Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1152266
and approve these little segments? There must have been an interesting format to that day. DOUG: Yeah. You know, obviously, we were going to be making up the workflow as we went along, because nobody's ever really done this before. So, during color grading, I think, they created what they called an 'A/B reel,' which was about an hour-and-a-half long [and] went through most of the main plot lines and all of the environments. We inherited that workflow from them. It wasn't necessarily continuous, I mean, quite a lot of it did flow as a story. But sometimes you went through different variations of the same scene. You know, you went from one segment to something that would never actually follow on from that segment. It wasn't quite like a normal narrative. OKAY, SO IT PRESENTED kind of like continuous segments. DOUG: That was the only way that we could get any kind of flow so that David, Charlie, Annabel, and Russell could make any decisions about the whole thing. AND THE FILM is about an hour-and-a- half? DOUG: That was a version which covered most of the different places that we went, but the whole thing, I think, was about 312 minutes and that includes sort of split-screen choice segments. If you get to a certain point, you cut to a shot of an old TV where you can choose to go back to different points in the narrative or go to the credits. There are quite a few of those. THERE'S A LOT OF SCENES that begin one way where they seem like they're almost exactly the same and then they kind of change a little at the end—like the choice is just slightly different at the end? DOUG: Yeah, we were very careful to make sure that all the environments were recognizable. So while they might not be exactly the same, the automation level was right, the panning was right, the reverbs were right, they were all the same. But then we'd introduce variations around that. DO YOU THINK THAT ACTUALLY having gaming experience helped you with the understanding of this being a nonlinear narrative? DOUG: I've known Joakim [Sundström], the sound supervisor, for a long time and we have a really good relationship. I think one of the things that helped him get me on the show was the fact that I had an appreciation of different types of workflows. I guess I'm a fairly technical sort of mixer in the sense of working out technical issues and solving the whole transition thing, [which] was quite a big deal. DOUG, HOW LARGE WAS YOUR TEAM? Were you the single re-recording mixer on this entire project? DOUG: Basically, I did all the premixing on the dialogues and about a third of the premixing on the sound effects, that was covered by Chris Burdon and Markus Moll. I final-mixed all the segments apart from the recaps, which Markus final-mixed on another stage. Joakim Sundström was the sound supervisor. The dialogue editors were Davide Favargiotti and Michael Maroussas. Christer Melen was the sound designer. I'm not sure whether they used any other sound effects editors to do bits and pieces, but I think it was mainly Christer. So, it was a relatively small team for five- and-a-quarter hours' worth of material. We were lucky, to be honest. One of the things Davide did during the dialogue premix was feed me only original material. So, there would be a process of mixing certain segments and then he would take that away, conform that into the other segments which had some of that material in, and then generally whatever was new. I had to then mix based on his conform. Then he'd take all that away and conform that again into other segments. He was brilliant at