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Audio for TV Series of big numbers,we have to hold up our end in dialogue and effects so that there’s no drop off when these big numbers end.The dialogue tends to be big and loud and bom- bastic, the comedy elements and the effects are usually pretty big; they don’t play a lot of backgrounds except in the high school hall- ways, and any hard effects are played right up there where the music levels are.” As far as the music on Glee is concerned, Earle believes it was a great convergence of elements that brought him and the music producers together — he’s a former drum- mer.“The music producers on the show are very successful pop music producers, and they wanted somebody who knows how to do all the elements — dialogue,music and effects. But I think the hardest thing to get around is the Autotune to make it work.We don’t overuse it, but you have to understand they’re producing four to five pop music songs per week, compared to making an album and taking a year to mix it, getting 70 takes to get a phrase right. It would be im- possible without Autotune.” So while Glee and Castle are different in their approach, Castle also mixes in a lot of music — in a 42-minute show, there’s about 39 minutes of music. “The difference on Castle is they never stop talking,” says Earle, who went to USC film school. “Almost every line is overlapped with the next line, and the only time they stop talking is the two- or three-second establishing shot into Todd-AO provides audio post for CW’s Nikita B URBANK— Todd-AO (www.todd-ao.com) supervising sound editor George Haddad heads the sound team for Nikita, a one-hour drama produced by Warner Bros.Television for the CW. Maggie Q stars as a trained assassin who has gone rogue from a secret US government agency.To say that the show is ac- tion-packed is to seriously understate the case, as Nikita’s former masters carry out an international effort, using sophisticated weaponry and futuristic spy gear, to rein her in. From a sound perspective, Nikita is as challenging as television gets.“Nikita is on the run, and every episode presents a unique test,” Haddad explains.“We’re in New York, Canada,Yemen, Ukraine, Paris, London,Hong Kong…and we have to develop the style and sound of each city to make it feel real.” Haddad and his crew (which includes sound effects editor Chad Hughes, sound recordist Alexandra Fehrman, dialogue editor Dale Chaloukian, and ADR editor Ruth Adelman) have six days to pre- pare and edit the dialogue, sound effects,ADR and ambient ele- ments for each episode before turning it over to re-recording mixers Ethan Beigel and Aaron Levy.Typically, as soon as one episode is finished a new one arrives. Haddad says that one of their main goals is to embed sound as a character and use it to help further the story. He notes that they rely heavily on Todd-AO’s massive sound effects library to find au- thentic sirens, car sounds and similar elements.They also dig deep into Hollywood’s talent pool of actors. “We need to create walla [crowd murmurs] in many lan- guages,” he explains,“so we’ve had to find actors who speak Russ- ian,Arabic, Cantonese and other languages. One episode included a scene in a Montreal bank,so we had to find actors who spoke French with a Quebecois accent.” Haddad’s sound team also has to develop appropriate sound el- ements for the numerous action sequences featured in each episode.That can range from military operations and gun battles to martial arts fights.No two scenes are alike, Haddad notes, meaning there is no bank of “standard” sounds that they can rely on. “It’s not like a detective show or courtroom drama where you’re in the same rooms and go through the same types of scenes every week,” Haddad says.“We design new sounds for every episode.” The editors use Pro Tools|HD V. 8 along with plug- ins for sound design.The mixers have a D-Command console with four Pro Tools|HD systems, along with HD digital projection for video playback. 28 Post • April 2011 www.postmagazine.com