PNYA Members Feature Prominently at 2021 Tribeca Film Festival
Alchemy Post Sound, Company 3, Goldcrest Post, HARBOR, Mechanism Digital and Parabolic are among the member companies that helped prepare films for screening at this year’s in-person and online festival.
The Tribeca Film Festival
is set to make a triumphant return for its 20th year with mostly in-person screenings around New York City beginning June 9. Select films will also be available nationwide through the new online platform, Tribeca at Home.
As always,
many of the features, documentaries and shorts in the fest were produced and post-produced in New York. Post New York Alliance (PNYA) member companies and individual professionals contributed to more than a dozen films competing in this year’s
festival, providing services including sound and picture editorial, color grading and finishing, sound design and mixing, ADR casting and recording, visual effects and more.
In the Heights
Several PNYA members were part of the post-production team for In the Heights, director John Chu’s highly anticipated screen adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony Award-winning musical. Company 3 provided editorial space and gear to editor Myron Kerstein and his crew. The facility also handled dailies (Dustin Wadsworth, dallies colorist), final color (Stephen Nakamura, digital intermediate colorist) and editorial finishing (Gina Kalim, finishing colorist).
Sound editorial and mixing was accomplished at Parabolic by a team led by Supervising Sound Editor/Re-Recording Mixer Lewis Goldstein. Alchemy Post Sound provided Foley sound via Foley Artists Leslie Bloome and Joanna Fang, Foley Mixers Ryan Collison and Connor Nagy, Foley Supervising Editor Nick Seaman and Foley Editor Laura Heinzinger.
ADR voice casting was done by Dann Fink and Bruce Winant, who brought together some sixty Dominican and Puerto Rican actors to deliver authentic voice performances. “We went to the actual streets of Washington Heights, where the film takes place, to find actors who put their hearts and spirits into the ADR sessions,” Fink says.
Catch the Fair One
Alchemy Post Sound and Mechanism Digital contributed their talents to Catch the Fair One, a revenge thriller from writer/director Josef Kubota Wladyka, which is making its world premiere as part of Tribeca’s U.S. Narrative Competition. Alchemy Post Sound provided Foley Sound (for Supervising Sound Editor David Forshee) and Mechanism was visual effects provider.
Alchemy Post Sound also provided Foley sound for False Positive (Leslie Shatz, supervising sound editor) Ilana Glazer’s film about a couple whose relationship is in crisis after visiting a fertility specialist, premiering in the Spotlight Narrative track.
Goldcrest Post provided color grading (Nat Jencks, colorist) for Italian Studies, writer director Adam Leon’s tale of a mysterious woman and a teenager on an adventure in Manhattan, making its world premiere in Spotlight Narrative.
Also screening in Spotlight is director Josh Ruben’s Werewolves Within, a “video game-inspired horror-comedy” about a forest ranger trapped by a snowstorm in a Vermont Inn. Company 3 provided finishing services (Jaime O’Bradovich, colorist; Josh Perault, finishing editor) and Mechanism Digital provided visual effects.
False Positive Werewolves Within
“We’re very proud to have two films in this year’s festival,” says Mechanism Digital President and Visual Effects Supervisor Lucien Harriot. “Our NYC studio supervised on-set and designed and executed the visual effects for both. Catch the Fair One had its fair share of gun play muzzle flashes and blood splatters. Werewolves Within required the addition of snow to hundreds of shots as the warm winter didn’t cooperate with the production. The werewolf required transformational effects and wire removal to give it the ability to run across walls.”
Harbor provided finishing services for Viewpoints entry Accepted, director Dan Chen’s feature documentary about the controversial teaching methods practiced at a small Louisiana prep school.
Company 3 provided color grading services (Kath Raisch, colorist; Matthew Cooke, creative editor) for Viewpoints documentary The Death of My Two Fathers for director Sol Guy and creative editor Matthew Cooke.
Accepted The Death of My Two Fathers
Harbor provided sound and picture finishing for Paper and Glue (Movies Plus). The film centers on a French visual artist known as JR whose large-scale mural portraits adorn streets from Paris to Rio.
Paper and Glue Tigre Gente
Goldcrest Post provided color grading for Tigre Gente (Steve Beganyi, colorist) which will make its premiers via Tribeca at Home. From director Elizabeth Unger, the film centers on a Bolivian park ranger and a young Chinese journalist who go undercover to investigate a deadly jaguar trade sweeping South America.
Goldcrest also provided color grading services that were invited back to Tribeca after having their planned 2020 premieres canceled due to the covid pandemic. They include director Jessica Earnshaw’s Jacinta (Marcy Robinson, colorist), director Deirdre Fishel’s Woman in Blue (Evan Anthony, colorist) and director Marc Levin’s I Promise (Ken Sirulnick, colorist). Company 3 also provided color grading for the short film No Longer Suitable for Use.
Light Iron, the post-production creative services division of Panavision, has welcomed colorist Sam Daley to its industry-leading roster of creative talent. Daley joins the team
as a senior colorist and will work out of the company’s New York facility, supporting clients with both feature and episodic projects.
Daley brings more than 20 years of experience in the New York post-production community, joining Light Iron from Company 3. After getting a start in commercial dailies at DuArt, he developed his skills at Tape House and PostWorks before
joining Technicolor. There, he graded dailies on some of the biggest New York productions at the time. Encouraged by the cinematographers with whom he partnered as a dailies colorist, he transitioned into final color.
Last March, sound and picture finishing facility Buttons implemented a hybrid audio and remote-controlled recording workflow. That allowed the company to continue business with minimal staff. It employed smart locks to give talent and client
access to the facility, and equipped each of its seven rooms with video cameras and two-way communication to meet safety standards including those mandated by SAG. As a result, it has experienced no covid activity to date.
Project work completed at the facility during this time included ADR for The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard (with Samuel L Jackson), Edoardo Vitaletti’s The Last Thing Mary Saw and Edith Hagigi’s Bleeker. They also recorded Kevin Bacon for EE, Tim Gunn for Amazon and Cecily Strong for Netflix Animation and Amazon Studios. All talent
came to facility while engineering was hybrid.
A graduate of Berklee College of Music, with a dual degree in Production
and Engineering and Music Synthesis, Billia has been an Adjunct Professor teaching audio post at NYU’s Graduate Film program for the past seven years. While he started out in the commercial world, features and documentaries were his true calling,
and opening Rumble Audio allowed him to fine-tune his work ethic and creative approach. Over the years, he’s cultivated collaborative partnerships with such esteemed filmmakers as Desiree Akhavan, Andrew Ahn, Aaron Katz, Michael Angelo Covino,
Sebastian Silva, Jem Cohen, Jill Magid, Alex Camilleri and Kate McKinnon. In that time, Ryan has also worked on acclaimed films produced by Terrence Malick, Laura Poitras, and Ramin Bahrani.
“Steve is one of the industry’s top documentary colorists,” says Goldcrest Post managing
director Domenic Rom. “He brings passion to the work as well as technical know-how and experience. We’re excited to have him join our growing team.”