C.R.A.Z.Y.

C.R.A.Z.Y. is a very significant film for me.  Jean-Marc Vallée has a deep understanding of the film process in all the film departments. Sound and music always play a crucial role in his films.

Slow motion, flairs, rack focus, short depth of field, speed ramping and stills enrich the film and give it a beat. Sound develops its own language interacting with all these narrative and editing elements.

Working with source music has many advantages.  One of them is that I work the sound design hearing the real music during the editing process, not late during final mix, which is usually what happens.  Let the music influence the sound and the sound influence the music. For the wedding scene, by example, when Zac goes on the dance floor and starts dancing, I slowed down progressively the pitch of the Cure’s 10:15 Saturday Night to an extremely low frequency pulse, to almost silence, in order to follow the character’s emotion, and than, a hit on the guitar back to reality with the music at normal speed.  I like these moments. We tweek them for hours until they just feel right… to our taste.

As a bonus for those who found this site, here are 2 tracks of the Christmas songs from Les Petits Chanteurs du Mont-Royal that were recorded for the film.

When we get excited in the making of a film and we put all our energy, expertise and imagination into achieving a specific goal it can become something very unique, special and strong.   C.R.A.Z.Y. is a good example of this.  The result was a great team effort!

There are a lot of sound design moments in the film.  For those of you who are interested, I did a commentary track on the first DVD release of the film talking about sound design for the film.  French version only!

Movie Trailer:

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