- Mac, when we spoke earlier, you talked about the sound
and I kind of equated that--
I love when you watch a TV commercial, like,
look at this picture on this TV, you gotta buy this TV,
and you're looking through your TV going,
"Oh, yeah, that's great."
[laughing]
How do you capture sound, like this, it's all about sound
with drum and bugle corps, so you're a sound guy
and you talked about what a challenge that was.
So tell us about that.
- It's a big-time challenge if you think of
an ensemble that has 150 members.
- With an indie budget.
- True. - Right.
- 150 members in this group: brass, percussion,
color guard, and they're on a stage that's
100 yards wide and they're not standing still.
In that last clip, they were doing a standstill performance,
but for the most part, they're doing a show
where they're moving at high velocity
from one end to the other and back and forth.
So that's really difficult to capture sonically.
You see these performances in person
and it makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up
'cause it's this wall of sound with extreme dynamics.
You know, symphony orchestra plays very quietly
and very loudly, very dynamic,
so my co-producer, John JT Torrijos,
he actually works with me at Skywalker Sound.
He pulled me aside.
This was probably 2009 into a small home theater room
and said, "I just want to play this for you."
He knew my drum corps background and he played
a performance that he recorded in Northern California
of the Blue Devils and Santa Clara Vanguard,
which are competing groups of Madison Scouts
and I was blown away by the clarity
and how well he captured sonically these performances
and I was like, "How'd you do it?"
He told me and so I talked to Tom, who is my co-director
on this film, and told him that I wish more people
could hear the clarity of these kinds of recordings
'cause the typical fan just kind of goes,
"Oh, it never sounds like it does live,"
but this is the closest I'd ever heard,
so JT, in a large part, was an inspiration to make the film
'cause we decided that's gotta be a key part
of making the film is we wanna capture and reproduce
these wonderful, amazing wall-of-sound performances.
- Yeah, you told me earlier that it had never
been captured like that before, is that true?
- It's true, yeah.
I mean, DCI, the league, does their own recordings
and they do a good job, but this was sort of like
one step closer, and it really comes down to
the mic placement and then also in post-production
we did a lot of work mixing the different channels
and really trying to make it sounds like it sounds like
when you're there sitting right in the middle
on the 50-yard line.