Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1512678
C A S Q U A R T E R L Y I W I N T E R 2 0 2 4 35 Bob Bronow has been a re-recording mixer for decades and brings his Emmy Award-winning experience from Deadliest Catch and Genius to crafting English- language mixes of international projects that maintain the vitality, perspective, and creative vision of the original language. Serge Perron is another industry veteran with a long list of credits that includes hits like Squid Game, Black Knight, and Money Heist. Kurt Kassulke CAS: So how did you first start working in localization? Bob Bronow CAS: I was working at a regular post house doing scripted TV and they got a Netflix contract to do some of their localization. The way that was done is they had one mixer come in and basically go through the show or the film and copy all the reverbs. Which now, with the Accentize Chameleon plugin, is so much easier. Back then, we had Altiverb and Indoor [from Audio Ease]. Indoor was terrific because it was just so easy. Say a character is in the kitchen [and] we're listening from over here. The little microphone goes over here and the speaker goes over here. And we're good. So, we would come in, and it would just be, today you're doing Russian, or today you're doing Polish, and we'd have a set number of tracks where all the characters would just fit in. And you retained the panning automation. It was a lot of level writing which was great. And then I moved on to doing other things that weren't as structured. Once again, only one guy in the room. And a lot of it was anime with Spanish television and Korean television. Those were a little bit different because I was the one who had to go through and copy all the reverbs. And it's not like they're talking in the kitchen and it sounds like they're talking in the kitchen. It's like, no, they're in a kitchen, but it sounds like they're talking in a box, so we need to do something about that. What was really interesting was when I was working for a company called VSI. They do localizations all over the world—they've got offices all over the globe and they are a soup-to-nuts kind of place. You'd bring your film there, they would translate it, they would cast it, they'd record it, they would mix it, and they would send you the new tracks. Which is great. When I first got there, I was going through the computer, and there's a folder that says "mixers" on it, where you put your templates and stuff. And I opened it up and it was a roster of who's who in the Bob Bronow CAS Serge Perron CAS