Inside Track: Disney's Frozen (original) (raw)

The success of Disney's Frozen underlines the importance of music in film, whether it be as songs or soundtracks.

Two of the hottest releases of 2013 were the Disney animated musical Frozen, and its soundtrack. Loosely based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale The Snow Queen, the movie tells the story of princess Anna and her sister Elsa, who has the power to turn everything into ice and snow. Despite being released towards the end of November, the movie became the second highest-grossing animated film of the year after Despicable Me 2, and looks set to become Disney's highest-grossing animated movie ever. One of the movie's prime attractions is its Broadway-style songs, which explains the immense success of the soundtrack album. Frozen (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) spent several weeks at the top of the Billboard albums chart — where it remained at the time of writing — and reached number three in the UK album chart, with international sales exceeding one million.

The standard release of Frozen (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) contains 32 tracks. The first 10 are songs written by wife and husband Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez. The other 22 tracks consist of one wordless choral piece called 'Vuelie' composed by Norwegian-Sami musician Frode Fjellhiem and used as the film's title music, and 21 orchestral pieces written and arranged by movie composer Christophe Beck (one incorporating a reprise of 'Vuelie'). Nine of the Anderson-Lopez songs were arranged by Dave Metzger, and incorporate Robert Lopez's original piano ideas, rhythm section and an orchestra. One of these nine songs, 'Let It Go', sung by Broadway actress and singer Idina Menzel, who voiced Elsa in the movie, has also been released in an alternate version, sung by Demi Lovato, with a beefier arrangement and production by Emanuel Kiriakou and Andrew Goldstein that is more in line with today's pop music. Both versions of 'Let It Go' were released as singles, but the Broadway-style original proved more popular, reaching number 22 and 21 in the UK and the US charts while the Lovato version managed 56 and 38.

Leaving aside the Levato version of 'Let It Go' and Fjellhiem's 'Vuelie', the Frozen soundtrack consists of two very distinct sections, and each was recorded and mixed by a different engineer during different sessions. David Boucher took care of the nine songs, while Casey Stone captured Beck's orchestral score. Boucher is best known for his work as engineer and mixer with legendary producer Mitchell Froom. Growing up in Atlanta, Georgia, Boucher studied music engineering at the University of Miami and went on to cut his engineering teeth at various studios in New York before moving to Los Angeles in 1998, where he worked for three and a half years as Bob Clearmountain's assistant. He began his collaboration with Froom in 2001, and has since recorded and/or mixed every album Froom has produced. "Mitchell really believes in the engineer-producer partnership,” remarks Boucher, who in 2001 had faced the considerable challenge of taking over from Froom's previous long-time sidekick, the inimitable Tchad Blake. While mostly based in Froom's analogue studio, Boucher has also expanded into working independently, for example as engineer, mixer and producer for indie rock-violinist Andrew Bird.

In The Beginning

Boucher's involvement in the Hollywood film world is the result of his and Froom's association with Randy Newman, who wrote the score for the 2009 Disney movie The Princess And The Frog, which Froom produced and Boucher engineered and mixed. The quality of Boucher's engineering and mixing work, and also, apparently, his capacity for breaking the ice and getting singers to relax, resulted in return calls from Disney. One such call came in October 2012, asking whether Boucher was up for recording the songs the Anderson-Lopez duo were writing for a forthcoming Disney movie. It was the beginning of an 11-month off-and-on process, which culminated in full band and orchestra recording sessions and mixdown at the Warner Brothers Eastwood stage in Burbank. These 11 months began with Boucher recording vocals at Sunset Sound, and later tweaking and mixing the recordings in the box at his own home facility.

"The first thing I received were the song demos,” Boucher recalls, "with Bobby [Lopez] playing piano and singing the male vocals, and Kristen [Anderson-Lopez] singing the female vocal lines. Bobby works in Logic, and his demos came in as a stereo bounce of his piano and a stereo bounce of their vocals with effects. There was no click, because he doesn't think that music should be tied to a click. In some cases Bobby also included some sketches of the rhythm section. We gave a stereo bounce of the vocals and piano to the singers, so they could practise them, and then recorded their vocals at Sunset Sound to Bobby's piano recordings. These were the final vocals that you hear in the movie and on the soundtrack album. We used either Studio 2, which has a Fred Hill-modified Neve 8088 desk, or Studio 3, with the studio's custom API-De Mideo console. The singers would have Bobby's piano in their headphones, and I recorded Idina with a vintage Telefunken ELAM 251 and Kristen Bell [who voiced and sang Anna's parts] with a Neumann U48, while I used a [Neumann] U67 or a U47 for the male vocals. The female singers' mics went into my Little Labs Lmnopres mic pres and vintage Urei LA3A compressors, and for the guys I used Sunset Sound's API mic pres and the LA2A or LA3A. Whenever possible the vocals went into Pro Tools via the Apogee Symphony I/O, and if that wasn't there, the Avid I/Os clocked to an Apogee Big Ben.

"Following each vocal recording session, the vocal-piano recordings were sent as Pro Tools files to David Metzger, with the exception of the song 'Do You Want To Build A Snowman?', which was sent to Christophe Beck. David and Christophe then wrote their band and orchestral arrangements, and made MIDI/sample mock-ups of them, which they printed as audio stems. I would then create mixes of the vocal-piano recordings with the stems of the orchestral and band arrangement mock-ups, trying to make everything sound as close as possible to the finished article. If we could get enough emotional impact from the arrangement

...