Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/889023
DEPARTMENT www.postmagazine.com 27 POST OCTOBER 2017 t doesn't take a detective to discover that police dramas are popular fair for broadcast series. There's no shortage of options, from gritty-city police work, like NBC's Chicago P.D., to sandy-grit crime scenes, like CBS's Hawaii Five- 0 — a show that offers action and comedy. Like to really laugh? Then there's Fox's police sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine. This fall, there are also a few rookies on the police series beat, as well. ABC is premiering Ten Days in the Valley, which, intrigu- ingly, is a police drama wrapped in a police drama. And there's the hard-hitting S.W.A.T. series coming to CBS. Here, Post asks studio pros, "What makes these police dramas sound unique?" Find out what the shows' supervising sound editors have to say. TEN DAYS IN THE VALLEY Ten Days in the Valley premiered on ABC this month, with new episodes airing on Sunday nights. The show stars Kyra Sedgwick as a writer named Jane Sadler who turns information from her journalistic investigation on LAPD corruption into a dramatized TV series. The demands of writ- ing for the show conflict with her responsibility as a single mother. When her daughter Lake [Abigail Pniowsky] goes missing, Sadler finds herself at odds with the LAPD. Her life suddenly becomes its own police drama. Tattersall Sound & Picture in Toronto, ON, Canada (www.tattersall- soundandpicture.com), which is part of the SIM Group (www.simgroup.com) family of compa- nies, handles post production on the new series. Tattersall's dialogue editor Sue Conley, who has worked on other police dramas such as The Line and Rookie Blue, says Ten Days in the Valley is similar to those shows in that more time is spent with the detectives on the street as opposed to being in the bullpen. Realistic backgrounds are important but subdued, taking a backseat to the characters' performances. "The drama and perfor- mances are what we're focused on. We guard the on-set performances as we felt that they drove the show. We worked hard to keep the production sound, to keep the show sounding as natural as possible," Conley says. One unique aspect of Ten Days in the Valley is that there's a drama show being filmed in the se- ries. To set that 'fake' show apart from the actual show, Conley says they kept it sounding phony. "For example, all of the sounds of those hollow set doors, which normally we would change in a real series, we kept. We also added a lot of reverb to the dialogue to give it that big soundstage feel. We added recess bells and various bangs, and actors practicing lines to create more chaos." Much of Conley's editing time was spent on 'outtaking,' searching alt takes for clean lines, words or even mere syllables to replace trouble spots, like clothing rustles, door slams and other extraneous noises on the production track. "For this show, there were a lot of takes and so I could fix just about any problem that came up. The actors were fantastic, often repeating lines the same way and so that gave me a lot of material to work with," says Conley. Of the boom mic tracks and lavaliere tracks available, Conley found the lav mic tracks to be the most useable because of the way they shot the show. "Often the boom wasn't in tight enough for me to use, so I ended up using a lot of the radio mics," says Conley. "But here at Tattersall, for the dialogue edit we like to keep the radio and boom mic tracks together when we have good recordings for both. This way the mixer can use a percentage of one or the other, to really help the dialogue shine so we can un- derstand what the actors are saying." In addition to outtaking, Conley also uses iZo- tope RX 5 to clean up the dialogue, to fix clicks and distortion, and to match backgrounds. "I'll get two lines to match by using the Ambience Match feature to sample the tone around the radio mics so that I can fill in any holes where I had to get rid of cloth rustles or other sounds. It doesn't always work but I think in the end, it got about 90-per- cent of the problems," she says. The most challenging section of production dialogue was during a subway scene. Conley says, "You always run into situations where you have to do ADR and there was just no saving the produc- tion on that scene. We had to re-create it totally with ADR. Fortunately, the actors on the show were sensational at doing ADR." CHICAGO P.D. Chicago P.D. is now in its fifth season on NBC. New episodes air on Wednesdays. The show follows the lives of Det. Sergeant Hank Voight [Jason Beghe] and his Intelligence Unit of the Chicago Police Department as they serve justice to serious crimi- nals — no speeding tickets here, folks! Supervising sound editor Jeffrey Kaplan at NBCUniversal StudioPost in Universal City, CA (www.universalstudioslot.com/studiopost) has been on Chicago P.D. for four years, and works on Chicago Fire as well. Kaplan, who has an Emmy nomination for his sound editing work on Law & Order, says Chicago P.D. is a bit grittier than other police series, and the story is told from the police I On-location sounds prove an audio editing challenge on Ten Days in the Valley. Tattersall Sound & Picture handles post on ABC's new Ten Days in the Valley.