Surround mixes at Spirit Studios
5.1 Mixing The Exception at Spirit Studios, Manchester
The first third of the year for me has been bookended by a pair of 5.1 mix sessions in the Avid S6 Suite at Spirit Studios, Manchester. They were mixes of short films made by local crews, with the filmmakers attending in both cases. It was a pleasure bringing the films to be finished there, the Exigy monitoring system in the suite sounds amazing and is beautiful to mix on.
RED SKY AT NIGHT
The year started off with Red Sky At Night in early January (feels a lifetime ago now). This short was made by Block B Films, very talented folks whom I’ve worked with several times now. A gothic vampire road movie, it artfully blends genres and injects some dark humour into proceedings too.
Although not a horror movie per se, it subtly plays with the genre and we supported this through world building with sound design. This allowed us to exaggerate the sound of certain key scenes, for example the intro throws you headlong into the film’s universe and leaves you guessing where it is going to go next.
We had already signed off on a stereo mix, but upmixing to 5.1 allowed us to make it a much more immersive experience and sound as good as possible at festivals. It received its world premiere at Manchester Film Festival, playing to a packed house.
THE EXCEPTION
In the last weekend of April we mixed The Exception, the latest short by Ben Hanley. I had collaborated with Ben once before, and we agreed some time ago to do the mix in 5.1.
Composer Darren Sng was also present, travelling up from his base in London. He provided me with the score stems in advance, which were already mixed and seperated to give us more control in the surround mix. I prepared the stems with some simple panning, sending the highest frequency and most sparse material into the left and right surround speakers and keeping the more constant and bass-heavy material towards the left and right speakers.
The score is quite fractured and uneasy, reflecting the mental state of the protagonist. Darren did an amazing job with the composition and also had lots of creative ideas when it came to mixing the score. For a couple of scenes we added some fairly extreme movement of the stems between the front and surround speakers. We worked on getting the levels right, and EQed some of the sound effects to ensure everything was sitting together in a harmonius way.
It was so rewarding to help both sets of filmmakers level up the sound of their films in a class-sounding space. Looking forward to mixing in the S6 Suite again in future!