by Jeffrey Humphreys

On July 31, 2024, I walked off a movie set for the last time. The film was the most recent Superman, directed by James Gunn. I knew in my heart I couldn’t have asked for a better note to end on. After forty-seven years filled with challenges, adventure, and days that were never quite the same, it was simply time. I look back with nothing but gratitude for a career blessed by the chance to work alongside the most extraordinary people in the world.

One of the first lessons I learned in this business is that we don’t achieve anything alone. Whatever success I may have had was never mine alone—it was the product of the amazing people I met along the way, those who trusted me and allowed me to work with them. The list is long, but three names stand out as pillars not only of my career, but of my life.

Jeff Wexler

As many of you know, we recently lost Jeff, and I count myself incredibly fortunate to have worked with him. We also lost Don Coufal, a dear friend who passed not long ago. When I think about the great production sound teams across the decades, Jeff and Don were the pinnacle—the standard by which all others are measured. Before I met Jeff, to me, he was bigger than life. Then one day, I got a call from him to see if I was available. I remember thinking if I was on the top of Mount Whitney, I would’ve run down that mountain immediately to make a 6 AM call in Long Beach. I honestly didn’t know what to expect when I met Jeff. I really didn’t. But it didn’t take long to see what an incredible man that he was. He was soft spoken but engaging. As a Sound Mixer, he was totally focused, and I mean all the time. Jeff genuinely showed an interest, not only to the people on his crew, but to everyone around him. Jeff retired a few years back and I always kept in touch with him. I called him at least once every month. I had just spoken with him a couple of weeks ago. We lost a legendary Sound Mixer, but more importantly, and sadly, we lost an amazing human being that I will always miss.

Geoff Patterson

I first met Geoff Patterson while filling in for the legendary Boom Operator Randy Johnson on a movie called Little Giants. Randy is one of those amazing people I met along the way. In all my many years as a Boom Operator, I think Randy was responsible for giving me more work than anyone else. He’s not only a great Boom Operator, but a mentor, and a friend, and I’ll always be grateful to him.

Back to Geoff. We were on a makeshift football field at the Burbank Equestrian Center, standing in front of his meticulously engineered sound cart—perfectionist to the core, never compromising, but never obsessive. I introduced myself, as I always did when there was a chance to get in front of a Sound Mixer. I don’t remember exactly what we talked about—probably cramming my whole life story into five minutes—but what stuck with me was simple, Geoff was a great guy.

Years later, another longtime friend, Sound Mixer Beau Baker, told me, “If you ever get the chance to work with Geoff Patterson, take it. He’s the greatest guy ever.” I tracked down Geoff’s number through the union and called him. He told me he had something coming up but had not made crew decisions yet. Time passed, and I hadn’t heard back, so I called again. Armed with Beau’s advice and my impression of Geoff, I knew I wanted to work with him. I rambled, I begged—not just for a job, but for the chance to work with him. I think he hired me just to shut me up. That was The One, a Jet Li action film. It was the first time in twenty years of doing this work that I realized how much fun making a movie could be. Geoff made it different.

From that moment until I retired, I worked with Geoff on many shows. More importantly, we built a relationship that started with a chance meeting and grew into years of friendship. During the time I lived in Minnesota, Geoff opened his home to me in Los Angeles, whether we were working together or not. There were years we spent nearly every hour of the day together—working, carpooling, sharing a house. Through all that time, not once did Geoff ever treat me with disrespect. Not once, even under the pressures of a film set. For those who know him, you’ll agree, Geoff Patterson is a wonderful man. The kindness and grace you see on set is exactly who he is in life, twenty‑four hours a day, seven days a week.

Not only is Geoff a great guy, he was also a great Sound Mixer. With two Academy Award nominations and multiple Emmy and CAS Award nominations, I don’t think that he ever got the accolades he deserved. It seems that people in our business get recognition because they’ve worked on a number of high-profile projects throughout their career. Geoff made different decisions in his life. He didn’t want to leave his family to go on locations when his two boys were young, so he chose to stay and work in Los Angeles, turning down projects that would take him away. He chose a different path. He didn’t care about any recognition. It was more important for him to stay home so he could run his boys’ track club, and just be with them, than it was to accept movies that would force him to leave town.

Lee Orloff

I think it’s safe to say that most people in our sound community either know Lee or know of his reputation. I certainly knew who he was when he offered me the Boom Operator position on Pirates of the Caribbean 2 and 3. Quite honestly, it was kind of intimidating. My first day working with him involved flying down to the Bahamas and walking out to the dock to board the Black Pearl. I remember the first scene that we did together like it was yesterday. I was on the deck of the Black Pearl, and like most scenes, there’s a lot of people talking. This scene was no exception. But it timed out, and the sun was in the right position, and I was able to boom everything. After the rehearsal, I went down below deck where Lee positioned himself, and he asked me, “What do I need to know?” Rather than go into some long explanation, I simply said, “It’s gonna be great!” I think he wanted a little more out of me by the puzzled look on his face, but I just walked back up to the top deck and we did the scene. It worked out fine. The reason I tell the story is to this day we joke about it. Sometimes I just don’t want to talk that much if I think I have it, which isn’t necessarily the right approach, but for us it worked. Oddly enough, that first day began a twenty-plus-year relationship of trusting each other on a movie set.

I think what everyone knows about Lee is, he is truly a great Sound Mixer. He is a rare breed with technical knowledge and execution. He can rebuild a Sonosax on the set while mixing five channels of dialog. I’m exaggerating of course, but you get the idea.

Lee had a knack. Lee could sniff out the most difficult movies that would be filmed in the most difficult conditions, working with folks that might be considered challenging to work with. No names of course. Lee didn’t try to steer away from those projects, he went after them, wholeheartedly, and embraced the challenge. I think it’s what made him feel alive. At the end of every day, I think he would reflect on the obstacles that we overcame. I have a photo of Lee that could not be more descriptive of how he approached every day. It’s him sitting, at his station, with a hardhat on, eating a cup of noodles. That’s the kind of guy he is. He brings his lunchpail to work every day, and just does the job. You would think that a guy that has seven Academy Award nominations, with one Oscar, six BAFTA nominations, and a Cinema Audio Society Career Achievement Award, might have a little arrogance about him. But not Lee. Not at all. I don’t think I’ve ever heard him talk about any of that stuff in all the years that I’ve known him. Not once. That’s one of the many things I appreciated about him. And I always respected his humility.

We really did a lot of difficult movies together. Pirates of the Caribbean 2, 3, and 4, The Lone Ranger, Knight and Day, Guardians of the Galaxy 2 and 3, Suicide Squad, Ferrari, Superman, and many others. Each offered their own unique challenges, and Lee always had a plan for everything. He was brilliant at looking at every situation in a unique way and figuring out a way to tackle things.

Now that I am retired, the people that are around me are not in our business, and I often get asked a few questions.

How did you get into the film business?

I had just graduated high school, and I was working at Carl’s Jr. I was probably adding the finishing touches on a superstar with cheese when the manager told me I had a phone call. It was my dad who is the head of the Transportation Department at CBS Studio Center. Even though I hadn’t asked him for a job, he told me I would start the next day as a laborer, Local 724. My call was 6 AM, and the first set I ever worked on in the film business was the original Muppet Movie. I stood there proudly with a push broom, and a shovel, and helped anybody that needed it. As I alluded to, I didn’t get anywhere without somebody I had met. In this case, one of our brothers of Local 695, Larry Ellena, hired me out of Local 724 and into 695 to work in sound transfer. Through a series of unfortunate events, caused by me, but out of the dust, I rose and got into production sound. Of course, I needed someone else for that as well. That was another brother in Local 695, and one of my best friends to this day, Tim Salmon.

Did you go to school for sound?

Not at all. Like many of us, it is the proverbial school of hard knocks. I learned by my failures, and did my best trying not to replicate them. I think it’s worth sharing my first day ever in production sound. I was sitting at home when my phone rang and it was a utility person working on a show called Max Headroom, with Joe Kenworthy. It was an emergency call to replace someone on Joe’s crew. I made my way down to MGM Studios and introduced myself. We were filming on a bus set, and I was asked to help set up a plant mic. I had no idea what they were talking about, I’m not exaggerating, I had no idea. I shouldn’t have taken the call because my experience was only in a transfer room. We got through the day, well at least I did, and needless to say, I wasn’t asked to return the next day. Having me on the set was like losing ten of your best men. If Joe reads this, he will have no idea what I’m talking about or who I am, because I don’t think we ever spoke.

My first real job was with Sound Mixer Dean Vernon and Boom Operator Ron Long. These guys were completely old school; everything was done on a Fisher Boom. They had been around so long, they really knew every trick in the book. I don’t think there was ever a Boom Operator as good as Ron Long. It goes back to that old saying, “He taught me everything I know, but not everything he knew.”

What was your favorite movie to work on?

My favorite film experience was Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. I had the privilege of working with the legendary Academy Award-winning Sound Mixer Art Rochester. It was the only film we made together, but it left a lasting impression. Art wasn’t just a great mixer, he was one of the most fascinating people I’ve ever met. His love of the outdoors and his stories about life beyond the set captivated me.

Art’s passion was a huge part of what made Master and Commander so special. When working with a director like Peter Weir, passion comes naturally. I had never worked for anyone like Peter before, and I never would again. The set was a full mock‑up of the British frigate HMS Surprise. Peter made it clear that every person mattered. He knew the names of every crew member, every background sailor, even the animals on board. At the final production meeting before filming began, Peter insisted that everyone attend. He shared his vision for the movie and told us that every job was integral to making something great. I’ll admit, I was skeptical at first, but it didn’t take long to realize he meant every word.

The entire project of Master and Commander was just incredible. From the time I arrived, and I saw the HMS Surprise sitting on its gimbal in the yet to be filled tank in Rosarito, Mexico, to boarding its deck and observing the meticulous attention to detail in the construction of that vessel. Once we began filming, the background arrived, adorned in their perfectly tailored wardrobe, climbing in the rattling as though we were in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. These were professional sailors who knew exactly what they were doing on that ship. Every move they made replicated what would happen if we were at sea in 1805, preparing to battle the French. At the very end, having the opportunity to travel to the Galapagos Islands to film the beautiful scenery, and creatures that are found nowhere else on earth. Every step of the way of that film was challenging but rewarding. I have never been so proud when I wrapped. I believe it was the only movie I didn’t want to end. I think no matter how good the experience is, we all want the job to finish, but Master and Commander was different.

Retirement

Retirement is very interesting. When we retire, there is no fanfare, no gold watch, no dried-out cake from Costco. We just rode off into the sunset, hoping we don’t fall off the horse. Trust me, I really enjoy retirement, but in a certain sense, it’s like hitting a brick wall going one hundred miles an hour. There’s no more call sheets, no more being asked to go into a grace period. I have to make my own breakfast burritos, and if I have a Fraturday, watching a Saturday sunrise while eating Thai food, it’s of my own choosing. I don’t stress out in traffic anymore. If I’m in the sun at one-hundred-degree temperatures, I’m most likely at a beach resort with an umbrella drink. Things are just different now.

In the end, the experience I treasure was never about the project itself, it was always about the people I shared it with. I mean everyone, not only the sound team, but every single person who steps onto the set. We are fortunate to work in a business filled with a wonderfully diverse group of people from different backgrounds, races, genders, religions, all coming together with one common purpose; to make a great film. That spirit of collaboration is what defines each and every project we do. I know I was lucky. I gave everything I had to the film business, and it returned the favor. It gave me all that I asked for. A good living, an amazing adventure, and great people like all of you. Forty-seven years well spent.

I’ll end with the words of the great philosopher, Ted Lasso: “Fairy tales do not start, nor do they end, at the dark forest. That’s only something that shows up smack dab in the middle of the story, but it will all work out. It may not work out how you think it will or how you hope it does. But believe me, it will all work out, exactly as it’s supposed to.”

And it did.

by Ebiut Cervantes

The 2025 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony was held on November 8 at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles, celebrating inductees Cyndi Lauper, OutKast, Soundgarden, The White Stripes, Bad Company, and Chubby Checker. The event streamed live on Disney+ and will have aired as a primetime special on ABC on January 1, 2026. ESU and rehearsals began on November 5, but the work started much earlier than that for my team and I.

I got the call from our Audio Supervisor, Skip Kent, to provide Pro Tools playback for this legendary event. This would be the second time I was involved with the RRHOF Induction Ceremony. I handled playback in 2022, the last time the ceremony was held in Los Angeles.

We had twelve live performances, some with Pro Tools and some without. The first performance alone was the Sly and the Family Stone Tribute (Stevie Wonder, Maxwell, Jennifer Hudson, Leon Thomas, Questlove, Flea, Beck, Omar’s house band). Now, I won’t be able to break down every single performance, but this one was particularly interesting due to the characters and situation involved.

I often get asked, “Why does ‘x’ artist even use Pro Tools?” Well, let’s clear up some misunderstandings. Using playback does not mean that the band or artist is not playing or performing. First of all, there is a huge spectrum of reasons to use playback. For some artists, it’s just a simple click and count for their IEM’s. For most, it’s used to add musical elements that need reinforcement and are not cleanly captured on a loud stage, such as string orchestras and choirs. And yes, there are “some” acts that are 100% “in the box” (I’m happy to report that we didn’t have any of those on this show). However, by far the most important reason to use Pro Tools playback is so that the show looks good.

Why “looks,” you might ask? Well, even though we can all agree that people don’t go home humming the lights, video content and lighting are a HUGE part of the show, and we play an integral role in making sure that light cues and video rolls happen perfectly in sync with the music. We do this through the use of LTC (linear timecode). Weeks before there is even a single soundcheck on stage, I receive temp tracks from the artist camps and assign LTC addresses based on the performance order. So, performance 1 gets LTC 01:00:00:00, performance two gets LTC 02:00:00:00, etc., etc. I import the temp tracks into a session and line up the start of the music with the top of the hour. The challenge with this is that as we get closer to the event, I receive final stems from the artist camps that, more often than not, don’t exactly line up with the temp tracks they originally sent. I’m then forced to re-sync the stems with the TC and re-export split tracks with a music reference on the left channel and LTC on the right, then send them over to our lighting and video friends who line up their programming and video/screen content. Using Pro Tools doesn’t mean an artist is cheating. It’s a powerful production tool used to make sure the show not only sounds good, but looks good too.

For this gig, I was asked to bring twelve channels of analog playback and four channels of Auto-Tune. We never know exactly which camps will request this, so we have it in our back pocket, ready to use if necessary. The “normal” stem output assignments from my rig are:

TRACK SOURCE
1 DRUMS
2
3 MUSIC
4
5 PROGRAMING
6
7 BGVS
8
9 LEAD VOX (REF ONLY)
10 CLIX
11 SLATE
12 Artist Slate
13 AT 1
14 AT 2
15
16 TC

I try my hardest to keep the outputs consistently laid out like this so that there is no confusion for the mixers downstream from me. That being said, some acts don’t have all of these elements in their playback, so I send out specific assignments for every act detailing what they should expect coming from me.

My outputs hit split world, handled by Steve Anderson and his crew of A2’s—and some of my dearest friends (Damon Andres, Steve Crane, Craig Rovello, Brandon Gilbert, Jason Sears, JP Elmore, Erik Bender, and Kim Petty). Here, all the signals hitting the stage get sent to all the different mix positions: FOH Production (Dan Gerhard), FOH Music (Robert Scovill), Monitors (Michael Bové), Music Mix in the M3 truck (Carl Glanville and Bob Clearmountain—yes, THE LEGENDARY BOB CLEARMOUNTAIN), and Broadcast Audio (Larry Reed).

Once I have actual stems ingested for playback, I assign them to their respective outputs and level-match them to a consistent level that will hit relatively consistently from act to act. This is key to the success of the show. Mixers shouldn’t be “fishing” for levels. The challenge is to keep the general balance that the artists are used to rehearsing with while still providing a consistent average broadcast level that everyone is comfortable with. I accomplish this mostly by automating levels, clip gain, and the occasional use of “gentle” compression.

My playback rig for this gig consisted of two MacBook Pros running Pro Tools 11 HD, two RME Fireface UFX units, two Ferrofish A16 MK2 AD/DA converters (for additional outputs), a Gearworks custom analog switch, a Digidesign Sync IO, and a Brainstorm SR-26 for TC distribution.

It’s a very basic setup. Both laptops run the exact same session simultaneously, each with its own hardware chain and outputs. Both sets of outputs then feed the switch. If the “A” machine or system were to fail, a tone signal driving the analog switch would trigger it to automatically flip to the “B” outputs.

For Auto-Tune, I use a redundant RME Madiface XT system running PT 2024 and the latest version of AT. I take a single MADI stream from split world to feed a DirectOut MADI bridge, which distributes the MADI stream to both systems. I feed the MADI outputs of the RME MADIface XT’s to a DirectOut EXBOX.SG so I can switch between the A/B outputs, and then feed the output of the EXBOX to a Ferrofish A32 to convert the MADI signal to analog. In the case that there are pitch or key changes in the middle of the performance, my AT system can chase the same show LTC I’m providing to the rest of the world, and I can automate any changes needed by the artist.

Now, back to the first performance: The Sly and the Family Stone Tribute (Stevie Wonder, Maxwell, Jennifer Hudson, Leon Thomas, Questlove, Flea, Beck, Omar’s house band). This was both the easiest and hardest performance of the night. Easy because they didn’t need much—it was just clicks and counts for the artists. That’s it. No Auto-Tune, no backing tracks, nothing. Just great music by legendary artists. What made it challenging was that some of the songs performed didn’t have much to “hold on to” musically since it was JUST click and counts and odd meters. During rehearsals, the band would get off the click when and if the singers decided to come in a bar or a beat earlier. So, it was on me to cut the click and counts on the fly so that the band could continue playing without being off from the click. This is nerve-racking because it’s a quick move, and you have to be 100% sure you’re making the correct call.

This actually DID happen during the show. Thankfully, I had the blessing of the house band’s playback engineer—my friend and colleague, Danny Cheung—and no one knew that anything had even happened.

The rest of the show went on without a hitch, and I’m looking forward to doing more of these amazing shows. Amazing not only because of the performers and inductees, but because I get to see and work with some of the best of the best in their fields—people I have the pleasure of calling friends.

Audio Supervisor Skip Kent & Broadcast Audio Mixer Larry Reed

by Richard Lightstone CAS AMPS

In the first week of November last year, an audio crew of more than forty were hard at work in the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles to get the 2025 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony on its feet.

Audio Supervisor Skip Kent explains, “Once I know who the bands are, then I start getting multiple emails and phone calls of who’s playing and what instruments they’re going to be using, and ultimately, what microphones we’ll be putting where. Musically, I speak with Bob Clearmountain if there are microphone choices that are left up to the Broadcast Mixer, and he respectfully considers the needs of FOH and monitors in his choices.”

Two audio recording trucks are involved with A&B consoles (Bob and Carl) and after one band is finished, the next band is being preset on that recording truck. The Front of House Music, handled by Robert Scovill, and the Monitor Mix Music by Mike Bove were on one console as they had time to change things over. Then there is the Front of House Production Dan Gerhard, who mixes video packages, delivers Robert’s music mix and mixes the award lectern microphones. You’ve seen this setup on just about every awards show, it’s two Schoeps microphones made up of a hypercardiod and a cardioid.

Skip continues, “This is no easy trick. After a loud full music mix, and full band, you now have one person standing two feet away from a Schoeps microphone that you have to get loud enough that people don’t complain. It’s really a difficult thing to do.”

Dan got to use a new device that he’s been introduced to, Alpha Labs De-Feedback. It’s a standalone unit in a computer program that uses artificial intelligence, to sample the room, taking the room out of the mic, allowing to get a higher volume before feedback.

The show is a mix of consoles, DigiCos, Studer Vista 10, Yamaha, and Avid. The show uses well over sixty IEM’s and that’s in the hands of Dave Ingels.

“Band after band after band get a sound check,” says Skip, “and there were a lot this year. It was very heavy. One of the other difficult things about this year, Soundgarden hasn’t been touring, so you can’t just call up the managers and say, “Send us over your stage plot and your input list.” You have to make it up when they decide to add Nancy Wilson or Joe Perry,
Larry Reed picks it up. “Wednesday, Thursday, Friday were all rehearsal days, and depending on how large the band is, you might have at least fifty-six inputs”

Larry explains, “There’s two mics on the kick drum, two mics on a snare, everything has a very specific mic. Skip talks to every band and every artist to find out what microphones they like, which ones they normally use, and tries to keep it that way for them so they’re getting exactly what they want or what they’re accustomed to. The variety of mics is enormous, Shure, Sennheiser, Audio-Tech. The keyboards get DI Boxes.”

Skip puts together the input list for all the different bands so that both the Music Mixers, the recording trucks, the Front of House Music Mixer, and the Monitor Mixer all know what’s being used for each band.

For example, with fifteen bands, there would be fifteen kick drums, resulting in thirty kick microphones and it grows from there.

Larry Reed continues, “It’s not just one mix that goes to everybody. The IEM Mixer has to create an individual mix and babysit each and every one of those artists. The drummer wants more bass, the lead vocal wants more, everybody wants more. He has to make many people happy throughout the entire show. Then, the Keyboardist decides, “Oh, I’m gonna turn my keyboard up because he’s not hearing enough, that screws everybody’s mix. We have no rewind button. We have no stop button, we don’t have second takes. We are live to the world. So, mistakes that are made are made to the world.”

Right after the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Ceremony was over, Larry and Skip were off to Las Vegas. Skip worked on the Latin Grammys Main Show. Larry on Latin Grammy Person of the Year and the Premiere Show, which takes place before the Main Show. Then MusiCares honoring Mariah Carey at the end of January, straight into Grammys Premiere, and then Oscars after that. Skip works on the Super Bowl Halftime Show. They are both very busy.

“Call time was 8 a.m. on show day, and the show doesn’t end until midnight,” explains Larry, “and then the A2’s have to tear it down, pack it up, and put everything back in the trucks. Skip and I drove to Vegas almost right away to get to the Latin Grammys, and then do the same thing there. I think I logged eleven days between Latin Grammys and Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, probably more than one hundred and twenty-five hours. I’m sure Skip did more.”

Skip Kent concludes, “I’m proud of the entire audio team, they are amazing. It’s such a difficult show.”

I want to thank Skip Kent and Larry Reed for taking the time to talk with me and explain their very specialized work in a hectic “live” environment. They are both very talented, with unique skills, and extraordinary patience.

      THE CREW

Skip Kent – Audio Supervisor

MUSIC
Robert Scovill – FOH Music
Mike Bove – Mon Mixer Music
Steve Anderson – Splits
Damon Andres – Music Stage
Steve Crane – Music Stage
Craig Rovello – Music Stage
Brandon Gilbert – Music Stage
Michael Faustino – Vocals A-2
Dave Ingels – Monitor In Ears

TV PROD
Larry Reed – A-1
Dan Gerhard – FOH Prod
JP Elmore – Playback
Ebiut Cervantes – Show Pro Tools
Erik Bender – Production A-2
Kim Petty – Production A-2
Mike Faustino – Production A-2
Christian Schrader – Sweetener

PRESS
In House Mixer

M 3 ECLIPSE
Bob Clearmountain – Mixer
Joel Singer – Engineer
Caroline Sanchez – M 3 Pro Tools
Jimmy Goldsmith – A-2

M 3 VOYAGER
Carl Glanville – Mixer
Seth Mintz – Engineer
Louis Cohen – M 3 Pro Tools
Mike Fortunato – A-2

FHP
Mark Dittmar – Project Manager
Jason Sears – Mon Mix
Phil Valdivia – Mon Ears
Damian Burns – Mon Tech 2
Ken Muller – PA Tech 1
Aaron Morris – RF assist
Cameron Stuckey – RF co-ord
David Crawford – PA Tech
Erik Sandberg – System Engineer
Joe Simmons – PA Tech 2
Dave Ingels – Mon Ears

FIREHOUSE COMMS
Brian Hurst – PL Tech
Sisse Jonassen – PL Tech
Erin Hedley – PL Tech
Local – PL Tech

POST
James Orbison – Supervisor
Milos Zivkovik – Audio Mixer

by Simon Hayes CAS AMPS

Production Sound as the Orchestra Pit
How live capture became the emotional engine of the film
I want to thank Jon M. Chu and Producers Marc Platt and David Nicksay for the extraordinary trust they placed in me and in our entire sound and music team. Their unwavering support for the live vocal process, and their belief that original performance was worth fighting for gave us the freedom to build the workflow this film needed. Wicked: For Good could only be made this way because Jon, Marc, and David backed us at every step, creatively and technically, and I am deeply grateful for that partnership.

On a stage musical, the musicians reside in the orchestra pit so as not to distract from the performers on stage and to support the cast in real time. The orchestra breathes with the performers, follows them when they pull on a phrase, gives them something to lean on when the emotion needs a foundation. On traditional musical films, sound and music were treated as separate entities. Music is seen as something that happens when the playback starts and production sound is thought of as the team that captures the dialog.
From the first day of prep on Wicked, and Wicked: For Good (both films were shot together), I wanted to completely remove that separation. There was going to be one integrated sound and music team, whose single job on set was to be the actors’ orchestra pit and to support Jon M. Chu’s storytelling, moment by moment, breath by breath.

That philosophy is how we ended up with the workflow; philosophy came first, the gear followed.

Building a Unified Sound & Music Department
One cohesive team, one heartbeat, one creative language
I noticed a separation between sound and music on my early musicals. Music took responsibility for prerecords and playback, Sound recorded the dialog, with booms and radio mics. You’d share a comms channel and work together on the transition point from dialog to playback, but, fundamentally, you were two different tribes.

That model made no sense at all, especially if you are dedicated to capturing live singing.

Over a number of films, I began to build on an idea that Sound & Music should be treated as the same department on the set and in prep as much as possible. This includes capturing any studio prerecords on the same boom mic and lavs that will be used for dialog capture on the set, alongside the music producer’s choice of vocal mic. This gives a wealth of choices to the Re-recording Mixer even if the project is not going to be live sung! If a project starts like this, it creates a cohesion that finds its way to Picture Editorial and ultimately, to Sound & Music Post and the mix stage.

On the last five musicals I have mixed, Arthur Fenn-Key, 1st AS, has boomed the prerecords and fitted lavs to the actors in the recording studio sending the feeds to the studio’s Pro Tools session.

On Wicked: For Good, our team crystallized around a few key people, many of whom I’d worked with before:

• As Production Sound Mixer, I am responsible for capturing dialog, live singing. and overseeing the entire on-set vocal sound and music workflow.

• Music Supervisor Maggie Rodford, who literally organized the mammoth task both creatively and technically of keeping us all in lock step from a musical standpoint. Maggie was there with me right from the beginning. We built the team together and were in constant communication many months before prep, discussing every nuance and intention of sound and music on the films. I am indebted to her as is our whole department.

• Josh Winslade, our on-set Pro Tools Music Editor, who lived in the middle of the playback world, shaping Greg Wells’s backing tracks, cuing music, and dropping in live elements on the fly.

• Benjamin Holder, Music Associate and Keyboard Player, who became the emotional heartbeat of the system whenever the actors needed freedom of tempo and dynamic.

• Arthur Fenn, Key, and Robin Johnson, my 1st Assistant Sound assistants, i.e., Boom Operators, who were the physical link between the actors and my cart.

• Natassja “Taz” Fairbanks, 2nd Assistant Sound, who became the quiet guardian of floors, leaves, puddles, and anything underfoot that could destroy a performance.

• Robin Baynton, Vocal Editor, who was getting our production tracks into his Pro Tools system and working on them on a day-to-day basis, as well as helping Myron Kerstein with the live vocals and music as we were shooting.

• Dom Ammendum, Music Producer, who was on set with us every single day as our conduit of Wicked musical knowledge and the creative guardian of Stephen Schwartz’s songs and score.

Beyond our immediate team, our work flowed directly into:

• Supervising Music Editor Jack Dolman
• Supervising Sound Editor Nancy Nugent-Title
• Re-recording Mixer Andy Nelson and Re-recording Mixer and Supervising Sound Editor John Marquis

And part of our wider team:

• Stephen Schwartz, Composer
• Steven Oremus, Executive Music Producer
• Greg Wells, Music Producer & Arranger
• John Powell, Score Composer
• Plus, Mike Knobloch of Universal Music, who is an incredible inspiration and support to me. Mike is such an advocate of the live sung musical and I cannot thank him enough.

We were not separate departments handling different parts of a workflow. We were one chain, carrying a live performance from Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande standing on a balcony, all the way to an audience sitting in a cinema.

To make that chain work, we had to build a technical infrastructure that treated music playback, live keyboard, production sound, and IEM monitoring as one instrument. That is where the Pro Tools and production sound integration came in.

Pro Tools & Scorpio Integration: The Percussion Section of Our Pit
The rhythmic backbone, the timing grid, the mechanical precision that drove the entire workflow
We built a playback system that behaved like a hybrid between a recording studio and a concert tour, but that also fed directly into my thirty-two-track production recorder in a way that picture editorial could use from day one.

The heart of the music side was a custom playback and Pro Tools rig that Josh and I designed together. It lived on the same style production sound ‘euro’ cart that I use, so the carts are light enough for a single person to wheel around sets and are a two-person lift for staircases. Josh’s playback cart was built around:

• Pro Tools as the main timeline and engine for Greg Wells’s backing tracks
• A Prodigy MC and RME MADIface Pro for high-quality conversion and routing
• MADI and Dante paths between playback and my Sound Devices Scorpio
• Dedicated outputs for:
– Cast IEM’s
– 30kw of JBL on-set speakers where appropriate
– “Thumper” tracks for choreography-only takes
– Stems feeding back into my recorder

That rig was incredibly powerful. It had to behave like a studio in the morning, a concert rig in the afternoon, and a surgical editing tool in the middle of a scene, or even during a take if Jon decided to change the shape of a moment.

From Josh’s Pro Tools system, I took seven discrete stems back into my Scorpio ISO tracks:

1. Mono music

2. Music left
3. Music right
4. Vocal only
5. Mono timecode from music, so picture and sound could remain locked
6. Sound effects only (embedded in the music where relevant)
7. Ben’s live keyboard

I think of that live keyboard stem as the secret weapon. When Cynthia or Ari wanted to drive the tempo themselves rather than be driven by a backing track, Ben could give them exactly the kind of musical support they are used to in a rehearsal room or on stage, and we could still fold that into a fully timecoded, trackable, repeatable film workflow.

All seven of those stems landed as ISO tracks on my Scorpio, alongside the booms and radio mics. My production sound dailies contained the entire musical context of a scene, not just the vocals.

I built two key mix tracks on the Scorpio:

• Mix Track 1 was my vocal and dialog mix. This was exactly what I would want to hear as a Production Sound Mixer: the spoken lines and the sung lines presented as one continuous performance, with no music baked in.
• Mix Track 2 was a mono music mix derived from the Pro Tools stems at a gain that I felt sat correctly under the vocal for dailies and for Jon’s headphones.

For the Picture Editor, Myron Kerstein, this was essential. On most films, early Avid assemblies are built from production sound alone, and music has to be laboriously synced or mocked up later. On Wicked: For Good, Myron and Lara (1st AE) can cut a scene using my two mix tracks, and they immediately have:

• A clean, a cappella version of the vocal on one fader.
• A controllable music bed on another fader, already in sync and already at a unique dedicated level appropriate for vocal and dialog.

If they want to make a quick stereo version, they can reach up to the music left and right stems that are also in my recorder. If they want to elevate the cut for a studio screening, they can timecode lock to Josh’s full Pro Tools sessions later and build a 5.1 music layout. At no stage are they forced to become Dialog Editors, having to reverse-engineer my work before they can even decide if a scene plays.

The Live Keyboard: Our Secret Weapon—The Strings of Our Pit
The emotional bed, the responsive phrasing, the melodic freedom that let the actors breathe and perform
The moment we committed to recording every vocal live, we knew we would often have to replace the rigidity of a conventional playback track with something fluid enough to follow the actors but disciplined enough to hold the shape of a score that Stephen Schwartz had spent years refining. Jon wanted truth. He wanted live breath. He wanted the actors to act their way through the songs rather than deliver a perfect vocal inside a rigid tempo grid. And so, our department had to become, in the truest sense, an orchestra that could follow them.

This is where the keyboard became absolutely essential. From Day One, Music Associate Benjamin Holder stood at the centre of this system with a humility and musical sensitivity that still astonishes me. Ben wasn’t there to lead. His job was to be the safety net beneath Cynthia and Ari, a responsive accompanist capable of changing tempo, tone, intensity, and harmonic feel at the speed of emotion. When Cynthia inhaled, he was already there. When Ari hesitated, he held space for her. When either of them needed to stretch a phrase or soften a moment, he simply moved with them.

The keyboard became the emotional barometer of every take. When Cynthia stepped into a scene with a certain intensity, Ben matched her. When Ari needed space to land a line, he softened the harmonic movement beneath her. When Jeff Goldblum leaned into comedy and theatrical phrasing, Ben pivoted instantly to support the nuance of his delivery. And what made this so remarkable was that the actors never felt the presence of technology. They simply heard what felt like a musical extension of their own intention.
Ben’s playing fed directly into Josh’s Pro Tools session, locked to picture with timecode, and from there into my Sound Devices Scorpio as a dedicated stem. We also captured the MIDI output from Ben’s keyboard, a crucial detail because those MIDI files often became the foundation of the tempo maps that Jack Dolman and the music team later built from in post. That MIDI capture allowed Jack’s team to see precisely how Ben had followed the actors’ moment to moment, creating a truthful map of the emotional tempo before any orchestration was written.

The actors trusted their IEM’s and their ear mix, courtesy of Josh’s rig and my production feed that matched their emotional truth. Sometimes only keyboard, sometimes keyboard with Greg Wells’s backing track, and sometimes a full crossfade into the prerecorded playback track. It was seamless.

Behind the scenes, there was a complex technical ballet happening between Ben’s keyboard and Josh’s Pro Tools session in real time. Josh cued tracks, set up crossfades, updated bar counts, dropped markers, built edits, and monitored timecode. Josh had to feel where the take was going, anticipate where Ben might return to tempo, and manage the invisible transitions that allowed the performance to evolve naturally without compromising the later orchestration.

Ben often had a personal click of his own buried in his IEM to keep the performance loosely tethered to the underlying architecture that Stephen Schwartz, John Powell, and Jeff Atmajian would later need for orchestration and music adaptation.

There were moments when Ben quietly removed his click mid-take, choosing to follow Cynthia or Ari wherever they went emotionally. Those takes were breathtaking. Wild, free, honest. But whenever he could, Ben kept the click in his ears.

This ultimately is why the keyboard mattered so much. It allowed us to preserve the truth of performance in a genre that has historically relied on the safety of lip-sync. It allowed Cynthia, Ari, and Jeff to act their way through songs without feeling constrained by tempo grids or technical expectations.

Across the wider rig, we carried a huge array of stems. Mono music. Stereo playback. Vocal-only stems. Thumper feeds for chorus timing. The keyboard stem. MIDI. My production mix. And each of those mixes could be routed independently to different departments: lighting for cue timing, playback for monitoring, choreography for spatial alignment, Camera Operators for movement synchronisation. Every member of the crew was listening to a version of the moment that supported their job. This is why I say production sound became the orchestra and conductor: our mixes became the heartbeat of the entire film set.

With the four months of prep and year of shooting, that is exactly what the Sound & Music Department became, the support system, the quiet machinery behind the emotion. The instrument that made the impossible possible and allowed this film to be made the way Jon Chu always intended: truthfully, musically, and with the full emotional weight of live performance.

The IEM System: Making the Invisible Audible
To give the cast the kind of support a pit orchestra provides on stage, the IEM system had to be both powerful and invisible. Wicked: For Good wasn’t a concert film, so the presence of an in-ear monitor or an earwig had to disappear completely. Costume and Makeup were essential collaborators from Day One. Every IEM cable and shell was colour-matched for the individual actor. Cynthia had green IEM’s painted to match her exact Elphaba shade; Ari’s were blended to her skin and makeup tone. On wider shots, the IEM’s vanished entirely. On mid-shots and close-ups, VFX painted them out only where absolutely necessary. We worked with PureTone in the UK to create custom-moulded IEM’s and custom earwigs for our principal cast. That achieved two crucial things:

They fit deep and securely in the ear canal, so when Ari was swinging from a chandelier in “Popular” or when Cynthia was flying through the air in “Defying Gravity,” the units didn’t budge.

They protrude less, making VFX paint-out far easier—and on wider shots, often unnecessary.

Inside those IEM’s they heard:

• Ben Holder’s live keyboard
• Greg Wells’s backing track
• A blend of their own voice and their scene partner’s voice
• A version of my boom/lav production mix emphasised for emotional clarity rather than technical neutrality

From a signal perspective, we used two tiers of in-ear support:

• Full-range IEM’s (Sennheiser EW IEM system) for serious live singing—capable of carrying Greg’s full-bandwidth backing tracks, the live keyboard, and their personal vocal blend with proper bass extension.

• Earwigs for moments that required only timing cues or simple guide information—no full-range fidelity, no cable from pack to ear, extremely low profile and often requiring no VFX paint-out.

Every principal actor had a personal mix. Before a take, you’d see Arthur standing beside the actors saying, “Give us a level—just a line,” and Josh would tweak their vocal level in the IEM against either keyboard or track so that emotionally they were exactly where they needed to be. And when they reached for a note emotionally, everything in their ear should rise to meet it—invisibly.

Building a Technical System That Supported Creativity
None of this integration mattered if the technical system couldn’t handle it. Every part of the chain—from Ben’s keyboard, to Josh’s Pro Tools rig, to the MADI system, the Scorpio, the booms and lavs had to behave like one instrument

That required:

• Zero perceptible latency
• Absolute timecode accuracy
• Redundant routing paths
• Seven discrete music stems feeding dailies
• A playback rig that could keep up with rapid camera moves and location shifts
• A system stable enough that Josh could edit on the fly while I was capturing live vocals

This wasn’t a normal musical workflow. It was a hybrid of theatre, live broadcast, studio recording, and feature film production sound. And it only worked because every person in the chain understood not just their own role but how their choices affected everyone else.

Capturing the Ensemble: Thumper Tracks and Real Footfalls
The crowds of Oz are characters in their own right, and the ensemble numbers needed their own live strategy.

The problem with chorus work in musicals is that on set, you are dealing with:

Massive choreography and footfall

Mixed abilities as singers; some are world-class dancers first

A lot of potential set noise

We took a hybrid approach. We recorded ensembles live wherever it made sense, knowing that the production would also bring in incredible ensemble singers from the stage show to support and sweeten those vocals in Post. But I was determined that the physical sound of the set would remain real: the stomping, the desk slams, the movement of bodies in the space.

That is where the “thumper track” came in. We would take the sub-bass from Greg’s backing track, filter out everything above around 38 Hz, and play that back to the dancers. They would feel the rhythm from the low frequency energy that could later be removed completely with EQ and noise reduction.

Choreographer Chris Scott would count them in: “This one is just for sound. No voices. One, two, three…” and we would record pristine chorus footfalls, table slams, and body movement in tempo.

Monitoring Like a Film Mixer, Listening Like a Dialog Mixer
As we shot, almost everyone on the shooting floor wore headphones. Every camera movement and lighting cue was motivated by music. Everyone on the crew needed to hear, and music rarely came out of speakers unless we were shooting huge chorus numbers. What they heard was my dailies mix: live vocal from the booms and lavs, balanced against a mono music track. That way Jon, the Operators and Grips, Choreographers, and Producers could all feel the shape of the scene as it would roughly appear in the cut.

What I listened to was slightly different.

On the first take of a setup, I would listen in context, with music, and set a relationship between vocal and music track that I hoped to keep consistent for the scene, so that Myron’s dailies would have stable levels. Once I was confident that balance was right, I would switch to listening a cappella, with the music often out of my monitoring.

There are two reasons for this:

1. Music hides problems. Clothing rustle, a noisy shoe, a generator that has mysteriously appeared behind set, a leaf crunch that looks lovely but sounds like a crisp packet. With music in my ears, those issues can sneak past; with only vocal, they stand out.
2. I treat live singing as dialog from a production point of view. It demands the same forensic care. I want to hear breaths, mouth noise, the real acoustic of the space, and I want to know exactly what is under every syllable. That mindset carries through all the way to Andy and John on the dub stage. Andy does not treat “dialog” and “vocal” as separate species. For him, as for me, it is all performance.

Recording “For Good”—Leaves, Puddles, and a Six-Mic Duet
If Wicked: For Good had a single scene that embodied the entire philosophy of the film, it was the balcony sequence for “For Good.”

On paper, it is a simple idea: two friends saying goodbye. In practice, it is a delicate blend of dialog, freeform singing, tightly structured musical material, and camera choreography, all set on a balcony that needed to feel like a real autumn evening, not a soundstage.

Real Leaves, Real Puddles, Real Wind
Before we even began to talk about how we would record the vocals, we had to understand what Nathan Crowley’s production design and Jon’s visual language required.

Jon’s vision of Wicked and For Good was built around vast real sets. Nathan’s stunning designs were built by real craftspeople and artisans. They did not want a CGI balcony with digital leaves and simulated puddles.

Those elements are beautiful for the eye. For sound, they are treacherous.
Crunching leaves underfoot and water squelching in shoes are exactly the sort of mid-band transient noises that fight the same frequencies as the human voice. Add wind machines, and you have the classic recipe for a scene that “looks great but will all be ADR later.”

We were not prepared to accept that trade-off.

Working with the Special Effects team, led by Paul Corbould, we deployed the Silent Wind system that we had refined across the show. Instead of parking huge fans on the stage, we kept all the noisy machinery outside the soundstage and brought the airflow in through stage walls with runs of flexible twelve-inch tubing, each handled by an SFX technician who could aim and feather the airflow with great precision.

What we heard on the mics was not mechanical motor noise; it was a broad, smooth “shhh” of air movement and the sound of leaves shifting.

We adopted a very simple rule:

• Only put leaves where the camera can see them.

On a wide shot, you might see a carpet of leaves stretching to the back of frame. On the reverse, that area may not be visible. We became ruthless about clearing any part of the floor that was not in shot.

This is where Taz Fairbanks came into her own. Shot by shot, lens by lens, she would liaise with the camera team, look at the monitor, then quietly sweep leaves out of the zones that were off-camera, while SFX kept them alive in the areas that mattered visually.

The same was true for the puddles. Visually, they sell the idea that it has been raining, but water and shoes are not friends of live vocals. Every time the lens went tighter, Taz and the art and props teams would go in, mop out the puddles that were now out of frame, and leave only what was absolutely necessary in the composition.

You cannot say you care about original performance and then allow unnecessary noise sources to exist in parts of the set that the audience never even sees.

Beginning as Dialog, Behaving as Song
“For Good” does not start like a “musical number.” It begins like a conversation between two people on a balcony.

Visually, Jon and DP Alice Brooks approached the early part of the scene exactly as you would treat a dramatic dialog sequence. We were largely on Steadicam, floating with the actors as they walked and talked, with the camera weaving in to find their faces.

Technically, I treated the opening like dialog too, but with one crucial difference: I knew that at any moment, Ari or Cynthia had the freedom to step into singing at any given moment, and I had to be ready.

We were using Schoeps CMD 42 digital microphones with MK41 hypercardiod capsules on the booms, sending AES straight down cables to the cart. That gave us an incredibly clean, modern boom sound with all the transient detail we needed, and a consistent digital path right into the Scorpio. On the early beats of the scene, Arthur and Robin were routinely working as close as they could; twelve inches above the actors’ hairlines on wider framings, down to three inches above the hairline on tighter shots, always dancing around the Steadicam.

From a sound perspective, the most interesting thing about those opening passes is that the performances were not locked.

Cynthia and Ari made a creative decision to allow certain words, certain lines, to just slide into singing, depending on how they felt in the moment. On one take, a line might be spoken, on the next, it might soften or swell into melody.

To support that, both actors wore IEM’s from the start. They knew that if they felt compelled to sing a word or a phrase, Ben Holder would be there, following them on the keyboard. Sometimes he would only give them a single note or a tiny fragment of harmony, just enough to catch the emotional weight of what they were doing. But the key point is that his job was not to lead; it was to follow.

Technically, the workflow at this stage was:

• CMD 42’s providing our primary vocal capture.
• DPA 4061 lavaliers on each actor as backup and as an option for some angles.
• Ben’s keyboard feeding Pro Tools which in turn fed the IEM’s.
• My dailies mix presenting the scene to Jon as an integrated whole.

Creatively, the opening is already a piece of live sung cinema. We just have not formally “started the song” yet.

Day One: Crane Day, No Booms Allowed
Once we moved deeper into the body of “For Good,” Jon and Alice made a choice that would reshape my approach to the scene. They wanted to release the cameras from the balcony edge and let it swoop and drift around the space using two Technocranes.
The moves they designed were beautiful: big, sweeping passes that would start at the edge of the soundstage and sail in over the balcony, finding the actors in mid-shot and then retreating back out to reveal the world, and feel the song open up.

There is simply no safe harbor to place a pole that will not end up in the shot, and even if you manage one pass, the crane move will have changed on the next. Day One of “For Good” would be lavalier-only for the singing sections. We ran two DPA 4061 lavaliers on each actor, each feeding its own transmitter and ISO track.

There were two reasons for this:

• Technical redundancy. If we took an RF hit on one transmitter at a critical moment, we had a second, entirely separate capture of the same performance.
• Creative flexibility. We did not stack the mics on top of each other. We placed one on the left chest and one on the right. With a left and a right, one of those mics will always be favouring the direction of the voice.

Incredibly dynamic performances like Ari and Cynthia’s do not sit neatly in a grid. There are phrases where one of them sings a little softer, one syllable that falls away because of emotion or breath. With four lavs in total covering the duet, Robin can look at a word where, for instance, Cynthia drops slightly under Ari and ask: Which of the four mics has the best capture of that exact syllable in that exact head position?

This is what I mean when I say that choice is king for live vocals. You do not ask for more microphones because you are unsure. You ask for them because you are certain that the performance is unique and that it deserves to be sculpted from as many angles as possible.

The DPA’s sounded beautiful, and because of the double-mic strategy, I never had that creeping anxiety of “if something goes wrong here, we have nothing to fall back on.”
During the day, especially once we hit the harmonic duet toward the end of the song, it was clear that we were dealing with something very special. When Ari and Cynthia start to mesh their voices together on that balcony, you feel that they are not just singing lines; they are essentially becoming one instrument. From a mix perspective, that is wonderful and terrifying in equal measure.

Day Two: Extending the Balcony and Bringing the Booms Back
At the end of Day One, Jon looked at those crane passes and said something that changed the way we approached the rest of “For Good.” He was happy with the scale, but he wanted to lean further into the intimacy of the performance.

He wanted the audience to feel as if they were standing on the balcony with Elphaba and Glinda. To do that, he needed the camera to physically get closer and to be able to move around the actors in a fluid, human way.

The solution was to extend the balcony. That change had a knock-on effect for sound: Suddenly, we could bring both the booms back in.

On Day Two, we kept the two DPA 4061’s on each actor, exactly as before. But now, on top of that, Arthur and Robin Johnson came back into play with the CMD 42 booms.
Because the balcony extension gave everyone so much more space, the booms could be in the air above the Steadicam, often coming down to hairline distance in the tightest close-ups. In wide or moving shots, they might be at twelve inches; in the key emotional moments, they were almost in line with the actors’ foreheads.

What made this day special for me was watching Arthur and Robin turn the act of booming into choreography.

They did not simply stand “on their” actor all day. They were constantly trading responsibilities. Sometimes Arthur would be on Ari, sometimes on Cynthia. Sometimes they would swap mid-take as the geometry of the shot changed. Behind the cart, I was keeping meticulous notes of these swaps so that later, Robin and Nancy would know, for any given beat, which boom was favouring which performer.

All of this built toward the final duet section, where the girls are standing incredibly close to each other, nose to nose, singing harmonies that are already at the deepest emotional level without anyone adding reverb or score.

Initially, I considered simplifying the situation. With the actors that close, it is very tempting to say, “Let’s just put one central boom between them and let that take over.” A single mic would certainly have picked up both voices beautifully.

Instead, I asked Arthur and Robin to play their booms so that the capsules were an inch apart in the air, one very slightly favouring Ari, the other very slightly favouring Cynthia. The microphone mounts were almost touching!

The tracks we now had:

• Boom A: CMD 42, MK41, focussed a touch more to one actor
• Boom B: an identical chain, but with that tiny emphasis on the other actor

The reason that matters is that when the harmonies lock and the girls’ voices start to intertwine, there will always be phrases where one is fractionally softer or rolled off because of the angle of the head or the emotional delivery.

Combine that with the four DPA’s and you have six world-class microphones covering two world-class voices in the most important duet of the film.

“For Good” as One Performance: Nancy and Robin with a Singular Dialog and Vocal Editorial Collaboration
If you go right back to the start of “For Good,” it begins life as dialog with moments of spontaneous song. By the end, the two characters are in full vocal flight.

For editorial, that raises a philosophical question: Where does “dialog editing” stop and “music editing” begin?

On Wicked: For Good, the answer is that there is no dividing line, and on “For Good” in particular, that is where the partnership between Nancy Nugent-Title and Robin Baynton became something very special. They approached “For Good” as one continuous performance.

They worked together and treated the scene as a single piece of acting that just happens to move through different kinds of vocal delivery.

The result is that you can watch “For Good” and never once feel that the mix has “stepped onto a stage.” The words that are spoken and the notes that are sung feel like they were born in the same breath, in the same place.

From my perspective as the Production Mixer, this is the payoff for all the choices we made on set: double-miking, half-inch boom spacing, Silent Wind, leaves only in frame, puddles mopped as soon as they are not needed.

The Cost of Truth: Collaboration Versus Lip-Sync
When people ask why we bother to go to these lengths to capture live vocals, I often talk about the creative cost of ADR compared to the financial cost of VFX paint-out. With live vocals, you ask a lot more of the crew. You ask Special Effects to move their machinery outside and invent a unique Silent Wind system for the movie. You ask Art and Props to constantly lay and remove leaves and puddles. You ask Costume to find ways to hide two transmitters on each principal without compromising comfort or silhouette. You ask VFX to budget for the removal of visible mics and IEM’s, not as a last-minute fix but as a planned, creative choice to preserve performance.

You ask Camera to coordinate with you on every pass. You ask your Boom Operators to learn choreography as complex as the dance numbers. You ask your Second Assistant to live in a world where every leaf and every droplet of water is a potential threat to the mix.

All so that when Ari and Cynthia stand on that balcony and sing “Because I Knew You,” the voices you hear are what they gave you in the moment, not a clean, polished replica assembled later in an ADR booth.

There are two ways to spend money and effort in a musical:

• You can spend it on ADR and studio time, and accept the creative compromises that come with actors trying to reinhabit a moment they lived months earlier.
• Or you can spend it on VFX paint-out, quiet floors, Silent Wind, double-miking, extended balconies, and custom IEM’s to carry the original performance all the way to the screen.

On Wicked: For Good, we chose the second route.

The Keyboard, the Playback, and the Tears
Earlier, I talked about the way we wove live keyboard with playback across the film. On “For Good,” those decisions were laser-targeted to the emotional structure of the song.
I asked Ben Holder what he remembered about the breakdown, and his summary perfectly matches what we built:

• The beginning of “For Good” and the very end were largely driven by live keyboard. These are the sections where the tempo is most free, where the characters are searching for the words and the music follows their inner rhythm.
• The middle section, including the “And just to clear the air, I ask forgiveness” middle eight and the final big chorus, runs to playback. We were still recording everything live, with the full six-mic setup, but the backbone of the music was Greg’s track, locking the rhythm section in and allowing the song to expand in scale.
• After that last chorus, when the song drops back down into the softer “Because I knew you, I have been changed for good” alternation, we went back to live keyboard. The dynamic drops, the emotion peaks, and the accompaniment needed to be able to breathe with the actors as they cried and sang through those final lines.

That final section is burned into my memory from my position at the cart.

I have said before that when a performance is really happening, I am aware of my faders as an instrument. On those takes, when Ari and Cynthia were standing there with tears streaming down their faces, harmonising through the last “For Good,” it felt as if the whole crew were playing one piece of music together.

Ben was shaping the keyboard in real time to support their fragility. Josh was making sure there was no technical cliff edge when we changed from playback to live accompaniments. Arthur and Robin were holding those booms half an inch apart, breathing with the actors. Taz, the Art Department, Props, and SFX had created a world of leaves and puddles and wind that felt real but stayed quiet enough to let the song live. Costume had made sure the transmitters were exactly where they needed to be, and VFX had already signed up to remove whatever mics we had to place in shot. And I was sitting there, riding those six microphones as if they were one voice, making sure I did not clip, did not miss a head turn, did not allow a single crackle of leaf or splash of water to intrude at the wrong moment.

When people say “there was not a dry eye in the house,” it is normally hyperbole. On those days, on that balcony, it was simply true. I looked around after one of those takes and saw Grips, Sparks, Camera Assistants, everyone, just quietly wiping their faces.

That is why we do it live. That is why we build playback rigs that behave like an orchestra pit, and why we spend two days negotiating the exact placement of every leaf. Because when a performance like that happens, you only get one chance.

My job as a Production Sound Mixer is to be able to turn to Jon, to Cynthia, to Ari and say, with absolute honesty:

“I got it. It is all there. What you just did will live on that screen exactly as you gave it to us.”

On Wicked: For Good, and especially on “For Good,” I can say that. And I can also say we did it as one department—Sound & Music, the orchestra pit under the stage, playing in service of the story.

An Interview with the Sound Crew

by Richard Lightstone CAS AMPS

At the time of writing, One Battle After Another, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, had a worldwide gross of $205 million. I caught up with busy Production Sound Mixer Jose Antonio Garcia on the sequel of The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping in Berlin, Germany. Later, I spoke with Boom Operator Dave M. Roberts in Asheville, North Carolina, and Utility Sound Technician Rachel Schroeder in Los Angeles, to get a full perspective on this challenging production.

Jose Antonio Garcia: The film was shot mostly with a VistaVision camera, its eight perforations per frame, so it’s noisy. I say mostly, because when it came to intimate dialog scenes Paul would use a Super 35 camera. We shot for more than one hundred days. It was my first time working with Boom Operator Dave Roberts, who has worked on many PTA (Paul Thomas Anderson) projects with John Pritchett. Rachel Schroeder was our Utility Sound Technician and has been working with me for a couple of years. A very good crew with incredible spirit. I really enjoyed Dave very much. It’s the first time I’ve worked with him, and I would work with him anytime.

Richard Lightstone: This is also the first time you’ve worked with Paul Thomas Anderson?

JAG: It was a pleasure to work with a filmmaker like him and with such fine actors, too: Sean Penn, Leo DiCaprio, and Benicio Del Toro. What’s amazing about this project was that there’s no egos. It was always about the movie. All the problems, all the solutions, all the thinking was, how do we make it better. How can we do this? It was a very intense project, but there was no video village, there were no producers.

We used to joke about an eighth of a page on the call sheet, calling it “death by an eighth,” because it was never easy. Suddenly, there were seven microphones out there. Paul likes to be in the car shooting with the actors. So, there is no space for me, it was a Hail Mary, tie the recorder as best as I could, and then feed Paul hardwired headphones, he has a very good ear. Then pray a lot, and light a lot of candles.

We were constantly on the move with a bag-rig. There were scenes that started with me mixing off the cart, let’s say it starts on the stairs, and then they come down, get in the car and take off and the bag-rig takes over.

We ended up mic’ing the cars a lot and putting lavaliers on the actor and a planted lavalier on the visor. We also had a bunch of what I call stunt mics, because they were constantly being smashed by the car door closing or placing them near the exhaust or on the engines. I think it worked, it helped a lot for post.

RL: It was a majority location film?

JAG: There were more than thirty locations. We started up in Eureka and then we went to Modesto, Sacramento, the Stockton area, then the mission in San Juan Bautista. Then we moved back to L.A. for a day or two, of exteriors, and then to San Diego and Tijuana and El Paso for the opening scene that we recreated by Tecate. We were also in Borrego Springs which was deadly in the summer. That was tough.

RL: Was there any stage work at all?

JAG: Very minimal. The stage work was two or three days for the tunnel scene, a tunnel that you could shoot down into and the body drop through the dumpsters. I have very deep respect for Paul, because he has all this recognition and power but it’s never about him, it’s always the movie in his mind, the movie, the movie, the movie. I really enjoy working with him. It’s very motivating working with an individual like that. For instance, Paul always wants both sides of a telephone call recorded with the actors. PTA would even fly the off-screen actor in to the location to achieve this. The post people also did some magic to mask the camera noise; it was very impressive.

RL: Your 1st AD was Adam Somner.

JAG: I loved Adam, he was one of the best AD’s I have ever worked with, and unfortunately, this was his last movie. He died of thyroid cancer November 27, 2024. You know sixteen of the movies he worked on received a Best Picture Oscar nomination. I loved that guy.

Boom Operator Dave M. Roberts

Dave Roberts: Even though this was my first time working with Jose, we dovetailed pretty quickly. It was good fun and it just felt like a fever dream. That’s kind of how it was, a fever dream.

RL: You have worked with Paul Thomas Anderson and many times with John Pritchett. Tell me about your relationship with Paul, PTA.

DR: He likes a small nimble group and likes to move very quickly. What you see on the call sheet may not necessarily be how the day is going to go. Paul folds you in as things evolve. You just kind of let him do what he does because he knows that everybody’s going to flow with what he’s trying to do.

RL: How did you work with the VistaVision camera?

DR: You do what you can, and the Camera Department was very helpful to get rid of as much of that noise as they could. Rachel wired everybody, and she was miles ahead of the curve. We would go into scenes on Paul’s show like, “Oh, this is great.” We’ll walk in, we’ll have two booms and decide who will cover what. Then you’d see the VistaVision sitting in the corner. You just have to be okay with it. But I think the post-production teams were wizards as well.

Paul’s style is very Altman-esque. He doesn’t want to loop. He had to really get comfortable with the fact that they can fix the noisy VistaVision camera, and we had to get comfortable with it as well. It all came together, and I was thrilled at how good it sounded.

RL: You had to deal with over thirty-one locations.

DR: It was difficult in terms of the number of locations. The locations themselves were not always very pleasant and there was a lot of car work. You put everything in a bag and send it off and hope it comes back with something good. There was a lot of free driving. That’s the way Paul likes to do it. He likes to go off on his own and make his movie.

We went to these places that were so far off the beaten track, you’d wonder why you’d go all the way there. But there’s something about actually being in the spot, that’s the kind of places Paul likes to create for the actors. He takes them to these places because it provokes a certain type of emotion. It helps his actors.

My recollection the most aggravating scene was the exterior phone booth outside of a market. It was a non-working phone with a sealed handset; we couldn’t get anything in there. Every take, we’d move a plant mic around because shooting VistaVision, you can see everything. Even trying to get a boom in there was problematic.

Also, some of the places were so blasted windy, it was just desert wind. You can conquer most of it, but between wind covers for the lavs, and wrapping the dead cat over his Sennheiser with another dead cat. It’s just constant wind, wind, wind.

It was a long shoot more than five months. We started in January in Northern California and finished up the end of July in Texas. We had a hiatus for a few weeks for Benicio. Paul wanted to wait for him, so they shut the company down for three weeks.

RL: Was there any VFX paint out employed?

DR: At times there were, it was kind of a negotiation. “Are you willing to paint this out? Is it a problem?” Then as time went on, it’s like, oh, yeah, we’ll just paint it out. They tried to protect the frame most of the time, but they would give us a take to get in there once they felt like they had the visual. The other thing we would do if it was really an egregious sonic invasion, they’d say, all right, we’ll just wild line it right now, while it’s fresh. We carried a silent camera, a Super35mm, and it would come out for intimate scenes or when they couldn’t get the VistaVision camera into some of the sets.
They did carry a blimp for the VistaVision. It was a brutal affair, a giant steel box that went over this giant camera. It was a fifteen-minute deal to reload.

RL: I understand where you live in North Carolina you suffered through a series of hurricanes?

DR: Three years ago, a giant oak tree fell through our home unannounced. We were out of our home for more than a year. Just when we were getting moved back in and life was looking normal, Hurricane Helene came along with nineteen inches of rain prior to the winds so the trees were sitting in soup. Our damage was minimal compared to many and luckily no injuries with us or in our neighborhood! The past year has been a little unpredictable. 

Utility Sound Technician Rachel Schroeder

RL: How long have you been working with Jose?

Rachel Schroeder: The first time we worked together was a movie called Amsterdam and that was the beginning of 2021. So, we’ve done quite a few

RL: How was it working with Paul Thomas Anderson?

RS: Paul’s amazing. He’s very intense and knows exactly what he wants and not afraid to reshoot whole scenes just to make sure he gets exactly what he wants. Paul is also very kind and he knew everybody’s name on the crew. I felt that he really cared about us, he tends to bring the same people onto his movies, everybody goes way back with him. It’s a family feeling on the set. It was really nice.

RL: And the many locations?

RS: I enjoyed us being a traveling ‘circus,’ but it was tough. The weather challenged us in a lot of the places like Eureka. It rained pretty much every day we were shooting there, so it was very wet and very muddy. But I prefer that to the desert. When we went out to Borrego Springs in May, it was already one hundred and fifteen degrees, very dusty and windy. I managed to scratch both of my corneas the first time we were in the desert, after that I resolved to always wear goggles.

RL: Jose complimented you on your wiring of the cast, what’s your technique?

RS: I approach every costume individually, and having several years of experience, I can predict what’s going to work best. I usually try to have at least three options. If the first one doesn’t work, I have something else in my head where I place the lav. These costumes were fairly straightforward, but with all the action and movement, it did interfere with my ideal wire placement. Leo often had a crossbody bag. I couldn’t place it where I would normally put it, so I had to go to the collar and make sure it was on the side where the strap wasn’t going to be. I worked closely with the property and costume departments.

The cast would show up one hundred percent ready and immediately start talking to Paul working things out, as they didn’t stick to the script that much. I’d hang back waiting with Key Set Costumer Corey Bronson, who was amazing. We worked well together, and he was very cooperative. He would cut holes or whatever I needed, and be there for moral support too. You just get it all done at once, I always like that.

RL: What was it like working with Boom Operator Dave Roberts?

RS: Dave is amazing, I’ve never seen a Boom Operator who’s more in tune with what’s going on, which was extremely important because of the free-form style. We followed Paul around and he would decide what he was going to do next. Dave was always on top of it. We never had to worry about missing anything because he knew exactly what was going on, what was going to happen next, and even what was going to happen after that. I’ve never worked with someone who was quite so on top of it like that and he obviously had a great relationship with Paul, almost as if he could read his mind.

RL: What sticks out about working with Jose?

RS: I remember when we were shooting in Sacramento, doing a lot of car stunts. We could have just sat back taking it easy. Jose was like, “No, we’re going to put mics on every single car,” to get the engine sounds and the crashes. We placed two mics on the car, one in the back, one in the front, in every single stunt vehicle.

That to me is Jose in a nutshell. He’s not going to sit there because there’s no dialog. He will find something to do, and it’s never superfluous. It always ends up being very important adding a whole new element to the car-chase scenes. I’m very proud of that; we had to crawl under so many cars and it was not easy, but the results were fantastic!

OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN SOUND MIXING FOR 2025

The Cinema Audio Society announces the nominees for the 62nd Annual CAS Awards for Outstanding Achievement in Sound Mixing

Motion Pictures – Live Action

F1: The Movie
Gareth John–Production Sound Mixer
Gary A. Rizzo CAS–Re-recording Mixer
Juan Peralta–Re-recording Mixer
Alan Meyerson CAS–Scoring Mixer
Alan Freedman CAS–ADR Mixer
Dennis Leonard–Foley Mixer
Additional Sound Teams:
UK/Europe/UAE crew: Dash Mason-Malik–Key Boom Operator, Freya Clarke–Boom Operator, Michael Ling–Sound Utility,
Mark ‘Gadget’ Reed–Bolero Comms, Mark McBride–Tech Support
UK/Europe crew: Niall Cropper–Key Boom Operator, Jo Vale–Boom Operator, Isla Bathgate–Sound Utility
Daytona crew: Patrick Martens–Boom Operator,
Eva Rismanforoush–Sound Utility
Pismo/Las Vegas crew: Michael Primer–Boom Operator, Rebecca Chan–Sound Utility

Frankenstein
Greg Chapman–Production Sound Mixer
Brad Zoern CAS–Re-recording Mixer
Christian Cooke CAS–Re-recording Mixer
Peter Cobbin CAS–Scoring Mixer
Kirsty Whaley CAS–Scoring Mixer
Sebastian Vaskio–ADR Mixer
Kevin Schultz CAS–Foley Mixer
Additional Sound Team: Denis Belingham, Zach Hunter,
Mathew Stark–Boom Operators

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
Lloyd Dudley–Production Sound Mixer
Chris Burdon–Re-recording Mixer
Mark Taylor–Re-recording Mixer
Chris Fogel CAS–Scoring Mixer
Nick Roberts–ADR Mixer
Adam Mendez–Foley Mixer
Additional Sound Team: Cei Frampton–1st Assistant Sound,
Mark McBride–1st Assistant Sound, Simrab Dhariwal–1st Assistant Sound, Efe Yucel–1st Assistant Sound

One Battle After Another
Jose Antonio Garcia–Production Sound Mixer
Christopher Scarabosio CAS–Re-recording Mixer
Tony Villaflor–Re-recording Mixer
Graeme Stewart–Scoring Mixer
Kevin Schultz CAS–Foley Mixer
Chelsea Body–Foley Mixer
Additional Sound Team: Dave M. Roberts–Boom Operator, Rachel Schroeder–Utility Sound Technician

Sinners
Chris Welcker CAS–Production Sound Mixer
Brandon Proctor–Re-recording Mixer
Steve Boeddeker–Re-recording Mixer
Chris Fogel CAS–Scoring Mixer
Jason Oliver–ADR Mixer
Tami Treadwell–ADR Mixer
Darrin Mann–Foley Mixer
Additional Sound Team: Ryan Farris–Boom Operator &
Pro Tools Playback Operator, Charlie Mascagni–Boom Operator, Emily Poulliard–Utility Sound Technician

Motion Pictures – Animated

Elio
Vince Caro CAS–Production Sound Mixer
Paul McGrath CAS–Production Sound Mixer
Lora Hirschberg–Re-recording Mixer
Bonnie Wild–Re-recording Mixer
Scott Michael Smith–Scoring Mixer
Richard Duarte–Foley Mixer

KPop Demon Hunters
Howard London CAS–Original Dialogue Mixer
Michael Babcock CAS–Re-recording Mixer
Tony Lamberti–Re-recording Mixer
Erich Talaba–Scoring Mixer
Giorgi Lekishvili–Foley Mixer

The Bad Guys 2
Ken Gombos–Original Dialogue Mixer
Julian Slater CAS–Re-recording Mixer
Greg P. Russell CAS–Re-recording Mixer
Sam Okell–Scoring Mixe
Paul Pirola–Foley Mixer

The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants
Will Files CAS–Re-recording Mixer
Mark Paterson–Re-recording Mixer
Steve Neal CAS–Re-recording Mixer
Shawn Murphy–Scoring Mixer
Jordan McClain–Foley Mixer

Zootopia 2
Gabriel Guy CAS–Original Dialogue & Re-recording Mixer
David Fluhr CAS–Re-recording Mixer
Warren Brown–Scoring Mixer
Doc Kane CAS–ADR Mixer
Richard Duarte–Foley Mixer

Motion Pictures – Documentary

​​Becoming Led Zeppelin
Nigel Albermaniche–Production Sound Mixer
Nick Bergh–Re-recording Mixer

I Was Born This Way
Travis Franklin–Production Sound Mixer
Leslie Gaston-Bird CAS–Re-recording Mixer
Gabriel Guy CAS–Re-recording Mixer

It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley
David Hocs–Production Sound Mixer
Lewis Goldstein CAS–Re-recording Mixer

Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery
Steve Foster–Re-recording Mixer
Lana Marie Hattar–Re-recording Mixer

Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror
Paul Stula–Production Sound Mixer
Tony Solis CAS–Re-recording Mixer

Non-Theatrical Motion Pictures or Limited Series

Adolescence S01 E01
Kiff McManus–Production Sound Mixer
Rob Entwistle–Production Sound Mixer
Jules Woods CAS–Re-recording Mixer
James Drake–Re-recording Mixer
Mike Tehrani–ADR Mixer
Simon Diggins–ADR Mixer
Adam Mendez–Foley Mixer
Additional Sound Team: Tom Pallant 1AS,
Kyle Pickford, Ash Sinani, Joanne Barcik 2AS,
Chi Limpiroj, Hannah Bracegirdle 3AS

Black Mirror S07 E06
USS Callister: Into Infinity
Stuart Piggott–Production Sound Mixer
James Ridgway–Re-recording Mixer
Sam Okell–Scoring Mixer
Mike Tehrani–ADR Mixer
Adam Mendez–Foley Mixer
Additional Sound Team: Stephen Lee–1AS,
Madeleine Quarm–2AS, Olly Ballantyne–Trainee

Chief of War S01 E01
The Chief of War
Fred Enholmer–Production Sound Mixer
Thomas Visser–Production Sound Mixer
Carlos Sanches CAS–Re-recording Mixer
Josh Eckberg–Re-recording Mixer
Chris Navarro CAS–ADR Mixer
Vedat Kiyici–ADR Mixer
Andrey Starikovskiy–Foley Mixer
Additional Sound Teams:
New Zealand: Key 1st AS Gerry Parke, 1st AS Nikora Edwards, followed by Cameron McGill, 2nd AS Hayden Washington-Smith
Hawaii: R. Kunani Nihipali Jr., Boom Operator,
Polina Gorman, Utility Sound Technician, Nohealani Nihipali, 2nd Unit Production Sound Mixer, Hannah Pómaika’i Mayo, 2nd Unit Boom Operator, Peter Portales, 2nd Unit Utility Sound Technician

Love, Death + Robots
Rob Cairns–Scoring Mixer
Joe DeAngelis CAS–Re-recording Mixer
Chris Carpenter–Re-recording Mixer

Star Trek: Section 31
Bill McMillan CAS–Production Sound Mixer
Todd M. Grace CAS–Re-recording Mixer
Edward C. Carr III CAS–Re-recording Mixer
Michael Perfitt–Scoring Mixer
Tami Treadwell–ADR Mixer
Darrin Mann–Foley Mixer
Additional Sound Team: Matthew Stark–Boom Operator,
Matt Farrier–Utility Sound Technician

Television Series – One Hour

Andor S02 E08 Who Are You?
Danny Hambrook–Production Sound Mixer
David Acord–Re-recording Mixer
Geoff Foster–Scoring Mixer
Nick Roberts–ADR Mixer
Richard Duarte–Foley Mixer
Additional Sound Team: Lee Thompson 1st AS,
Jim Hok, Mike Sinden, Jordan Feemster 2nd AS,
Adam Laschinger Playback Operator

Pluribus S01 E01 We Is Us
Phillip W. Palmer CAS–Production Sound Mixer
Larry Benjamin CAS–Re-recording Mixer
Tim Hoogenakker CAS–Re-recording Mixer
Judah Getz CAS–ADR Mixer
Jamieson Rabbe–ADR Mixer
Ron Mellegers–Foley Mixer
Additional Sound Team: Mitchell Gebhard1st Assistant Sound/Boom Operator, Andrew Chavez 2nd Assistant Sound/Utility Sound Technician

Severance S02 E10 Cold Harbor
David Schwartz CAS–Production Sound Mixer
Bob Chefalas CAS–Re-recording Mixer
Jacob Ribicoff–Re-recording Mixer
Chris Fogel CAS–Scoring Mixer
Kris Chevannes–ADR Mixer
George Lara CAS–Foley Mixer
Additional Sound Team: Graham Gardner Boom Operator, Christy Illius and Dave LaVenture Utility Sound Technician,
John D’Aquino Pro Tools Playback Operator

Stranger Things S05 E08 Chapter Eight: The Rightside Up
Michael P. Clark CAS–Production Sound Mixer
Mark Paterson–Re-recording Mixer
Will Files CAS–Re-recording Mixer
Steve Neal CAS–Re-recording Mixer
Craig Henighan CAS–Re-recording Mixer
Carlos Remirez–Scoring Mixer
Judah Getz CAS–Foley Mixer
Additional Sound Team: Brenton Stumpf Boom Operator, Jerrid Jones 2nd Boom Operator and Sound Utility Technician,
Troy Johnson Tandem Unit Production Sound Mixer,
Nick Brower Boom Operator, Caleb Carlon Utility Sound Technician

The Pitt S01 E13 7:00 PM
Von Varga–Production Sound Mixer
Todd M. Grace CAS–Re-recording Mixer
Edward C. Carr III CAS–Re-recording Mixer
Tami Treadwell–ADR Mixer
Alex Jongbloed CAS–Foley Mixer
Additional Sound Team: Javier Hernandez Boom Operator, Yervant Hagopian 2nd Boom Operator, Christina Meyer Utility Sound Technician, Andy Adams,
Josh Mantlo additional Boom Operators

Television Series– Half Hour

Hacks S04 E04 I Love LA
Jim Lakin CAS–Production Sound Mixer
John W. Cook II CAS–Re-recording Mixer
James Parnell CAS–Re-recording Mixer
Carlos Rafael Rivera–Scoring Mixer
Fernanda Domene–ADR Mixer
Jacob McNaughton–Foley Mixer
Additional Sound Team: Boom Operator Ryan Fee,
Sound Utility Technician Claire Mondragon,
Video Assist Josh Levy

Murderbot S01 E01 Free Commerce
Michael LaCroix–Production Sound Mixer
Alexandra Fehrman CAS–Re-recording Mixer
Emilie Corpuz–Re-recording Mixer
Additional Sound Team: Kirill Belousov Boom Operator,
Jack LaCroix, Wireless Microphone Technician

Only Murders in the Building S05 E09 LESTR
Joseph White Jr. CAS–Production Sound Mixer
Mathew Waters CAS–Re-recording Mixer
Kyle O’Neal CAS–Re-recording Mixer
Alan DeMoss–Scoring Mixer
Mitch Kluge–Foley Mixer
Additional Sound Team: Kira Smith Boom Operator,
TR Boyce 2nd Boom Operator/Utility Sound Technician

The Bear S04 E03 Scallop
Scott D. Smith CAS–Production Sound Mixer
Steve “Major” Giammaria CAS–Re-recording Mixer
Patrick Christensen CAS–ADR Mixer
Ryan Collison CAS–Foley Mixer
Connor Nagy CAS–Foley Mixer
Additional Sound Team: Joe Cambell, Michael Capulli Boom Operators, Nick Price, Eric LaCour Utility Sound Technicians, Uriah Brown Sound Intern

The Studio S01 E08 Golden Globes
Buck Robinson CAS–Production Sound Mixer
Lindsey Alvarez CAS–Re-recording Mixer
Fred Howard CAS–Re-recording Mixer
Adrià Serrano–Scoring Mixer
Brian Magrum CAS–ADR Mixer
Ron Mellegers–Foley Mixer
Additional Sound Team: Nick Allen, Boom Operator/2nd Unit Mixer/Playback Operator, Cole Bluma, additional Boom Operator, Rachel Schroeder & Kelsey Nie, Utility Sound Technicians, Evan Hare, Video Utility

Television Non-Fiction, Variety or Music – Series or Specials

100 Foot Wave S03 E04 The Eddie
Keith Hodne CAS–Re-recording Mixer

Billy Joel: And So It Goes S01 E01 Part One
Mark Mandler CAS–Production Sound Mixer
David Mitlyng–Production Sound Mixer
Michael Stewart–Production Sound Mixer
Bob Chefalas CAS–Re-recording Mixer
Bradshaw Leigh–Score & Music Mixer
Brian Ruggles–Music Mixer
Jay Vicari–Music Mixer

Formula 1: Drive to Survive S07 E09 Under New Management
Steve Speed CAS–Re-recording Mixer
Lydia Brown–Re-recording Mixer
Nick Fry CAS–Re-recording Mixer

John Candy: I Like Me
Brad Dawe–Production Sound Mixer
Michael Kool–Production Sound Mixer
Gary A. Rizzo CAS–Re-recording Mixer
Tyler Strickland–Scoring Mixer

Pee-Wee as Himself S01 E01
John Mathie–Production Sound Mixer
Daniel Timmonds CAS–Re-recording Mixer

AMPS Sound Nominees

Excellence in Sound for a Feature Film

F1
Gareth John–Production Sound Mixer
Al Nelson–Supervising Sound Editor
Gwendolyn Yates Whittle–Supervising Sound Editor
Gary A. Rizzo–Re-recording Mixer
Juan Peralta–Re-recording Mixer
Additional Sound Teams:
UK/Europe/UAE crew: Key Boom Operator
Dash Mason-Malik, Boom Operator Freya Clarke
Sound Utility Michael Ling
Bolero Comms Mark ‘Gadget’ Reed
Tech Support Mark McBride
UK/Europe crew: Key Boom Operator Niall Cropper
Boom Operator Jo Vale, Sound Utility Isla Bathgate
Daytona crew: Boom Operator Patrick Martens
Sound Utility Eva Rismanforoush
Pismo/Las Vegas crew: Boom Operator Michael Primer Sound Utility Rebecca Chan

Frankenstein
Greg Chapman–Production Sound Mixer
Nathan Robitaille–Supervising Sound Editor
Nelson Ferreira–Supervising Sound Editor
Christian Cooke–Re-recording Mixer
Brad Zoern–Re-recording Mixer
Additional Sound Team: Boom Operators Denis Belingham, Zach Hunter, Mathew Stark

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
Lloyd Dudley–Production Sound Mixer
James H. Mather–Supervising Sound Editor
Chris Burdon–Re-recording Mixer
Mark Taylor–Re-recording Mixer
Additional Sound Team: Cei Frampton 1st Assistant Sound, Mark McBride 1st Assistant Sound,
Simrab Dhariwal 1st Assistant Sound,
Efe Yucel 1st Assistant Sound

Sinners
Chris Welcker–Production Sound Mixer
Benny Burtt–Supervising Sound Editing
Felipe Pacheco–Supervising Sound Editor
Brandon Proctor–Re-recording Mixer
Steve Boeddeker–Re-recording Mixer
Additional Sound Team: Ryan Farris Boom Operator & Pro Tools Playback Operator, Charlie Mascagni Boom Operator, Emily Poulliard Utility Sound Technician

Warfare
Mitch Low–Production Sound Mixer
Howard Bargroff–Re-recording Mixer
Richard Spooner–Re-recording Mixer
Ben Barker–Supervising Sound Editor
Glenn Freemantle–Supervising Sound Editor
Additional Sound Team:
Stephane Malenfan Key 1st Assistant Sound,
Christopher Atkinson 1st Assistant Sound,
Luke Brickley 2nd Assistant Sound

Oscar Sound Nominees

Motion Picture

F1
Gareth John–Production Sound Mixer
Al Nelson–Supervising Sound Editor
Gwendolyn Yates Whittle–Supervising Sound Editor
Gary A. Rizzo–Re-recording Mixer
Juan Peralta–Re-recording Mixer
Additional Sound Teams:
UK/Europe/UAE crew: Dash Mason-Malik Key Boom
Operator, Freya Clarke Boom Operator, Michael Ling
Sound Utility, Mark ‘Gadget’ Reed Bolero Comms,
Mark McBride Tech Support
UK/Europe crew: Niall Cropper Key Boom Operator,
Jo Vale Boom Operator, Isla Bathgate Sound Utility
Daytona crew: Patrick Martens Boom Operator,
Eva Rismanforoush Sound Utility
Pismo/Las Vegas crew: Michael Primer Boom Operator, Rebecca Chan Sound Utility

Frankenstein
Greg Chapman–Production Sound Mixer
Nathan Robitaille–Supervising Sound Editor
Nelson Ferreira–Supervising Sound Editor
Christian Cooke–Re-recording Mixer
Brad Zoern–Re-recording Mixer
Additional Sound Team: Boom Operators
Denis Belingham, Zach Hunter, Mathew Stark

One Battle After Another
Jose Antonio Garcia–Production Sound Mixer
Christopher Scarabosio–Re-recording Mixer
Tony Villaflor–Re-recording Mixer
Additional Sound Team:
Dave M. Roberts Boom Operator
Rachel Schroeder Utility Sound Technician

Sinners
Chris Welcker CAS–Production Sound Mixer
Brandon Proctor–Re-recording Mixer
Steve Boeddeker–Re-recording Mixer
Additional Sound Team: Ryan Farris Boom Operator &
Pro Tools Playback Operator, Charlie Mascagni Boom Operator, Emily Poulliard Utility Sound Technician

Sirât
Amanda Villavieja–Production Sound Mixer
Laia Casanovas–Supervising Sound Editor
Yasmina Praderas–Re-recording Mixer
Additional Sound Team: Alfonso Casanovas, Jorge Garcia, Anass Moustatii, Boom Operators

BAFTA Sound Nominees

Motion Picture

F1
Gareth John–Production Sound Mixer
Al Nelson–Supervising Sound Editor
Gwendolyn Yates Whittle–
Supervising Sound Editor
Gary A. Rizzo–Re-recording Mixer
Juan Peralta–Re-recording Mixer
Additional Sound Teams:
UK/Europe/UAE crew: Dash Mason-Malik Key Boom Operator, Freya Clarke Boom Operator,
Michael Ling Sound Utility, Mark ‘Gadget’ Reed Bolero Comms, Mark McBride Tech Support
UK/Europe crew: Niall Cropper Key Boom Operator,
Jo Vale Boom Operator, Isla Bathgate Sound Utility
Daytona crew: Patrick Martens Boom Operator,
Eva Rismanforoush Sound Utility
Pismo/Las Vegas crew: Michael Primer Boom Operator, Rebecca Chan Sound Utility

Frankenstein
Greg Chapman–Production Sound Mixer
Nathan Robitaille–Supervising Sound Editor
Nelson Ferreira–Supervising Sound Editor
Christian Cooke–Re-recording Mixer
Brad Zoern–Re-recording Mixer
Additional Sound Team: Denis Belingham, Zach Hunter, Mathew Stark, Boom Operators

One Battle After Another
Jose Antonio Garcia–Production Sound Mixer
Christopher Scarabosio–Re-recording Mixer
Tony Villaflor–Re-recording Mixer
Additional Sound Team:
Dave M. Roberts Boom Operator
Rachel Schroeder Utility Sound Technician

Sinners
Chris Welcker–Production Sound Mixer
Benny Burtt–Supervising Sound Editing
Felipe Pacheco–Supervising Sound Editor
Brandon Proctor–Re-recording Mixer
Steve Boeddeker–Re-recording Mixer
Additional Sound Team:
Ryan Farris Boom Operator & Pro Tools Playback Operator Charlie Mascagni Boom Operator
Emily Poulliard Utility Sound Technician

Warfare
Mitch Low–Production Sound Mixer
Howard Bargroff–Re-recording Mixer
Richard Spooner–Re-recording Mixer
Ben Barker–Supervising Sound Editor
Glenn Freemantle–Supervising Sound Editor
Additional Sound Team:
Stephane Malenfant Key 1st Assistant Sound,
Christopher Atkinson 1st Assistant Sound,
Luke Brickley 2nd Assistant Sound

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Names in Bold are Local 695 members