Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/145624
Mixing for Web Series from those scene to the mixers for use in the current episode. To achieve this, Buchholz kept a master session that included all the completed episodes. He updated his master session every time an episode wrapped. "The only way I could keep track of these nexuses as we called them — these areas where the stories would all overlap — was to take the finished mix sessions and copy them into one master session. I always had a copy of all the final mix sessions with me in one master mix session." In addition to Klein and Mohr, many other mixers worked on the show, including Lisle Engle (six episodes), Josh Schneider (four episodes), Jamie Santos (five episodes) and Chris Philp (one episode). Having a master session Black Box's Kunal Rajan provided dialog editing, background effects and sound design for Tainted Love on YouTube's Machinima Prime channel. 34 proved invaluable. When a scene was recalled from a previous episode, Buchholz had the exact elements that were already established for that scene. "As the story is being told, it's the exact same point in time, so it was important that we had the exact elements." He was the thread that held the audio team together. No matter who was in the mix chairs, he was able to provide them with the correct elements in a coherent way. Mohr notes that with Pro Tools 10, Buchholz could export a selected series of tracks that were spotted to the new position in the current episode. "For Kevin [Buchholz] to have the forethought to have all those sessions in one, and then to have this ability in Pro Tools 10 to quickly fly these precise sound effects builds out as needed, was a great thing that accelerated our workflow and kept things moving smoothly." Buchholz notes that creator Mitch Hurwitz spends a lot of time getting the dialog right, from performances to placement. So he and his audio team did everything they could to preserve production sound. Buchholz worked with dialog editors Shannon Beaumont and Todd Niesen to pull words and syllables from out takes and other places in the dialog. "For the entire Post • July 2013 series, there was only five or six times we needed to use ADR to replace a line due to wind or noise or some other technical issue," explains Buchholz. On the mix stage, Klein recalls constantly moving lines of dialog and voiceover to make sure all the jokes were coming through. "We'd try moving the dialog two frames to the left, or two frames to the right, or overlaying it with the VO to make a point," she says. "It was all about getting the jokes available to everybody that was watching. Whether it was the first pass, second pass or third pass, if you watch that show a couple of times, you will get them all. They will uncover." The music is another key element to the comedy. It's not just a series of cues — it acts as a character. Music editor Jason Newman and composer David Schwartz worked closely with Hurwitz to craft the music tracks. Mixing the dialog and music, Klein was constantly aware of the music placement, the levels, and how the music and the dialog interacted with the effects because it was part of the comedy. Buchholz adds, "The challenge was in making sure the voiceover hits where it needs to, the dialog hits where it needs to, and that the jokes embedded in the music hit where they need to. It's a delicate balance of these elements that are fighting for the spotlight." For each episode, Buchholz spent five to seven days working with the audio team on the Foley (Adam DeCoster,Tom Kilzer, Andrew Morgado), sound effects (Lisle Engle, Bob Arons), dialog edit (Shannon Beaumont, Todd Niesen), ADR (Nate Poptic, Dana Olsefsky, Greg Stacy, Kim Lowe) and music edit (Jason Newman). The re-recording mixers spent two days per episode on the final 5.1 mix. For Mohr, having an entire season, all 15 episodes, play back seamlessly is a testament to the broad team of people involved with the project. Even with all the different mixers and different audio editors who worked on the series, there is still a consistent sound. According to Mohr, if you watch the entire season straight through, you wouldn't notice the change in the mixers or editors. A contributing factor to the consistent sound is that everything was done at Larson Studios. "It's a wonderful mix facility. It has multiple mix stages that are all equipped with the same gear and have the same capabilities. That affords us the ability to not only move talent around, but also have confidence that everything is going to work the same way. What we hear is going to be the same. We are going to get the same results and everything will playback the same way in every room." Klein, who worked on the original series years ago, feels that mixing Season 4 of www.postmagazine.com Arrested Development is a highlight in her long career. Not only were the mix sessions full of rewarding challenges but at the end of it all, the episodes play back exactly as they were mixed. "The fact that they were streamed with Netflix, and that we didn't have to go through any broadcast network made it more rewarding at the end. We didn't have to watch that first broadcast and go, 'What did they do to our mix?' With streaming, it allows us the bandwidth and capability to actually air our mixes as we mixed them." TAINTED LOVE Kunal Rajan, MPSE, Streamy Award-winner for Best Sound Design on the Web series Fear Clinic, is the supervising sound editor on a new Web series Tainted Love, which premiered May 5 on the Machinima Prime channel on YouTube. Rajan owns Black Box Entertainment (www.blackboxentertainment.com), which did the dialog editing, background effects and sound design on the series. David W. Collins, who recently won a BAFTA Game Award for Audio Achievement on Journey, a game developed by Thatgamecompany, is the rerecording mixer. Tainted Love, created by Orlando Jones, is an action/comedy that fuses live action and comic book style graphics to tell the story of newly expectant parents. Their desperate criminal behavior is a misguided yet wellintended attempt to raise money to pay for all the things that come with having a baby. Collins feels the combination of live action and animation helped the production to feel bigger than it really was. "When we have a big moment in the story, huge fights or gun sequences, the picture switches to animation and it just opens things up incredibly. It reminds me of the old school smoke and mirrors type of production, where you use every trick in the book to make it come across as a much bigger story than what we had time and budget for, and it really works." Director Avi Youabian asked Rajan to treat the sound as if it were a feature film, since Tainted Love was not intended to be a Web series when it was first created. For inspiration, Rajan watched scenes from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World to get an idea of how they handled going from live action to the comic book style animations. "It's not like how you would do a typical animation. I treated it more like a live-action film. I tried to make it sound more like real life. Sometimes creating surreal sounds is easier than making something sound real. Especially with the comic book visuals, it was hard to make it sound real, yet still sound violent and gritty." According to Rajan, the animators were