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AMS Neve DFC Helps out ‘Chicago’

An AMS Neve DFC provided automation and sound-processing tools on the Bob Fosse 1970s-era musical Chicago. Michael Minkler (Academy Award winner for Black

An AMS Neve DFC provided automation and sound-processing tools on the Bob Fosse 1970s-era musical Chicago.

Michael Minkler (Academy Award winner for Black Hawk Down) served as re-recording mixer on the film with Dominick Tavella using a 48-fader Neve DFC at Sound One in New York. Minkler praised the performance of the DFC on the movie, which was the first film he had mixed on the console in its entirety. “The DFC did a great job,” he said. “We were able to jump around from mix to mix, reel to reel and snapshot to snapshot with relative ease.”

Minkler also found the dip filters particularly valuable on such a complex project. “I needed to have multiple dip filters going so that I could get in and remove noises without altering the actors’ voices when singing,” Minkler said. “And the DFC’s dip filters performed very well.”

Minkler also had to bring together the master edit, Foley, ADR, sound effects, dialog, score and songs, as well as accommodate a few editorial changes late in the mix, such as the removal of the “Class” song and dance sequence.

“The entire picture was taken from the perspective of the character Roxie, ” Minkler said. “But [directory] Rob Marshall created the landscape. Here you have a 1930s-era play with 1970s music that wants to look and feel contemporary. So the job for us became finding a way of effectively weaving these three eras together. We move between reality and fantasy, from music to dialog, and all of this had to be assembled in such a matter that you don’t really notice that you’re in one place or the other. You never feel manipulated by the movie; you just sit back and go for the ride. It’s seamless. And the DFC helped make that possible.”

For more on the AMS Neve, visit www.ams-neve.com.

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