Supervising sound editor Geoffrey Rubay has worked at Soundelux in Hollywood for the past 10 years. “Audio for feature films is our main thrust, and indie films are an important part of that business,” he told me.

His latest project is Anvil: the Story of Anvil, a rockumentary about the famed ‘80s metal band that presented Rubay with several challenges. “It was shot documentary style, so the sound was recorded on location ─ often in bad conditions ─ and sometimes the footage isn’t what you’d typically use to tell the story, as it was so rough,” he noted. “So often it was about restoration. And as it covers over two decades, we had to deal with material that ran the gamut from old VHS video and old cable access footage to beautiful HD footage shot two years ago in Japan. And the audio quality also ran the gamut.”

So how did Rubay pull all the disparate threads together? “First, we gathered audio from the best sources we could find – and often that’d be what existed inside the Avid edit we got,” he explained to me. “We weren’t going to find a better master than that. In some cases, we went back to old recordings and CDs, or back to the original camera sound that was shot for the documentary recently, so it was a real amalgam. The two biggest musical pieces ─ which bookend the film ─ feature a song titled, Metal on Metal, and the best recording we had existed only as a stereo mix on a laser disc that was put together after a big concert in Japan. It wasn’t very good.”

To compensate, Rubay did “a lot of work” on the track at the start of the film to make it sound “really big.” For the second version used later in the film, the band added some instrumentation to beef it up. “We recorded the band in the studio ─ playing along with themselves ─ to create a heightened reality,” he reported.

Rubay used his standard Pro Tools HD3 Accel system to edit and then pre-mix the show. Then he did the final mix at Todd-AO ─ a sister company of Soundelux ─ on Stage 7 using another Pro Tools HD Accel system. “Stage 7 is a great room to mix a feature,” he added, “and it’s a great set up.”

Rubay also made extensive use of the Izotope plug-in, a noise reduction suite. “They make a hum [and] broadband noise, and de-clicking applications,” he said. “They also have a ‘de-clipper,’ which is great for removing distortion or clipping artifacts from sound. We had a lot of that, so that was very useful.” Another useful tool he used was the Altiverb plug-in by Audio Ease. Waves plug-ins were used extensively on the film. “I really like their Renaissance equalizer and Renaissance compressor,” he told me. “That’s my favorite combination for music jobs.”

The whole project took Rubay some six weeks to complete, “although we had a few gaps,” he summed up. “The mix took five days, just prior to Sundance where the film premiered, and we just recently did a few updates preparing it for its final release.”

CONTACTS:

Avid
www.avid.com

Audio Ease
www.audioease.com

Soundelux
www.soundelux.com

Todd-AO
www.todd-ao.com