Sound Lounge partner and mixer Tom Jucarone is currently short-listed in the Audio Mixing category of the annual AICP Post Awards competition. His nomination comes for The Most Vicious Cycle, a 3 ½-minute public service video for March for Our Lives, a student-led advocacy working to curtail gun violence. Jucarone is a two-time winner of the award and has been short-listed seven times since the category was introduced in 2012. This year’s winners will be announced May 16.

For Jucarone, this nomination is special. Produced in the aftermath of the mass killing at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, The Most Vicious Cycle presents all-too-familiar images of a school shooting as a blast from a semi-automatic rifle sets off a Rube Goldberg-like chain of events. To underscore the point about the endless succession of such tragedies, the shooting sequence plays three times with slight, but telling, alterations. Among other accolades, the piece just won a 2019 Webby Award for Public Service and Activism.

The soundtrack for the piece was complex. It included the song Safe by Keisha (with her brother Sage and rapper Chika), along with hundreds of individual sound effects supporting the events depicted on screen. Almost none of the sounds were recorded during production, meaning they all had to be created, edited and mixed by the sound team that, along with Jucarone, included Sound Lounge partner/sound designer Marshall Grupp, and Foley artist Leslie Bloome of Alchemy Post Sound. “People watching it don’t realize how audio-intensive it is,” recalls Jucarone. “Each sound rolls into the next so that it feels like it was recorded live.”

Last year, Jucarone was an AICP finalist for the Kaiser Permanente spot Curry Overcomes, featuring NBA star Stephen Curry. In 2017, he won the award for The Piccards, an ad for Hennessy that paid tribute to a Swiss physicist who was the first man to reach the stratosphere, and his son, the first to reach the ocean’s deepest point. He also came up a winner in 2012 for the Google spot Introducing Google Play.

Over the course of his career, Jucarone has mixed scores of spots that have won awards at major world advertising competitions. He has also mixed more than 100 Super Bowl spots, including five this year. His many other claims to fame include serving as mixer on the Grammy Award-winning Beatles reunion video Free as a Bird.

Jucarone says that he is grateful that his work on The Most Vicious Cycle has been recognized by his peers, but he is more gratified by the attention the piece has focused on the problem of gun violence in schools. “Projects like that are a labor of love,” he explains. “It’s rewarding to make a contribution to a piece with such a powerful impact.”

Credits:

Client: March For Our Lives. Sarah Chadwick, Sofie Whitney, project strategists & coordinators; Ryan Deitsch, content creator; Jackie Corin, national outreach director; Matt Deitsch, chief strategist. 

Agency: McCann New York.Andre De Castro, Nick Larson, creatives; Gaby Levy, producer; Sean Bryan, Tom Murphy, chief creative officers; Joyce King Thomas, creative advisor; Nathy Aviram, chief production officer; Rob Reilly, global creative chairman; Susan Young, Daniela Vojta, executive creative directors. 

Production: Mill+. Ben Smith, director; Ian Bearce, Christina Thompson, exec producers; Tia Perkins, producer; Andrew Hollingsworth, Danika Casas, production coordinators; Kyle Cody, shoot supervisor. 

Editorial:  The Mill. Ryan McKenna, editor; Matthew Campbell, edit assist. 

VFX:  The Mill. Christina Thompson, exec producer; Grace Tober, producer; Roshni Kakas, line producer; Umesh Chand, production coordinator; Angus Kneale, chief creative officer; Ben Smith, creative director; Kyle Cody, shoot supervisor, 2D lead artist; Venuprasath D, 2D lead artist; Christian Nielsen, 3D lead artist; Molly Intersimone, Badarinath Chinimilli, Prasanna Bhatt, Rajeshkumar K, 2D artists; Tim Kim, Ryan Federman, Todd Akita, Tighe Rzankowski, Dave Barosin, Weicheih Yu, Sudakshina Sridharan, Vittal Kuntla, Fazal Khan, Giri Prasath S, Raj Kumar M, Sunil MM, Sendil Kumar J, 3D artists; Scott McGinley, Alex Allain, John Wilson, animation; Clemens den Exter, design; Laura Nash and Wendy Eduarte, motion graphics; Anish Mohan, asset supervisor; Senthil Murugan Balasundaram, tracking supervisor; Mikey Rossiter, colorist. 

Audio: Sound Lounge Marshall Grupp, sound designer; Tom Jucarone, mixer; Becca Falborn, sr. producer. 

Foley: Alchemy Post Sound. Leslie Bloome, Foley artist; Ryan Collison, Foley mixer. 

Music: Supervised by Rob Kaplan and Aaron Mercer from Wool & Tusk; “Safe”

Track: Produced and Engineered by Drew Pearson; Mixed by Jon Castelli; Engineer for Mix by Ingmar Carlson; Mastered by Emily Lazar at The Lodge, NY; Assisted by Chris Allgood; Written by Kesha, Sage, Chika, Pebe Sebert, and Drew Pearson; Chika vocals recorded by Mitch Davis at Pull Music; Executive produced by Lagan Sebert and Hampton Howerton for Vector Management; Digital marketing, Jon Romero for Vector Management; Kesha appears courtesy of Kemosabe Records/RCA Records

About Sound Lounge

Sound Lounge is an audio post-production facility, providing services for TV and radio commercials, feature films, television series, digital campaigns, gaming and other emerging media. Based in Manhattan, Sound Lounge is artist-owned and operated. Follow on FacebookTwitterLinkedIn and Instagram or visit http://www.soundlounge.com for the latest Sound Lounge news.

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