
Los Angeles, CA (January 22, 2025)—Our recent Mix Presents Sound For Film: Awards Season all-day virtual event highlighted some of the most amazing work happening in motion picture sound right now. We spoke with 13 sound teams from some of the top films released in 2024; here’s one of the most notable moments and insights from the day:
Danny Sheehan, Supervising Sound Editor
“Ridley [Scott, director] would do his day’s recording and when the filming was done, I would then work with Stefan [Bucher, production sound mixer] and we would go get the crowd together, take them into the arena, take them onto the palace steps and just get a huge toolkit of reactions, jeers that were very specific. It was like we had the place to ourselves, weirdly.
Stephane would say, ‘The acoustics on this stage are amazing. Go to the Colosseum and get all of the reflections from here to get them going up some stairs. The set had a lovely rake, so it wasn’t just the foreground people that we were hearing.
We were able to hear the layers beyond that; we were able to capture those 600 voices each time we went for a take. We also did your traditional loop group crowd recordings, because with the bigger-scale crowd chanting something—like ‘Mercy!’ or ‘Kill!’ or ‘Live!’—it was difficult to sell those moments because there wasn’t clarity.
Matt [Collinge, re-recording mixer] was able to manipulate that during the mix to get that sweet spot of keeping the energy up, but also landing that storytelling moment with the audience.”