In Contention

Tag: John Midgley

  • On the sound of ‘The King’s Speech’

    In today’s Oscar Guide, I addressed one of the biggest surprises of this year’s slate of below-the-line Oscar nominees: “The King’s Speech” being recognized for Best Sound Mixing. It’s easily attributable to sweeping love for the film, but I tried to give some context for why sound is actually integral to the experience of the film in some way.

    Today, the good folks at SoundWorks Collection, in lieu of one of their custom profiles on the sonic construction of the film, have offered up a dense interview with production sound mixer John Midgley. Midgley has worked on films such as “Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace,” “Hotel Rwanda” and “Children of Men,” and in the interview, he actually touches on some of the points I made in the piece.

    Head on over to SoundWorks Collection to check out the full interview — a hefty 30 minutes’ worth — or watch the embed after the jump. It provides a lot of insight into a process that, even if it doesn’t appear award-worthy to the layman, deserves a great deal of respect nevertheless.

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  • OSCAR GUIDE: Best Sound Mixing

    I feel like we’ve done a pretty decent job of educating some of our readership on the difference between Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing over the last five years here at In Contention. It struck me that we haven’t really covered it in a focused way this season, and the Oscar Guide seems as good a place as any to recap.

    Sound editing, which we covered Friday, concerns the manifestation of artificial sound effects and the overall manipulation of the sonic identity of a film. Sound mixing concerns the balance of those various elements, in addition to music and dialogue, as well as the on-the-set maintenance of production audio. This year’s slate was an eyebrow-raising one to say the least.

    The nominees are:

    “Inception” (Lora Hirschberg, Gary A. Rizzo and Ed Novick)
    “The King’s Speech” (Paul Hamblin, Martin Jensen and John Midgley)
    “Salt” (Jeffrey J. Haboush, Greg P. Russell, Scott Millan and William Sarokin)
    “The Social Network” (Ren Klyce, David Parker, Michael Semanick and Mark Weingarten)
    “True Grit” (Skip Lievsay, Craig Berkey, Greg Orloff and Peter F. Kurland)

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