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DEPARTMENT www.postmagazine.com 34 POST AUGUST 2017 The story of Alias Grace is set in 1843. Two household servants were charged with murdering their employer and his mistress in a rural town north of Toronto. The guilty man was hanged, but the woman, Grace Marks (Sarah Gadon), was sent to a women's prison. She claims no memory of the murder and so her case sparks interest with a psychologist who comes to interview her. Grace recounts her emigration from Ireland, her first servant job in Toronto and her time of ill-fated employment in rural Richmond Hill. Tattersall paints a specific picture with sound for the different locations: Ireland, prison, the interview site at the governor's house, Toronto and Richmond Hill. Ireland is noisy and hectic, so Tattersall builds up the environment with Irish speaking crowds, children and chickens. Toronto is different. It's a diverse city awash in numerous languages. Using loop group and their library of custom recordings, Tattersall included as many different languages as she could into Toronto's street crowds, like Hungarian, German, Italian, Greek and more. "We just kept adding languages because we wanted it to be very obvious that Toronto is like the Tower of Babel," she says. The design for rural Richmond Hill included ambiences that Tattersall specifically captured at a remote park located two hours north of Toronto. She used three Schoeps CCM-4 mics, arranged in an LCR pickup pattern, and recorded to a Sound Devices 744T. "I recorded in early summer, in the same time of year that the story is set, so we got authentic Ontario field and woodland birds and insects in a natural setting. There are no cars or airplanes. There is nothing. So it would've sound- ed the same as it sounded in the late 1800s," shares Tattersall. In contrast to the lively environments of Grace's memories, her present reality in prison sounds stark. The prison has a strict "no talking" policy, enforced by severe punishment for rule breakers. Tattersall shares, "There is no talking or murmurs. You just hear distant doors and distant footsteps. There are tonal elements, like wind going down the corridor, to make it sound lonely and gloomy. All of the sounds are very subtle, just enough textures to create an atmosphere." Tattersall details a scene in which a group of women prisoners are eating lunch. The only sounds are of clinking spoons and the slurping of soup, created from a combination of production sound, Foley and hard effects. There is absolutely no talking. "It's kind of odd to not hear talking while looking at a room full of 60 people," she says. (Side note: Alias Grace is based on a true story. Tattersall mentioned that some of the scenes were shot in Kingston, Ontario, in the real women's pris- on where the actual Grace Marks was held.) Flashbacks aren't the only narrative device that the series uses to tell Grace's tale. "There are quite a lot of dreams that happen. The doctor dreams about what happened to Grace, and she has dreams as well. There are also re-imaginings of events because Grace often can't remember what really happened. Sometimes she describes events one way, and then a different way, so we are not sure which is real and which is not. The series could've been quite messy and hard to follow but it's not. It's skillfully tied together using voice- over and Grace's dialogue as she's talking to the doctor. This helps guide us through the different realities," explains Tattersall. The tone and quality of Grace's voice is an indication of from what time period she's speak- ing. When Grace is reflecting with wisdom in her later years, her voice sounds older and wiser. During her interviews with the doctor, Grace is middle-aged and so her voice sounds younger. These nuances in her performance were critical to help the audience follow the story. Tattersall Sound's dialogue supervisor David McCallum supervised all of the voiceover recording ses- sions and ADR sessions to ensure that Gadon's performances were delivered in the precise tone that director Mary Harron and producer/writer Sarah Polley wanted. To complicate matters, Gadon's character had a northern Irish accent. A dialect coach was on-set and present during the ADR sessions to help keep Gadon's accent authentic. "David [McCallum] and the dialect coach did an amazing job of figur- ing out which words needed to be replaced for accent. While editing the dialogue, David would use as much of the original as he could and then just insert a syllable or a word from ADR. All of his edits are seamless. It sounds fantastic. It's techni- cally fantastic dialogue," shares Tattersall. Audio post for GLOW was completed at Larson Studios. Netflix's original series, GLOW, GLOW, GLOW follows the lives of women who become wrestling stars.