Eleven founder/mixer/sound designer Jeff Payne has announced three team additions to his growing audio post company, with Madeleine “Maddee” Bonniot as producer, Andrew Smith as assistant mixer and Jordan “Jojo” Hart as client services and facilities coordinator.
A Los Angeles native, Bonniot moved north to attend the University of San Francisco and earned a BA degree in media studies, while working in the university’s events management department. She made her way back to L.A. after college and worked as an associate producer at Santa Monica music house HUM. Her event and music production background helped her find her way to Eleven, where she has taken on the role of producer.
Born and raised in the suburbs of Montgomery County, MD, Hart recently relocated to the Los Angeles area. Having studied communications, Hart has garnered experience as a production assistant, as well as with event planning–learning the tricks of the trade at a young age by helping with her mother’s event planning business. These skills have allowed Hart to bring a keen attention to detail and creativity to her client services capacity.
Growing up outside of Philadelphia, Smith has always had a passion for music and sound design. From playing drums to programming beats in high school, he has always known he wanted to work with sound. Moving to Los Angeles in 2015, Smith shifted his career focus to audio postproduction, landing a six-month internship at Eleven that yielded his current role as assistant mixer.
Jennifer Kent On Why Her Feature Directing Debut, “The Babadook,” Continues To Haunt Us
"The Babadook," when it was released 10 years ago, didn't seem to portend a cultural sensation.
It was the first film by a little-known Australian filmmaker, Jennifer Kent. It had that strange name. On opening weekend, it played in two theaters.
But with time, the long shadows of "The Babadook" continued to envelop moviegoers. Its rerelease this weekend in theaters, a decade later, is less of a reminder of a sleeper 2014 indie hit than it is a chance to revisit a horror milestone that continues to cast a dark spell.
Not many small-budget, first-feature films can be fairly said to have shifted cinema but Kent's directorial debut may be one of them. It was at the nexus of that much-debated term "elevated horror." But regardless of that label, it helped kicked off a wave of challenging, filmmaker-driven genre movies like "It Follows," "Get Out" and "Hereditary."
Kent, 55, has watched all of this — and those many "Babadook" memes — unfold over the years with a mix of elation and confusion. Her film was inspired in part by the death of her father, and its horror elements likewise arise out of the suppression of emotions. A single mother (Essie Davis) is struggling with raising her young son (Noah Wiseman) years after the tragic death of her husband. A figure from a pop-up children's book begins to appear. As things grow more intense, his name is drawn out in three chilling syllables — "Bah-Bah-Doooook" — an incantation of unprocessed grief.
Kent recently spoke from her native Australia to reflect on the origins and continuing life of "The Babadook."
Q: Given that you didn't set out to in any way "change" horror, how have you regarded the unique afterlife of "The... Read More