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October 2017

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DEPARTMENT www.postmagazine.com 30 POST OCTOBER 2017 a wrangling job because we're trying to find what sounds best and we're looking through 16 tracks," says Reeves. To have all the dialogue available in the session, Reeves has his assistant pull in the dailies and uses those to rebuild the audio edit from the picture department. "During the picture edit, they use the mixed track from production. So we go back to the isolated tracks and reassemble that before dialogue editor Gabrielle Reeves and I do our edit," concludes Reeves. S.W.A.T. On November 2 nd , CBS will premiere its newest police drama, S.W.A.T. According to the network, "S.W.A.T. stars Shemar Moore as a locally born and raised S.W.A.T. sergeant newly tasked to run a specialized tactical unit that is the last stop in law enforcement in Los Angeles." Supervising sound editor Wade Barnett, at Formosa Group's new NOHO facility on the Television Academy campus in N. Hollywood, CA (formosagroup.com), is working with showrunner Shawn Ryan and post producer Nicholas Bradley to define the sound of S.W.A.T. Barnett describes it as a "police show on steroids. There's a lot of big action — helicopters, car chases and big fight scenes. We want the sound to be big and bright, and cinematic." Because the story follows a S.W.A.T. unit, there's bigger weaponry and beefier transportation. Forget standard police cruisers, the S.W.A.T. team has "access to higher-grade automobiles," says Barnett. "We have room to play around with the cars to make them sound even bigger, like supercharged engines." They even have an armored vehicle that resembles a tank. To build these souped-up cars and high-caliber gun battles, Barnett and sound effects editor Luis Galdames pull effects from their own recordings as well as from Formosa's extensive library of sounds. Then they edit and layer several effects togeth- er to match the sound to the action on-screen. "Sometimes we'll process the sounds a bit using Serato's Pitch 'n Time. Or, we'll layer in designy ele- ments, like animal noises to help sell an engine rev. You have to pull out everything to really make it work. The car chases and helicopter sequences are what make our job fun, but it takes time to get it right," says Barnett. On the dub stage, re-record- ing mixer Alexandra Fehrman (effects/Foley/back- grounds) makes sure those effects punch through the mix and add to the excitement on-screen. The action scenes are fun to edit effects-wise, but they can pose a challenge for dialogue. All the gear the S.W.A.T. cast wears can affect the lavalieres, and their movement through the scene makes their dialogue hard to capture with the boom mic. Barnett notes that it's also tough to get the ADR to sound good in those action scenes. Their solution? "We clean up the production dialogue with iZotope RX 6," answers Barnett. "Luckily we have the tools to clean up the tracks so much more now than we could before. It's amazing what we can get away with now, with the new algorithms that they have in RX 6. When you're in crunch-time and you don't have time to record whole scenes in ADR or maybe you don't want to replace the scene because of the perfor- mances, you can really save a lot of dialogue with these tools and not have to do much ADR." Formosa Group's new NoHo facility is helping to define the sound of CBS's S.W.A.T. series. The sound on S.W.A.T. is big, bright and cinematic, like the show's action.

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