Girl In Progress opened last weekend in US theaters.
The film was directed by Patricia Riggen and stars Eva Mendes, Patricia Arquette and newcomer Cierra Ramirez.
I was hired by Post Modern Sound as the Supervising Sound Editor and Re-recording Mixer on the film.
As a dramatic comedy, the sound work wasn’t overly complicated, but the film did offer several challenges due to several scenes having fairly noisy production dialogue, a large amount of source music material, and some complicated chaotic moments.
Patricia Riggen was very in tune to the sound scape of the film requesting alot of detail and options in the sound editorial elements as well as having the sound design give a feeling of place and character emotion.
There was one scene in particular where everything goes wrong at the Crab Shack cafe while Grace is acting as interim manager. At the same time, the married man whom she is having an affair with, calls her to break things off. The sound of the chaos at the cafe slowly melts away as she realizes that she is being dumped, and crashes back in when he hangs up. The sound team had done a temp version of this scene during the picture cut to help establish the chaos during the picture edit process. This is something I always encourage as part of the process of post; to begin sound work before picture lock, that way the picture and sound can evolve together. It occasionally happens on projects I work on, and it always creates a greater collaboration between sound and picture.
The mix took place at Post Modern Sound in Vancouver, over 6 days plus 1 day for Printmastering. Greg Stewart mixed Dialogue and Music and I mixed SFX. I edited the SFX, along with sound editor James Wallace, so it made sense for me to mix in the SFX chair on this film. Greg and I mixed on the Euphonics System 5. My session had 10 hard SFX mono tracks, 12 stereo SFX tracks, 4 x 5.1 Signature Sound & Sound Design tracks, 20 Background Ambiance tracks which were premixed into 2 x 5.0 sets, as well as 12 Foley tracks. I also ran a Digidesign Command 8 to do some virtual mixing on the original elements, especially on my premixed Ambiances.
Click here to view the trailer for Girl In Progress.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80X5mV1Qmss
Synopsis: As single mom Grace (Eva Mendes) juggles work, bills, and her affair with a married doctor, her daughter, Ansiedad (Cierra Ramirez), plots a shortcut to adulthood after finding inspiration in the coming-of-age stories she’s reading for school.