Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/856624
C A S Q U A R T E R L Y S U M M E R 2 0 1 7 21 b y K a r o l U r b a n C A S M P S E Karol: What I really liked about this piece that made me want to interview you was that it seems to really be a show that was constructed to integrate sound's full psychological influence. This particular show was shot so incredibly well for sound and your team took advantage of these opportunities. I particularly loved all of the out-of- sync dreamy in-the-head sequences of the chanting women reinforced by blurred images and extremely tight close-up hyper-sharp shots. I found that really effective. Were those moments that you were guided by the guide track and then finessed and made better and set in space? Or were these actual moments that you were able to creatively decide and experiment with on the dub stage? Lou: I think your comment is true that you rarely get to work on something where sound is thought about very, very early on, and I think there was space in the scripts for sound. And then I think another big step into the sound was the director, Reed Morano, who definitely was thinking about sound before even day one of shooting. Enough to actually write down a bunch of thoughts and impressions about the sound before filming and to give it to us so that we could be aware of it and be thinking about it. And then during the picture edit, she really helped bring a lot of those concepts into the guide track. So I would say, particularly for the first three episodes, that a lot of the construction of the transitions and flashbacks were there as placeholders in the guide track. And it was our job to make it not just a reverb flashback kind of thing. But the place where they wanted to go—surreal or stylized—was definitely thought about in the cutting room. Karol: Were you guys given a lot of time and latitude to interpret how that would be done? Lou: Yes, absolutely. I mean, there were some transitions completely reinterpreted, and some we did exactly what they did in the cutting room. If you've seen a few episodes, you'll see sometimes we're using music to pull you into the next thing, a flashback or whatever, or it might be a dialogue pre-lap that's affected. Pulling you back out of the flashback could be a slow transition or a hard cut with a sharp sound on it. So, in many cases, in the first three episodes [which were directed by Reed Morano], I would say that those ideas were framed-up for us to execute. But occasionally, we'd come across something that just worked better and there was a really great willingness on [creator/writer/EP] Bruce Miller's side and Reed's side to check out the idea and let it play if it worked. Karol: So, the editor and the director were both very good about being open-minded to reinterpretation? Lou: And the showrunner, yeah. Karol: When did you first hear of the project and were brought in to collaborate? Lou: I heard that the showrunner on Penny Dreadful had actually called Bruce Miller and recommended us as a crew. We were coming off Penny Dreadful last year, so it timed out really well. They were shooting in Toronto, so we got a chance early on to meet with Bruce, get some of his ideas about what the show was going to be, and just get some early thinking going on. They were shooting sort of late summer last year. I think sound editorial started sometime around November, December, and we didn't start doing mixes until about January. [But] we did a temp mix sometime before Christmas and that was a good opportunity for us to get a bunch of sound stuff figured out and concepts ironed out and get