GearBox is obviously no stranger to young, hip, tech-savvy, Pro Tools-owning, talented customers with serious reputations. That said, they are most often to be found in the music industry.

Mike Prestwood-Smith meets all of the above criteria but his enviable track record is in film and television. He bought his first Apple Power Mac based Pro Tools|24 Mix system from GearBox three years ago and has since upgraded to Pro Tools|HD.

Prestwood-Smith says he bought his Pro Tools system for one reason: dialogue mixing. "I bought a Pro Tools system a few years ago and started using plug-ins and automation to mix dialogues, and have never looked back. Almost every piece of sync sound goes through my Pro Tools dialogue chain.

"The Waves plug-ins are quite spectacular for dialogue mixing, particularly de-essing and background noise removal. The Waves C4 is the best processor ever made for dialogue mixing. Full stop." And no, he isn't an official endorsee.

Although he is now technically freelance, the place you are most likely to encounter Prestwood-Smith professionally is De Lane Lea's Theatre One, the largest dubbing theatre in the west end of London.

Having recently co-mixed Anthony Minghella's Cold Mountain alongside film industry legend Walter Murch and now earmarked for the next Harry Potter film, Prestwood-Smith is fast gaining a reputation in the industry, as one of the best film sound mixers the UK has to offer.

You could also say that Prestwood-Smith is a 'people person'. In addition to finding the time to answer our questions, he is keen to make sure that Matt Gough, his co-mixer on Cold Mountain gets a mention.

In fact, Prestwood-Smith references his perspective on the role of re-recording mixer to needs and opinions of the people in the team.

"Strictly speaking, a re-recording mixer does exactly what the name implies," Prestwood-Smith offers. "They re-record sound from one medium to another."

Prestwood-Smith goes so far as to suggest that this "sounds easy", before qualifying it with, "but the problem comes when you have hundreds of sounds to balance together, dialogue, ADR, Foley, FX and music - and loads of opinions about how those sounds should be mixed."

"A mixer must tread a fine line between technician on the one hand and diplomat on the other, sifting through the barrage of opinions and politics that often accompany a film whilst at the same time making the balance sound audible, clear and with a bit of luck, exciting," he says. "I think the roles are pretty much 50/50."

Mixing and writing music from a "tender age", Prestwood-Smith was in his late teens when he went to New York to study studio electronics, synthesiser programming and music theory.

"When I came back to England I was lucky enough to get a job as a runner at John Wood Studios," Prestwood-Smith recalls. "At the time John Wood was mixing around 50 per cent of all TV commercials and was a great place to learn about sound mixing.

"I worked in projection, and a year in the transfer bay, before becoming an assistant mixer in their state-of-the-art 8-track video mixing room," he explains. "We were doing a programme called The Home Cookery Club and I found myself donning a pinny and a pair of headphones doing ridiculously fast Foley recording when it struck me that we could use a sampler and do it in half the time," says Prestwood-Smith. "After a little persuasion, John Wood got hold of an Emulator II and we sampled all the pots and pans and boiling loops - and did indeed do the show in half the time."

So impressed was Wood that he bought the pinnacle of samplers at the time, a Synclavier. This became Prestwood-Smith's "baby" for the next few years while he track-layed and mixed hundreds of commercials with the system before moving to facility house Goldcrest.

"At the time, Andy Kennedy and I were the only madmen spoddy enough to know the machine backwards and became the ones sound editors came to when they had a tricky bit of sound design to conjure up," Prestwood-Smith notes. "In 1997, I had a call from Adrian Rhodes to come and assist him as co-mixer on the Avengers at De Lane Lea, which was a job I could not refuse. I've been at De Lane Lea ever since."

"Mixing sound to picture is not as different to music mixing as most people may think," says Prestwood-Smith. "The basics like balance, EQ, reverb etc are identical. The picture becomes a focus for the way things sound and in that way, it is perhaps more literal and less cerebral than music mixing but there's still a lot of creative fun to be had. Getting a load of tracks and making a mute scene have an atmosphere and a life of its own can be completely consuming."

So how was it working with Walter Murch, famous for his back-to-basics approach to sound mixing? "Walter is an absolute legend and was fascinating to work with," says Prestwood-Smith. "I have heard they call him The Cue Butcher because of the way he re-works music cues at the final mix and it's true that he has a no-nonsense approach to sound.

"He uses his ears to get the sound he wants, rather than getting bogged down in too much technical stuff. Having said that, he is a perfectionist and will tweak and tweak as long as any one I know. In many ways, I would like to think I am similar and we would often find ourselves making the same notes when we reviewed a reel."

"I think I may be more a little more literate with new technology and as a consequence rely more heavily on the technology but I like his way and plan to adopt a little more of it. Having said that he is the Obi Wan Kenobi of sound and my Jedi training is still not complete," Prestwood-Smith offers.

"There were a lot of people around during the mix," he says of the multiple film sound engineers present in the dubbing theatre. "Sometimes I would turn around and see 15 people sat behind us, attentively conjuring up hoops for us to jump through. Having said that everyone had their role. Because of the nature of a big-budget film, options have to be kept open for as long as possible. Dialogue gets replaced, pictures re-cut, music re-scored – right up to the last minute – and a veritable army of people are required just to keep a handle on all these variables. It's just the way things have got now. The technology has allowed sound to remain fluid throughout a mix and on something of this scale that means lots of brains to keep the pipes from bursting."

"Although there was a lot of music, the balance of music dialogue and FX was pretty straight forward, with the exception of reel one and the battle scene," Prestwood-Smith reveals. "FX and dialogue had to be heavily shaped around a big cue that sliced its way through most of the second half of the battle. Each sound had to find its own EQ and placement in order is make it through and a lot of time was spent pre-mixing FX very wide in order to have control over them on the final mix.

"I think the pre-mix we made for reel one FX and Foley ended up being about 112 tracks wide," Prestwood-Smith recalls. "It meant that the illusion of a huge battle could be maintained while the picture focused pretty much on two characters and their experiences during that battle.

"The other main difference in music for the film was having the tracks split as wide as they were," he explains. "Woodwind, brass, strings and percussion were all recorded separately and presented as LCR tracks on the final. This meant that a lot of Murch-type tweaking could take place and cues could be reworked and scenes effectively re-scored when necessary. The Harrison desk we mixed on had every input used on reel one, which I think was a first."

But the dubbing theatre has more to offer than a very large desk, as Prestwood-Smith explains. "Studio One at De Lane Lea is a fantastic room. Having a room that size in the centre of town makes it quite unique. De Lane Lea keeps it very well maintained. I think when the new AMS Neve DFC mixing console and Pro Tools|HD Accel systems go in later this month it will be, in my opinion, the best place to mix sound for film in the UK."

And does Prestwood-Smith have a message for GearBox? "Yes you're the best ever audio/video equipment supply people on the planet. Anything else you'd like me to say will cost ya!"

January 2004 sees Prestwood-Smith mixing Jean-Jacques Annaud's Two Brothers – a "beautiful-looking film about two tigers that get split apart only to be pitted against one another" – closely followed by work on Harry Potter 3.

For further information please visit:
Cold Mountain
De Lane Lea