‘Pitch Perfect 2’ Re-Recording Mixer Reveals Some Details About His Work

Pitch Perfect 2 sound mixer Kevin O’Connel says that he was extremely fascinated by the prospect of working with Elizabeth Banks for her directorial debut, and the results completely met all his expectations. He has enough background in the industry to have something to compare it with: before working on Pitch Perfect 2, Kevin O’Connel has already been an Oscar nominee some twenty times – yet he says that Elizabeth Banks is one of the sharpest directors he ever had an honor to work with.

In the sequel to extremely popular first movie, a capella group The Bellas enters an incredibly fierce international competition, and O’Connel had to put special effort into making the sound of each contestant special and unique. Hollywood Reporter reveals some details about the process.

“The mix involved making the competing German team sound ‘big and bold, but then make The Bellas sound even better. The songs were very complicated.’ All tracks were kept separate, about 98 channels per song, to give them as much flexibility as possible during the final mix. ‘A challenge was to make it feel real, particularly when the dialogue would go right into a song. We took great effort to try to achieve that,’ O’Connell says.”

The sequel by Elizabeth Banks unexpectedly turned out to be a box office success, despite getting rather middling critical scores – however, the same could have been said about the first movie, which nobody expected to be a success, either. According to the Inquisitr, the movie excelled not only in theaters.

“The soundtrack from the original Pitch Perfect peaked at a respectable No. 3 on the Billboard 200 chart. Pitch Perfect 2‘s soundtrack has already overtaken that. Pitch Perfect 2 debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 album chart.”

Although some critics panned the sequel for the plot, which is basically recycled from the original movie, for lack of cohesion, for poor performances of some actors, even the lead actress Anna Kendrick, it still seems that it gives viewers something they want. Previously, it was speculated that the third movie in the series may be possible if the sequel at least repeats the success of the original, and now it seems that these speculations are destined to become reality. Although there was no confirmation from film creators, Pitch Perfect 3 seems more than a distinct possibility.