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EMMY CONTENDERS www.postmagazine.com 29 POST JULY 2016 E mmy season is upon us. Any second now the official list of nominations for the 68 th Emmy Awards will be released and we'll all hold our collective breath to see who takes home the statuettes in September. Until then, let's take a look at a few shows, from a sound perspective, that have a shot at that top honor. These four shows — House of Cards, Silicon Valley, Mr. Robot and Better Call Saul — consistently sound amazing, thanks to the hard work of their respective post sound teams. HOUSE OF CARDS Since 2013, Netflix's House of Cards has racked up nearly two-dozen award wins and over a hundred nominations. Both the composer, Jeff Beal, and the re-recording mix team of Nathan Nance (dialogue and music) and Scott Lewis (effects, back- grounds, Foley) have won Emmys for past seasons of the series. Will they have repeat success? Up for consideration, for sound mixing, is the Season 4 finale, Episode 13 titled, "Chapter 52." In "Chapter 52," the re-recording mixers had the opportunity to play with emo- tional elements. In the episode opener, military police walk through a hallway in Guantánamo, shackle an inmate and lead him away. Pounding drums — played by guest musician on the score Peter Erskine, blend with transient laden sound effects of boot thumps, chain rattles, clanging doors and handcuff clicks. "We were able to play with the sound effects and music to build tension there," says Nance, who happens to be a drummer himself. "Composer Jeff Beal's music is awesome but I really enjoyed this season because of guest drummer Peter Erskine. The drums brought a whole other level of tension that hadn't been there before. It also cul- minated at the end of this episode. These drums come in and they really build up that tension." That ending scene relied on sound to paint a graphic mental picture. In the situation room, on-going negotiations with two terrorists end in the death of their captive James Miller (played by Sean Graham). On a projection screen, President Frank (played by Kevin Spacey) and First Lady Claire (played by Robin Wright), and a room full of advisers watch as the two men hold a knife to Miller's neck. Just as they slit Miller's throat, the camera cuts away to a close-up of Frank and Claire. Lewis recalls, "We wanted the sound to make everyone wince because visually you don't see what's happening. That was a moment where sound played a big role. It sounds really brutal." Nance's careful futz processing of the terrorists' dialogue sounds realistic while still allowing the actors' inflections to come across clearly. On all of his futz processing for the show, Nance says, "I usually end up with an overcomplicat- ed combination of plug-ins. I use Audio Ease's Speakerphone, and especially on this show, I've been using iZotope's Denoiser feature. If you push that too far it becomes unpleasant in typical dialogue situations, but to me it sounds like a bad cell phone connection." Nance and Lewis mix House of Cards in 5.1 surround in the Alfred Hitchcock room at Skywalker Sound (www.skysound.com) in Marin County, CA. They have been mix- ing the series together since Season 2, and last season they started mixing the show on an Avid S6 console, which was still in beta at the time. Lewis says, "We were ac- tually one of the first people at Skywalker Sound to use it. We got to do a lot of beta testing and tell Avid what we liked and didn't like, and they were really good about taking our comments into consideration." Nance feels, as far as the hands-on con- trol, the S6 does a good job of mimicking an actual mixing console by separating the editorial portion of the surface from the mixing portion. One advantage of the S6 over a traditional console is the ability to map plug-ins to the surface, including third-party plug-ins like Nance's go-to reverb, the Relab LX480 — a Lexicon 480 emulator. Using the S6 touchscreen display, he can manipulate the plug-in parameters right from the board. "The S6 is a much better mixing platform than the options that were available before with the Avid ICON. With the S6, I rarely go over and grab the mouse. To me, that's import- ant because I can do more than one thing at a time on the console. With a mouse you are literally only able to do one thing at a time," says Nance. With House of Cards, a Pro Tools- based, in-the-box workflow makes sense to Lewis and Nance since picture changes can happen for any episode at any point in the mix process. "It's like working on a 13-hour movie. The best option for us is to stay in the box," concludes Nance. SILICON VALLEY HBO's comedy series Silicon Valley, which just finished up Season 3, has won nine awards and 33 nominations, including an Emmy nomination last year for outstand- House of Cards' re-recording mix team of (below, L-R) Nance and Lewis.