Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1262492
40 C I N E M O N T A G E F E A T U R E network, HBO's QC process would find more dirt, and it would be removed and a new delivery file sent to HBO. In pre- COVID-19 days, what you watch at home is pretty danged pristine. Natalie told me that on the first episode of Season 3, DRS spent 335 hours cleaning dirt. But now that Fotokem's doors were shuttered, the dirt removal system was sitting idle, and those DRS technicians were home like the rest of us. B y M a r c h 2 3 , t h e D R S p r o c e s s had been completed for the first five episodes, but the last three were not so fortunate. So each of those three episodes were divided into 4 parts, and Natalie, Morgan, our post coordinator Anastasia Moore, and L eena would frame through the cut, logging frames with dirt. Then Alex and Ish, using paint tools on their Resolve software, would paint it out. That's a much slower and more cumbersome system than DRS, and so the delivered versions of the last three episodes, though pretty clean, were not the immaculate presentations that the first five were. There just wasn't the time or resources. ADR was also not a part of our process that transferred well to the shelter-in- place world. The cast of "Westworld" is a group of amazingly talented profession- als, well-versed in what it takes to give a good performance on an ADR stage, but in quarantine there are no ADR stages available, and there is no substitute for getting a quality ADR recording. We didn't have enough lead time to put to- gether some other clever ADR option for our actors. So we decided we would live with the occasional noisy location track, which we often do anyway, and ask the actors to record only added dialogue on their iPhones. Some results were better than others. If the actor was quarantined in the center of a huge megalopolis, it was difficult to get a good recording. The majority of the cast recorded their lines deep in their closets or in their cars, win- dows rolled up. Loop Group was another beast altogether; rather than having a dozen group artists together in a room, recording it all onto two mics simultane- ously, each group member recorded their tracks separately, which became a night- mare for the sound editors. Big shout out, however, to No. 1 on the call sheet, Evan Rachel Wood, who just happens to have a recording studio in her home. Her ADR was pretty flawless. O n M o n d ay, A p r i l 27, j u s t b e fo re midnight, Kelly, Natalie, Morgan, Leena, Anastasia, Ish and I finished checking the J2K delivery file for the season Finale in a Clearview session, before it went to HBO. We all gave it a thumbs-up. The Finale aired the following Sunday, May 3. Normally we'd be in the same room and have a bottle or two of champagne nearby to celebrate the end of 14 months' worth of hard work. Given the number of hours we'd all spent in front of our laptops over the past six weeks, no one was even slightly interested in a virtual celebration on Zoom. Our celebration will have to wait. So how did we do? The episodes aired on consecutive weeks, as planned. HBO spent more on finishing the shows than they would have had there been no worldwide pandemic, but not so much more. If we'd had more time to design the remote workflow, we would have set up remote 5.1 systems in a few producers' homes so that we could monitor that sound format instead of just listening to the two-track stereo that our laptops could handle. We would have installed color-corrected reference monitors in a few homes so that we saw what Kostas saw rather than what our laptop screens displayed. And we would have set up a better-quality streaming picture and sound signal from Clearview. Since the shelter-in-place orders, Clearview 's business has dramatically expanded, and based on the new needs of their custom- ers, they have introduced new products Jill Paget.