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June 2018

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www.postmagazine.com 4 POST JUNE 2018 BITS & PIECES NEW YORK CITY — For the biographical documentary Love, Gilda, from Magnolia Pictures, director Lisa D'Apolito allows comedienne Gilda Radner to tell the story of her life in her own words. From boxes of old cassette tapes, home movies and diary entries, D'Apolito pieces together Radner's formative years. That's combined with interviews from her friends and fellow Saturday Night Live alumni, clips of her per- formances and Radner's own manuscripts read by famous comedians, like Amy Poehler and Bill Hader. Sound supervisor/re-recording mixer Paul Furedi at PostWorks New York (www.postworks.com), working with sound effects editor Dominic Bartolini and dialogue editor Marlena Grzaslewicz, had the challenge of bringing all of these disparate sources into a cohesive soundtrack. The most challenging source was the old cassette tapes. Not only did they require extensive dialogue restoration and clean-up using every tool in iZotope RX 6, but dialogue editor Grzaslewicz also needed to perform pitch-correc- tion due to the wow effect from the tapes. In addition to repairing the dialogue issues, the archival material needed a bit of sound enhancement. Furedi explains, "Dominic [Bartolini] did a really nice job of designing textural sound that helped to lend these glowing feelings of nostalgia to this old footage of Gilda's childhood. It felt very dreamy and non-specific, but very appropriate." Bartolini and Furedi also added diegetic effects to the archival footage and to the clips of Radner's SNL performances. "We tried not to leave anything totally silent, but we weren't trying to make it sound modern either. We wanted it to sound like a live show from the 1970s," says Furedi. The additional sound effects helped to bridge gaps in the background sound and helped to mask some of the more severe processing on the dialogue tracks. Love, Gilda, which opened the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival, was more than four years in the making. As it was taking shape in picture editorial, Bartolini did the initial noise reduction on the archival materi- al, some of which was carried forward into the final mix. "This is an epic-scale kind of project. There was a lot of magic that we did in the mix, but there was a lot of magic that happened before," says Furedi. "After Lisa [D'Apolito] heard the final mix, she said, 'They told me it couldn't be done.' From what they had found in these old boxes of cassette tapes, they told her to not even try because this stuff is too rough and she'd never be able to make anything useful out of it. And so the director felt vindicated when we were finished with the mix," concludes Furedi. — By Jennifer Walden CREATING A COHESIVE SOUNDTRACK FOR LOVE, GILDA Furedi Radner's SNL headshot With husband Gene Wilder Radner's own, personal photos were used to tell her life story.

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