Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1279181
48 I M PS E . O R G Kontakt "Rise and Hit," a virtual instrument triggered by sample playback. It allows you to build and create all kinds of cool swooshes, whooshes, and rises. You can make your own from scratch, so I started creating a few of these and I played them in real time to the slow-mo tackles on screen. I sent a few of these ideas to Will and he was really into them! So I just kept going until I had a library of about 20 of these whooshes, each with different swells, decays, stutters after impact, and other variables. This ended up informing all of our sounds for anytime we'd see Aaron getting hit. You'd see real- life footage of a New England Patriots game and there would be this massive hit, and in our final mix, we would echo out the crowd with lots of reverb, and feature the whoosh as well. It sounded jarring, but somehow reminiscent, like a flashback. Combined with the realistic sounds that we edited for the hits themselves, it felt brain rattling without being literal. That was a through line that we used for all of the episodes. EM: You were nice enough to bring me aboard this show and I learned so much from you through the entire process. As the supervising sound editor, approximately how long did you have to work on each episode? JG: We had two weeks total per episode, and each episode was 60 to 65 minutes long. It was intense. It was a lot of work to get accomplished in the amount of time, but with your work and with dialog editor and mixer Lucien Palmer's work on Episodes 2 and 3, we were able to get the job done. It was too fast and I would much prefer to have three weeks for a 65-minute piece. EM: There was a lot of archival footage in this show. What sorts of mic sources did you have to work with? JG: A lot of the audio was in really poor condition. Most clips were single channel, or dual mono with the same information in both channels. A handful of the clips had terrible, baked-in phase cancellation issues (destined for QC flags), indicating improper transfer from the original source onto the videotape archive. Our sage post-production supervisor, Mark Lipson, explained to me exactly how this inadvertently happens from film to videotape transfers, and was instrumental in pursuing the original film clips that needed replacing. In situations like this, the sound supervisor must ask, "Is this the very best source audio that we have? Is this the very best copy?" A good 90 percent of the time, our picture editorial team was able to find better source material. Assistant editor Michael Engelken, who managed all of our requests, was incredible. In terms of mixing, if it's older archival footage, I will put a filter on any of the sounds that we've added to make them sound authentic to the era. For instance, I'll cut off the high frequencies significantly, and Aaron Hernandez of the New England Patriots in custody