CAS Quarterly

C A S Q U A R T E R L Y I S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 57 uploading and downloading files to-and-from different facilities. One thing that was always important was the need to help maintain tension and suspense, and we had to think about how best to use the limited tools at our disposal to achieve this. The chess matches were generally a crowd of silent spectators around two seated, unmoving players—themselves also silent. So, we had to think outside the box of literal sound to give ourselves a palette to work with. Lawrence: I had mixed the scores for both of [composer] Carlos Raphael Rivera's prior collaborations with Scott Frank: A Walk Among the Tombstones and Godless. So, I signed on to mix The Queen's Gambit long before starting work on it because, without knowing anything about the story, I knew it would be a great collaboration. Because of the pandemic, we had to modify our workflow in order to work fully remotely, but the creative collaboration was quite similar to our previous projects. The music had to do a lot of heavy lifting in support of the game play throughout the series. There were many chess tournaments that required long sequences of music, which Carlos scored beautifully. My challenge in mixing the score was to ensure that the tension and drama built into the compositions were supported by the mixes. Essentially, 1) Do no harm, 2) Help the music emotionally where appropriate, and 3) Recognize when my help might be needed and when it wasn't. I always want the music to sound as lush and impactful as it can while standing on its own. But when I mix music for a film or TV series, I also work with the reference sound design turned on much of the time, probably more frequently than many other music mixers do. And because the sound work on The Queen's Gambit was in such good shape when I came on board, I was able to mix the music to fit cohesively within it. Hopefully, that made life easier on the dub stage. Can you talk about the design of the chess sets and gameplay? The sound of the pieces moving and the drive/urgency and interaction of the clock are great. How did you utilize PFX, designed FX, and Foley to create so many depths of foreground, background, and occasionally hyper-reality. Leo: PFX played a huge role in this series, especially with the chess pieces. Many of the chess scenes had great on-set recordings of gameplay captured on multiple mics. This not only provided the real sound with natural acoustics, but also sync marks and reusable material to layer throughout other scenes. Foley was the next crucial layer that made these chess matches, pieces, and movements so intricately detailed—touching, grabbing, sliding, and cloth movements really added to the fullness of the chess piece gameplay. The final component, of course, was design. Almost all moves during focused chess play are sweetened with whooshes and stingers, which not only add indications of speed but also convey a lot of character emotions. The clock was a huge player and tool used to naturally bring us in-and-out of hyper-real moments. Music influenced a lot of the design throughout the series and we continuously created syncopated moments between the clock, music, and chess movements. Music was also a big driver in the ceiling chess moments and influenced the rhythm of the movements. The goal was to feel (through the sound) the movement of those pieces as if we were in Beth's head with her. Most source materials used to create those ceiling chess moments were from contact mic recordings on many different surfaces with different movements. How did you go about creating an open but not empty feel to the backgrounds? This is as true of Mexico City as it is of the far less exotic junior college exterior at the beginning of the episode as Beth leaves class. Eric: During production, we asked the on-set sound team to record with a Decca tree, so we had multichannel recordings of a lot of the interiors, which was really helpful in blending the production sound with our designed backgrounds. The sense of space that these recordings gave was helpful with the openness of the backgrounds, especially in some of the large locations where the matches were shot (hotels, gyms, etc.). Then, in order to make these open spaces not feel empty, we relied on loop group, which was especially helpful in creating a sense of specificity. The Dann + Bruce Company, which supplied the group voice talent, was able to get native Spanish speakers for Mexico City, native French speakers for Paris, and native Russian speakers for the final episode. We had a group of young girls come in to record the kinds of lines that orphans in Kentucky might say for walla for backgrounds at the orphanage. So, having some specially designed vocal elements to play with was a hugely helpful tool. Did you have to make any significant adjustments to overcome the adversity of COVID-19? Eric: At the end of the week when it seemed like working Production mixer Roland Winke Re-recording mixer Eric Hirsch

• Cover