Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1515063
64 S P R I N G 2 0 2 4 I C A S Q U A R T E R L Y squeaks, that could transform into a vocal. As far as going to plugins, I try to keep to the basics; reverse, pitch, speed. Once you start adding the monster plugins, you can definitely hear it. It sounds fake to me. I use them, but as a layer underneath the more full sound. Since we have three people from Legends of Tomorrow here, let's do a case study. Are we getting Lex to come in and record to the picture? Are you building libraries of what he's saying? The example you [mentioned earlier] had to be to picture. LL: It's mostly to picture. Often, I see picture before I actually go in, that's very helpful. I think I was able to see picture on a few of the episodes to give me an idea what the actual creature or alien was. AK: They were practical too, on set, right? Though sometimes all we have is a jpeg to go off of. ML: Right. Except when he did the eating humans and he would open up. LL: Most of the time, I see picture. If I don't, the first few minutes of the session is talking with the sound supervisor, whoever's editing, and we kind of agree upon what we're looking to achieve with the sounds. ML: And our showrunner, Geoff Garrett, is very involved as well, and he's very particular. We typically get about 11 pages of notes at the end of a mix. So, he was involved with every aspect, including telling Lex and Austin and myself what he was looking for. Austin had been doing the series for, I think, five years before I got there, so he was a wealth of information about everything that had previously happened and what we were looking for on the stage. I relied on Austin a lot. When you're done recording with Lex, how do you go about getting that into your sound effects session? What level of detail are you going with other sounds added to it? ML: I would take the raw Lex recordings and tighten up the phrasing. We had multiple layers, so they didn't all happen at exactly the same time unless I worked on them. I wouldn't always make them happen at exactly the same time. Sometimes one sound could bleed into another and create a phrasing. Especially depending on when the second character was in the scene. I needed to make time for the other character to respond and distinguish it from the first one. Once I received Lex and added my layers to it, then I would ship it over to Austin. He would assemble it from there for the mixer. AK: Mark was very organized about what he has. We had four raw tracks and four processed tracks down below. I would go through and comp even more to make some choices, and then give all that to [effects mixer] Joel Catalan on the stage. and he would make more choices. How much processing is he doing? Is he expected to do anything more or is he just mixing your tracks? ML: At that point, he was mixing. He wasn't doing any deep processing. Maybe reverb or ambience. He had what he needed. AK: He would take over a bit. Some mixers don't ever touch anything but a fader. Joel was good about editing further and making choices. L-R: Steve Avila MPSE, Lex Lang, Mark Lanza MPSE, Steve Bissinger, Austin Krier, and Timothy Muirhead