Tim Prebble has published a fantastic article on his blog, talking about the sound design of “The Warrior’s Way“. Tim talks about several of the creative challenges he had on the film, how he used different recordings and effects and also describes the sound work in specific scenes. It’s very inspiring!
We started sound editorial at the beginning of May and did an initial 10 week stint (including 1 week of temp foley) culminating in a temp mix, and what a temp mix it was! I documented it at the time with screenshots simply because it was the largest session I’ve ever presented to a temp mix! Check the two sessions I was wrangling (dialogue/ADR and music were running from seperate ProTools rigs).
So you can see the film is in six reels, and you can also see where the most intense scenes are – Reel 5 is busy!! From the outset we worked with predub stems in mind, which for FX were: FX1, FX2, FX3, SD, SWORDS, MOVEMENT, VIOLENCE, GUNS1, GUNS2, IMPACTS. So in the temp mix we bused each set of source tracks to a 5.1 output – I knew we wouldn’t have time to get amongst the source elements too much so I also did as much panning as possible (there were some scenes that only worked properly when panned for surround). As it was all running live into the mix I minimised the track count as much as possible, whereas as we developed the elements further and headed towards the final predubs, each stem would be fed from a standard 32 track layout.
Two weeks after the first temp mix we did temp mix number 2 although this was comparatively easier for me as when we did temp mix 1, we printed seperate stems for FX, Ambience, Foley so I conformed those 5.1 stems and presented those to temp mix 2, with additional tracks for patching cuts and/or adding new material. So temp mix 1 took us 5 days to mix, whereas temp mix 2 took 2 days.
We then had three weeks before predubs for the final mix started, giving us a total of 18 weeks of sound editorial. We did three weeks of predubs, with dialogue/ADR in one theatre and Ambience, Foley & FX predubs in another. That was followed by 2 weeks of final mixing/mix screening & fixes prior to a week of deliveries…. For me & the sound editorial team it was 25 weeks from start to finish… So thats the how – now the what and why….