Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1470109
72 I m ps e . o rg Loop group placeholders that would give Guillermo an idea of how the sfx crowds would eventually become support rather than the featured element. MA: It's common to send various mixdowns of effects and clean up passes on production dialogue back and forth from the picture edit but I've not heard of loop group being captured that early on. Jill would you like to walk us through that workflow? JP: Sure. Nathan got started a bit earlier than I did for the design aspect of the crowd scenes. It was primarily the Copa to start. A little bit of carnival, too. The carnival barker voices were recorded pretty early on, but for the Copa, we didn't record any loop group specifically for that until much later on. I pulled group from previous films that I've worked on that I still have libraries for as a template. Not that any of that ended up in the final track, but it ended up being perfect for the temp scenario for Guillermo to listen to. That became sort of a model for what we did end up recording with the actual loop group later on—to add to what Nathan had already put in from his own tracks. MA: The film is based in the early 1940's and incorporates period specific vehicles, elevators, typewriters and guns. How did you tackle authenticity for this and did you get a chance to record original content? NR: Yeah, we did a ton of recording. This is the first of many spots where I'll be giving a big shout out to Dashen Naidoo, who was one of my sound effects editors/sound designers on the show. He was a massive help through all of this. Guillermo always makes sure that we get a lot of access to the set. I went to set one day when they had a lot of extras there so I could want to get some good stereo recordings of the carnival audiences. Greg Chapman and his team carved out a little space for me, and they were really great. They just made sure that my radio frequencies weren't clashing with anybody else's. And Denis Bellingham, his boom up, was sort of looking out for all my rigs that I stashed around the set. We got a bunch of the period vehicles from both the carnival era as well as the city, Dash led the show there. He worked with the vehicle captain and the locations manager to make sure that we could get police organized to shut down the roads to record these cars and all of that. We went back on a day where they weren't shooting, and the location manager, Stan Lidon, was able to make sure we had everybody needed to run the Ferris wheel, run the carousel, run the bumper cars. We recorded all of those rides, Bradley Cooper as Stanton Carlisle in Guillermo del Toro's Nightmare Alley. © Searchlight Pictures