Taking Broadway musicals to celluloid is always a tricky proposition, and the more successful they were on the Great White Way, the harder it can be to give them their own identity on screen. Director Bill Condon decided to accomplish that with a combination of a strong cast, including Eddie Murphy, Jamie Foxx and Danny Glover, and hit pop vocalists including Beyoncà© Knowles. That’s a lot of star power, but there’s a lot of music in this movie – 32 songs, including two new ones written specifically for this Paramount/DreamWorks production.

Watch the trailer, below, then read on.

Re-recording mixer Michael Minkler was an obvious choice for this gig. He’s a two-time Academy Award winner – one of them for Chicago – and he has a track record with major movie musicals, including Rent and A Chorus Line. Still, he says getting the music to the movie was a challenge this time.

“The music recording sessions had been going on for about a year before we started working on the film,” says Minkler, noting that Condon worked closely with hot young producer team the Underdogs to shape the music productions to work both for the movie and as standalone tracks for the soundtrack album. One way to accomplish that was to give Minkler and the others on the audio team as much flexibility as possible after the tracks left the recording studio and came to Todd-AO for post.

“We got 64 channels of music, broken into stems – vocals, drums, percussion, guitars, strings, brass, and so on – in stereo pairs, ” Minkler explains. “For instance, I’d have two sets of four-channel drum tracks, and I’d have the sax solos on their own tracks. The basic premise here is that the music producers are working in a stereo world, [but] the movie is working in a 5.1 world. I needed a lot of flexibility with the tracks to be able to adjust them to the picture edit. In the mix, I’ll push and shove the instruments around in terms of level and placement in the sound field [to fit] the way the dialog, sound effects and narrative of the picture moves. That’s always the challenge with musicals. On stage, the music and the movement are inseparable. On records and on screen, they have to suit their own purposes, yet also find a way to work together.”

One of the ways that takes place is in adjusting the music tracks to precisely fit nuances on the screen. Audio editors Randy Spendlove and Matt Sullivan created rough mixes of the songs for production playback on the set, using stems made up of a dozen or so stereo pairs. Then began a lengthy temp mixing regimen – six rounds in all – that saw music editor Paul Rabjohns tweak the tracks a little more each time in a Pro Tools HD rig. “A song might need to be extended significantly to cover a particular scene, so they would copy a passage and fly it in elsewhere,” says Rabjohns.

There were other types of fixes. In the scene featuring the song “Fake Your Way to the Top,” Eddie Murphy got a bit carried away and ad libbed an extra “Baby!” while doing his performance, one that wasn’t on the music tracks. “We found one on another song, copied it, flew it in and then squeezed it as needed to fit the picture and the dynamic,” Rabjohns says.

Once record mixer Manny Maroquin came aboard to do the final music mixes, the tweaks could get microscopic, using plug-ins such as Serato Pitch ‘n’ Tune for minute time compression and expansion applications. Antares Auto-Tune [www.antarestech.com], which is a staple in the recording studio, was used to fix pitch issues where the actors had sung an a capella part and Condon wanted the music score to fade up to meet them.

“Sync was a huge issue throughout this process,” says Rabjohns. One of the collateral problems stemming from that was adjusting vocals during the picture editing process. “Because the Avid video output is compressed, we couldn’t see the mouth movements on long shots as well as we could on close-ups,” Rabjohns explains. “But you certainly did notice them when you saw the high-definition playback. Keeping the mouth movements and the vocal in perfect sync is crucial to making the whole movie musical experience believable.”

“The picture, sound elements and music are all moving targets on musicals, and sync is the thing that brings them together,” agrees Minkler. “But even by the seventh and final mix pass, we found we were still dealing with sync issues.”

The solution was unique. They linked a Pro Tools system and a second Apple G5 running Gallery VirtualVTR [www.virtualvtr.com] using a Kona video card. “That let us have both the standard QuickTime movie digitized from the output of the AVID and the HD picture running in perfect sync at the same time,” Rabjohns says. “The picture on QuickTime is about 2 GB per reel. The HD picture is more like 20 GB per reel, so the difference is amazing. You then use the other tools to move the audio to fit the picture.”

When the edits got to the mixing stage, Minkler, teaming with Rabjohns and SFX-and-dialog editor Richard Yawn, worked from linked Pro Tools systems, each with about 6 TB of storage, through a Euphonix System 5 digital console. “The trick here is to fit all the pieces of the sound puzzle together – the music, dialog, sound effects,” he says. “I’ll listen to the two-track reference mixes that the Underdogs did, just to hear where their heads were at. But when it comes to putting the music against picture, the narrative become dominant. I might use frequency adjustments here and there to keep each element clean, but more often than not, the tools are placement, processing and level. At the same time, though, you still want to maintain the overall balance that the record has. It’s all a matter of small moves. For instance, if I see a singer make a particularly dramatic move on screen during a vocal, I might push the line up a dB. Or I might take some low end out of the vocal track. That’s the fine line with musicals. I did it with Chicago and Chorus Line and Rent, and I’ve been refining it a little more every time.”

The mix will sometimes see one song moving through several major transitions before it’s over. The opening scene, which takes place backstage after a talent show that connects the Supremes-like vocal trio with Murphy’s character, is one. It goes from dialog to Murphy teaching the girls a song to him grabbing a microphone as a curtain pulls away to reveal an auditorium filled with thousands of cheering fans – a fantasy transition that had to be seamless even as Minkler went from dialog to a single vocal to a full orchestra surrounded by dozens of sound effects and crowd noises. “That’s the balancing act in a nutshell,” he says. “It has to be both musical and cinematic.”

Processing can help. To keep each element singular yet ensemble, Minkler turns often to a music engineer’s standby: digital reverbs. He relies a lot on the Lexicon 480L and 960L and the TC Electronic TC6000, the latter two especially for multichannel applications. “The reverbs are key,” he says. “That’s where you can create space around each element. Music and dialog live in different world ‘ one lives in the recording studio and the other lives on a shooting stage. The ambience around them is like the glue. There’s a lot of tricks for putting the pieces together, and with musicals you often need to use every one of them.”