Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1535880
68 M PS E . O R G and nuanced. It's amazing what the team did in that amount of time. RB: Yes, the big thing about Maisel from day one of Season 1 was that the showrunners didn't want it to sound like a "TV show." They wanted it to sound like every episode was a movie. I'm like, "Well, but it's all dialogue top to bottom. How are we gonna accomplish that?" So that was our challenge—to pack it to the gills and still try to hear the dialogue. DB: Amy Sherman Palladino is widely known for her rapid-fire dialogue. Her style of writing and shooting is very challenging for sound, starting with the production sound mixer all the way through the dialogue and ADR teams, and of course, the mixer. Mathew, can you talk to us about your process, from when you get the script to when you turn over your production sound to editorial? Mathew Price (production sound mixer): Sure. Well, first thing, when I got a script, I read it for pleasure because we always laughed at the scripts. Everyone was always waiting for the next script on Maisel [laughs]. But then I'd break each scene down into the separate elements I'd have to deal with. Then, on my second pass, I marked it all up—noting how many actors will talk in a scene, the location of where we will be filming, and imagining what kind of noise and logistical problems we might have there. I'll also look for any music cues and try to figure out whether or not it would be just straight playback, whether it would go into the room or, if there is dialogue during the music, how many people might need earwigs so we can keep the music off the floor, all those kinds of details. Then when we got to set, I'd watch rehearsals, and I learned where the camera and the actors would be during the scene. Then my team and I decided how we would mic them, and what mics we'd use. Can we get a boom in there? Do we need to hide a mic somewhere, like plant mics on the set? The tricky part was that with all the camera and actor movements and the wide shots, we didn't often get a chance to plan or even boom sometimes, so we just wired everybody as much as we could and flew through it. One point I'd like to make is that almost everyone on set was working to get through the day, but I knew that once the day was done, my tracks have to live on with our friends in post-production, so I always tried to think of what they would need. If there was live singing, I always wanted to record the singing live on set whenever possible since I approach singing the same way I approach spoken dialogue; it's just musical dialogue. In this episode, the Carol Burnett character was actually singing live, although everyone else was lip-syncing. We needed to figure out mic placement since it was impossible to boom because of the way the scene was lit. We wound up putting a mic in her hair which worked out great. The background singers had very unfriendly costumes for wireless mics so we decided that they should just lip-sync. Filming on location in New York is always challenging because it's always noisy, so we'd send scouts out to locations in advance to see what we'd be dealing with and what noise issues we'd have to handle. My primary challenge and job as production sound mixer is to protect the vocal performances by getting clean, usable dialogue that hopefully will not need to be replaced by ADR later on. No matter what the circumstances, we always fought hard for that. The thing about Maisel was that when we started on Episode 1, it was one thing, and then as each episode and season went on, it got bigger and bigger and bigger with more people talking simultaneously. The size of the cast and the movements of the camera were some of our biggest challenges. A lot of old-school production mixers want to boom everything because, of course, it sounds great and cinematic. But with Maisel, there were so many people talking and so many wide shots with the camera always moving, it was really a matter of keeping the radio mics clean and making sure that everything sounded great. We were very lucky because everybody in the cast had great voices. There were no mumblers, no whisperers. DB: So, when you have that many tracks, are you labeling them by character name? What's your layout in your recorder? MP: Well, I worked with equipment from a company called Zaxcom. I have a Deva 16 recorder, which has 16 tracks on it. Very different from when I started out running two-track reel-to-reel Nagras. There's a lot more flexibility now