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Jonathan Wales immerses horror film audiences with Nugen technology

Re-recording mixer Jonathan Wales, who works both as a freelancer and for Warner Brothers Studios, didn’t set out to specialize in horror, but a thirty-year-long career path brought him there. “I tend to work on a lot of horror movies”, he says. “It wasn’t supposed to be that way, but when you start doing something well, people notice, and you end up doing more of it. It was an accidental career path, but it’s a fun genre to work in. Right now, there’s probably an even amount of time spent between original series content and horror films and shows.”

Among Wales’ most notable mixing projects are Netflix projects like “Haunting of Hill House”, “Midnight Mass” and “Fall of the House of Usher”. His feature-length film credits include “Insidious”, “The Red Door” and “The Black Phone.” When he’s not working on re-recording projects, Wales is also a scoring mixer and is credited with mixing the score for every Mike Flanagan project, from the first episode of “Haunting of Hill House” in 2018 forward.

Wales says he has also seen a change in the way directors and producers attack horror projects. “Over the past five to ten years, there has been an increasing trend towards mixing in Atmos as the primary format”, he explains. “That requires us to have solutions that handle a lot of detailed format conversions like upmixing and downmixing, while simultaneously managing level specs. That’s how I’ve come to grow my relationship with Nugen Audio.”

Wales credits the brand’s Halo Upmix as being one of his go-to tools. “It played a huge role on the ‘Fall of the House of Usher’”, he shares. “I use it on all sorts of audio elements, including things you wouldn’t expect - like individual stereo background files. Sometimes I like to deploy it just to see what happens. With music especially, there are always songs we try to make sound bigger. Nugen was also one of the first companies that provided a way to fully upmix beyond 5.1, into Atmos, in a way that makes sense.”

As many of Wales’ latest projects are for Netflix, keeping his projects to spec has become especially critical. “We use Nugen’s VisLM loudness meter as a sort of bible on level specs”, he says. “That plug-in is very important because it maintains a history of what you’ve been doing over the length of the program. So, if something isn’t quite in spec, you can find the exact placement of the problem and go directly to that section to make corrections. The results are reflected in real-time, so you can decipher if you’re making something better.”

Wales says Nugen Audio’s Halo Downmix is another of his go-to solutions. “Halo Upmix, Halo Downmix and VisLM - those three plug-ins are in every template I have. There is no scenario where I’m not using them”, he concludes.

(Photo: Nugen Audio)

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