postPerspective Update

Post Sound: Sonically Creating
Atlanta‘s Many Locations

By Patrick Birk

Donald Glover’s award-winning series Atlanta recently returned to FX for its third season, which features Earn (Glover) managing a European tour for his rapper cousin Alfred (Brian Tyree Henry). They are joined by Alfred’s eccentric friend Darius (LaKeith Stanfield) and occasionally by Earn’s ex-girlfriend Van (Zazie Beetz).

This season marks a departure from the previous ones in a few ways. The characters are on the road, visiting Amsterdam, London, Paris and Budapest, and four of the 10 episodes do not feature any of the lead characters, instead functioning as an anthology of Twilight-Zone-esque asides within the show.

A series with as many experimental twists as Atlanta required an imaginative sound team to do it justice. The show's Formosa Group-based crew — including supervising sound editor Trevor Gates and re-recording sound mixers Diego Gat and Sam Ejnes — spoke with postPerspective to explain how they pulled it off... and how they worked with the show's newly Emmy-nominated director Hiro Murai.

How did you treat dialogue from so many different locations?
Gat: In terms of the sound location signature for dialogue, if the shot allowed for good boom placement, we could use it. But sometimes we didn’t have that because of the placement of the cameras.

For example, it’s hard to get a good boom angle if they’re using multiple cameras, which they only do occasionally on this show. Also, the boom could have a lot of noise because it’s not a soundstage. For the most part, we are shooting on location. So every actor has a lav, and we get all the ISOs. Everything is separated, split and phase-aligned by the sound dialogue editorial team.

Before we start every new scene, Sam and I use the same reverb plugins, and we either agree on a preset that we already share, or we send each other presets of new locations. Whoever gets ahead of that scene makes a preset and shares it with the other, and we really play the reverb.