There are, obviously, various approaches to what we may call average levels in films for theatric release, the least important being the reading on the VU meter. When mixing, we try to establish a normal listening level for a given scene, and we try to relate it to the levels heard just before that, in previous scenes. Sometimes a whisper that hardly moves your meter's needles may sound very loud - if it was preceded by silence. Sometimes a scream that's well into "red" may be lost in the surrounding noise and sound soft... There's no point in measuring these values - I can't remember when was the last time I looked at meters - the beauty of mixing for theatres is the constant monitoring level we use on dubbing stages, so we can learn, after some time spent there, what is the right level for every sound. Of course, there will always be some examples where the crew went deaf because they tried to record the Print Master while monitoring at 7....
And, regarding this statement:
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But mixing in mono is creativly the hardest of the lot to get right, much less to distract the listener ?
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my answer is NO. Why? Because there's less channels to deal with, there's less definition to take care of, there's less bandwidth, etc. It was sooo much easier to match different camera angles in mono, that I really miss it sometimes.....