Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1397791
30 C I N E M O N T A G E C O V E R S T O R Y 'I'm a kid of the '60s. It was 'The Dick Van Dyke Show,' Lucille Ball's show, and all of those shows that you would see on re-runs that were just constant.' Zene Baker. P H O T O : M A R K E D W A R D S systems, the picture editors agree that the process had certain advantages, particularly in balancing life and work. "You had the ability, . . . even though we might be [working] until 10, 11, 12 o'clock at night, to step away at 7 o'clock and have dinner with your family, which has never happened in my life," Webber said. "It allowed for the craziness, but also allowed for a healthy home life." For "WandaVision" to work, audi- ences not only had to become invested in what they were seeing but also what they were hearing. Sound designer Steve Orlando was as diligent as the picture editors in recreating old sitcoms. "The exciting thing about this show was it was a chance, at least at first, to go in a dif- ferent direction from past Marvel films," Orlando said. "Since the show was sort of a love letter to sitcoms, I also tried to base a lot of sounds on TV static and noises or switches whenever possible, especially the Hex." Like the picture editors, supervising sound editors Kim Foscato, Matthew Wood, and Gwendolyn Yates Whittle, MPSE, closely scrutinized classic sit- coms. In re-watching "Bewitched" and "The Dick Van Dyke Show," Whittle was struck by how sparse the soundtracks were. "There's no Foley — they all float- ed," Whittle said. "You never heard their feet. It was just much simpler than what we expect from TV now. You expect it to be fuller; you expect it to sound much more like a feature film." Seeking to honor those sitcoms' sonic style, the team created a sound world that was initially quite limited: mono tracks were used for early episodes, with stereo reserved for MCU scenes. "It was really interesting to see how [the sound] expanded and grew with Wanda's vision of how life is changing with these differ- ent television shows that she had grown up with," Foscato said. "You have those mono shows at the beginning, and then it was widened." The bare-bones mono tracks could be unforgiving. "You can hear all of the inconsistences in dialogue that we, as dialogue editors, work really hard to get rid of," Foscato said. "Of course, once we popped into the Marvel universe, I don't think that you could be that extreme going back and forth. By Episode 4, we started to see the cracks and see going into the Marvel universe and now it's starting to get a lot . . . bigger of a soundtrack." Like the picture editors, the bulk of the sound editing crew worked remote- ly. Re-recording mixer Danielle Dupre