By Luke Harper

The series What We Do in the Shadows, now in its fourth season, has had a long journey to its current home on FX. In the early 2000s, Taika Waititi and Jermaine Clement had an idea for a funny short film called What We Do in the Shadows: Interviews With Some Vampires. Jump to 2012, and a very successful Kickstarter campaign led to a What We Do in the Shadows feature film. Jump once more to 2018, when FX picked up the pilot for the series, directed by Waititi, and ordered 10 more.

Steffan Falesitch

In case you haven’t seen it, the show — which picked up seven 2022 Emmy nominations — is a Staten Island-set documentary-style comedy about vampires, roommates, cults of character and sort of…well…the supernatural, generally.

LA’s Formosa Group has been tasked with the show’s post sound, and I recently sat down with supervising sound editor Steffan Falesitch and re-recording mixers Diego Gat and Sam Ejnes — all Emmy-nominated for their work this year. Since the series is shot in a documentary style, the team was tasked with keeping the audio sounding as if it were captured during the interviews.

Sam Ejnes

“We originally went really big for the pilot and tried a lot of cool stuff and huge things, but then Taika came in and dialed that back quite a bit,” explains Ejnes. “We had to concentrate more on that ‘captured sound.’ Everything is through the microphone that we see on-camera, so that was our starting point.”

The team then worked with Clement, who would “periodically let us do things as if the documentary crew had planned something bigger,” continues Ejnes. “As with any project of this nature, you have to have those first few feedback meetings to find the proper balance. It’s supernatural, but it is a captured sound documentary.”

Diego Gat

Let’s find out more…

Can you talk more about the challenges of keeping it “real”?
Sam Ejnes: Every character is mic’d, but if people just walk in on-screen, we play it like they’re just coming through the boom. We push and pull a little. You have to find the right balance between reality and quality. Clean dialogue is crucial, of course. In Season 1, there are some microphone bumps and things of that nature that are story-based. And we’ve kept that up throughout to add to the realism/doc feel. Steffan made this lovely little sweetening file that we use constantly. It’s the sauce we keep putting in the show. Finding the humor in the dichotomy of size has been an ongoing process.

Do you have to restrain yourselves from just going huge and supernatural?
Ejnes: We do. It’s the fourth season, and we are all very comfortable with the aesthetic, so we have ways of being clever about it. Playing with expectations, audible irony, that sort of thing. The bat transitions are a good example. We started big, but now they are these exquisitely tailored “fwumps” that communicate just the correct amount of magic and power. Each character has its own subtly different version. We tell the story through a simple sound.

The SFX editor, Dave Barbee, is really good at giving me just exactly the sounds I need every time. He’s really nailed it for four seasons now, and I am really glad to have him with us.

New supernatural characters must be a lot of fun to design, and the wraiths have been a highlight this season. What is your approach for the sound design?
Steffan Falesitch: Well, I ran with that a little. Each wraith is two people whispering. We have loop-group recordings that I edit to sort of overlap. There are some extreme challenges to characters like this. For instance, I had to create a scenario where the whispers were loud enough to deafen the characters. How do you hurt ears with whispers?

Can you describe your style, Steffan?
Falesitch: It’s an interesting thing to try to put into words. Recently, I was having some remodeling work done on my house, and I asked the architect what his style was. He said he didn’t have one. His style was whatever I wanted it to be. That’s what my position is. I’m a transparent mediator.

That said, dialogue is king. If you have good dialogue, you are 70% of the way to success.

I wonder if that particular priority is based on your extensive 30-year career of high-level dialogue editing, starting with the Dragnet remake in 1989?
Falesitch: Yes. I try to make sure every line is recorded properly, and I regularly communicate with the dialogue editor. I use iZotope extensively and try to keep current on all the available denoising software. Dialogue is still where I start. Every show has dialogue, so my skill set focus stays nicely relevant.

Diego, you use denoisers on the show as well, yes?
Diego Gat: I am a big fan of Cedar, but Waves Clarity does an exceptional job as well. The only drawback is the processing load. You can realistically only have very few instances running simultaneously. The heavy lifting of dialogue cleaning has been done in editorial, obviously, but I still have occasion to get in there. Editorial does the heavy-lift pass that decides whether ADR is necessary. I refine and shape. iZotope RX is the go-to for that and for granular surgery.

Ok, getting back into the workflow, what kind of time frame do you have per episode?
Gat: The pandemic has had an interesting effect on workflows. Now we receive five or six edit-locked episodes and have about two months to complete them. We do our first-pass mix in one day.

What’s the process like for this show?
Gat: We start early on day one watching the Avid mix to get a feel for how it looks and what they are looking for. We don’t have the time to do everything we want, so we have to prioritize. We can plan which scenes we want to take more time with. At the end of day one, we have a mix and send that out for review. We receive notes on the morning of day two and combine them with our own from playback, and then we fix those by lunch.

After lunch, showrunner Paul Simms, the editors and the producers view and make notes, then we spend the rest of the day tweaking for those. We send out a final by 7pm on day two.

Is there a lot of ADR in this show?
Falesitch: There’s not much at all, and even then, only for story points. That’s partly due to the quality of technical and crew — they are superb — and partly because it’s a doc-style show; periodic imperfection is par for course in that genre.

In fact, we will even play up poor dialogue every now and then by mixing as if the actors don’t have radio mics because they just walked into the room or whatever. Or, during hugs, we will add muffle and play up the cloth. I then apologize to the production sound mixer.

What’s the go-to reverb for you guys?
Gat: Stratus. We love it and use it on everything.

That’s very clever — and a phenomenal way to leverage an aesthetic.
Falesitch: There’s a fine line between rushing, settling and just leaving certain things alone because an actual documentary wouldn’t be as precious and precise as we are capable of being with the talent and facilities on hand. Maintaining a particular audio vibe is critical.

Can we talk about the music? Quite the coup getting Mark Mothersbaugh.
Ejnes: Right? That’s Jermaine and Paul Simms making those choices! Documentary scores are challenging to emulate because they don’t tend to have dedicated composers but instead rely on various licensed pieces from whomever can be sourced.

Gat: The genius of Mark Mothersbaugh is how eclectic his palette is in terms of available instruments and timbres and actual stylistic choices. He also knows masters of the most rare and amazing instruments.

You might notice subtle nationalistic references within the music and sound design to match plot or characters specifically. Nandor (Kayvan Novak) might have Middle Eastern tones and cues, whereas Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) would have hints of Greek in hers. And, of course, show tunes for Colin (Mark Proksch). Very rarely are the cues trying to call any kind of attention to themselves, but the strength and consistency they bring to the show are undeniable.

Before I let you go, I’d love to hear about the path your careers took.
Falesitch: I was working as a dialogue editor at Modern Sound back in the day, when you had to be at a studio somewhere because the equipment was so heavy, so you were surrounded with people. The same building housed edit and mix, and you were working simultaneously. The sound supervisor was there, and at the end of the day, you’d screen for them and absorb all of that feedback. So for me it was an apprenticeship.

This was during my Star Trek days, and the people were amazing. I’m still in contact with them and learned a lot from them. I consider it an apprenticeship. It’s why I am training Aaron Diecker, and trying to pass along what I learned. In our industry, that form of learning is very important.

Ejnes: I went to Emerson College in Boston and then did my final semester in LA. I was an intern at a little studio and then became an engineer there. I spent all the time I could learning everything — sitting in on sessions, assisting any way I could. I taught Pro Tools workshops as well, so I had a baseline experience, but actually getting hands-on with the shows was the biggest thing.

I eventually started getting offers for outside work from different friends, producers and directors, so I left that studio job and started mixing, designing, working on-set, working on video dialogue… that sort of thing. During that time I was reaching out to people on the web through things like forums and Twitter and eventually got myself onto the big stages. I got to Todd-AO and watched someone mix an M&E, for instance. I asked them questions while they were doing reel changes.

Eventually a friend gave me a tip about a mix tech position at Todd-AO. That job was like grad school. Being a mix tech for broadcast is one of the best ways to learn how people work, how shows operate, how a stage runs, how a studio’s going, etc. I would be first in, set up the stage and watch the mixers come in and hit play and mix. I would be present to fix tech issues, and then at the end of the day, I would wrap everything up.

I got hired right before they closed but was able to follow a show over to Formosa Group. They brought me in, and I got to work on features and learned how that process works. Eventually I graduated into a mix chair. So being able to observe and ask questions while being in the biggest and best studios got me to where I am now.

Gat: I actually had a mentor. I started doing sound for live theater in Argentina, where I am from. I was a lighting director back then, and the guy next to me had more knobs and faders, so I needed to get in on that. He taught me a few things, and we developed a great friendship. At the same time, I was starting film school at the University of Buenos Aires. I gravitated toward sound in film. One day a studio needed a mixer. I had no experience, but I went for it; I threw myself in and mixed features — 140 by the time I moved to LA in 2016.

I got to work with the best sound supervisors in Argentina! José Luis Díaz became a close friend, a mentor and, eventually, my business partner. He had won many Argentinian Academy Awards for sound, so he was an excellent teacher. We mixed 26 features together.

Luke Harper is an audio engineer and instructor of 25 years living in Minneapolis. He owns an Atmos mix facility, called DeCoded Audio.