News
Heywood and AMS Neve provide know-how for Knowing
7 May 2009
Experience (plus top-of-the-line equipment) enables award-winning mixer to beat the clock
Just like the plot of the film itself, the final mix for Knowing, a sci-fi thriller starring Nicholas Cage, turned out to be a race against time. Phil Heywood, the award-winning mixer who led the re-recording mix team at Deluxe’s StageOne Sound in Sydney, suddenly saw his mix schedule slashed in half, from six to three weeks. Fortunately, his audio mixing credentials are matched by time management skills (he finds the mix flows best if he works sequentially on long runs). And, of course, it helped to be working on first class equipment, and particularly StageOne’s new 72-fader AMS Neve DFC Gemini.
‘For the first time in Australia we have a quality Hollywood-style dubbing stage that sounds awesome, is a comfortable room to work in and is aesthetically pleasing with top-of-the-line equipment readily available,’ Heywood told Pro Audio Asia magazine (read full article here). The DFC Gemini not only provided Neve-quality sound, but was easily able to handle Knowing’s several hundred inputs, including raw and replacement dialogue, atmospheres, masses of effects and foley, plus music, all mixed in 5.1 format.
Other challenges included an unusually high proportion of original location dialogue, as Alex Proyas, who directed Knowing, is happy to forego some audio fidelity for the sake of a convincing performance. By contrast, Phil Heywood’s view is that if you lose the dialogue you lose the film. He therefore strung together a series of noise-reduction devices, plus ‘the Neve’s excellent inbuilt limiters that didn’t hit hard, but kept the transients under control’, so that he could keep the dialogue at the forefront without raising the noise floor too much. It worked a treat. ‘It’s amazing how much noise on the sync dialogue you can get away with in the final mix when everything else is in,’ commented Heywood, who, in true film-hero style, overcame all the obstacles to beat the clock and bring the mix in on time.
