By Michael Kross

While Netflix’s addictive series Stranger Things awaits the start of production on Season 4, we reached out to two of the show’s Emmy-nominated re-recording mixers from Season 3, Will Files and Mark Paterson. We recently spoke to the other mixer, Craig Henighan, who is also a sound editor on the show. You can see his story here.

These two, who often work together, had worked solely on films before Stranger Things creators the Duffer Brothers reached out, wanting the series to feature a filmic-sounding mix.

Here they share mixing tips and a unique approach to the work on the sci-fi series.

What are you guys working on now?
Mark Paterson: Will and I just started premix on Ghostbusters, and then I’ll start back on Bios, which is an Amblin movie starring Tom Hanks. We started it right before lockdown but didn’t get to finish. It’s weird getting back up and running because everyone is temp-mixing for potential online previews, and the landscape of our industry is very different at the moment.

Do you guys work together all the time, or just on Stranger Things?
Paterson: Not all the time but often. We mix it up, but we try to do projects together because we enjoy collaborating with each other. We have a similar approach to mixing and are both pretty easy going. The filmmakers seem to enjoy what we do.

Since you’re both re-recording mixers how do you split up the work?
Will Files: Generally speaking, when Mark and I work together, he’ll do the dialogue and the music and I’ll do the sound design and the Foley. We occasionally swap chairs to cover for each other as well.

When you say Foley, you mean you mix in the Foley?
Files: Yes. The goal is to always try to make the Foley integrate so it sounds like it was recorded at the same time as the voices. When they’re shooting the show on set, they’re lucky if they can even get a good recording of the voices, so you’re very unlikely to get a good recording of all the footsteps and other incidental sounds. That’s why we have to fill it in with Foley effects.

Stranger Things

When you’re mixing, are you working at the same time? Do you share a session?
Files: On an episodic show with such a massive scope, we couldn’t waste a single moment of mix time. So we often ended up working practically on top of each other all the time. We’re sitting at a console together, but Mark’s half of the console is talking to his machines, and my half of the console is talking to my machines. So we can both jump around and work on different things if we need to, but we’re sharing speakers and a screen.

It’s an interesting situation — the whole thing of mixing with a partner — because you’re trying to create something that feels creatively cohesive. It’s difficult when you’re working with someone who doesn’t have a similar aesthetic to you, but luckily Mark and I have very similar sensibilities. We found that almost by default, we were making similar choices in how we approached the scenes, either from a sound effects or a dialogue point of view.

Paterson: Yeah, and we talk about it; we can pass things around. Typically, we do a predub and have a couple of days by ourselves when I’ll be preparing dialogue and music. Preparing dialogue for Stranger Things is fairly typical in the sense that I’m doing basic balancing and cleaning, but I also save time to try creative ideas. The show is full of different treatments on dialogue that give it a very distinct style. There’s also a bunch of cool transitions to get in and out of scenes, so I try to get some ideas going at that stage in the mix.

Stranger Things

That would include mixing music for the surround environment and generally getting in shape for final mixing. Then we put the two predubs together and hear it for the first time as it was intended to be. From that point, we start to talk about how we’re going to turn it into the final product that we present to the directors.

How much actual ADR is in a typical show? Also, in terms of dialogue, who is playing with all the vocal effects?
Paterson: There’s no set way of doing it. Sometimes they play around with ideas in the cutting room. Usually, if it’s a specific voice, like a robot or a character has a specific treatment to his voice that’s worked out before we’re mixing and recorded in a specific way.

For the most part, with Stranger Things, transitions and treatments were the kind of thing that we did on the stage. The dialogue was in great shape from editorial, so I wasn’t spending additional time clearing it up and trying to make it play. Instead, I was able to spend a bit more time creatively designing those moments and experimenting. As part of the premix, I would prepare a bunch of stylistic moments and present them to the directors. More often than not, the directors would enjoy them, so they stayed in the final mix. It’s one of the reasons I enjoy working with them so much.

Typically, I get the raw ADR straight from the recording studio, and it’s been put in sync by the editors. I get both microphones … usually it’s a radio mic and then whatever else they use, like a Sennheiser 416, for example. The matching process is one of my tasks during predub. Sometimes they’ll do something just to get me closer, and usually it’s in pretty good shape, but until I’ve mixed the production and know what that’s going to sound like, it’s hard to finalize it.

Can you give me an idea of how much is ADR is recorded?
Paterson: Every project is completely different. On Stranger Things the production audio was really good; Michael Rayle and the other guys on set did a really great job — even in scenes with water, generators or something else noisy. There wasn’t a lot of ADR for technical reasons. If it was 20%, I’d be surprised.

Often you get scenes where you have some challenges due to the recording environment, but a lot ADR could be to change a performance or add lines for story purposes. We can do so much with production these days. It has to be pretty bad to change it for a technical reason.

The sound design is such an intrinsic part of this movie, and this series. When does that come together?
Files: It’s funny that you just called it a movie because we kept calling it a movie while we were working on it. I think that has a lot to do with the Duffer Brothers’ sensibilities and style, because every single one of the episodes was basically a mini-movie in the sense that it’s very cinematic and very big-sounding and very big-looking. That was definitely the approach we tried to take with the sound design and the mix. We tried to give it that big summer movie blockbuster kind of feel. Big, stylish and expressive. Large and in charge.

The sound design was led by Craig Henighan, and he has a long working relationship with the Duffer Brothers and the editors. They would often send him a sequence as soon as they put it together, and he would start working on sound design ideas. Then he would send them back a sound sketch: “Here’s a little mix of some sound ideas.” They would put it into their cut and play around with it. That was a very iterative process. By the time it got to us, it had already been developed to the point of having a really polished set of ideas in it.

A lot of my job was to take the great work that Craig had done and to try to sculpt it in such a way that it was more articulate and left more room for the dialogue and for the music, so we weren’t missing any the moments. Mixing is a lot of constantly taking things away, but we’re trying to do it in a way that feels very fluid, so the audience doesn’t realize we’re taking things away. It’s like a constant passing of the baton; we’re trying to make the audience feel like they’re hearing everything at the same time, but, of course, you can’t hear everything at the same time. It’s a bit of a sonic trick.

How did the show’s VFX affect your job, if at all?
Files: Just like on a big summer blockbuster, the visual effects kept evolving through the entire mix, and as a result, so did the sound design. We were constantly moving things around, adding things and taking things away. Adding new ideas. That definitely kept us on our toes all the way through the very end.

At the start of the mix, how do you know on a series like Stranger Things where you’re going to go in terms of overall feel?
Files: The first thing I usually do when we get the episode is watch the current cut of the episode with the editor’s mix — whatever sounds they’ve put into the Avid. I’ll listen to that because I want to have a sense of what they’re trying to accomplish from a story and vibe point of view. Usually they have a fairly rudimentary soundtrack, but it has lots of ideas in it that might be useful for me later.

There’s something really emotionally useful about that very first time you watch something because you’re watching it like a real audience member. I try to file that away in my head — how did I feel about this or that moment the first time I saw it? That will continue to influence the choices I make.

I try to approach it from an audience point of view, even if that means putting on blinders and pretending that you don’t know what’s happening next. Although, of course, we did do some things where we developed the sound further in a later episode, and we liked what we did and went back to the earlier episode and updated the sound in those episodes. It’s a very fluid, creative process. That’s one of the things about working on an episodic show. It’s basically a six-hour movie!

What are some plugins that you’re using — or that you just love — to get those unbelievable vocal effects?
Paterson: There isn’t one plugin that does all of those things. Most of the time I use a delay and a reverb, which I bland together to make the effect. I prefer to do it that way because it gives me total control over all the parameters. Fabfilter Pro-R, Valhalla, VSS3 and Altiverb are my go-to reverbs. Slapper 2 is a great delay tool, but I still keep H-Delay in the session because it has a simplicity I enjoy.

Then there was, of course, the odd time when I used something more extravagant, like Eventide Blackhole, one of those more creative plugins. But it’s simple for the most part.

What was it like working with Matt and Ross Duffer? Were they in the room a lot with you while you were mixing?
Paterson: We did a lot of spotting sessions with them. We’d sit and watch an episode and get their thoughts on everything as a kind of roadmap for each episode. It was a great opportunity to get an idea of what they wanted before we started mixing. Then we would assemble the episode and make sure we had something fairly solid to present to them before they came to the stage.

Files: We would all get together in a screening room at Netflix and watch each episode with the Duffers, the composers, Craig the sound designer, and with our dialogue editor Ryan Cole and music editor David Klotz. That gave us a lot of super-useful information for later, when we started mixing, because we knew what they were going for.

The Duffers actually gave us a very long leash in the mix. We would basically spend about three or four days mixing by ourselves before we played back for them. We’d usually play back for the producer at the end of the third day, and he’d give us some notes, and we’d do those. Then we’d play back for the director and get more notes.

With a few exceptions, they didn’t really feel the need to sit around and watch us work because they had so much other stuff to do. I guess we earned their confidence early enough that they felt like they could trust us to make it great. We were very nervous going into our very first episode playback because this was our first episode mixing Stranger Things with the Duffer Brothers and our first real experience mixing television — we usually mix movies. They wanted to work with a film-mixing team this time, which is part of how we got the job.

Stranger Things

Do you remember any moments when there’s nothing visual happening, but you’re thinking of what kind of audio element you can add to enhance the scene?
Files: A lot of things are implied with sound. It’s a lot cheaper to put a sound in than it is to put visual in. There are a lot of times in the earlier episodes when they weren’t showing the monster, or they would show the monster only very dimly in the shadows. All the storytelling at that point would be happening with the sound. Part of that is because it’s very effective dramatically, but it’s also very effective financially. What we do with sound is a lot cheaper than visual effects.

Paterson: We often use the music as a similar tool. Obviously, in many ways it’s the identity of the show with its distinct ‘80s feel. A lot of the cues are incidental and blur the line between sound design and music. They provide tension where there wouldn’t usually be, unlike in a traditional movie, which is very specifically scored. The Duffers don’t work like that. They have a bin of things to choose from, and a lot of it’s written without a specific hit sync point in the picture. We were able to use pieces of music wherever we felt we needed them and present that to the guys as an idea.

It really shows that the audio drives the whole. The sound just sucks you in.
Files: It’s a great way to make the screen bigger, even if you’re watching on a phone or tablet. Good sound can help give any project a big cinematic feel.

Especially if you have a nice 5.1 setup at home.
Files: We would go over to Netflix and listen to the episodes in their home theater setup rooms. They’ve got these test rooms where you can check the mix on multiple different types of speakers, setups and sound bars.

For the first couple episodes, we went over there just to double-check it and make sure it was translating well for everybody. We would also check the mixes on our iPads and our iPhones. Netflix set us up with a special account; they basically uploaded just test pieces for us, and we could literally screen it on Netflix. It was real-world test, and super-helpful for checking translation.

Michael Kross is a re-recording mixer and sound designer based out of Los Angeles. Formerly, senior re-recording mixer at E! Entertainment Television, Kross has been in the industry for over 20 years. You can contact him at Mkross@gmail.com or on Instagram @MichaelKrossSound.