New York, NY (February 27, 2024)―Re-recording mixer Jonathan Wales, who has carved out a niche for himself in horror projects during a 30-year career, is increasingly seeing filmmakers take advantage of the potential to scare viewers using Dolby Atmos.
Wales says he has also seen a change in the way directors and producers attack horror projects. “Over the past five to 10 years, there has been an increasing trend towards mixing in Atmos as the primary format,” he noted. “That requires us to have solutions that handle a lot of detailed format conversions like upmixing and downmixing, while simultaneously managing level specs.”
Wales credits Nugen Audio’s Halo Upmix as being one of his go-to tools. “It sounds natural, and you can control what it’s doing in a very understandable way,” he said. “It’s one thing to be able to make tweaks in a plug-in, it’s quite another to have them be predictable and do what you expect. That’s one great benefit of Nugen plug-ins. Another thing I like about Halo Upmix is that it has relatively low latency. Some upmixing plug-ins have incredible processing delays and that’s not very useful. People in my line of work can’t use extremely high-latency plug-ins while working in real-time.”
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Among Wales’ most notable mixing projects are Netflix titles like Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass and Fall of the House of Usher. His feature-length film credits include Insidious, The Red Door and The Black Phone. When he’s not working on re-recording projects, Wales is also a scoring mixer and is credited with mixing the score for every Mike Flanagan project, from the first episode of Haunting of Hill House in 2018, forward.
Halo Upmix has become a staple on Wales’ scoring work as well. “It played a huge role on Fall of the House of Usher,” he reports. “I use it on all sorts of audio elements, including things you wouldn’t expect—like individual stereo background files. Sometimes I like to deploy it just to see what happens. With music especially, there are always songs we try to make sound bigger.”
