PARAGON HOSTS NICOLE KIDMAN FOR ADR SESSIONS
Paragon's Fred Paragano served as ADR mixer on the project, and says the studio provided a week of recording in July, with a steady stream of pick-up sessions running into late October.
Two years ago, Paragon invested in a Solid State Logic C300 mixing console, and the facility's Studio B has been permanently set up to host ADR sessions, with a projection screen in the control room and an LCD in its large booth. Kidman was recorded using a Neumann KMR 81i shotgun mic, and VoiceQ was used for cueing.
"We love it," says Paragano of the ADR application. "It's great. It cues the talent with the lines of dialogue - anything you want to do for an ADR session. You can change the timing structure, how the beeps and pops work, how fast the text scrolls…"
The challenge of a session like this, says Paragano, is managing the different mixes: one mix that feeds Kidman, one for the control room, and one for the uplink to the Big Bang Sound (www.bigbangsound.com.au) crew in Sydney. "I have to provide three separate mixes - and everyone wants to hear something different, so it's a lot to manage."
In some cases, the visuals were brought to the studio in the form of H.264 files, from Australia, by ADR supervisor by Nick Breslin, who had the content encrypted on a drive. It would then be uploaded to Paragon's SAN. Other times, the visuals were acquired through DigiDelivery.
The visuals, says Paragano, "have the original production dialogue and some broken out sound effects, and that is all being managed through the console."
The studio records to Pro Tools, and Paragano says he keeps it real clean. "I'm the kind of person who likes to not put anything in the chain. It's very clean. I'm running into a mic-pre and into the system from there, but I'm not adding any compressors or anything. I don't want to tie anybody's hands."
Using Source-Connect allowed the team in Tennessee to connect with the Big Bang crew in Sydney. In addition to providing a communication link, the tool also gave the team at Paragon transport control over decks in Australia. The US team also used Dolby fax, and even Skype to allow the Sydney crew and director Baz Luhrmann to view Kidman's in-studio performance.
Wayne Pashley was supervising sound editor for Big Bang. In addition to Paragano, the Paragon team included recordist Brian Calhoon and assistant Andrew Mayer. Final files were delivered via DigiDelivery.