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Emmy-Nominated Editors on HBO’s The Last of Us

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By Iain Blair

The Last of Us, HBO’s series based on the videogame of the same name, is full of violence and zombies created by a parasitic fungus. And, like the game, it’s an intimate character study that tells the story of Joel (Pedro Pascal), a smuggler, who has to protect and escort Ellie (Bella Ramsey), a teenage girl with a rare immunity to the plague, across a US ravaged by the zombie apocalypse.

Timothy Good, ACE

The nine-part series was created by Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann, who also created and wrote the 2013 game, and co-showrunner Craig Mazin, the writer behind HBO’s Chernobyl.  The series racked up 24 Emmy nominations, including ones for editors Timothy Good, ACE, and Emily Mendez.

I spoke with Good and Mendez about the editing challenges, collaborating with the showrunners and the post workflow.

Tell us about working with Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin as well as how you approached the edit.
Timothy Good: Here’s the fun thing about them: They’re incredibly generous with artistic interpretation, so they told us nothing. They didn’t give me a sense of how it should be cut. They just said, “Do what you do, and we’ll see how it works.”

I’d never played the game, but Emily had, so our strategy going in was that I’d be able to interpret it for an audience who didn’t know the game, and she’d be able to understand it for people who did. Of course, Neil and Craig know the game intimately, so they’d be able to adjust it. The only thing we got in preparation for editing was the screenplay, which was a very dense, rich document with a ton of description. It was an excellent road map to what they were looking for, and we just took off from there.

Emily Mendez

How did you guys divide the episodes?
Good: I cut the pilot and Episodes 3 and 4, and then Emily and I cut four more together. Craig’s initial approach was, “Do what you do, and then I’ll see if you connect with what I’m doing.” And evidently, I connected perfectly with that because he said to me, “I want you to do as many of them as you possibly can.” I told him I’d try, but it would probably be impossible because it’s so much work.

In addition to the three episodes I’d already been given, he wanted me to cut Episode 7, which we shot out of sequence for weather reasons, but I just didn’t have enough time. That’s when I suggested bringing on Emily, and I told him I’d take over if it didn’t go well – knowing full well that she’d succeed. And she did, at which point Craig said, “Now you guys get to operate as a team,” which was awesome, as there was no way to get through four more mini-features in such a short time.

Emily, you used to be Tim’s assistant, and here you are as Tim’s co-editor on four episodes. How does that work? Give us a sense of how you guys collaborate.
Emily Mendez: We’d co-edited before on a couple of episodes in Season 3 of The Resident. When I came on this show, I was his assistant, and he threw me a few scenes to edit on Episode 3, called “Long, Long Time.” It was the first episode we worked on, and once Craig saw them and liked them, Tim told him I’d cut them, so Craig was aware I could cut. During that time, I was also working closely with Craig on temp sound design, so I was building that relationship and a kind of shorthand with him. He loves sound, as do I, and we’re both very passionate about it, so we bonded very closely over it.

Live-action video game adaptations are tricky. How did you avoid the pitfalls of making it look too much like a game while keeping it compelling for viewers?
Mendez: From the beginning, Neil and Craig took a really grounded approach. They were honoring the game but still creating a show we could enjoy and connect with. The scripts were so beautiful, and I always felt we were in a place where it’s grounded and real.

In the edit, Tim and I always took that approach, of staying grounded and connected to our characters — always story-based and character-based.

Good: The other thing is that, as Craig has said, a video game is a very active and participatory medium, while a TV series is very passive. So he had to adjust everything the game was into a passive format, so you never felt like you were a participant, but always an observer. That’s how he’d translated the game story into the screenplays with Neil. That allowed us to read them like film as opposed to a participatory medium, and always through the lens of character.

Tell us about the workflow. What editing gear and storage setup did you use?  
Good: We shot the vast majority of the film in Calgary on ARRI Alexa Minis, capturing a 2.8K extraction from 3.2K ProRes. VFX turnovers were EXR. RPL supplied our Avids, and we used their nifty cloud-based system. I believe we started out with a 32TB Unity and added more storage by the end.

Where was all the editing and post done?
Good: Mostly in small post offices in Burbank. I was in Calgary for the first three months, starting with Episode 3, and they sent me back. The picture edit of those seven episodes took one year to do. The rest of it was the sound mixing, VFX and so on.

What was the hardest scene to cut and why? 
Good: That’s a really good question. I’d say the trickiest scene was the big battle sequence in Episode 5, mainly because we had so much material. It was filmed over three weeks at night, and it was the big action set piece of the entire season. The director was Jeremy Webb, and he had four cameras running at all times, so the footage was massive. And my process is that I need to see it all. So I watch everything and catalog it all and start creating little selects of every single piece that I think will work in telling the story. Then I put it all together in a massive sequence.

Then Jeremy saw it and made his adjustments. Then Craig saw it and said, “It’s great except for one thing: The story’s being hidden. We need to find the story of the actual battle. How can we make it about Joel and Ellie’s character connection?”

I then had to spend days going through all the footage to create a skeleton of how these two interact within the context of the battle and figure out a way to show how Joel only shoots while protecting Ellie. He never shoots otherwise. Ellie’s always on the move and unpredictable, causing Joel to have to react all the time and panic at the thought of losing her.

There are a lot of VFX. Did you use temp VFX?
Mendez: Yes, depending on what we were working on. We had a VFX team in the office with us and they’d help us with temps as needed. For the battle scenes, a lot was practical but we had VFX for “the bloater.”

Good: Alex Wang was the VFX supervisor, and we had a ton of vendors — including Weta and DNeg — working on over 3,000 shots. What was great was that production design did most of the work for the actors so they could feel like they were in this world. Then VFX took over above the frame; the bluescreens would only start 12 feet above the frame and eyeline.

What about sound? Did you use sound temps?
Mendez: Yes, and figuring out the sound design was a long process. For instance, on the pilot we had some very complicated scenes, including the plane crash. In the earlier version we had a sort of chaotic soundscape with lots of layers — people screaming, alarms going off and so on. Craig watched it and suggested scaling it back, so on my second pass we had a gunshot in the distance, a transformer blowing, and so on. The sounds were more deliberately placed, which allowed more silence. So then we went with more restraint, which made it more tense, and that became our template.

Congratulations on your Emmy nominations. Where does this rate in terms of creative challenges and satisfaction for you?
Good: It’s the best thing I’ve ever done, the most wonderful collaboration I’ve ever had and the most difficult challenge ever.

Mendez: I agree completely, and it’s given me so much opportunity to grow. I’ve loved everything about it.

Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.

Emmys: Supervising Sound Editor Talks Reservation Dogs

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Created by Taika Waititi and Sterlin Harjo, Reservation Dogs is a comedy series about four Native American teens growing up on a reservation in Oklahoma. The multi-nominated, multi-award-winning show got an Emmy nod this year for Outstanding Sound Editing for the episode “This Is Where the Plot Thickens.” Supervising sound editor Patrick Hogan shares the nomination with David Beadle, Sonya Lindsay, Michael Sana, Daniel Salas, Amber Funk and Lena Krigen.

Hogan, who has also been Emmy-nominated for shows such as Cobra Kai and American Horror Story along with several miniseries, movies, and specials, has also been nominated and/or won multiple times on the festival circuit. We talked to Hogan about Reservation Dogs sound and what went into the episode under consideration right now.

How would you describe the soundscape of Reservation Dogs? What makes it unique?
The Rez Dogs soundscape is definitely restrained and, I’d say, tasteful. Life on the reservation is different than being in the city. There are geographic and cultural differences, which we try to reflect in the sounds of the show. When we are on the reservation, it isn’t as busy as when we are in a city. There are fewer people — even in a similar location — when compared to how we would fill in the sound in a city scene. We play it sparser; we leave more space between the characters, if you will, which also leaves a little more space, sonically, for smaller sounds to play. We hear a lot of the Foley in the show. In the nominated episode, you can really hear Big’s police uniform and utility belt jingle and jangle as he runs around in the woods, little details like that. Even the sound design moments are usually one or two carefully crafted sounds rather than a large sound-design build.

What direction were you given by the showrunners?
Sterlin is actually pretty hands-off when it comes to the sound. He usually talks more in terms of the story and emotion and gives us the latitude to discover how to accomplish that in the sound. I guess, generally speaking, his main direction is usually keeping it simple and letting the characters and their experiences drive the scene. The sound subtly comments on and reinforce those experiences. But he’s really great at discussing what the intention is in a scene and then giving us some freedom to experiment in the sound. He always lets us know when we’ve gone too far and have to dial it back.

What episode did you submit for Emmy consideration and why? What was it about that episode that you feel made it worthy?
We submitted Episode 208 — “This Is Where the Plot Thickens” — for Emmy consideration. We really love this episode. It is really, really funny and also really touching and puts us inside (almost literally) Big’s head. It was an episode that had several interesting sound moments and was a great example of the “less is more” approach we take with the show.  That’s what we thought would make it worthy — that combination of showcasing our sound editorial abilities while tackling some big moments in very subtle and effective ways, all without being too showy or distracting from the episode.

What was a challenging scene or sequence from that episode?
There is a moment while Big is tripping when birds chirp in the woods, triggering a flashback. The sounds of the birds transform into a police siren. It was a great opportunity to use sounds to inform the audience about what is happening and a great example of how sound can subconsciously affect the audience. I’m not even sure how many people realized they were hearing that. But it’s moments like those that I love in sound design. We spent some time on that scene on the stage, working to make the pitches of the birds match the sirens and manipulating the bird sounds and the sirens so the transformation sounded natural and had a similar pace to the visuals.

It was nice that we had the time on the stage to work through some trial and error to make it work just right. Again, I don’t know that audiences will notice it and appreciate the work that went into it, but it was a little detail that helped the audience experience Big’s drug-induced trip through his memories… and the clarity he gains by re-experiencing those painful memories.

What was an example of a note you were given by the showrunners?
When Big’s third eye opens, the showrunners were very clear that the temp sound wasn’t working — that is needed to both sound more realistic and be transformative as the drugs open up his memories. Your eye doesn’t really make a sound when it opens. But this is very common thing you encounter in sound for film and TV. You need to create a sound for something that doesn’t make sound in real life, and you have to make that sound seem realistic — if something did make a sound, what would it be? And then on top of that, what would it sound like when memories and thoughts that you’ve repressed come flooding back into you?

What tools were used on the show? Anything come in particularly handy?
We always work in Pro Tools. It’s basically the industry standard for sound editing and sound design. I don’t know all the plugins that the sound editors who work on the show use in their systems, but personally, I use Auto-Align Post, Dehumaniser, iZotope Ozone10, iZotope Trash and FabFilter EQ extensively.

What studio did you work out of?
Reservation Dogs sound post was done at Formosa Group, mixing on Stage 5 at Paramount with Joe Earle and Gabe Serrano. I have worked with Joe and the editors on this show for almost 20 years.

What haven’t I asked about Reservation Dogs that’s important?
I think what’s great about Reservation Dogs, beyond its significance as the first TV series with an all-Indigenous creative team, is that it’s both very funny and very touching. And the sound (and music) works really well within that world to help accentuate the funny moments (like the Foley for the stick when Kenny Boy pretends he is holding a rifle) and the sad or emotional moments (the low tension drone bed playing as Big remembers when he failed Cookie, which leads to him feeling responsible for her death). It’s those small details that I think make Reservation Dogs such an amazing show.

Sound is the end of a long journey in bringing a film or TV show to fruition. It starts with the writing, goes through production and direction and the actors’ performances. All of that gets shaped in picture editing, then sound brings in all the final, subtle touches that tie it all together and give it a sense of location and time. And I really think Reservation Dogs is a great example of what happens when all of those components come together and perfectly complement one another.

The other thing I’d mention is the great work our dialogue editors [David Beadle and Sonya Lindsay] do on this show. We shoot very little ADR, and it is entirely filmed on real locations, no soundstages. On top of that, the actors often improvise and try different things in each take, so often we don’t have many takes of a line. The dialogue editors work really hard to clean up the dialogue and make it all work. They use every dialogue editor trick in the book since they can’t rely on getting it clean in ADR or having multiple takes to search through to find a clean take. I’m really amazed at what they are able to accomplish with all those restrictions and how they always deliver clean dialogue tracks to the stage.

Emmys: Editing FX’s Welcome to Wrexham

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Born in Cairo but living in Los Angeles, Mohamed El Manasterly was a DJ before transitioning to editing. His says his knowledge of music serves as a guiding force in his edits, style, and ability to create seamless transitions within his work.

Mohamed El Manasterly

El Manasterly was one of the editors on the docuseries Welcome to Wrexham, which he describes as “a captivating fish out of water story, following Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds as they take on the ownership of Wrexham soccer club.” Beyond its sports backdrop, the series delves into themes of friendship, perseverance, cross-cultural exploration, ambition and the unbreakable bond of comradeship.

The series — which will air Season 2 in September — received six Emmy nominations this year, including one for El Manasterly and his fellow editors. Let’s found out more….

How many editors are on the series and how is it broken up?
Our editing team consisted of four editors: myself, Charles Little II, ACE, Curtis McConnell and Michael Brown. Welcome to Wrexham thrived on a pure collaborative approach, with each of us contributing to every episode. The post team’s planning strategy was truly ingenious. For instance, I might build an episode, only for another editor to finish it, and vice versa. This workflow was instrumental in giving each episode multiple and distinct viewpoints, resulting in a fast evolution of the show’s development.

How early did you get involved on the show, and how early do you get your segments to edit? What’s the average per episode?
I joined the editing process a few months after it began, immediately immersing myself in scene cutting. Our editing team didn’t have a fixed scene quota. Instead, we tackled available scenes, maintaining a continuous and productive pace. At times, I took the lead on a specific episode, while also contributing to scene construction for other episodes or addressing notes. We navigated between episodes, driven by the structure created by our showrunner, John Henion.

With a show that has so much heart and focus on the community, even beyond the team, how did you approach telling a story that would speak to general viewers, not just sports fans?
Having moved to the US from Egypt nine years ago, during my initial four years here, much of the work I undertook revolved around films shot in the Middle East. Producers sought me out for my ability to bridge the cultural gap between the East and West. My approach involved identifying universally shared human traits — such as family, love, hate, struggle, ambition, success and failure — that transcend specific cultures or locations.

In the case of Welcome to Wrexham, although football provides the backdrop, the series derives its essence from the people, their aspirations and their passions. This aspect is what truly resonates and finds relatability across audiences, regardless of their backgrounds.

What direction are you typically given for the edit?
When it comes to editing unscripted content, good planning can only go so far; the true essence and texture of the show are ultimately shaped during the editing process, which unfolds in different stages. We were lucky to have executive producers who had a clear vision for the show’s aesthetic. Additionally, FX, the network behind the series, provided the freedom to explore and experiment.

The workflow was as follows: Showrunner John Henion collaborated with our story producers to outline the structure on paper. Once a rough draft emerged, editors, like myself, joined in to contribute our perspective. Scenes were prepared and then the cutting process began. Each scene’s purpose, tone, mood and role in advancing the overall narrative was always well-defined.

When the first cuts were ready, we would share them with Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds, whose feedback proved instrumental in elevating the show. Drawing from their scripted background, they gave the series a fresh sensibility, introducing nuances that redefined the boundaries of unscripted content.

Was there a particular segment/episode that was challenging? If so, why?
Each episode had its own challenge, but one of the most occurring was the football matches, given the repetitive nature of them. The main challenge revolved around maintaining freshness in our approach to each match and avoiding repetition. The solution emerged in the form of crafting a distinct theme for every episode.

Themes such as legacy, family and history acted as the interpretative lens through which we examined the material. Each episode focused on two or three characters, with the narrative of each match being conveyed from their perspectives. Whether focusing on players, coaches or even fans, the angle was shaped by the character’s perspective. We deliberately started each game in various ways — occasionally by capturing players’ preparations at their homes, sometimes diving into a match midstream when Wrexham was behind, and so on. This approach made every game feel fresh and new.

What system did you use to cut and why? Is there a tool within that system that you use a lot? How did you manage your time?
I use Avid Media Composer because of its robustness and stability. It’s a preferred choice for many major productions due to its reliability and sharing capabilities. Moreover, the software remains highly stable even when handling extensive amounts of footage and managing long-term projects. It supports collaboration among multiple editors on the same project, enabling seamless sharing of bins and enhancing overall workflow efficiency.

While working on Welcome To Wrexham, I operated remotely, which gave me the flexibility to organize my day as I like. I usually wake up at 5am, spend some time meditating and praying, and then start my first work session from 5:30am to 8:30 am. During this time, I can get a lot done without any distractions. After that, I go to the gym from 8:30am to 9:30am, and by 10am, I’m ready for our team morning call. At that point, I’m feeling fresh and have already accomplished quite a bit of work. After the call, I have another editing session from 11am to 1pm. By that time, I’m usually feeling tired, so I take a short 30-minute nap, followed by a 15-minute walk. This helps me recharge for my last editing session of the day.

What was the episode you chose to submit, and what is it about this episode that you think made it worthy of Emmy’s attention?
We selected the season finale episode titled “Do or Die” because we believe it showcases the best editing work. Throughout the season, we’ve been weaving parallel stories involving Rob and Ryan, the fans and the players. In this final episode, we bring all these story arcs to a conclusion during the crucial and defining match of the season. The primary objective of the entire season has been Wrexham’s promotion from the National League, making this match the culmination of the show’s buildup.

This episode took place in a high-stakes, intense game and we interwove moments to conclude the characters’ stories. However, it wasn’t just about wrapping up their stories; it was also about quickly reminding the audience of their individual journeys and providing a satisfying conclusion. This posed significant challenges, as we had to meticulously strike a balance between time spent in the match and moments taken to conclude character arcs. It took numerous iterations to achieve this delicate balance effectively.

Emmys: Editing A Black Lady Sketch Show

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HBO Max’s A Black Lady Sketch Show is an Emmy Award-winning, half-hour sketch comedy show. “It’s written, produced by and starring Black women on,” explains editor Malinda Zehner Guerra. “Robin Thede is the creator and star of the series. Its hilarious world of characters have been brought to life across four seasons by some of the funniest women in comedy including Quinta Brunson, Ashley Nicole Black, Gabrielle Dennis, Skye Townsend, Issa Rae and many more.”

Malinda Zehner Guerra

We reached out to Zehner Guerra, who was nominated for an Emmy Award for editing the show, along with supervising editor Stephanie Filo, ACE, and Taylor Joy Mason, ACE, to find out more.

You have multiple editors on the series. How is it broken up?
The post process for A Black Lady Sketch Show is a little bit different than on other narrative shows, since each sketch is its own standalone world. This season we had three editors — myself, Stephanie Filo and Taylor Joy Mason — and we would each take a new sketch as we finished our last.

Every few days we would be jumping into a completely new world and have to figure out the specific style, music and pacing for each one. It was definitely a challenge, but I think my experience in a wide variety of genres and formats across scripted and unscripted TV and features was an asset. I was already used to switching from a survival show, like Naked & Afraid, to a competition show like RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars and then changing it up again with a thriller independent feature like Confessional. So it was easy to pivot from cutting our Bridgerton-style sketch, “Frock of Shit” one day, to our murder podcast, “Fresh To Def,” and then the hilarious Telenovela, “The Bold and The Cubicle.”

Once all the sketches were shot and cut, we would then work on building the episodes, seeing what sketches made the most sense together.

With so many different stories, you must get to play with a lot of different pacing. How do you find the “funny” or enhance it in the edit?
Robin loves a super-tight edit with hardly any air between lines, so sketches move at a blistering pace. You’re always looking for moments to add reactions or lines from characters off camera that the viewer might not notice on their first watch. That really makes a sketch feel full of life and encourages the people to go back and watch again to pick up on those little things they may have missed the first time. Steph, Taylor and I would often share our cuts with each other while we were working on them to see what jokes were landing and offer suggestions to amp things up. It was a very fun, collaborative process of trying to make each other laugh.

What direction are you typically given for the edit?
The overall direction from Robin was to always push the comedy as much as you can and make the funniest sketch possible. The scripts were so hilarious to start with, but our cast are amazingly talented improvisers, so there was always tons of improv and alternate takes to play with, which gave us plenty of room to make different choices than what was scripted.

My first pass would normally be fairly close to the script, but I’d also have some alts prepared to show. We’d get into a session and start playing around with all the different options and trying out everyone’s ideas and put them together, and the end product was always a new level of hilarity. Robin really loves the post process, so all ideas are welcome, no matter how crazy, because they always lead to an even funnier sketch in the end.

Was there a particular segment/skit that was challenging?
Overall, the biggest challenge with editing comedy, especially A Black Lady Sketch Show where the cast are such amazing improvisers, is having too many amazing jokes to fit into one sketch. Between the script and the improv, you could easily have enough content to fill an entire episode with just one sketch. After you put everything you love into a cut, that’s when the fun starts and you get to roll up your sleeves and get a little ruthless — you start slicing and trimming and you really get to find out what the final product will be. I think that’s when an editor can really shine. When you are able to focus on what is best serving the story, the pacing and the comedy and then get rid of everything else, even if it’s your favorite joke.

What episode did you submit for the Emmys? What was it about that episode that stuck out?
We chose Episode 4, “My Love Language is Words of Defamation” because it really highlights the range of sketches we had this season. It has a great mix of genres, including our Monty Python-inspired “Gladys and the Knights of the Round Table.” It opens with “Fresh to Def,” our murder podcast sketch, which was across the board a team favorite. It also features a few of our fan-favorite sketches and characters, including a return to the “Black Lady Courtroom,” which has become such a signature sketch for the series and also guest stars Issa Rae and Yvette Nicole Brown.

What system did you use to cut and why? Is there a tool within that system that you use a lot?
We cut the show on Avid Media Composer. I think one of my most used tools in Avid is the AniMatte for changing the timing of things in a two-shot. A lot of times you’ll have a great reaction from one character, but the other person in the frame is already talking or moving in a way that doesn’t match their coverage. AniMatte allows you to comp in a different part of the footage and make it all flow seamlessly. It’s a great way to really fine tune the picture.

How did you manage your time?
Time management is crucial in post and can be really hard when you’re working on several sketches in different phases at the same time. On A Black Lady Sketch Show our post team, led by post producer Gwyn Martin-Morris, was integral in keeping us on track. She had the best system of spreadsheets for tracking all the sketches, and daily run-downs of what sketch we were working on or if we were working with the director or producers on a cut.

And, of course, our rock star AEs who kept the project organized and would help us find music or with temp VFX. That took the guesswork out of what was happening day to day and really let us focus on editing.

How do you manage producer’s expectations with reality/what can really be done?
So much of making a film or TV show is about experimenting and collaboration, and a cut is constantly evolving. When you get notes, or are working with the director or producers, the best mindset to have is, “let’s try it.” Sometimes I’ll read a note and my initial reaction will be “that won’t work,” or “we don’t have that footage,” but I’m going to do my best to see if I can address it.

Once I start playing around or looking at ways to repurpose footage to address the note, a path often appears to make it happen. It won’t always totally work, and we might decide to not use it, but sometimes it leads to an even better idea in the end. The more you try things out and come back with options or solutions to the problem presented, the more trust your director or showrunner will have that if you do come back and say something can’t be done, then it can’t, and you move on to the next note. Those moments of experimentation can really lead to some magical moments, but you would not have found them if you didn’t give it a try.

Emmy-Nominated Beef Director Jake Schreier

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By Iain Blair

The Netflix limited series Beef tells the story of two Los Angeles residents from opposite ends of the economic and social spectrum. Danny (Steven Yeun) is a struggling contractor living in gritty Koreatown and Amy (Ali Wong) is a successful lifestyle guru living in the wealthy suburb of Calabasas. Their lives become inextricably linked after a road-rage incident in a parking lot that quickly escalates into a full-blown feud.

The series earned 13 Emmy nominations across multiple categories, including one for executive producer/director Jake Schreier, whose film credits include Robot & Frank and Paper Towns.

Jake Schreier

L-R: Jake Schreier, Ali Wong and Steven Yeun

I talked with Schreier about directing the show, how he collaborated closely with “Sonny” Lee Sung Jin, the show’s creator, and DP Larkin Seiple on the look, and his involvement in posting the series.

How did you prep for this show since you directed most of the episodes — 6 out of 10?
It was quite a scramble. Sonny and I’ve been friends for six years, so before I was even involved, we were talking about it and how to accomplish it and how to approach production. At some point we figured out we would have to cross-board the whole thing; it’s not like it’s episode by episode. We just treated it like one long movie and shot across all nine episodes and the final one that Sonny directed.

So there were just a lot of conversations with him and production designer Grace Yun, about getting a sense of perspective and how to work that into the show in the limited time frame you have in television, how to give it a sense of authorship, and how to really ground audiences in Danny and Amy’s perspective.

Once you got going on this, did you work closely with Sonny on a daily basis?
Oh, 100 percent. He was there for the whole shoot except when he got COVID, and then he was there on his iPad, so it was a complete collaboration. It’s Sonny’s show and his vision, and I looked at it more as what can I offer and bring to it? Like different approaches of how you’d want to work your way into a scene, such as the church scene.

There’s a way that the writing seems to dictate an approach, but in conversations with Sonny it became clear that we should take a very different approach. And when your collaborator is also a friend, you can have those conversations and have the time to revise your approach.

Talk about the visual approach to the show, and working with Sonny and Larkin to find the right look.
We went for something cinematic, and we wanted there to be an element of handheld, of being observed. I think what’s tricky about it is there’s a real level of specificity that we had to achieve in terms of the places in LA and the main locations – Calabasas and Koreatown. But there’s also this heightened place that the show goes to, so how do we come up with an approach that would accommodate the reality of where it starts and some of the heightened places that it goes to? That is a very delicate balance to play, and we wanted you to really connect with it on that heightened level.

What about working with Larkin?
He’s also been a friend for a long time, and he’s a brilliant DP. He has such an interesting approach to lighting and such a smart approach to story as well. Just telling this story in general was such an incredible collaboration across the board, and you always want something to become greater than the sum of its parts, and we all felt that was the case here.

Tell us about the shoot. Obviously, most of it was location work, right?
Right. Grace Yun built an incredible set for Amy’s house and one for Danny’s apartment, but the rest was all locations, and we moved around a lot. For instance, we had motels in three different episodes but just for little pieces, and we could only shoot there for one day. So that was one long seven-stage day getting it all. We shot for six days an episode, so it was quite a sprint.

Maybe the craziest day was where we had to shoot the prison scenes in the beginning of Episode 9, and then the prison conversations at the end of Episode 6. Then we used the parking lot for scenes of Danny’s parents at the end of Episode 7, and we moved to a different parking structure to shoot scenes from Episode 8 and the end of Episode 6. So all that was just one day.

Jake Schreier

TV schedules are like that, and it’s why all the prep and conversations are so important, because once you’re in the middle of it it’s all moving extremely fast. And I’d always shot-list it and storyboard the script entirely in sequence, even if we were running around and shooting it out of order, to make sure those shots all intercut properly in the edit. All that planning had to be done ahead of time, as on the day it’s just a scramble.

Congratulations on your Emmy nomination for episode 9, The Great Fabricator. How did you handle the big car crash sequence?
Thank you. We got lucky with the location because it had all these private roads where we could stage the chase, and it had a hill and we could send the cars off it. It was exciting having all this action stuff to do, but then we just had six days to do it all. So how do you stage it and pull it off so it doesn’t feel compromised and is also effective? It also leaves moments for the emotional moments between Danny and his younger brother Paul. And I think the emotional moments were just as important as the action stuff.

Jake Schreier and Ali Wong

There is a fair amount of VFX work, especially with all the phone scenes. How involved were you in the post process?
Sonny was nice enough to let me stay through all the post. We had incredible editors, including Nat Fuller [Emmy nominated for his work on Beef], who cut Episode 9 and five others, and I really shoot for the editor. There’s a real specific idea in the way we want the order of the shots, and the way we want the story to be told, so it’s very important to be there for the edit.

Sonny and I had a nice trade-off where I’d turn over a cut and he’d work on it while I moved on to another episode. Then I’d come back to it and we would work on it some more, so it did what it needed to do for the story while also preserving some of the film language and grammar we’d done on the day. As for all the VFX, it’s great to have a showrunner like Sonny who is so meticulous about all that. We had various vendors [including Mas FX, Ghost VFX, Banditry and Reactor] and we tried to make it more about removing things than adding things.

Where did you do all the post?
We had offices in Burbank and then we basically went remote because of COVID and a lot of it was happening on PacPostLive, and we were trading cuts back and forth.

Jake Schreier

Isn’t it unusual for a director to be that involved in all the post?
Yes, as usually on episodic TV I’ll turn in my cut and the showrunner will take over, and this could have gone that way. But we ended up seeing the show in a very similar way, and when you come in without the attitude of trying to protect your cut or shield it, and instead it’s like, how can I help make it better, it’s a far better way of collaborating.

What about the DI? How involved were you?
I was there for some of the sessions which were done at Color Collective with colorists Alex Bickel and Alex Jimenez. But that was really them and Larkin who has such a great sense of lighting, color and texture. I’m so happy with the way it all turned out.

What’s next for you?
Whenever we can get a fair deal, I’ll get back to directing the upcoming Thunderbolts movie for Marvel, which got shut down by the strikes.

Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.

 

Emmys: The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Sound Editor

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Damian Del Borrello, MPSE, is a New Zealand-based sound designer with more than 15 years of experience crafting soundscapes for TV and film. Most recently, he served as the supervising sound editor of Amazon Studios’ The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, a prequel to the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit film franchises.

Del Borrello received his first Emmy nomination for sound editing on the episode, “Udûn.” We reached out to him to find out more.

Damian Del Borrello

What direction were you given for the soundtrack of the series?
The word that kept coming up in conversation was “cinematic.” The producers really wanted us to treat Rings of Power like a series of feature films, rather than a TV show. There was a real desire by the showrunners to bring something new to Tolkien’s Middle Earth, which was very exciting but also quite daunting. The original films were touchstone moments in cinema and redefined what fantasy sounded like on the big screen. Personally, I had been working in Wellington with some of the sound editors who worked on those original films, so the sense of responsibility was immense.

How would you describe the show’s sound?
The original LOTR films are often described as “fantasy documentary style” sound, which I think means “realistic.” Even though there are fantastical creatures and worlds, the level of detail is very high, and the quality of the sounds themselves is organic. We didn’t use synthetic sources for things like magic and creatures, almost everything came from real word recordings. The result was an organic sounding, yet highly detailed track.

The sound team

Can you describe your workflow on the series?
Robby [Robert Stambler, MPSE, co-supervising sound editor] and I were brought on at the start of principal photography and began building our libraries straight away. Picture editorial were cutting as soon as the first rushes came from location. For the first year or so, we would receive sequence cuts from editorial, which we would then flesh out and export stems for the editors to lay into the timeline – this meant they could work with high quality sounds as the cuts continued to evolve.

As we moved into the second year, full episodes started taking shape, and we would then assemble our sequence sessions into master sessions – each episode was split into four reels.

The last six months of the schedule had us mixing in Auckland New Zealand, which involved Lindsey Alvarez and Beau Borders, who both did an amazing job.

Any particular scene stand out as challenging and if so, why?
One of my favorite scenes is the orc battle in episode 6 ‘Udun’. The way in which music, sound effects and dialogue all weave in through the chaotic action is so satisfying. We never miss an emotional beat, sword slash, or pained scream – the clarity in the sonic storytelling is just awesome!

How closely did you work with the re-recording mixers on this one? How did that relationship work?
I was constantly on and off the mix stage, reviewing one episode with the sound team, reviewing another episode remotely with the showrunners and prepping new episodes to start on the stage at a later time. Supervisor/re-recording mixer collaboration is crucial in achieving a great soundtrack and also in having fun while at work — my relationship with Lindsey and Beau was fantastic; we all became close friends and would spend most weekends hanging out as well!

What tools did you call on for this show?
All sound editorial, both effects and dialogue, was done in Pro Tools. With the constantly evolving cut, it was important for us to be able to update our editing and premixing within a single session so all the details could be carried forward to the mix.

A key workflow tool was Matchbox by Cargo Cult. The ability to compare two AAFs/QuickTime video files/audio guide tracks and accurately find matches/differences meant everything. Our first assistant sound editor, Andrew Moore, was the co-developer of Matchbox. His ability to build detailed change notes and reconform files was amazing and kept us all on track when updates across multiple episodes came up.

Why do you think this particular episode was worthy of a nomination?
One word – “scale.” In my opinion, this is one of the most cinematic episodes on a streaming platform to date. The sheer volume of work to create the sounds for all the action, VFX and environmental components in the episode is monumental. Then, to have quiet, subjective moments as well as crystal-clear action sequences with massive amounts of spectacle and impact, makes this episode particularly special.

 

 

Emmys: Wednesday‘s VFX Supervisor and Producer

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The Netflix series Wednesday is a modern take on the class TV show, The Addams Family. It stars Jenna Ortega and Wednesday Addams, who while attending Nevermore Academy, attempts to master her emerging psychic ability, stop a killing spree and solve the mystery that embroiled her parents 25 years ago. Setting the series’ tone, the first four episodes were directed by filmmaker Tim Burton.

Wednesday

Tom Turnbull

Wednesday was nominated for 12 Emmy Awards, including one for Burton for direction and one for visual effects. VFX supervisor Tom Turnbull and VFX producer Kent Johnson were just two of the team who have been recognized for their work. We spoke to them about the show and its visual effects.

How many shots did each episode have, typically? 
Kent Johnson: They ranged, per episode, from as many as 311 to as little as 97 with an average of 184 shots per episode.

Tom Turnbull: Yes. Roughly 300 shots per episode, which is not super high, but working within a budget and schedule we deliberately focused our resources on shots that count rather than shot count. If a shot did not move the story forward, support the characters or provide emotional impact we did not do it.

What are some of the key VFX in the series?
Turnbull: Thing was the effect that was most important and that most interested me going in. I knew, done right, Thing would be incredibly popular and critical to the character of Wednesday. He needed to be as perfect as we could make him.

Kent Johnson

Nevermore Academy was also a critical, only partially existing as a location, it needed to be created digitally such that is would be accepted as fully real. The creature work, of course, was key and very tricky to pull off on a television budget and schedule.   

Johnson: I agree. The most prominent VFX in the series was likely Thing, the disembodied hand who was usually a 2D effect removing the actor but often a completely 3D CG character. Other effects include set extensions of a castle in the Carpathian mountains of Romania to make it into Nevermore Academy, the CG creatures Hyde Monster, Enid Werewolf, piranhas, Kent the siren/merman and spectacular particle effects in the appearance and destruction of the villain Crackstone.

Did you use virtual production or real-time VFX?
Turnbull: We did not entertain real-time VFX on the show. There was a strong feeling that we needed to ground the look of the show in real-world locations and filmmaking, and that virtual production would not be in keeping with our aesthetic. We did consider virtual production for some driving sequences, but logistically during the height of the pandemic, it was very difficult to orchestrate from Romania. We did use real-time rendering for Nevermore previs with Unreal, allowing us to explore its layout and design and to quickly design shots.

How many different vendors do you use, and what is the turnaround time like? Is it like a traditional television schedule or do you have more time?
Turnbull: There were four main vendors who worked on the complex hero effects and about six or seven secondary vendors who provided support. One of the great things about working with the Netflix model of releasing an entire season on one day is that it allows time to really work the material for early episodes. There is less pressure on hitting a date and some flexibility of dropping in upgraded effects after the mix and color are complete.

Episodes 101 and 102 effectively had eight months to complete, which you would never get on a traditional TV schedule.  This pays dividends in developing looks and procedures that can be applied to later episodes that have a much shorter delivery.   I hope never to see a TV schedule again.  The streaming model provides better creative opportunities.

Johnson: In the end, we relied on 11 different VFX houses. The delivery schedule varied wildly. Some of the more complex sequences took as much as five months from turnover to final delivery while simpler effects were knocked out in days or weeks. Although the turnovers and deliveries were highly fluid, we gave each episode a VFX production schedule of about 100 days in our planning of post.

What about the pipeline? Can you describe it?
Turnbull: On the production side we managed our workflow with Filmmaker databases and spreadsheets. We took the approach that we needed to provide post with as much data and reference as possible, scanning sets, performers and props along with a vast number of digital stills. Managing that much data is a task unto itself. During post we kept a shadow edit on Resolve to manage and assess shot work in context.

Production shot on an ARRI Alexa LF with Signature primes.

Johnson: When we had a locked edit, the editorial department would provide the vendor a QuickTime of the VFX shots in context as a reference. They would then order EXRs of the relevant frames plus 24 frame handles from the post facility using an automated process. The EXRs are posted to the specific vendor’s Aspera accounts for them to download. When the visual effects are approved as final by all of the stakeholders, the final EXRs are then sent from the vendors to the colorist for final grading.

What were the biggest challenges this season? 
Turnbull: To me, the biggest challenge of the season was the sheer volume and variety of the VFX work required. I had worked with Miles and Al before and was familiar with the density and scope of what they put down on the page. It was common to get to page 10 of a script and already be well over what would be considered normal for episodic, both for plot and visual effects. There was no singular effect that I did not have confidence in delivering, it was the number of different effects necessary to tell the story.

There were very few days where VFX was not on-set doing some kind of major effect. It made for a very high-energy, dynamic filming situation, which fortunately, I enjoy. We put a lot of effort into managing the volume of work and in collaboration with Tim and the showrunners, Miles and Al, managed to refine it to its essence. If we had not done that we would have been significantly over budget and the show would have suffered for it.  Less is more as they say.

Johnson: Nevermore Academy was a complex CG asset that required a great deal of time to design, redesign, adapt, model and tweak from shot to shot. The 3D CG Hyde monster was a new creature from the mind of Tim Burton. It required a few different concept artists approaching it from different artistic sensibilities to land on Tim’s vision and then a great deal of time to make such an outlandish creature appear photoreal in both appearance and movement.

 

What were the tools that you used, and why did you choose them for this project? 
Johnson: As the VFX producer, the tools that I personally used were Adobe Acrobat for scripts, Adobe Photoshop to sketch on and annotate tech scout stills, Microsoft Excel and FileMaker Pro for budgeting, DaVinci Resolve to edit Thing’s rehearsals and Adobe’s Frame.io to view previsualizations of virtual drone shots around Nevermore Academy. I’m very pleased that Tim Burton chose to use a physical miniature of the Addams Family house for a flashback where Wednesday buries her deceased pet scorpion in the family’s pet cemetery. Our vendors used Nuke, Maya, ZBrush, Houdini, Adobe After Effects and other software tools.

What was it about this particular episode that made it Emmy consideration worthy? 
Turnbull: Variety. Episode 108 has a bit of everything in it, Thing, Nevermore, Hyde and Enid Werewolf, along with a host of new effects surrounding Crackstone’s incarnation and demise. It also features complex creature work, including transformations, much more than any of the previous episodes.

We were also under considerable time pressure to wrap principal photography, and it was a minor miracle that we managed to get it in the can. A lot of the visual effects work was, as a result, created entirely in post. No one within the Academy voting membership will ever know or appreciate the team effort that went into that, but I do. The biggest achievements are often the ones that are not noticeable.

Johnson: The episode submitted was the Season 1 finale. With almost 300 shots, it showcased all the best VFX of Wednesday, including Thing, Nevermore Academy, the fight between two fully CG creatures of the Hyde Monster and Enid Werewolf. The battle between Wednesday and her nemesis, the pilgrim Crackstone, brought back from the dead and ultimately destroyed with complex dynamic particle effects and finally the poetic defeat of Christina Ricci’s character by a swarm of animated bees controlled by telekinesis.

Emmy-Nominated Director Paris Barclay on The Jeffrey Dahmer Story

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By Iain Blair

Paris Barclay is one of television’s most successful and honored directors. A two-time Emmy Award winner, he’s directed nearly 200 episodes of television, including such series as The West Wing, ER, Glee, CSI, The Shield, Scandal and NYPD Blue. He received his ninth Emmy nomination for an episode of the Netflix show Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. 

Paris Barclay

The 10-part true crime series, created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, dramatizes the life and death of notorious serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer (Evan Peters). It received six Emmy nominations. Barclay’s nod was for Episode 6, “Silenced.”

I recently spoke with Barclay about making the harrowing show, the challenges, his love of post and the importance of sound.

What were the challenges of directing your episodes — 6 and 10 — and how did you prepare?
I got the scripts a couple of weeks before I had to start official preparation, so I was able to ruminate on it and imagine it. What I kept coming back to was music — not the music that would play on the show but the whole thing as a kind of musical system. That was my private touchstone. I didn’t really express that to everyone else, but I’m also a composer, and I think of things in terms of beats, silences and crescendos, and the blessing of different instruments. So I tried to sort of play it like I’d play a score that I loved. That was the over-arching design.

Then we got technical, and there was a period of thousands and thousands of meetings. What would the slice of meat look like that appears in the final scenes? That was probably seven meetings just for that. How would we do Tony’s story, and would it be different in terms of the style we were doing for the rest of the show? How would we be able to bring Evan to that period and also a brighter mood than we see with him in the past? So in meetings with Ryan and the writers and producers we gradually hashed out all of these things, bit by bit. And then we changed them, constantly, because that’s the way it goes.

Talk about working with your DP John O’Connor.
He was my DP on both episodes, and we began working on the template that had been established on the first episode by director Carl Franklin and DP Jason McCormick. Jason was sort of our visual stylist for the whole series, and working with Ryan he conceived how the show would look. He left the rule book — basically, one page of different visual rules we had to adhere to, which we then had to deviate from. It was great to have the rule book, and we used it like I used the music. It became something that we blocked in and out depending on the scene and the circumstances.

The show has a great look. What cameras and lenses did you shoot on?
We shot on the Sony Venice, and we used the Blackwing 7 series of lenses created by Bradford Young and others that have that very particular patina and have that bokeh and certain fall-off and glow. And, of course, those lenses were undoubtedly tweaked by Jason to make sure they were exactly what we wanted. I believe we used two sets of the Blackwing 7 series of lenses, one that was a little bit more traditional in the Blackwing style, and one that was a little bit moiré distorted that we used in certain moments.

Tell us about the shoot.
We shot it all here in LA at Raleigh Studios, and the shooting schedule depended on various factors. So while I was shooting Episode 6, we were also cleaning up parts of Episode 1 and other episodes, so the schedule went a bit longer than usual.

I shot for about 18 days on Episode 6, and Episode 10 was a bit more efficient, shooting for about 14 days. They were definitely longer than normal TV as we shot cinematically, and it takes extra time to do all the setups and get the beautiful look we were hoping for. I think we did get the look we wanted.

Did you start integrating post during the shoot?
Oh yeah. I was super-fortunate to have Taylor Joy Mason as my editor. She was brilliant and came up with lots of great ideas. We were on the phone a lot about the things I was delivering, and she was trying things that were somewhat experimental and not necessarily in the traditional style of the show, which opened it up.

For instance, like the flutter-cutting between Dahmer and Tony when we go back to him telling his parents he met a good friend, and then we go back to the club. That was a real editorial collaboration from the get-go. Then there was the strobe lighting that made it intermittent and allowed us to go back and forth between experiences. Taylor and I were talking all along, and also talking about sound, as it plays such a critical role in this. We recorded sound everywhere, but then it was a matter of, which scenes are we really going to drop the sound out of?

We didn’t plan to use sound everywhere, but at least we had it – and thank God we did as some of the scenes that had been scripted as silent actually ended up with dialogue in them, and some of the scenes that had dialogue ended up without it. So it was a constant back and forth process, which lasted all the way through to the final mix.

How involved were you in all the post and who was on the team?
I was already involved in another Ryan Murphy series, The Watchmen, so I had Alexis Martin Woodall, president of Ryan Murphy Productions who’s brilliant in post, and she’s a former post supervisor, and is our secret weapon.

Then there’s Regis Kimble, who’s the post supervising editor, and he cut some of the episodes and also worked closely with all the editors to make sure the tone and style and look were consistent. Not every show has this, but having Regis was a godsend.

Then Todd Nenninger, a producer and post supervisor, was doing everything from dealing with the editors and the colorist to the VFX houses and locking in the sound on a day-to-day basis, and we’ve worked together on every Ryan show I’ve done going back to Glee. And he works closely with Scott James, the co-producer. They’re the people who actually executed my dreams on the stage and traveled this thing from start to finish, and I trust them completely.

I was already involved in another Ryan Murphy series, The Watchmen, so I had Alexis Martin Woodall, president of Ryan Murphy Productions, who’s brilliant in post. She’s a former post supervisor and our secret weapon. On some shows, I worry about post, but this team always makes things better. And directing this was very interesting from a post perspective, because Episode 6 starts with a very different look. It’s generally a brighter, sunnier look, and even the nights are not quite as dark and quite as yellow, because we’re living in Tony Hughes’ world. So the club scenes are more alive and have more vibrant colors. But then, as Dahmer intrudes into this world, we began to come back to some of the visual vocabulary, color and style that you associated with him before.

So when he considers crushing the pillows and trying to drug Tony, you see it go back to the style you’ve gotten used to. He’s center-punched in the middle of the frame in very tight focus, and the colors of yellow and despair that we’ve associated with him come back. And all that ends up with the final scene where we’re surrounded in the darkness of his apartment by dank yellows, until finally he’s enclosed completely in black. And the orchestra’s playing the cello line intermittently though the entire episode, and that cello line keeps getting stronger and stronger until at the end when the cello becomes a bass, and the sound drops out of the bottom. So all that’s part of the mix of that particular episode.

What was involved in terms of VFX?
There were very few visual effects in Episode 6. The main ones were for the baby in the first scene, to keep it animated and alive, as some of the baby footage wasn’t of a real baby. We also did some production and period clean-up. This was done by Fuse FX.

For Episode 10, where we see Dahmer being killed in prison, we used a lot of VFX to make it all as vivid as we needed. We had to change his face a bit, add blood and sometimes detract blood, so all that was a VFX surgery and redo to make sure it was all balanced and worked the way we wanted.

What about the DI?
Doug Delaney at Picture Shop was our final colorist, and he did all 10 episodes in the series. He’s brilliant. For instance, he brought in some of the brighter tones that lifted Tony Hughes’ world and all the optimism and took it back to Dahmer’s yellow, dark world in the end.

You’ve directed so many great shows. How do you rate this experience?
It was the most challenging because of the subject matter and my personal feelings about Dahmer, and the complexities of dealing with deaf actors, and also the sound issues.

The sound team from Formosa Group handled the sound mix, and we had a great team — supervising sound editor Gary Megregian, and re-recording mixers Laura Wiest, Jamie Hardt and Joe Barnett. This was really a sound show, and that made it more complicated than Glee with all the music. So you ask, exactly when do you lose the sound, and what replaces it? What about creating the sound of what a deaf person might hear? They created this roar that had a feel and flavor to it, that wasn’t quite a plane or air, that had to be imagined by people, and they did a terrific job.

Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.

Daisy Jones

Emmys: Re-Recording Mixers on Daisy Jones & The Six

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Amazon’s Daisy Jones & The Six, which many believe was inspired by the story of Fleetwood Mac, was created by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, and is based on the 2019 novel of the same name by Taylor Jenkins Reid.  It follows a rock band that finds huge success in the 1970s but breaks up due to tensions among the group. Their story is told through documentary style interviews with the band members and footage of concerts and recording sessions.

Daisy Jones

Mathew Waters

As you can imagine, a show about music needs serious post sound, which was provided by re-recording mixers Mathew Waters, CAS, and Lindsey Alvarez, CAS. Both were recognized with Emmy nominations for their work on the series — one of nine that the show has received overall.

We spoke to the sound team, who mixed at Formosa Group Hollywood, to find out more…

How did you split up the duties? Who did sound and music, versus dialogue, etc.?
Lindsey Alvarez: I mixed the dialogue and music, while Matt Waters helmed the effects, backgrounds and Foley.

Mathew Waters: Although we have different duties, it is very important to work together and not as two different specialties. In the end, it is important to have a very contiguous soundtrack.

Lindsey Alvarez

How would you describe the soundscape of Daisy Jones & The Six? What makes it unique?
Lindsey Alvarez: The soundscape is very much grounded in reality, so the actors are actually playing and performing the songs. The showrunners wanted it to sound like a live concert, not produced tracks for a music video. Our strategy for this was to play with the spaces of each venue, which is taxing because you can’t treat voices the same as you would for drums, bass, guitar, etc. Each instrument deserves its own treatment.

We were provided multiple sources to play with to make it feel live, but you’re constantly dancing a fine line of making the band’s songs sound great but not too perfect. You want it to have the warmth and imperfection that records of that era had. On the other hand, the story is being told through interviews. As the dialogue mixer, the challenge was actually nailing the volume level of the interviewer in those sections — mixing her to sound off-mic and behind the camera. Subtle, but a unique challenge for me.

Mathew Waters: I would agree that the soundscape was grounded in reality. It was fun creating environments that fit the era. And it was fun to have an evolution to the growing popularity of the band throughout the episodes. Working with no crowds to small crowds growing and then to Soldier Field. It was very important to go on a real journey with this band so by the end of the story, you really believed that this was a real band.

What direction were you given by the showrunners?
Alvarez: They were intent on making the band’s music sound diegetic, while at the same time making sure the score wasn’t competing. The directive was: music on camera should be grounded and real, while score should feel subliminal.

What episode did you submit for Emmy and why?
Alvarez: We submitted the final episode, “Track 10: Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide.” This episode showcases many of the challenges that we faced as mixers, chief among them was making sure the viewer wasn’t constantly assaulted by a cacophony of rock music and stadium crowds. This meant finding a balance between atmosphere and story. We wanted to put the viewer in the stadium, but also make sure they understood the dialogue.

It’s also an episode that pays off an emotional arc teased from the very beginning of the series, so we felt a certain pressure to “stick the landing.” There was always the risk that the soundscape would undermine the character stuff.

Daisy Jones What was a challenging scene or sequence from that episode?
Alvarez: One of my challenging scenes was making the audience believe that tens of thousands of people are singing along with the band. Did I have a recording of that? Ha, no! What I did have was a recording from production of the extras singing when they filmed it. Our sound mixer, Chris Welcker [also Emmy nominated], knew to capture extras on the day. I used that, layered with loop group recordings, plus our own singing on the dub stage to throw into the mix.

From there, you EQ, adjust timing, add delays and reverbs to achieve that homogenous crowd-singing element — which is almost subliminal in the moment because the focus is on the lead actors looking at each other, not singing. It’s very beautiful storytelling.

Waters: It was really fun making the end concert super exciting from the beginning yet still having somewhere to go by the end. It was also fun and challenging to keep the energy up while still hearing the characters talk or whisper on stage. And, of course, all the different layers of crowds. Closeup singing, close-up cheering and shout outs mixed with medium distant crowds and then large crowds.

Daisy JonesWhat was an example of a note you were given by the showrunners?
Alvarez: After our first playback of this final episode, one of our showrunners, Scott Neustadter, wanted more cheering and specific callouts from the crowd, which was in the mix but not featured. It was a bit too clean. So we made sure to have them peppered through each scene without recycling or repeating anything. It was carefully crafted by our supervising sound editor, Mark Relyea.

What tools were used on the show? Anything come in particularly handy?
Alvarez: We mixed in Pro Tools. I’m always a fan of iZotope’s RX, which is useful for dialogue cleanup with mouth clicks and noise. My other favorite for this show was Slapper by Cargo Cult which is a surround plugin for delays.  I heavily relied on it to give each music venue its appropriate acoustical sound.

Waters: Slapper for sure. A must.

You both typically work as a team. What are some other projects you’ve worked on together and why does this pairing work?
Alvarez: I love working with Matt. Previously, we teamed up for Only Murders in the Building, which landed us an Emmy. Since then, we’ve worked on other shows and films together, so there’s something to the chemistry. Matt has an easy going personality and an unending archive of anecdotes that make working in a dark studio a little lighter.

Waters: We love working together. We also mixed the Hilary Swank film Ordinary Angels together. Lindsey is not only super talented but also has a great spirit and is well on her way to an even more fantastic career. We try to have fun on the mix stage and create a safe place for everyone to have opinions to get the best track possible to tell the story.

What haven’t I asked about Daisy Jones & The Six that’s important?
Alvarez: It’s pretty incredible that this band actually performed and recorded together. I think that’s what makes this show so much fun to watch. The chemistry is palpable. There were countless times that we would blend performances shot on-set with pre-recorded performances, and that’s a testament to the band working so well together.

Not to mention, the editing feat for Amber Funk, our music editor, to make sure we had all the material and make sure it was in sync. It was, of course, another challenge for me to match the performances together but it keeps me on my toes, and I love that. I got into this business because of music, so anytime I get to relive those days, I happily welcome it.

Waters: I would also say that the entire team, including Mark Relyea, our sound supervisor, and the showrunners and music department were fantastic. Of course, the writing and the actors, but also, the set design and costumes were fantastic and gave us inspiration as well. When you have very talented people doing their best, it makes it fun to keep creating with the soundscape.

The Daily Show

Emmys: Editing The Daily Show With Trevor Noah

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While Trevor Noah may have left The Daily Show, his time there had an impact, earning 17 nominations during his run. This includes his last season, which was recognized for best writing, talk show and editing.

As you can imagine, editing a live-to-tape daily talk show is challenging and takes a village. While we reached out to two of the show’s editors — Storm Choi and Einar Westerlund — these editors were also nominated: Eric Davies, Tom Favilla, Lauren Beckett Jackson, Nikolai Johnson, Ryan Middleton, Mark Paone, Erin Shannon and Catherine Trasborg. They were recognized for their work on “Jordan Klepper Shows Trump Supporters January 6th Hearing Clips.”

Let’s find out more…

What is your typical workflow on the show?
Storm Choi: Some segments on our show are edited over weeks, while other breaking news pieces are cut in just minutes. So the workflow is fully dependent on the day, and flexibility becomes very important. But regarding our nightly delivery process, after taping we generally have one editor assigned to each act to quickly make any changes and to cut it down to time. The acts then go through a QC check and are assembled onto a final sequence, which we feed to the NOC (Network Operations Center) by playing out through a fiber connection.

Einar Westerlund: The Daily Show is a variety show with many editing requirements and many discrete teams who focus on particular portions of each day’s delivered content. Every editor on our team performs every role at one point or another —be it prepping the day’s open and graphics materials, assembling news clips and montages to support the host’s headlines, fine cutting the live interviews and/or chats, or cutting longer scripted and unscripted segments. I focus on cutting the unscripted segments where Jordan Klepper attends a Trump rally to explore the impact of the January 6th Hearings on the MAGA faithful.

Cutting Jordan’s field segments is a challenging and exciting process because it is one of the featured aspects of the program in which The Daily Show reports the news with a first-hand account. Memorably, Klepper and The Daily Show production team actually attended the January 6 insurrection in Washington, DC, back in 2021, so getting that content onto the air quickly felt urgent as it showcased how special The Daily Show really is. Our segment from June 2022 is in many ways an extension of the work for that original piece and as always, the executives wanted to air the segment as soon as was possible.

In terms of workflow, the priority is editing quickly to make a coherent, poignant and funny segment for air within a day or two of production. Our production team is very experienced in gathering material in the field, and they rarely overshoot. They pre-select interviewees with an ear for articulate and provocative characters who can give a segment energy and surprises during a 5- or 10-minute chat with Jordan. They get all the releases beforehand and shoot with two cameras and an experienced sound crew so that almost every frame is of high quality and fair to use. Because the content is highly topical and attached to the day’s unfolding news, Klepper and the producers don’t have much time to sift through and organize the segment before we edit. The editing assistants and I have to get started completely on our own once we get the material.

When this shoot wrapped, the crew forwarded all the audio files so transcribers could begin making timecoded transcripts almost immediately. These are always helpful for everyone because the segment can be effectively “paper cut” in rough form within a few hours. Once the footage was loaded for cutting, I organized everything and synchronized the multiple cameras and multi-track sound files. Also, I searched in advance for the best B-roll cover to use with the inevitable voiceovers that would guide the audience through the material.

Once prepped, I began screening the interviews myself, often at double speed in places, and marked the parts that I felt might be funny or serve our story. Soon after, Jordan Klepper, Ian Berger and Stacey Angeles provided me highlighted transcripts of sections they felt were most important. I assembled these “selects” and together we decided the parts that seemed best. Often there is an abundance of good content, so we will roughly order the selects into thematic “buckets” to more easily compare and contrast the answers to similar questions from different characters.

Within a couple hours, this long assembly was ready to review, and we discussed the arc of the whole piece. Most importantly, the expositional portions of the interviews had to tell our story and allow the funniest parts of the interviews to land for the viewer who might not be familiar with all the elements of the investigation and controversies.

Once the basic order was formulated, I started tightening the beats right away. We looked to reduce the overlong expositional elements and tried to finish each beat on the laughs or shocks that we felt made the segment really sing. While this was happening, Klepper, the producers and the writers honed the voiceovers, and requested any special graphics and news cover we needed for the final.

For example, in one segment, we had to describe for the audience the conspiracy documentary 2000 Mules, so loading and picking clips of that were vital. Once all the VO, clips and graphics were ingested, I dropped them in and did my finishing — audio mixing and color.

Storm Choi is pictured, center, bottom row

What are some of the challenges your team experiences?
Choi: Many times, the challenges are also the fun parts. We’ve grown more adventurous in what we think is possible, and that’s very apparent in the studio greenscreen segments at the desk where we’ve put our hosts into movies, car chases, a TSA checkpoint and inside the US Capitol — one time we turned Leslie Jones into a chicken.

These segments are often conceptualized in the morning and have to be ready to rehearse in the afternoon. This involves quickly creating and testing various background plates and foreground elements, as well as often implementing sound effects, lighting, graphics and props — it’s a multi-department fast dance, but it’s the ability to turn these around quickly and adjust on the fly that frees up our showrunner, director and writers to be as creative as they dare to be. And I really enjoy the puzzle-solving process.

Westerlund: Our team has been doing this for many years, and our process is very well refined. Of course, we do constantly feel that the segments can improve and be made more quickly. We have tried live streaming the production cameras, uploading footage immediately to import from the cloud, messengering cards during the shoots — but most of these efforts to expand the amount of time for edit have yielded only small gains and produced other problems.

Our greatest challenges at this point are editorial. We often disagree about the appropriateness of certain controversial content, as well as disagreeing about what is most funny. Sometimes, for instance, as in the case of the two influencer women in our nominated segment, we were torn about whether they deserved being associated with the other extremists on parade as they seem to have only stumbled into the fray by accident because it was a big event.

What gear did you use, and why?
Choi: We edit on Avid Media Composer, though some digital content is cut on Adobe Premiere Pro. For plugins, we use both Sapphire and Boris FX Continuum. In the past year, we’ve also developed a remote editing system as well. For that we use Cisco AnyConnect, HP ZCentral Remote and Evercast.

Through the pandemic and in moving to two different studios in the past couple years, we’ve been lucky to upgrade our everyday post technology. Because of the various sources of footage and the range of editing work on our show, we need as many tools as possible at our fingertips. I imagine our tech will continue to evolve as we go into the election coverage in 2024.

Westerlund: For me, the Avid Media Composer networked with the other Avids and a shared Unity system for the media is the indispensable heart of the editing setup. Having several systems share a project folder and large hard-drive partitions allows the team to ingest the material on several systems at once. In a crunch, other editors or assistants can import supplementary materials or even locate hard-to-find sound bites and visuals without disrupting the main edit. Occasionally, part of the footage may have audio or visual problems, and the DP or audio engineer can try to make a custom LUT or sound filter in another edit as well. The multiple Avid setups allows the principal editor to press ahead without digressing for technical reasons.

Additionally, Adobe Media Encoder provides very fast file conversions to distribute rough and final edits for executive and legal approvals. Making these small files and creating secure Shift MediaSilo links has proven to be very efficient. Our show began making these links while we were all working from home during the pandemic, and the process has proven to be a huge time saver. We no longer have to schedule screenings or make numerous tape outputs during the edit.

When this segment was ready for air in our live-to-tape studio setting, I sent the final version to an EVS system directly from the Avid for the control room to roll into the studio.

What does this Emmy nomination mean to you?
Choi: My team is special. I know everyone says that, but it’s true. Our entire staff feels more like a family than any other TV show I’ve worked on, and that sentiment only gets stronger regarding the editing team. There are nine of us, and you honestly couldn’t get a wider range of personalities in this band of quirky rascals. But we’re really tight and love each other, and I’m continuously amazed how talented my colleagues are. To get to share this nomination together makes me so grateful and happy.

Westerlund: Emmys are the industry’s highest honor. Although we have been nominated and won Emmys numerous times over my 27 years with the show, I never fail to feel humbled and appreciated when we get a nomination. The work we do at The Daily Show is always challenging, and I feel the show provides a unique and informative perspective on our culture and especially on our politics. The Daily Show truly reveals the “pulse” of America almost every night. The Emmy nomination is an affirmation that what we do is still appreciated by the industry and the public.

The White Lotus Emmy-Nominated Editor Heather Persons

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By Alyssa Heater

White Lotus

Heather Persons, ACE

The White Lotus, created, written and directed by Mike White, is a dark comedy series that follows the drama surrounding wealthy people on their lavish vacations. With a large cast and shocking, intertwined storylines, it is no surprise that it snagged 23 Emmy nominations — for both acting and craft — for its second season.

We spoke with Emmy-nominated The White Lotus editor Heather Persons, ACE, to discuss her approach to cutting the series while working in Italy, Los Angeles and Hawaii, and how she collaborated with showrunner White. For Season 2, she edited Episodes 2, 4 and 6, while editor John Valerio, ACE, cut 1, 3, 5 and 7.  Persons was nominated for her work on Episode 6, “Abductions,” and Valerio for his work on Episode 7,  “Arrivederci.”

Let’s find out more from Persons…

How would you describe the pace of The White Lotus Season 2, and how does it differ from the first? Does Mike White collaborate with you in setting the pace?
I wouldn’t say that the pace was very different in Season 2. It may have felt a bit livelier because we were covering more ground. For Season 1, we were confined to shooting solely in the Four Seasons Maui because of the pandemic, but for Season 2, we were able to roam all over Italy, and consequently, the world felt bigger. Mike wrote in more action-filled sequences, and there was more intercutting of different locations, so that helped it feel more pacey.

Mike cares most about the characters and is always wanting to make sure the emotional and comedic beats are in full flower; that’s his biggest concern. We are always just trying to land the storytelling, and if that means speeding something up or slowing something down, that’s what we do. Mike is not afraid to make something slower if it means the audience will feel the emotion more.

He’s an incredible artist. His work is surprising and original, and this project was fun with all the different storylines.

How do you approach cutting together a series that features an ensemble cast and multiple storylines that are all woven together? Can you talk about some of the challenges?
Something that really helped with cutting the various storylines together was the music. We had an incredible score from Cristobal Tapia de Veer and his colleague Kim Neundorf. We combined their music with cutaways to second unit footage — the hotel, the beach, the water, etc. — and found that this was a potent way to segue from one section to another.

We discovered this in the first season by accident… how do we get from this to that? We had some cool underwater footage, so we started experimenting. My co-editor, John Valerio, is great with transitions. In Season 2, we relied on paintings from the hotel and atmospheric footage around our locations. That was something that evolved over time. We didn’t plan it going in but found that it worked. It also helped immerse the audience in our stunning locations and made the story feel like it couldn’t happen anywhere else on earth.

Sometimes we realized that things weren’t working where they were, so we moved them, but very rarely did we drop a scene. Mike really knows what he wants, and he plans ahead. If we did move or drop something, it was usually because of tone. Sometimes we had to drop extremely funny things because tonally they didn’t fit in with the vibe in that sequence. That’s always hard to do. It’s also fun to play with how different stories bump up against each other. By shifting things, you create different connections. It’s a process of discovery.

Focusing on the episode “Abductions,” there is so much tension building between Harper and Ethan and their concerns of infidelity. Tanya is becoming more suspicious of Quentin, and Portia is realizing she is in too deep with Jack. How do you use editing to enhance that uncomfortable feeling?
This was the penultimate episode, so we were really tightening the screws for what would be resolved in the finale. Things got chaotic as they were coming to a head. We used a lot of different techniques to enhance the tension: speeding or slowing the pace, adding intense or emotional music, creating montages. For instance, in the scene where the Di Grasso family goes to the farmhouse in hopes of having a family reunion, Mike wanted to slow the pace down almost to real time so it would feel very different from the insanity of the party at Quentin’s villa or when Valentina and Mia are having sex.

Slowing things down helps you feel Bert’s loss when he realizes that there is no going back and that he’ll never be reconnected with his dead wife. When you have moments like that intercut with Tanya partying and getting down with the coke dealer, it’s like an existential truth bomb going off in the middle of a crazy party. The party is like taking sugar with your medicine; it helps it go down.

A lot of the tension and unexpected surprises were built into the writing of that episode, and we did everything we could to maximize that. Often, it is a combination of what you’re showing when, the pace at which you’re cutting, and what you’re doing with the music. Especially in that episode, we have operatic scenes and quiet, heartbreaking counterpoints. I think that’s what makes it compelling. You have the party insanity, where we are cutting more quickly in montages with great Italian party music, and slow-motion footage intercut with emotional dialogue scenes.

For instance, the scene where Jack drunkenly spills secrets to Portia while in the hotel is devastating because you realize that there is something very broken in him and that this girl is in over her head. It’s much darker than you ever imagined. It’s a quiet, slow scene between two people on a bed intercut with Tanya at the party.  It’s the contrast between those kinds of moments and how we treat them editorially that builds the tension and keeps the surprises coming.

Absolutely. You spoke a bit about incorporating music and sound. Will you share a bit about your collaboration with those teams?
We have a wonderful sound team supervised by Kathryn Madsen. The show is pretty naturalistic. There are lots of waves, lots of ambience, and Kathryn and her team sweetened all that. As a writer, Mike cares about the dialogue, and Kathryn is excellent with that.

Our sound mixers, led by Christian Minkler, were great. It was a new experience for us, mixing remotely from Hawaii, but we made it work. Composers Cristobal Tapia de Veer and Kim Neundorf were instrumental in helping us create the mood and vibe of the show. It was a thrill to get their work and incorporate it into the show. I would literally be blasting the cues as they came in and dancing around the cutting room.

They captured the danger, the sexy anxiety and wildness of the show. I temped with a cue from Christos in the pilot, and Mike loved it and quickly hired him. I’m so happy that we got to work together. I was lucky that my co-editor, John, was great with music too. He was an inspiration.

Were there any scenes in Season 2 that were particularly fun or challenging to edit?
There was a sequence in Episode 4 where Mia is plotting to sleep with the piano player in an attempt to further her singing career. She feeds him the wrong pill and he collapses. I had so much fun with that because it was ridiculous and delightful, like a French bedroom farce. It was sort of a puzzle for Mike and me to figure out how to keep all the balls in the air, to make it feel like a fluffy confection while moving other darker elements of the story forward.

I also loved cutting Episode 6, especially the party sequence with Tanya at the villa. Our DP, Xavier Grobet (ASC), shot beautiful footage for that, so it was high drama and gorgeous mayhem all the way.

Did you work on-set in Italy or remotely?
John and I each went to the set in Italy for about a month, then we cut at home in Los Angeles after that. Once shooting wrapped, we all worked from Hawaii for the remainder of the project because that’s where Mike lives and likes to work. The benefit of us going to Italy was that we could be involved in shooting b-roll. John worked with that unit to get us lots of footage inspired by the location and the story we were telling.

The White LotusDid you use any remote viewing software to help with collaboration in these different locations?
Typically when working on-location, we’d take the whole editorial crew with full Avid Media Composer setups, which can be expensive. For The White Lotus, we wanted to experiment with doing something more mobile, so we just took our laptops and worked offline every day. I traveled and worked in five or six different cities and would plug my laptop in at the hotel and get to work. It was beautiful. Then at the end of the day, I would forward my work to my assistant, Bob Allen, in Los Angeles, and he would update the system.

It was a bit cumbersome and would be hard to do for an entire show, but just for a month, it was fine. When we got back to Los Angeles, we got all caught up.

What software do you use for editing?
I have only ever worked on Avid. I don’t use any plugins. I once heard a stylist say, “I can cut hair with a Coke bottle.” I’m kind of like that — just give me any Avid, and I can cut it for you. I’m not really a technology nerd. I’m a story nerd.

What was it like editing a project that incorporates two different languages, English and Italian, and how do you create balance? Are there people on-set who help with translating and cohesion?
I actually started taking Italian classes a few months before the show started because I thought it would be fun. I enjoyed it so much. We had several Italian actors with varying degrees of English fluency, so we did have people on-set helping them. Mike’s assistant, Chiara Nanni, who is originally from Catania, joined us in Hawaii as we finished cutting the project. She would look at clips and tell us if anything didn’t make sense or if we needed to adjust any dialogue.

You can kind of figure out what actors are saying if they’re following the script, but sometimes they ad-lib. Once we would lock an episode, Chiara would listen through and let us know what needed to be fixed. Sometimes we have subtitle cards, which she would double-check. We’d go through all of those and figure out what was working and what wasn’t. Having her there was extremely helpful.

The White Lotus

Heather Persons and Bob Allen

That’s awesome. Tell me about your assistant editor. What is your collaboration process like?
My assistant editor, Bob Allen, is a total pro. He’s worked with many of the greats — Dody Dorn, Francoise Bonnot — and is the best assistant in the world. When we work together, he does all of the sound work and mixing and all of the VFX. He has great taste and loves movies. We’ve worked together on several shows now, so we really have our system down. We’re in London working on a movie now.

Alyssa Heater is a writer and marketer in the entertainment industry. When not writing, you can find her front row at heavy metal shows or remodeling her cabin in the San Gabriel Mountains.

Michael J. Fox

Emmy-Nominated Michael Harte on Editing Michael J. Fox Movie

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By Iain Blair

Michael Harte, ACE, who already owns an Emmy and a BAFTA, has received another Emmy nomination for his work on Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie. Incorporating documentary, archival and scripted elements, the Apple TV+ film chronicles Fox’s personal and professional triumphs and travails and explores what happens when an incurable optimist confronts an incurable disease, such as Parkinsons.

Michael J. Fox

Michael Harte

I spoke with Harte (Three Identical Strangers, Don’t F**k With Cats) about the editing challenges, collaborating with Oscar-winning director Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient  Truth) and the post workflow.

Tell us about working with Davis, and your creative approach to editing this.
I had never worked with him before, but I knew his work. After director Tim Wardle and I did Three Identical Strangers, we approached Michael J. Fox about making a documentary and found out Davis was already making one — and he needed an editor and knew my work. So we teamed up.

His idea for this was to make a documentary about Michael J. Fox that felt like a Michael J. Fox movie. He wasn’t sure exactly how it’d work, and initially there was talk about shooting recreations. He told me to just watch all of Michael’s films and TV shows and archival material. That was our starting point.

What were the main challenges of editing this film?
Typically, by the time I come onto a project, most of the footage has been shot, but there was nothing here… not even definite ideas about the overall approach. All we had was Michael J. Fox. So the first place we started was with his audio book “Lucky Man,” which Michael had recorded himself.

On day one in the edit, I began to break it down from seven hours to 90 minutes, which gave us the rough structure of a movie or documentary. At that point Davis was very clear that he wanted to use recreations to tell that story, and mix in archival footage of home movies, behind-the-scenes stuff, interviews — a pretty standard documentary approach.

We had no idea we’d end up playing with his movie clips in the way we did. I have a bit of an aversion to using recreations, especially when it comes to doing them with such a famous actor, as you never show their face – just the back of their head. I think audiences get a bit bored with that technique after a while. And Davis knew we had to come up with something unique to tell the story because Michael is such a unique character, so I initially spent a couple of months going through all the movies, shows and archival footage. But there was so much of it that we had to bring on a team to help go through all the material, and they were always working away in the background.

So all that was a huge challenge, especially because we were looking not so much for material to tell an already compelling story, but for micromoments. For example, Michael might be playing with his hands to distract the audience from the fact that he was developing symptoms of Parkinson’s in his left hand. We treated the film and TV footage less like archival elements and more like verité moments we could mine to allow audiences to see things in a different way.

Michael J. FoxTell us about the workflow. What editing gear and storage setup did you use? Give us some of the technical specs on this film.
The editing gear was Avid Media Composer with Jump Desktop for remote access. For the storage setup, we had footage backed up onto drives and LTOs and proxy files stored on Nexis. Footage was mixed-format — a blend of archival, verité documentary footage, interviews and scripted recreations.

Verité documentary shots were done on the Sony FX9 at 23.967fps, DCI 4K (4096×2161) using AVC-Intra VBR 400, 4:2:2 10-bit. Recreations were shot with an ARRI Alexa Mini LF, 23.976fps, Open Gate (4448×3096) using a high-density encoding workflow. Pickup inserts used Blackmagic Pocket 6K in Blackmagic RAW. The offline edit was achieved using Media Composer 2022.12.3 working in Rec. 709 and using DNxHR LB 1080p as our codec.

The final online/conform happened using Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve 17.4.5. All footage was transformed into ARRI Log C color space before sending out for the final color grade.

Where was all the editing and post done?
I cut it in London. During the COVID lockdown, I set up my own edit suite near my home, so for the first four months, I was on my own working away, but Davis and I were in constant contact. Then I moved with my whole family to LA for the last six months of post, and we cut at his offices.

Once Davis and I were in the same room, that’s when the film started cooking. It’s funny because initially during COVID I really liked working alone, and all the technology made it possible. But there’s no substitute for being in the same room and talking. Davis would say, “It’s not about the editing as much as the conversations you have before you start the day,” and it became a very creative process for us. Davis doesn’t like watching me cut since I cut very fast and give him stuff to watch, which is hard for a director. So he’d leave for a few hours and come back later.

Then, in a genius move, for the last six or seven weeks, Davis decided we needed to have a fresh perspective, so we all moved to Martha’s Vineyard and finished the film there at a small edit suite we set up. It was the best thing to happen to the movie because we were able to slow down and step back from it.

What was the hardest scene to cut and why? 
It was the whole sequence that jumps between Family Ties and Back to the Future, when Michael is shooting the TV show all day and then shooting the movie all night. Typically, I like to watch all the material in one go and not cut it, and then I like to cut chronologically. That’s kind of my method. But this sequence was so tricky to get right. I kept going back to it over the course of a year and playing with the shots and rhythm and pacing. It was all about finding the right shots, and with such great source material, it had to be just perfect.

Michael J. FoxThere are a few VFX. Did you use temp VFX?
No, but we had a storyboard artist in Barcelona, and he did the recreations you see in the movie. Davis was in LA, I was in London, and we’d do Zoom calls with the artist. We’d go online and say, “Cut the trailer here. Michael walks out here,” and so on. He’d do it on a screen on Zoom and create maybe 15 storyboards at a time so we’d have movement to watch. He would do the camera work, and it was an incredible process. He’d do any of the VFX Davis wanted as well.

What about sound? Did you use sound temps?
Yes, and I get obsessive about sound and music as I’m cutting. I don’t like to leave that till the end, so all the sound design was temped so that when we sent it to Apple TV+ and Michael J. Fox to watch, it had all the sound. My brother works in sound, and for years he’s been telling me that sound is the most underrated weapon in any project, so I’m always very conscious of it. I can’t send a cut to anyone unless all the sound is right. Bad sound is more jarring than a bad picture, so I was very involved in the sound – more than with the mix and score – as they could send me stuff. I wasn’t as involved with the DI at Company 3 in LA as I was in London, and the last thing Davis needs is someone telling him how to grade his film.

Congratulations on your Emmy nomination. Where does this rate in terms of creative challenges and satisfaction for you?
It was an amazing experience… to be able to be as creative as I got to be on it. I was nervous about doing it because it’s Michael J. Fox! If you get it wrong, you’re going to look silly. Davis was brilliant at keeping my confidence up. He was like, “Don’t worry about what anyone else thinks. If we do this for the right reason, it’ll work.”

Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.

Editor Bob Ducsay on Peacock’s Poker Face

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By Iain Blair

Poker Face

Bob Ducsay

Thanks to such hits as Knives Out and its sequel, Glass Onion, director/writer Rian Johnson has almost single-handedly revived the murder mystery genre. His latest project is Poker Face, a 10-episode series following Natasha Lyonne’s Charlie, who can tell when someone is lying. After leaving her job in Las Vegas, she hits the road with her Plymouth Barracuda at every stop encounters a new cast of characters and strange crimes she can’t help but solve.

To help edit and set the tone for his new show, Johnson turned to his longtime editor, Bob Ducsay, ACE. I spoke with Ducsay about the editing challenges and the post workflow on the show, which streams on Peacock. Poker Face was recently nominated for four Emmy Awards, including for production design and lead actress for Lyonne.

What were the main challenges of editing Poker Face?
One of the big ones right out of the gate was that we made Episode 9 first instead of doing the pilot. That was because of scheduling and some other issues.

How did that affect setting the very specific comedic tone for the rest of the series, especially as that episode is a lot darker than the others?
Normally you do Episode 1 first, and that sets the tone for the rest of it. Doing it like this was far more of a challenge because the episode is so tonally different. But Rian and Natasha knew where this was ultimately going to land for the audience, and I just did my best to follow their cues. And while in a way it was very challenging to work backward, I did have the benefit of having read all the other episodes and understanding where we were headed.

We then shot Episode 1, or at least a big chunk of it, and we were able to get our footing. I think my having a good grasp of the whole season helped a lot. But looking back, it was pretty interesting and challenging coming off Episode 9 and going into such a contrast with Episode 1, which, while it does have real violence and real stakes, has a lot more lightness and comedy in it.

You’ve cut so many of Rian’s projects. What is your collaboration process like?
Rian and I have worked together for over a decade now. I started with him back on Looper, and since then we’ve done Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Knives Out, Glass Onion and now this show. One of the great things we have now, which we certainly didn’t have back when we did Looper, is a real shorthand.

My job as an editor is to serve and enhance the vision of the director – and in this case, the writer/director, which is even better. That’s all a lot easier now after all this time working together since we understand each other really well.

The show had multiple editors. How did that work?
We had three other really great editors – Glenn Garland (ACE), Shaheed Qaasim and Paul Swain – who cut the other episodes, and we were all equal. As I cut the first two – 9 and 1 – they were able to look at them, which was so helpful in terms of establishing the tone. In fact, many of the other episodes are a lot lighter and more comedic than even the pilot I cut.

While I didn’t oversee the other editors, I did give them some tips about the kinds of things that Rian looks for as well as some general advice. These one-hour episodes are all treated as mini-movies with different directors and different DPs and different writers, but in the end it’s all Rian’s coherent vision that pulls it all together. We cut and posted it all at Keep Me Posted, and FotoKem’s Nextlab did the dailies.

What about integrating the VFX and post?
We were still posting Glass Onion when we began making the first two episodes of Poker Face, so I had some resources, like VFX editor Vaughn Bien, who was also on the film with us. He did a lot of temp VFX right away, and that helped a lot since Episode 9 had a lot of VFX. Almost the entire episode takes place at night, and DP Steve Yedlin (ASC) shot a lot of stuff day-for-night, so we had a lot of post work to do on all that coverage.

Then, just generally, we had a lot of VFX, especially for the snow, as we shot it in New York in the summer. In fact, all the episodes had a lot of VFX, done by Rocket Science VFX and Ingenuity Studios, and we had a great VFX supervisor, Craig Clarke.

Tell us about the workflow and the editing gear used.
We cut on Avid Media Composer, rented by EPS-Cineworks, with the then-current software version 2021.12.1, and our storage was 10TB. Our SFX and music library was 4.5TB. Storage was less than ideal because we were finishing Glass Onion at the same time, and we weren’t physically in the same space as the rest of the editorial and post team.

The other three editors and their crews were right down the street at Rian’s production company on a separate Avid Nexis system, while the Nexis storage we were using had both Glass Onion and this show on it.

What was the most difficult scene to cut and why?
It’s the scene in Episode 9 where Charlie gets found out and is trying to leave the hotel, and they want to kill her. It was very tricky because building tension requires very specific timing with all the quiet moments… the pauses, the looks. It’s all pure editorial. Is she going to die or not? And building all that is very challenging, as it all comes down to feeling, and the pace is very intricate and quite precise.

I assume you must have used a lot of temp sound?
Yes, and I’m very sound-centric. I cut in 5.1; I’ve done that for almost a decade now. Sam Bollinger, my first assistant, starts the temp while I continue to do additional work, and then of course we get elements from the sound team. We do a lot less than we would on a movie, but I put a lot of effort into the mix while we’re cutting.

I know it’s obvious, but there’s a huge interaction between the soundtrack and picture — even though the soundtrack doesn’t drive the initial edit — because I cut without music and sound effects. The initial edit is based on the picture, story and characters, but once that’s done, I like to get into all the sound and get a nice temp going with the soundtrack. That’s when I take another pass on a sequence, and that’s when you understand how key sound effects are going to work.

How would you sum up the whole experience? Where does it rank in terms of challenges and satisfaction?
Right up there, as I’ve done virtually no episodic TV before this. So the format, with the act breaks, was novel to me and very appealing. And I just loved the show and the whole tone.

Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.

The Dropout

The Dropout: Emmy-Nominated Director Michael Showalter

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By Iain Blair

Money. Romance. Ambition. Success. Deception. Downfall. Conviction. Hulu’s limited series The Dropout, the story of Elizabeth Holmes (Amanda Seyfried) and Theranos, is a cautionary tale of Silicon Valley hustle, ambition and fame gone terribly wrong. It focuses on how this self-made female billionaire loses it all in the blink of an eye and ends up facing a potential 20-year jail sentence for fraud.

The Dropout

Michael Showalter

The six-time Emmy-nominated limited series was directed and executive produced by Michael Showalter, the prolific director, writer and producer who was nominated for his work on the episode “Green Juice.”

I spoke with Showalter, whose credits include The Eyes of Tammy Faye, The Lovebirds and the Oscar-nominated The Big Sick, about making the series and his love of post.

Can you talk about directing a show that combines both heavy drama and great comedic timing to tell its story?
Our showrunner and writer Elizabeth Meriwether and her team of writers did a great job weaving humor into the story the whole way through, in every episode. We spent a lot of time in prep going through all the scripts, literally line by line with Liz. It’d be like, what’s the joke here? And getting a picture of what’s in our lead’s head, and then me trying to bring that to life, whether in performance or by using the camera to focus on certain aspects of a scene.

For example, right away, even in the very first episode, we have a scene where Elizabeth Holmes and her brother are in a car, and he’s flipping through her CDs. They’re all Lilith Fair-type female artists. That shot was really important, as was having those CDs on hand. So it’s knowing what is funny and then making sure you have the time to shoot it and do it justice.

How was the shoot?
I directed the first four episodes out of eight over about four months, so we had a good, long schedule. But it was very challenging in many ways, especially in the material itself and in making sure we were telling the story in the right way. It had a big scope, and it was difficult production-wise because every day we were in a different location. We shot almost entirely on location, with lots of background and set elements and VFX stuff.

All of the locations were in LA and doubled for a ton of different places in the story, including Texas, Tennessee, Palo Alto and even Beijing. Then we were also dealing with COVID and all that entailed.

Who was the DP, and what look did you go for?
My DP was Michelle Lawler, who shot The Shrink Next Door for me. We shot digital on the ARRI Alexa [with Leitz Summilux-C lenses]. We wanted a very naturalistic look, but we also did quite a lot of work in the DI.

L-R: EP/showrunner Elizabeth Meriwether and EP/director Michael Showalter on-set

Tell us about post. Was it a traditional TV post schedule?
It was more like a movie post. Limited series like this definitely feel more like movies, as you have the same beginning, middle and end story structure. There is no second season waiting for you. The big difference between film post and TV post is that with the latter, the director doesn’t usually get to stay with the material as long. It’s more down to the showrunner to see post through all the way to the end.

But with this show, it was big and more like a film post, and I was pretty involved all the way through. And we began discussing the sound and music and VFX with our teams in prep, so that felt more like a movie than a TV schedule.

Do you like the post process?

I love it. It’s so creative — you now have all the ingredients, and it’s where you start cooking them to make the show. And if it doesn’t rise properly, you can go back and start again. I love that whole aspect of post and all the experimentation and trial and error. It’s where you discover what you have and get the chance to present it in the best possible way for an audience.

Sometimes you go into post thinking it’ll turn out a certain way, and then it morphs into something completely different and better. With this, it did change in post a bit and got shorter, but I knew that would happen. Basically the show stayed the same. Post was very planned out in terms of the music we used and all the VFX.

Where did you do it?
Because of COVID it was all remote and on Zoom and Evercast.

Let’s talk about the editing. There were multiple editors, so how did that work?
The Dropout
I worked with David Berman, who was Emmy-nominated for Big Little Lies, and Steve Welch, who cut New Girl for Liz Meriwether and won an Emmy for Malcom in the Middle. All the editing was remote too, and it’s so good now with Evercast and other systems.

When I cut my last movie, The Eyes of Tammy Faye, I was here in LA, and all the editing and post was being done in New York. It worked great. I can get cuts all day long within minutes and give my notes. Then the editor can make changes and upload them, and I can instantly review them. It’s so seamless now, and you can do stuff like ADR that way too. I like working that way, and as a TV and film director, I like to empower editors. I’m not the sort of director who’s in the room all the time looking over the editor’s shoulder and micromanaging while they push buttons. I like to give the footage to them and see what they do with it. That’s more my style.

What were the general main editing challenges, given that the series covers nearly 20 years?
I think it was trying to compress so much storyline and so many characters into manageable episodes while keeping up the pace and balancing the drama and comedic elements.

There are quite a lot of VFX. Who did them and what was entailed?
I like to be pretty involved. FuseFX and VFX supervisor Bud Myrick did them, and when you have a project that’s this big in size and scope, I like to rely on all the experience and expertise of the VFX team. We had some big sequences, such as the whole bit when Elizabeth Holmes goes to Beijing for the summer. We shot that in downtown LA and had a lot of set extensions and greenscreen work for it.

When you’re shooting stuff that will get a lot of VFX added to the frame in post, I absolutely want to know on the day exactly where the VFX are going to live in the frame I’m making. So the VFX team is on-set with us the whole time, and we have an ongoing conversation about every little detail. I’m fascinated by VFX, and although no one wants to admit it, the technology is so good now that you can basically fake anything — and the audience will never know. So it might look like you’re in Paris for a scene, but it was actually shot on a soundstage in Burbank.

What about the DI?
We did it with Dave Hussey at Company 3. I’m pretty involved, along with all three of our DPs. We went for a slightly saturated look, and there’s a denseness to the colors. We didn’t go in with that in mind, but it evolved, and I think that the saturated, high-contrast look we settled on really suits the drama of the whole show.

Alongside your producing partner, Jordana Mollick, you run Semi-Formal Productions, which recently inked a two-year first-look deal with HBO Max. What’s the plan?
We’re developing a lot of shows and producing and helping writers and new talent. It’s an exciting time in television.

Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.

 

 

 

 

 

Emmy Chat: The Sound of Euphoria From Set to Final Mix

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By Randi Altman

There are few shows that have had an impact on the way we look at high school students more than HBO’s Euphoria. It goes behind the keggers, tackling subjects such as addiction, repressed homosexuality, human trafficking and domestic violence. It stars Zendaya as Rue Bennett, a recovering teenage drug addict who struggles to find her place in the world.

Sean O’Malley

We recently reached out to Euphoria production mixer Sean O’Malley and re-recording mixer Anne Jimkes-Root to talk about their Emmy-nominated episode, “Stand Still Like the Hummingbird,” and how they work together to make sure the quality of the sound captured on-set follows through to post and beyond.

Sean, as production mixer, what are you capturing on-set?
Sean O’Malley: Along with boom operator Chris Thueson and sound utility Kendra Bates, I record all the dialogue, live music and as many practical effects as possible on-set. Our goal is to get the cleanest sound possible.

Anne, what was your role on the show? Were you mixing dialogue, music, sound effects?
Anne Jimkes-Root: I was one of three re-recording mixers, along with Austin Roth and Chris David, covering all parts of the mix in a single Pro Tools session per episode. This allowed us to easily and constantly balance the various layers of the mix against each other.

Anne Jimkes-Root

How long have you been working on this series?
O’Malley: I have been mixing this show since the pilot back in 2018. It’s hard to believe we have only done two seasons in that time, but as a crew we have truly become a family.

Jimkes-Root: Chris David started with Season 1 in 2019, while Austin and I got involved with Season 2. We started working on sound editorial for the first episode in June of 2021, going all the way through February 2022 for the final mixes.

Why did you submit that particular episode? What was it about it that you felt was worthy of a closer look?
Jimkes-Root: It was a tough decision between Episode 5 and Episode 7. The latter features a big stage play in which memory, reality and fantasy constantly intertwine. This allowed us to experiment with various audio treatments, sometimes guiding and sometimes misleading the audience.

Episode 5, however, contains an incredible dynamic range in terms of events and performances. This led to a mix that is constantly shifting gears and changing its sonic style. It flows from a very dialogue-heavy opening sequence to a car scene where the dialogue is partially unintelligible. Here, sound design becomes the star of the mix until it gets swiftly overtaken by Labrinth’s hypnotic rhythms, musical pulses and vocal elements as soon as Rue jumps out of the car and starts running. There is this constant motion, both visually and within the sound mix, that gives this episode a kind of anxious energy you can’t step away from as a viewer.

O’Malley: It’s a very compelling episode covering a wide array of emotions and audio. My job is to capture the raw sound on-set in a way that will honor both the actors’ performance and the director’s vision. This episode is a fantastic example of the delicate balance between giving the actors the freedom they need to do their best work while maintaining the standard of quality we have for the show.

Can you give an example from that episode of something that was particularly challenging, or that you are most proud of?
Jimkes-Root: One of my favorite parts of the episode is the opening sequence — the emotional rollercoaster of Rue going up against her mom, wreaking havoc in her home and attempting to destroy her relationship with her girlfriend Jules. The visceral power of this sequence relies heavily on the actors’ dynamic performances and their dialogue interactions.

It was fantastic to see people respond so emotionally to this first part of the episode. Through masterful performances, excellently recorded production sound and intricately mixed dialogue, it all feels very real and in close proximity to the viewer/listener.

O’Malley: The moment when Rue and Jules face off at the kitchen table was particularly challenging — Rue is emotional and screaming loudly, while Jules is quiet and composed.

What was your process like on this particular episode?
O’Malley: It was a delicate task to capture Rue screaming at the top of her lungs while still being able to hear Jules’ quiet breaths. Because these scenes are so impassioned, we try to give the actors space when preparing. We aim to adjust the microphones as little as possible and stay clear of their eyelines, allowing them to stay in the moment.

ADR is not an option in a sequence like this, so we chose our microphones and their placement very carefully. The sequence plays out in five different rooms, so we made a very flexible plan to tackle each element shot by shot, making sure we had clean on- and off-camera dialogue before moving on to the next setup.

Jimkes-Root: In terms of post sound, we wanted to keep the dialogue raw and exposed, just like Rue herself. This meant that we wouldn’t be adding layers of room tones and backgrounds. Rather, the focus was on bringing down the noise floor and creating many subtle perspective shifts in the dialogue using volume, EQ and reverb.

And, of course, making literal breathing room for the emotional breaths captured by Sean, Chris T. and Kendra to play through. This resulted in a dynamic, three-dimensional production track aimed at amplifying the incredible acting.

What direction/feedback did you get showrunner Sam Levinson?
O’Malley: I’m fortunate that Sam trusts me to get what I need. Without his support and blessing, my job would be much more challenging. Most of our conversations center on prioritizing the importance of individual auditory moments that make up a scene to ensure his vision is brought to life in post production.

For example, sometimes he knows the score is going to play over a specific moment, so we give the actors and camera department ample space to get the shot. Other times, Sam wants to emphasize the quietness of a particular scene, so even if the actors have little or no dialogue, we approach the scene as though it were jam-packed with conversation. Capturing the small but significant way with which an actor breathes can truly elevate a performance.

Jimkes-Root: Our mission is to refine and build on the material that was captured by Sean in close collaboration with Sam. As Sean mentioned, his recordings are intimately connected to Sam’s vision for any particular moment. That means we focus on preserving as much of the on-set performances as possible in the dialogue mix and anything added to that.

Additionally, we strive to cover the nitty gritty of the mix, to get the car-bys and dog barks in place and mixed in so when Sam comes to the stage for the final mix, he can focus on what’s most important. The music is definitely at the top of that list and plays a major role throughout the series.

What tools do you use in your work?
Jimkes-Root: Sean brought in a 5.1 microphone, which prompted some interesting experimentation on both the recording and the re-recording side throughout several episodes. He provided us with these terrific 5.1 recordings from the perspective of Rue standing in the middle of traffic. We would still add synced sound effects to cars passing by and crashing into each other, but there was a lot of movement and perspective baked into the 5.1 recordings that made for a very useful layer within the full mix.

In terms of plugins, Auto-Align Post was a total game-changer. The ability to flawlessly align the waveforms of multiple mics (e.g. boom and lavs) allowed us to apply the fundamental mixing shapes very early on in the dialogue editing process. This was especially helpful during the various argument scenes in Episode 5, where there were quite a few mics at play that needed to be balanced against each other.

O’Malley: I use Sound Devices Scorpio as my primary recorder, and I’m really happy with it. I can easily record 32 channels of audio, which comes in handy on a show like Euphoria, where I might have 10 actors wearing wireless microphones while recording a live musical performance simultaneously.

Like Anne mentioned, whenever we have a sonically interesting environment, I like to use a Holophone 5.1 microphone to more effectively capture the recording space. This microphone was critical in Episode 7 when we had over 200 extras in a high school auditorium.

What else is important for us to know about your role on this show?
Jimkes-Root: My role on this project is grounded in the interaction and collaboration with the rest of the team, both within and beyond sound. The level of dedication to high-quality filmmaking within every single department was electrifying. Whether or not you are interested in the story and subject matter of Euphoria, I believe it’s worth taking a look at Episode 5 for its stellar performances, stunning cinematography, intense editing and the stylistically dynamic music and sound mix.

O’Malley: I try to form a relationship with the post audio department as soon as possible. I’m blown away by how common it is for the production and post sound teams never to meet. We are working on the same project and have the same goal, so it only makes sense to work together. I believe an open line of communication allows us to deliver the best-sounding show possible.

Rainbow

Ted Lasso’s Sound Team: Collaboration, Beard and a Rainbow

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For its two seasons, Apple TV+’s Ted Lasso has been the feel-good show we all needed, as well as an Emmy favorite. This year should be no different, with the show garnering 20 nominations, including ones for sound mixing and sound editing.

We reached out to re-recording mixers Ryan Kennedy and Sean Byrne, who were nominated for their work on Episode 205, “Rainbow,” and co-supervising sound editors Brent Findley and Bernard Weiser about Episode 209, “Beard After Hours,” which was also recognized. The group, which worked out of Warner Bros. Dub Stage 7, have all been on the show since its inception and are all about to start working on Season 3.

Brent Findley

With the success of Ted Lasso, have you stayed the course or made some changes along the way in your approach to the show?
Brent Findley: As the storytelling style of the show evolves, our approach evolves along with it. Season 1 introduced the characters and locations and the heart of the show with levity.  While Season 2 continued with the comedy, it also had a veil of seriousness. The journeys of the characters became more internal and more intimate. The soundscape followed that.

There were more moments of suspending literal environments and sound effects to make way for the emotions of the story. While our physical environments might look the same, we chose elements and mix techniques that allow the audience to focus on the heart of the story during our actors’ strong performances. I would say Season 2 is less literal than Season 1 in regard to the soundscape. We pull out an impressionistic brush more often.

Bernard Weiser

Bernard Weiser: Adding to Brent’s answer, Season 2 became more intimate with the characters. Season 1 was broader with the ensemble cast, and the dialogue challenge was to track the storyline clearly among the craziness of the group.

Season 2 needed to capture the intimacy within, and the dialogue track needed to reflect that through the mic choices and the detail while protecting each performance within the production. This really is not a different approach, but as Brent said, an evolution of the storyline, which we follow and match with plenty of “barbeque sauce.”

Ryan Kennedy: Each season I feel like I grow a lot as a mixer. I am often approached with new experiences on this show, and my line of attack is different every time. I have my bag of tricks that I lean on, but I find with this show in particular that I like to reevaluate what I used to know and try viewpoints that are different from the way I normally engage with the scenes.

Ryan Kennedy

Sean Byrne: A lot is the same for continuity — same reverbs, same background sounds, etc. In your mind, I’ll bet you can hear what Disneyland sounds like on Main Street — the train bell, excited kids, popcorn, turnstiles, distant coasters. It has a character, and so do the scenes in Ted Lasso. What tends to change is when we want to make a point that supports the story. There, we get to pull out all the tricks we know to put the listener into a sonic fantasyland.

What made you pick the episode you submitted? What about it did you feel was worthy of a closer look?
Byrne: The “Rainbow” episode was a very tricky mix. We are traveling from a quiet studio to the stadium, following Roy Kent through the maze of the city. All while being scored by The Rolling Stones song “Rainbow.”

Getting everything to cut through that song — dialogue, crowds, cab rides, bone pops, sound design and so on — was no easy feat. It’s a full-range song at a high volume. It didn’t leave a lot of room for detail, yet we had to make room without the listener hearing wild fader moves or EQ. We really strived to have the listener take the emotional and sonic journey with Roy. Feel everything he’s feeling.

Sean Byrne

Kennedy: I love the heart of this episode, “Rainbow.” The depth and complexity of the message as it involves sound is integral to the message of the show.

Findley: Episode 209, “Beard After Hours” is an enigma. It’s literally a bonus episode that is a side trip from the primary arc of the series. Every few minutes, Beard finds himself in a different place with a different challenge. From a sound editing angle, it meant that every few minutes required completely new environments and effects. The only constants were his iPhone and his apartment keys. He doesn’t even get to keep the same pair of pants!

Every turn revealed a different sound design moment never visited before: drunken crowd leaving Wembley (loop group singing) leading to a stripped-down main title song on the tube, sports reporters talking to him through the television, a psychedelic lava-lamp room, a noir-Mickey Spillane-style interaction with a pants-repairing redhead leading to a run for his life, a paranoid hotel night clerk, a much-deserved slo-mo beatdown in an alley to a mournful rendition of Blue Moon, our loyal soccer hooligans fulfilling their fantasy on the Richmond pitch, a rainstorm and divine interaction, a rave in a church, and wrapping it all up with the theme from The Benny Hill Show (Yakety Sax). What a trip!

Weiser: When we found out that Beard was getting his own episode, I believe we knew that this would be a challenge and a wild ride. And certainly Jason and the Ted Lasso writers delivered just that! This episode challenged us to put Beard’s craziness together with his intellectual side to give us insight on him. It also exposed Beard’s feelings with the Richmond fans when he provided his “hooligans” with a night in their personal heaven. After all, one of the things that makes the Ted Lasso series successful is the wonderful heart each character has.

Can you give us an example from that episode of something that was particularly challenging or that you are most proud of?
Kennedy: There is a lot to this episode that I am proud of. The scene with Nate and his parents celebrating their anniversary at A Taste of Athens is one. But I think the moment I am most proud of is the buildup of Roy Kent quitting his job as a sport commentator and making his way to the stadium. Our music editor, Richard Brown, did an amazing job with his work on the Rolling Stones song. He combined the mix of coming in and out of that song to build the tension that leads up to Roy joining the coaching staff of AFC Richmond. That is one of my favorite moments in television (regardless of my participation in it).

Byrne:For me, I had to think quickly during playback. The producers wanted to hear something happen with the crowd to make it disappear while Roy is in the tunnel, something dramatic. I got the idea to group the Atmos crowds together and do a low pass sweep on them as Roy breathes. His breath sucked the crowd out of the stadium. The producers loved it. It really helped sell the story without dialogue.

Findley: Beard’s apartment keys are a recurring character through the episode. It was very important that the chosen elements added up to the right feel…not too heavy, not too thin, not too dense. It might seem minor, but it’s a testament to the sonic detail devoted to every element of the show.

Weiser: For dialogue, the scene outside the club, in the street, with Beard and the lady in red was tough at first. There was a fair amount of traffic noise, and the clarity of the dialogue was difficult. We certainly shot ADR for the scene but realized that we needed to pull out all the stops to try and save the original performance encapsulated in those production tracks. In true Ted Lasso form, it was a collaborative effort between dialogue editing, ADR, FX, Foley and mixing. The end result is that only two ADR lines were used and we are very proud of a seamless track for this scene.

What was your process on these scenes?
Kennedy: My approach to this scene was to acknowledge the emotion that I was witnessing on screen. I wanted the audience to feel the anxiety that Roy was feeling. We had to carry that energy from the studio to him arriving on the pitch. The music, Foley and dialogue had to create the atmosphere and intensity to get us from point A to point B. Our production sound team had the wherewithal to use Roy’s actual lavalier mic that he takes off himself when he quits the commentator job. That in and of itself was a great tool for me to use in the process of mixing the scene.

My other processes for the scene were following along with the action on the screen, adjusting the production sound against the music track to come to a balance that highlighted the emotion we felt with Roy joining the coaching staff of Richmond — the pinnacle of which was to see Nate’s realization of what was happening, the musical breakdown followed by the show ending. It’s a bit of a cliff-hanger, really. It was a lot of fun to put together.

Findley: I worked with Foley artist Sanaa Kelley to dial in the right combination of metal pieces. We had several exchanges of ideas and samples as the episode developed. Based on our conversations, Sanaa went out to antique stores and curated just the right keyring, skeleton key and other supporting keys to give this prop true character.

The first time we see it, it is seemingly innocuous. Beard just lets himself into his apartment and puts the keys in a bowl by the door. No big deal, right? The sneaky part is that Sanaa performed it with repeated passes to get it right. She does that every time we hear the keys through the episode. The first hint that there’s something special about the keys is when they drop out of Beard’s coat pocket in the pub. There is a subtle ring-out of the keys as they fall then a perfect little jingle when Jeremy presents them to Beard.

Beard then drops them in Red’s apartment… though we purposefully did not play the dropping, just the picking up later when Red points them out to him. This is an example of the suspension of literal sounds to serve the story… to stay with Beard in his head. Had we heard those keys land in that quiet environment, we could’ve been thinking about why Beard didn’t hear them instead of absorbing the story. The keys really have a hero moment during Beard’s beatdown. Marcus Mumford’s rendition of “Blue Moon” is so mournful that if the keys had just fallen out naturally, the heart of the moment would have been broken. Therefore, we sustained and pitched Sanaa’s keys to be sympathetic with the song as they “sang” their way to the ground. This kind of attention really locks in all the elements into a cohesive soundscape, even though Beard’s journey is disjointed.

Weiser: There was nothing complicated with the process. We cut the production dialogue straight through and cut the ADR through the scene. Then we did the tedious work on the dialogue, making sure not to “overcook” the production tracks while cleaning them up.

In the end, this is what all dialogue editors would do. The difference is in the choices and taste of the dialogue editor and the editor’s faith in allowing the dialogue mixer to work his/her magic as well. This is where the collaboration takes place. One cannot finish the job without the other, and when we work together, 2 plus 2 can equal 10. I like to think that it’s this collaboration that makes the show special and what makes Ted Lasso.

What tools do you use in your work?
Kennedy: I use the Avid S6 console, and I like the FabFilter EQs and compressors. I call on iZotope noise reduction when needed, and I like to use Altiverb Reverb for its realistic reverb impulse responses.

Byrne: I use the Avid S6 console. I’m strictly a console and keyboard user. You never know when you might be working on another stage, so I don’t go crazy with macro devices and such. I really like Stratus 3D reverbs. For an Atmos environment, Stratus spreads to the speakers very nicely. Also, Revibe and Reverb One have some go-to presets that sound great in certain situations.

Findley: We use so many different things to solve problems and to create new things. I’m afraid to start listing because I know I’ll forget something. Our primary editing workstation is Pro Tools. We’ll conform to new versions of picture with Matchbox. For dialogue, Bernard Weiser and Ashley Harvey might use Auto-Align Post, Soundminer, RX, Revoice Pro, Envy, Pitch’n Time Pro, Debird and Undertone, to name just a few.

For sound effects and design, in addition to Soundminer, Envy, and Pitch’n Time Pro, Kip Smedley and Mark Cleary employ a lot of fun tools like Morph, Traveler, Stutter Edit, Enforcer, Whoosh, Crowd Chamber, even an Arturia hardware synth. Again, I’ve definitely left things out. We’ll also do specific field recordings to get unique material to work with so not all the source sounds come from an existing library.

What haven’t we asked that you feel is important about your role on Ted Lasso?
Kennedy:  I’d like to echo Sean’s response. Our job of mixing is always about picking what is important at the moment for the mix. Sometimes it is the dialogue, and at other times it is the music or the FX. The emotion and feeling of a show can change depending on what we’ve chosen. We love working with the producers and dialing in exactly what is needed in every situation.

Rainbow

Byrne: Pulling focus. We get so much amazingly recorded material, so it would be easy just to try and play it all. But the best mixes I’ve heard pull the listeners’ focus to what is important at the moment in the story. I want to pull the listeners’ attention to a feeling without them noticing, whether that is the feeling of being surrounded by 80,000 fans or of having a panic attack or of feeling completely alone in a crowded room. If you notice my work, then I haven’t done a good job.

My colleagues are so gifted at their craft. I’m constantly learning from them. My jaw drops watching Ryan Kennedy mix music and dialogue — timing the wall slaps and echoes to the beat of the song and spending the extra time to make the ADR sit perfectly in the mix. Brent and all of our editors make such excellent choices with their editorial that it gives Ryan and I time to really get deep into the mix rather than just working to get the job done. Brent and the team’s work on “Beard After Hours” was magnificent. So many details were added, all of the ear candy. I’m very grateful to be part of such a talented group of people.

Rainbow

Findley: My role is making sure everything you hear, save for the music, makes it to the church on time (the church being the mix stage) and that the sonic hopes and dreams of our creative leaders come through in the process. Translating the storytellers’ descriptions of how they imagine the soundscape to be into instructions that the sound team can work with is a core function. Often those descriptions are feeling-based, so converting those into practical application is important.

The thing that stands out the most to me is the overall feeling of collaboration at all stages of the process and from all levels of hierarchy. A good idea can come from anywhere. Anyone on the team can pitch an idea in their wheelhouse, and it is given thoughtful consideration. While we’re careful not to get mired in too many choices, and we don’t pitch ideas just for the sake of saying we contributed, the phrase “What if we…” is exciting to hear because what follows will be a fresh idea to think about.

Weiser: My colleagues have said it well. I can only say what a privilege it is to work with this wonderful sound team and mention the solid support we have enjoyed from our producers, from Warner Bros. Post Production and from Apple.