MIXING RUNNING AMERICA

A sound mixer, a director, and an editor walk into a dark room, the director says to the sound mixer...

Two weeks of composing and sound mixing at Ante Up studios are completed on Running America.  Michael Seifert and company put together an amazing original score that I couldn't be happier with.  It's rare that you can become unwedded to the temp music you've seen up against a scene so many times, but after a couple of rounds with Michael's music in there, I couldn't even remember what we had slugged in as temp.  The alt-folk sound includes steel pedal guitar, banjo, harmonica, various acoustic guitars - it really captures what I was going for in terms of reinforcing the look and feel of the film.

Sitting in a dark room listening to scenes over and over, I began to jokingly suffer from "ear fatigue" during the mix - listening to trucks whooshing, distant thunder claps, ambient RV noise, and various other sounds over and over.  Pete Horner came in from Zoetrope in San Francisco to do the mix and had only the kind of ideas a good sound mixer has - adding layers to the film that otherwise wouldn't happen without his ears.  We had kind of gotten used to the fact that this was a movie shot, well, on the side of a road for 53 days, but in the mix we realized it again - and spent a good amount of time both adding in and taking out the accompanying sounds.  We reduced distractions (the ever-present hum of the RVs which our runners stayed in) but we also added layers of sound, giving us the visceral sense that the occasional 18-wheelers that brushed past were a very real danger (and they certainly were).

We also were aware of the most prescient sound for a runner - that of each footstep landing against the ground.  This was an important element, and we worked hard to make sure this is a, ahem, running theme throughout the film.

Now to a week of color correction, where we make an already gorgeous film even more gorgeous...