By Patrick Birk

As the saying goes, there are two things for certain: death and taxes. But for most of us, death will come through natural causes and not murder. That cannot be said for the mother of Madison Hamburg, the filmmaker behind HBO’s Murder on Middle Beach. This four-episode series focuses on Hamburg investigating the 2010 murder of his mother, Barbara. Murder on Middle Beach eschews simple shock and spectacle and instead takes viewers on a journey as Hamburg wades through a troubled family history and miles of red tape.

Annie Medlin

While I typically write stories about projects that I’ve played no part in, this one was personal. I first met Madison in 2018 after I received a call asking if I was available to record some production sound for a documentary. I spent two days in Connecticut with Madison, producer Solomon Petchenik and cinematographer Ben Joyner. I came away from the experience hoping Madison would be able to get some answers. I never expected to see the doc go to HBO, but in retrospect, it makes perfect sense. And Jigsaw Productions has helped Madison give the project the treatment it deserves.

The sound of this documentary is composed, quite literally, of many moments tied to Madison’s life. Myriad interviews and undercover recordings, compiled over the 10 years since his mother’s murder, are seamlessly woven with audio from home videos dating back to before his birth and punctuated with the cold, dry click of a VCR. Sonically, we are transported into Madison’s world and experience a glimpse of what it means to unflinchingly examine your entire history in search of justice and closure.

Alex Loew

To find out more about the audio post side of the film, I reached out to supervising sound editor/re-recording mixer Annie Medlin and sound effects editor Alex Loew, both of whom have worked on docs in the past, including Atlanta’s Missing and Murdered and A Wilderness of Error. They are based at NYC’s Final Frame Post, and I reached out to talk to them about helping to bring this documentary to life sonically. They joined the project after a recommendation from Jigsaw. Let’s find out more.

How did you start on the project?
Medlin: After our initial conversation, Madison and I realized we were on the same page. We’d discussed character-driven sound stamps, like a haze sound to signal his mom’s memory or presence. From that, I think he felt we were a good fit for the project.

Early on he sent me a rough cut of the first episode. This was when the quarantine was really scary … around summer 2020. I usually just watch a few minutes of a project to prepare for an interview, but I knew right away that this was going to be different. I watched the whole thing immediately. It’s just such an intriguing journey that he takes us on, and that was before our work or cleanup or color correction. I was very struck by it.

This series came to you in the summer and aired by November. That’s a pretty quick turnaround.
Loew: We pride ourselves on our turnaround time. They keep us pretty busy at Final Frame. We typically go from one project to another, so we don’t have many breaks. But it’s allowed us to hone our skills into the fine-tuned aspects of sound design at a quicker pace. It went fast. We had finished the fourth episode, and then the following week, they were already up on HBO. It’s was a weird whirlwind, especially during this time.

Madison Hamburg

With such a busy schedule, what do you do to maximize efficiency?
Medlin: I think the relationship that Alex and I have really helps because I don’t usually need to take the time to do a lot of instructing about the sounds he should add and what his part will be. He just intuits it and adds a bunch of subtle Foleys and a lot of incidentals along with the more front and center sounds that we worked with in the show.

Another thing that helped was staying in constant communication with Madison and having him send us stuff. He sent us a bunch of long rolls of audio transferred from his home videos. We sifted through them at the beginning of the project and found a bunch of onboard hits and artifacts that were baked into the actual tapes. We tried to use those as much as possible.

Loew: That really helped us with the initial palette. Madison definitely provided us with a ton of cool tones and weirdness that you couldn’t normally get from an everyday library. The libraries we looked at were way more sci-fi and a bit too techie-based for this. We were looking for the lo-fi kind of feel that’s really hard to get.

The Hamburg family in happier times

Medlin: Yeah, there’s something about that dry, clean VCR button sound that worked really well for me and made it feel like we were with him sifting through all these files and videos. It was important to me to make it feel like we were there with him at every step.

Loew: I think a lot of what helps the process is getting the right sounds together at the beginning. It’s not really about tweaking with EQs and having too many effects. If you have the right sound from the get-go, it helps speed things up. You get all of your paint colors together, you start mixing them, and then you have something unique.

Medlin: Yeah, a lot of these effects are just bone-dry, right in your face, so it has to be the right sound. There’s no covering it up. We were responsible for helping Madison tell his mom’s story, so it had to be right.

There were so many audio sources in this series — VHS tapes, interviews, cell phone recordings. How did you mix them into a cohesive whole?
Medlin: In order to turn this around so quickly, I dove into the world of Madison’s story. I then brought up and edited the dialogue as part of the mixing process so I would know how the pieces would fit together. That informs how much something needs to be cleaned up.

Madison Hamburg’s sister, Ali

Sometimes, there just weren’t that many options, and I had to do my best to make sure to keep my toolkit open and my iZotope license working. It’s a ton of mixing. Given that it’s a documentary, there was some leeway, and I wish that I could have cleaned things up enough so that there were no subtitles, but that’s not the reality of the process.

We use a lot of realtime RX plugins on these interviews, which is enormously helpful. It’s a big time-saver, and it keeps things consistent through the whole series. Any verité theme, like Madison driving to see his aunt or all the hidden mic stuff, is heavily cleaned up and Audio Suite’d as well as EQ’d and de-essed and all kinds of other wonderful things.

We separated the verité scenes from the talking head interviews, and that really helped me visually. So I was looking at my Pro Tools session to get a sense of what space we’re living in for how much of the film. I know it’s a show, but I think of it as a film broken into parts. I know how to comb through it really quickly; I know the limitations of RX pretty well at this point.

Loew: When Annie went through the source audio and cleaned things up, from an editing standpoint, I tried to help her out in that I’d listen to the source audio, especially the dialogue. If there was any kind of noise or background that would be hard to take out, I would look for those kinds of backgrounds to offer her, because she might find them helpful to mask whatever was baked into the dialogue tracks. Of course, Annie had the final say with what I sent her, but a lot of the time, that was my approach scene to scene. And I focused heavily on the dialogue while I was cutting the effects in for that purpose.

Madison Hamburg and his aunt

I was struck by the vintage newsreel footage that periodically appeared in the documentary. I read that Madison pushed pretty hard for that to be included.
Medlin: Absolutely. That really struck me when I started this, the use of the old footage. In the first episode, there’s that 1960s Connecticut tourist video’s audio that creates this wonderful tension between an idealized Cold War suburban America and the stark reality of living in that community. I added some pitch shifts, like a little wow and flutter in certain places, to give it that feel of variation in tape speed. Part of that, I think, is to add a little wink that this is sort of an ironic juxtaposition of these modern-day drone shots with the 1960s, lo-fi dialogue.

Loew: As far as effects go, those sections — where you have that ’50s or ’60s narrator over top — were like using the sound of a needle going over a record groove. There is that kind of background hiss against very lush backgrounds of seaside Connecticut. I felt like those areas in the film were slowed down and very cinematic. They allowed for a lot of intricate effects and background detail. It was nice to be able to combine those two worlds together in that way.

What were the most challenging sections of the film for you?
Medlin: I think the most challenging part of this was the hidden mic section of the last episode. There’s a very long stretch where Madison is spending time with his dad in New York City and they are driving in a car. He was wearing two different mics on his jacket. I think he said they were self-recording lavs, so that was a big challenge. It’s just such a long time to go without someone being directly miked.

Madison Hamburg and a detective working the murder

It’s very challenging to intercut dialogue when both speakers are sourced from the same mic the whole way through, because they have to be treated very differently. The noise floor is dramatically different in some instances. I’m pretty happy with the way it came out, honestly, considering the source. I really had to lean on our naturalistic sound design in those sections to bob and weave and make it feel like you’re still there the whole time and not in a vacuum.

Alex, did you have to assemble a large number of backgrounds to make that section happen?
Loew: For the car interior, surprisingly, not so much. It was a combination of maybe three or four car interiors — and I hate to admit this — that I would recycle throughout the show because they were very immersive. The kicker is that you keep those consistent backgrounds and then vary them with interstitial bumps and hits and little impacts that you see in the car. It makes it a little bit more of a unique background in that way, even though you’re adding incidental effects to it that might not be perceived as incidentals, but rather as just part of the background.

Medlin: You made some great choices in that scene, although they did have to be EQ’d to match so that it didn’t sound fake. Basically, we were creating the illusion that you’re a fly on the wall, and that means you have to hear everything as it happens. But it also needs to be seamless throughout the whole thing, so it almost feels like it’s playing out in real time. You’re bearing witness to this huge tense moment between Madison and his dad.

Madison Hamburg with his aunt

We want to support what the film is exploring without calling attention to ourselves until it’s time for our “big VCR” sounds. I think a huge part of this job is about supporting the editorial choices that are made. If we can make everything flows seamlessly on our end, I think it validates all the editorial choices, picture-wise

For example, Madison would listen down to a part of the film and say, “You made that transition work so much better. I’ve always bumped up against it, and we had no choice but to cut it that way. But now that I’m hearing it and watching it, it smooths the transition and makes it work.”

Another instance I’m proud of was in the first episode, when Madison is marching into the Madison Police Department for the first time to be interrogated. That was some noisy-ass production sound, and almost none of it was usable. I really had to clean up the dialogue and let it pop up in the right places and reverberate the right way, and we manufactured almost all the incidentals that you hear in that scene. All the footsteps, picking up the phone, all that stuff. I left in a few things I would normally clean up because it’s nice to hear a little bit of boom-handling noise when it’s clear that it’s just him and one other guy. It gives it that DIY feel, and it’s not supported by music. It’s just this really tense, quiet moment.

What’s a favorite moment from the series that a viewer might not realize is sound-designed?
Loew: Annie, I feel like you did a great job with the July 4th fireworks opening for Episode 2. You took those effects and made it seem like we were in it.

Madison Hamburg

Medlin: That did work really well. There’s a shot of Madison’s mom and aunts, and they’re all frolicking around in the dark. Maybe they’d had a few drinks, and they were just laughing and having fun. There’s a wonderful backward laughing sound that Alex added in that I love because you don’t really intuit necessarily that it’s backward. It just sounds like it’s off. Or it’s almost like these are actually aliens and not people, and we just don’t speak their language. I thought it was so cool, and it struck just the right tone — you’re watching these people from afar as they were 20 years ago. That really sticks out for me.

What are the most essential plugins in your toolkit right now?
Medlin: I use Altiverb for almost all my verb sends. I still like the Dolby Media Meter, personally. I use that on almost everything.

Loew: I’ll never get tired of the Media Meter. I feel it’s the best meter out there.

Medlin: We also have the Waves Diamond bundle that we use throughout Final Frame.

Loew: I do love the Soundtoys plugins, and I feel like you can really achieve a lot with just a Crystallizer and an EchoBoy. I also want to mention the Valhalla DSP reverbs. They’re 50 bucks a pop, and they are pretty incredible. Sometimes, I’ll use them for a ring out or just a subtle reverb on a background. And the modulation part of the reverb is what I love, because you can take a pretty basic background of, say, wind going through trees of a forest, and then you can add a little modulation, add a little space to it, and it becomes a totally different place … a different part of the world.

Any final thoughts?
Loew: I want to reiterate something Annie mentioned earlier. Our sound work doesn’t exist unless you have directors and editors who are willing to take chances, who really trust a sound department like Madison has trusted us. We really value and love these experiences with these kinds of directors.

Medlin: Absolutely. If we can play any small role in that, we’re extremely proud. And we support everything he’s doing; we hope that he’ll be able to film more and get the answers he deserves, for sure.

Main Image: Barbara Hamburg

Pat Birk is a musician, sound engineer and post pro at Silver Sound, a boutique sound house based in New York City.