Reel

00:18 Monsters, Inc. · 2001 · Sound editorial

The Sully and Randall fight. Gary Rydstrom stopped the mix, decided the punches were not working, and sent me to cut new ones. These are those punches.

00:52 Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony · 2002 · Music editor

Abdullah Ibrahim at the piano under his own narration, then Radio Freedom, then a train carrying protesters singing for Mandela. I did every music edit on the picture and about three quarters of the sound effect edits. At 03:05, Hugh Masekela lets out a train whistle from a festival stage and a rider throws his leg out of a moving train doorway on the same frame. Those are two different pieces of film. I was nominated for Outstanding Individual Achievement in a Craft: Music and Sound at the 2003 News and Documentary Emmy Awards for this work. The film won.

03:13 Punch-Drunk Love · 2002 · Sound effects recording

I was the only sound effects recordist on the picture. What the production sound recordist captured on set is his. Everything else in the effects tracks is mine, and it is extensive.

Three of them are here. The supermarket freezer section is me opening and closing freezer doors at a market in San Rafael. The vertical blinds are the blinds in my apartment.

The bathroom he destroys was my session. The production sound recordist had caught distortion on set, so Coya Elliott and I went out with a demolition crew and a sledgehammer for more. She was senior to me and chose to assist rather than lead, which is why the recordist credit is mine alone. We took turns. I wrecked it while she recorded, then she swung and I recorded. Her captures were clean. Paul Thomas Anderson wanted the distortion. He approved all of it, and the two were mixed together.

Elsewhere in the picture, in the scene where he walks his date to her car, the truck is an Arco tanker. I recorded those at the fuel distribution facility in Richmond, California, where they load up for the gas stations, standing in the rain catching them as they went past. A lot of standing in the rain for one scene.

05:38 Minority Report · 2002 · Sound effects recording

The percussive booms that land after the studio logo, before the first image. Gary Rydstrom was designing the picture and sent me out for the source. Dee Selby and I went to the old Presidio Hospital in San Francisco while it was being torn down, put a contact mic on a concrete pillar, and recorded the wrecking ball hitting it. Four of them are in the film.

05:45 Robert Glasper Experiment: Live · 2018 · Re-recording mixer

"All Matter," with Bilal on vocals, from the North Sea Jazz Festival in Rotterdam, featuring the Metropole Orkest conducted by Vince Mendoza. I mixed the film, which was built from separate concerts recorded by other engineers: North Sea Jazz, the Shanghai Jazz Festival, the Troubadour, and Marcus Garvey Park in New York. Different rooms, different nights, different crews, and it had to play as one performance.

The tracks arrived in very different condition. Some locations gave me a full multitrack and some gave me almost nothing, and a lot of it was not clean. There were mics feeding back. Marcus Garvey Park was the worst of it. So before any mixing happened there was a long corrective pass: notching out the feedback, pulling the low-mid out of Lalah Hathaway's vocal, finding the right amount of compression and corrective EQ for B.Slade at the Troubadour. The orchestral pieces were the easy part.

Then it was delivered in 5.1, which nobody had planned for. None of it was recorded with surround in mind. That arrived late, as a wouldn't-it-be-great.

07:35 KTLA Grand Park and the Music Center's 4th of July Block Party: Home Edition · 2020 · Re-recording mixer

D Smoke and band, from the broadcast for Los Angeles.

08:06 KTLA Grand Park NYELA · 2021 · Re-recording mixer

Los Angeles New Year's Eve, the virtual edition. Steve Aoki's set, audio sweetening and the mix.

09:19 Innocence · 2022 · Sound design, sound editorial and the re-recording mix

A father and son in a car. They pass a parked police car, and it pulls out after them. Directed by Marcella Taylor.