3: lot of times and just listen to what's going on
Speaker 3: rather than even pay attention to the visual? Are you
Speaker 3: always have to be locked into that in editorial?
Speaker 5: I don't because I'm like working down here and then
Speaker 5: the picture will be up there. Right, The picture is
Speaker 5: always running, but I'm not like I'm focused on the
Speaker 5: editorial screens.
Speaker 2: And the other stuff.
Speaker 5: So there's a lot of me not actually paying attention
Speaker 5: to what's actually on the screen. But if I'm going
Speaker 5: to sit out and watch the movie and listen for
Speaker 5: any kind of stuff, I'm doing that staring at the
Speaker 5: screen because it's really that's what's important.
Speaker 4: Yeah, by the time it comes to us at the mix,
Speaker 4: we're more really focused on the screen on the visuals
Speaker 4: as well. But there's interesting times where it's the opposite
Speaker 4: of the chicken in the egg scenario where we may
Speaker 4: be working with something that is very early on in
Speaker 4: visual effects or very early animatics, if we're working in
Speaker 4: an animated film, and we're able to use our imagination
Speaker 4: of what something might eventually look like or feel like
Speaker 4: and then direct things in that kind of way. Where
Speaker 4: this could track back to our temp mixes that we
Speaker 4: were talking about earlier, where early on in the project
Speaker 4: where we do a temp mix where we are exploring
Speaker 4: some creative ideas for things that we can't see yet,
Speaker 4: nobody has seen yet because that's still in development. So
Speaker 4: as we are putting ideas to the screen and to
Speaker 4: our ears, that pass of the film is often then
Speaker 4: provided to the visual department. So visual effects team or
Speaker 4: animation team, and they're hearing what we've been doing and
Speaker 4: are reacting to that. At times as well, where something
Speaker 4: may not have sparkle or shimmer, and we create an
Speaker 4: aesthetic that has a layer of that that may trigger
Speaker 4: another response of a visually creative idea and following that,
Speaker 4: or if it is a really busy action scene, we
Speaker 4: may have vehicles of different kinds moving in different ways
Speaker 4: off screen and behind us, or even across the screen,
Speaker 4: where we may have a single storyboard hand drawn image
Speaker 4: describing for six seconds the main characters move. We need
Speaker 4: to we need to tell a story with that, so
Speaker 4: we add in things that then inspire what we eventually
Speaker 4: do see. We need to sit back in the mix
Speaker 4: and watch the film as an audience would, so our
Speaker 4: eyes are up on the screen and feeling things for
Speaker 4: as much of the first time as we can convince
Speaker 4: ourselves and trick our brains to see and feel things
Speaker 4: for the first time. Where an audience is going to
Speaker 4: come in, they're not looking at the mixing console with us,
Speaker 4: and they aren't looking at pro tools and everything. At
Speaker 4: that point, we trust that we have all of the
Speaker 4: elements that we need to then look up and rap
Speaker 4: focus with everything at our fingertips to tell that story.
Speaker 3: I was going to ask you mentioned pro Tools. Is
Speaker 3: that your tool de jour or is that like where
Speaker 3: you live most of your life.
Speaker 4: When it comes to mixing. Typically, yes, we're pretty much
Speaker 4: all in pro tools, using different other tools in our
Speaker 4: toolkit at the same time, different plug ins for processing
Speaker 4: things in different ways depending on the need of the
Speaker 4: film at the time. But when it comes to Jeff's world,
Speaker 4: he has a whole playground.
Speaker 5: In his room that I do have a whole playground,
Speaker 5: but it all feeds into pro Tools. There's a lot
Speaker 5: of great DAWs out there, and there's a lot of
Speaker 5: debate about what's the best daw.
Speaker 2: I'm not going to.
Speaker 5: Debate computers or religion, but I will say that if
Speaker 5: you need to transfer work between multiple people, it's nice
Speaker 5: to have a stable language that you can use and
Speaker 5: you can interchange that with virtually anybody.
Speaker 2: And that is pro tools.
Speaker 5: If that's I don't know what the solution is to
Speaker 5: what that would or what that would look like if
Speaker 5: it wasn't pro Tools, but yeah, that's what it is now.
Speaker 3: So duncan you never get to actually hack around things
Speaker 3: with machetes and butcher knives or anything. Are you jealous
Speaker 3: of Jeff here?
Speaker 2: Yes, Duncan, are you jealous of me?
Speaker 4: I'm grateful that I wasn't in the room with Jeff
Speaker 4: when he was swinging a blight around with great force.
Speaker 5: I did have to think about it because these walls
Speaker 5: are fabric so there was some calculation to exactly how
Speaker 5: much I could swing before I destroy my walls.
Speaker 3: When do you actually get to sit down and watch
Speaker 3: us with an audience, or do you ever get that opportunity?
Speaker 5: The TEME screenings are great to go to. I definitely
Speaker 5: go to as many of those as I can. Sometimes
Speaker 5: there's no room to go like that, they're like packed
Speaker 5: in a certain way. But if I can go to
Speaker 5: every TEMP screening, I will do that because you will
Speaker 5: get ideas based off the reaction of the audience.
Speaker 2: Like even just sitting there in a space we have
Speaker 2: no control anything, you will also have ideas come to
Speaker 2: watching in that space.
Speaker 5: So I will absolutely watch it like that, going into
Speaker 5: the wild and watching it just in the Metroplex or whatever.
Speaker 2: I haven't done that. I thought about doing that, but
Speaker 2: I did not do that. That's I don't know what
Speaker 2: about you doncan.
Speaker 4: In the visual realm. There's an aspect of when you're
Speaker 4: working on the picture with a perfectly calibrated monitor, you'll
Speaker 4: throw it onto another device consumer thing, an iPad or
Speaker 4: a laptop, and you get a look at what things
Speaker 4: are going to translate to the public in That's another
Speaker 4: aspect of the preview screenings that we enjoy as well,
Speaker 4: is how is our work translating out in the real
Speaker 4: world into an environment that we hope is as perfect
Speaker 4: as possible. Sometimes, as we know, the theaters aren't necessarily
Speaker 4: as well looked after as filmmakers we would like them
Speaker 4: to be, so we sometimes need to think about how
Speaker 4: that's going to play. The experience of a film like
Speaker 4: this with a packed audience is a whole other level
Speaker 4: and a good reminder of why we want to go
Speaker 4: to the cinema and why we all like to go
Speaker 4: to the cinema. That shared reaction of experiencing a the
Speaker 4: modern day campfire story like that is irreplaceable. We're watching
Speaker 4: different content at home. It can be the exact right
Speaker 4: thing for the intended audience if you're making an episodic
Speaker 4: or something for the home viewing experience, but a film
Speaker 4: like this plays amazing at home, but outstanding in a theater.
Speaker 1: So we love that.
Speaker 5: I'm not the one to think of this that's been said,
Speaker 5: but when you go to a theater and you sit
Speaker 5: down in a theater, you distractions are gone, your phone
Speaker 5: is put away, you're you are there, and you're focused
Speaker 5: on the screen. And I think we we rob ourselves
Speaker 5: of that if we just at constantly watching things on
Speaker 5: a streaming service and constantly hitting pause on it and
Speaker 5: checking our phones all the time, and we don't get
Speaker 5: the full experience of what the filmmakers intended us to
Speaker 5: have if we do it that way. And so I
Speaker 5: think it is important to go to the theater and
Speaker 5: just what witness these things in the theater.
Speaker 3: You guys have both been working in this industry for
Speaker 3: a while, and I'm curious, do you have any particular
Speaker 3: favorite films or even television shows where you're just like,
Speaker 3: this is this is premo, this is kind of like
Speaker 3: what I wish I could have done. Work like this.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 5: I appreciate lots of different film even films that people
Speaker 5: are like, oh that's not even that good. There's ideas
Speaker 5: in that that could be good, or oh, spark an
Speaker 5: idea in me from watching that movie, and so I
Speaker 5: think there's a I have a lot of films in
Speaker 5: my head that are like that, that are like like
Speaker 5: death Proof is like one of the best car chases
Speaker 5: in a movie ever, right, And somebody go, what on
Speaker 5: death Proof? Isn't that that's and then maybe they'll go
Speaker 5: watch it, and maybe they won't. But for me, I
Speaker 5: think the editorial of that car chase is exceptional. Again
Speaker 5: four versus Ferrari, great cars, great everything. Some movies that
Speaker 5: maybe did really well that our car movies. Maybe I
Speaker 5: don't even think that they sounded that good, but that
Speaker 5: asked me personally, So it's just really I think we
Speaker 5: all have that.
Speaker 4: No, I'm always pretty blown away by coming from a
Speaker 4: coastal country town in Australia to now living here in
Speaker 4: Los Angeles. Like a lot of my dear friends are
Speaker 4: people whom I have looked up to for my entire career,
Speaker 4: and that's really cool to be able to say, oh,
Speaker 4: we're going to go and have a beer and then
Speaker 4: next week we're mixing a film together. Now and I
Speaker 4: think flashback to myself fifteen to twenty years ago, and
Speaker 4: I wouldn't believe the experiences that I've been able to have,
Speaker 4: but it's it's been awesome to sit next to people
Speaker 4: and think, Wow, I grew up loving the films and
Speaker 4: stories that they've been telling, and now we're sitting here
Speaker 4: telling storage together. Is pretty awesome.
Speaker 3: What's next for you, Duncan?
Speaker 1: Next up?
Speaker 4: I have another World War two film for Apple TV
Speaker 4: coming out later in the year, and a couple of
Speaker 4: episodic series as well, which are always great too. It's
Speaker 4: a different muscle to flex than in the future film business,
Speaker 4: but it's it's always a good challenge.
Speaker 5: How about you, Jeff, I will be helping out on
Speaker 5: one of these World War two movies, and then after that,
Speaker 5: I think there's some ghost story we're going to be
Speaker 5: going into.
Speaker 3: So how are you going to fit the Japanese zero
Speaker 3: inside of your recording studio to record those gunshots?
Speaker 5: That's a really good question, Like we'd take we'd have
Speaker 5: to take it apart and bring it in as bits.
Speaker 5: We bring the bits in and then record them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and my wife's what's this Japanese zero doing here?
Speaker 3: Honey? It's for work?
Speaker 2: How much did this cost?
Speaker 5: It's a write off?
Speaker 2: What do you want? Guys?
Speaker 3: Thank you? So much for your time. This was so
Speaker 3: great talking with you. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2: Of course it was fun.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this has been awesome Mike, thank you very much.
Speaker 1: NOI