In a largely male domain, she mans the soundboard

Current project: Marc Forster’s “Finding Neverland”; just completed Forster’s “Stay.”

Joining the club: She’s one of only three female rerecording mixers working in feature films.

Credits: “Adaptation,” “Panic Room,” “Galaxy Quest,” “Quills.”

The ingredients: “A rerecording mixer is responsible for taking elements of the soundtrack and blending them together into the final mix that you hear on the movie. We will take the dialogue and the sound effects and the music elements, and we’ll adjust the balances of those and place them in different speakers in the room. We’ll add reverb or equalization and other effects to them so they will have emotional or realistic impact, then we control the overall volume and quality and the mix and that gets sent off to the lab and becomes the sound track that you hear on the film.

“It’s a perfect [job] for me because you can be a technical nerd and play with all the computers and push all the buttons. Actually, it can be a really intense working environment. This is their last chance to fix or change a movie, so people will panic. More often than not, though, it is a really fun, creative time.”

Into the mix: “You can do it as a cooking analogy -- one person gets all the ingredients together and creates the menu, and my job is to actually do the cooking, put it all together.”

Time-shifting: “For certain blockbusters that have a particular release date like July 4 or Christmas, those movies will have a hard deadline. One thing that is happening more and more is that we will finish a movie and they might not have a release date for it. They may wait and see what else is coming out and sort of position out. A good example of that is ‘Finding Neverland.’ I mixed that almost a year ago, and it’s only being released now. Last year at Christmastime, there was a movie called ‘Peter Pan,’ and they kind of didn’t want to be in the same time frame.”

New tools, new trends: “It is pretty common nowadays that there are two mixers [on a film]. Traditionally there have been three, though -- one who does the dialogue, one who does the sound effects and one who does the music.

“But as our technology has advanced, it’s a little easier for one person to do more of the work because our mixing boards and the gear we work with are all computer-driven.”

Looking for a few good women: “I always encourage women, girls in high school, to visit me here and see it is a place where they can work. I think it’s a job that people just don’t know about.”

Getting in: “I studied filmmaking at New York University, and I kind of just gravitated to the post-production world. I am kind of a gear freak -- I like buttons and knobs and stuff like that. I got interested in sound because I was a musician.

“In New York I worked as a recording engineer. I moved [to San Francisco] and started in the machine room, which was, at that time, how you kind of came into my job -- you started in one of the support jobs. I became friends with some of the other mixers and was encouraged by them to go forward.

“One of my mentors at Skywalker is a mixer called Tom Johnson, who really helped a lot and gave me a lot of breaks.”

Union or guild: “We are part of the editors’ branch of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees.”

Age: 41

Residence: San Francisco

Salary: “You can make between, on the very low end, $80,000, and on the high end -- some of those guys make half a million year if they are working all the time. It is a high-paying job. But there is a lot of responsibility. You have to be somebody the director trusts and can communicate with, and you have to deliver the project on time.”