The Hatch Awards, an annual celebration of Boston's best in advertising featured a number of Soundtrack and Finish winners. Soundtrack engineers Mike Secher, Brian McKeever, Brian Heidebrecht, and Howard Carle contributed to winning spots for McDonald's, Timberland, Fidelity, Truth, Stowe Mountain Resorts, Stanley Tools, Gametap and more. Finish's Toar Winter contributed his talents to award-winnng spots from McDonald's and Gametap.

Shine a Light on Soundtrack

If you like your music loud, you're gonna love Soundtrack's latest feature film project, Shine A Light, featuring the legendary rock n' roll band The Rolling Stones in concert during their 2006 "A Bigger Bang" world tour.

You're going to especially love the film if you're a fan of the acclaimed filmmaker Martin Scorsese, since this is his documentary reviewing the 40+ year career of the the Stones. Interspersed amongst the live concert footage is archival footage of the band dating back to the their early days in the 1960's. One favorite moment of everyone who worked on the film is of a then 24-year-old Mick Jagger explaining that he'll probably continue singing and touring with the Rolling Stones for another year or two before he moves on to something else!

Periodically, Scorsese turns his attention and expertise to music, one of his loves. In 2005 he reviewed the early career of Bob Dylan in a documentary called No Direction Home which was presented as part of the PBS American Masters series. In 2004 he executive produced a seven-part TV documentary on "The Blues", sharing the seven nights with other august filmmakers including Clint Eastwood and Wim Wenders. In 1976 he shot The Band's farewell concert, calling it The Last Waltz.

So what's the difference between mixing Martin Scorcese's latest rock n' roll documentary and, say, mixing Scorsese's Academy Award winning film The Departed? "Volume," is Soundtrack F/T's Tom Fleischman's somewhat impish answer. And Tom should know, since he mixed both films -- as well as The Aviator, Gangs of New York, The King Of Comedy, The Color Of Money, The Last Temptation Of Christ, Goodfellas, Cape Fear, Casino and Kundun for Marty over the years. A lover of rock n' roll himself, Tom had no problem embracing the loudness factor, but he did institute a policy of frequent breaks away from the volume to preserve the hearing of everyone on the mix stage. It's one thing to enjoy a 90 minute rock n' roll concert, it's quite another to work at high decibels 8 hours a day for 8 weeks.

Another person on the stage with Tom was the man who recorded the concert, Bob Clearmountain. Bob's career spans almost the same 40 years as the documentary, having begun as an intern at New York's Media Sound in 1972. His discography on allmusic.com is eight pages long with 60 projects per page. That's almost 500 projects including "Born In The USA" for Bruce Springstein as well as notable projects for Paul McCartney, The Who, David Bowie, Bryan Adams, Roxy Music, INXS, Bon Jovi, The Cure, The Clash, and the list goes on ... for eight pages.

But a movie is not an album project; Tom explains how the two men worked together: Bob provided the mix stage with a complete 5.1 surround mix of the music. He also provided seperate elements that could be used to accomodate the movie mixing style, which needs to follow the picture and point of view of the camera. For example, when the camera closes in on Keith Richards, the Stone's guitarist, Tom needed to be able to pull the guitar out of the mix a little. The challenge was balancing these two perspecitves: honoring the dynamicism of the camera while preserving the integral nature of the music.

Another major component of the sound was the live audience. The Beacon Theatre is a favorite music venue among New Yorkers because it only seats 3000 people. The intimacy makes for a great concert-going experience. The audience provides a great deal of the excitement in the film, especially on iconoclastic songs like "Brown Sugar" where everyone sings along. To give Tom the control he needed in balancing the music with the audience, a second group of fortunate fans were brought into a studio in LA to watch the concert and have their reactions recorded -- a two hundred person ADR/loop group if you will.

In a few weeks Tom, Martin and Bob along with supervising sound editor, Philip Stockton, music editor Tass Filipo, dialog editor Fred Rosenberg and film editor David Tedeschi will be reconvening on Stage B for the home DVD version of the film. At that time they'll mix on bookshelf size, near-field speakers to get the sound scaled down to living room dimesions. But like we said at the top of the article, if you like your music loud, you'll want to see this on the big screen with BIG SPEAKERS.

A Note from Rob
Both in Boston and NY, we've always tried to pass along the lessons learned from one Soundtrack Group company to another, making your experience with us that much better. We're upping the ante these days, learning to share not only expertise but also combining people and tasks in ways never before considered. For companies like ours, that means keeping the production elements at your fingertips for immediate, real time adjustments.