Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1500716
That's cool that they give you the first draft of it, and if you need to pull in the deeper stuff, they give you more options as well. KV: Obviously, they bring the idea, it's on screen, and we have to play it. But sometimes you don't know until you go around and around and around it. If that's not right, then, here, let's try this. And then when you hit it, everyone says, "Yeah, that's cool." It's the magic combo and it's working for the story, which is the most important. LB: We have a shorthand developed between us and Nick and his crew, as well as with the clients. Sometimes, we zig when they wanna zag, but we know their aesthetic. In terms of how much we quiet the dialogue in terms of cleanliness, I never over-clean. I like to err on the conservative side with the cleanliness of tracks. As Kevin said, we start off with amazing ingredients [provided by] production sound mixer Phillip Palmer CAS, his boom operator, Mitchell Gebhard, and the rest of their crew. So, I get really great raw tracks to begin with, which can withstand some massaging and equalizing and de-essing and even noise reduction if need be. But overwhelmingly, it's just minimizing noise, not eliminating it. We're huge fans of Phillip's and we start off with great material, just as we do with the sound effects. Frankly, having such quality material and such a quality track really makes it so we can finesse and massage and everything can be built around, and all the music can sit there, and all the sound effects and ambiences can fit around the dialogue, and there's room for it. It's not like it's delicate and fragile in the dialogue production track and we have to stay out of the way. We don't. It's so well recorded and rich and full sounding that even with some shaping and sculpting on my part we really can crowd it a little bit with beautiful ambiences. It really makes it great and easy to treat with a light touch. And we have great boom. I always try to rely on that first, but the guys shoot very cinematically and sometimes it's hard to get the boom in there, so I will rely on lavs with boom more for fill and for richness, like ambience, if you will, the room sound. How long do you guys get to mix on the show? LB: For the majority of the show, we had three days stem-to- stern. A day and a half of mixing and then the rest of the time is playback and fixes. On shows that Vince Gilligan or Peter Gould directed, maybe we'll have a fourth day. In some cases, if it's longer than the typical 45-50 minutes, we will get a fifth day. Stacey, how much time do you get to do a regular episode? Stacey Michaels CAS: Twenty hours of Foley, but we often need a little bit more to really get it all done. And again, because it matters to Vince, it gets played, so it's a nice snowball effect of creativity. We luck out because sound matters to Vince Gilligan and creating a three-dimensional world for his show matters. So, we get the time necessary to make that happen. When I first started on Breaking Bad, things that were cued were extremely detailed that I went, "You're kidding me, no wonder this takes 20 hours!" We had to do the sound of dry grass faintly blowing because it was right close to camera, and the temp had music right there so I think there's music all over this, but okay, here we go. And when I heard the show, I had to shut up because they played all of it, and it sounded amazing! Another example is when we had a L-R: Phillip W. Palmer CAS, Stacey Michaels CAS, Larry Benjamin CAS, and Kevin Valentine.