Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1538091
42 FA L L 2 0 2 5 I C A S Q U A R T E R L Y or less noisy, but as long as it's consistent and cohesive, that's what she's going for." When prepping for a mix, a big part of David's system is his template. "The template I use is always evolving. I might discover a new way to do something or realize I like this more than that. For instance, now that we have more powerful systems, I started putting multiple reverbs on a single return. That way I can just [activate] whichever I want and it's always ready to go. "A lot of my levels are also set to defaults that worked well last time. If I liked it, I'll carry that forward. My mix techs always ask, 'Are we using this as your template?' And I usually tell them yes, not because I'm using the same template every time, but because I take the automation from the end of one episode and use it as the starting point for the next." David concludes: "I'm constantly adapting and optimizing, making little tweaks that speed things up and help me avoid repeating the same setup work over and over." Joe DeAngelis CAS: Mixing with Intent and Efficiency Joe DeAngelis is a dialogue mixer with Pacific Standard Sound and is currently working on a show called Alien: Earth. He began his mixing career solo on House, handling every element of the mix himself—backgrounds, dialogue, hard effects, Foley, music, and final balances. That early experience instilled in him the value of having a consistent, repeatable process. As he transitioned to team mixing at Universal and later Technicolor, Joe adapted his workflow to fit shared environments. Initially, he mixed dialogue on in-ear monitors while his partner, Rob Carr CAS, handled backgrounds. However, he soon found limitations to working in headphones. Joe explains, "I found that the choices I was making in my ear monitor—whether to favor boom or lav—weren't always translating on the speakers. This was before Auto-Align Post. We had a backroom at Technicolor— an old ADR stage that we turned into a mix room for client playbacks. I went to Kevin Spears, who was running the facility, and said, 'Hey, I want to do my premixes in the backroom now because I want to work on speakers.' So, I started doing my pre- dubs in the backroom while Chris Carpenter, who I was mixing with at the time, worked on the big stage. Then I'd just KVM (keyboard, video, mouse) over to the stage when needed. I found that worked much better." Mixing on speakers provided a more accurate representation. "Now, I have a studio at home, and I do the first two days of the mix there. I know that if I mix at 79 dB in my studio, when I get to Glen Glenn, where we mix in the big room at 82 dB, my mix will translate. I've cleaned the dialogue, EQ'd it, applied reverb What might seem like small details, David notes, can make a major difference in the workflow. "Those things don't sound like a huge deal, but really, they're the difference between a mix that goes smoothly and one where you're handed pages of notes and have to spend hours fixing things you didn't know needed fixing." Time is a key factor in David's approach. Ideally, he lets the dialogue mixer go first, but when the schedule allows, he often starts by pre-dubbing backgrounds to establish a foundation. When working with his mix partner, Karol Urban CAS MPSE, David explains: "We have a pretty good system where she starts on dialogue, and I start on backgrounds at the same time. If I finish the backgrounds early, I'll move into headphones and start going through Foley and effects, setting reverbs scene by scene. So, by the time she's done with her first pass of dialogue, I usually have the backgrounds pre-dubbed, the reverbs set for Foley and effects, and we're ready to do a first pass together." He continues, "Depending on where the music is, we might start laying that in, too. On a show like Government Cheese, for example, it was kind of a middle-of-the-road schedule. We would've loved more time, but we also weren't totally under the gun. We had enough room to flesh things out and even had internal playbacks for ourselves before playing back for the producers." As an FX mixer, much of David's work hinges on the dialogue pass that comes before him. He notes that his mix partner has a baseline level of acceptable noise and often leaves room for his backgrounds to help smooth things out. "We both have a similar philosophy," David explains. "Some noise is totally acceptable. We'd rather have a bit of noise in the dialogue than overcook it with too much reduction." That shared understanding allows for faster collaboration and fewer second-guessing revisions. "Karol's aiming for smoothness—line to line, scene to scene. It can be a little more