Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/348146
www.postmagazine.com 37 POST JULY 2014 AUDIO FOR WEB SERIES & SHORTS scene, touting the tag "Sex. Drugs. And Classical Music." Barnett feels the show's use of music, and the high-quality of that music, are the most unique aspects of this series. The pilot's title scene takes place at a night at the symphony. A conductor is feverishly leading the ensemble and a violinist steps forward to perform the lead melody. He's actually a well-known violinist, says Barnett, and he really played that piece for the show. Another interesting scene, later in the episode, is where the lead actress and another mu- sician play musical spin the bottle. They spin a bottle, drink a specifi ed number of shots, and then play a particular style of classical music. "The lead actress in show, Lola Kirke, never played the oboe before this. She trained a long time with professionals to get all the hand and fi nger movements right. She pretty much learned how to play for this series," Bar- nett explains. In the series, a new conductor, Ro- drigo (played by Gael Garcia Bernal), takes the place of the older conductor in the title scene. There is an excitement for Rodrigo, a hype that precedes him. When he takes the stage, the crowd goes crazy. "We wanted the crowd to have a Beatle-mania sort of feel, which isn't very typical for New York symphony orchestras," says Barnett. "We wanted to portray a little bit about Rodrigo's char- acter and his persona through the sound design in that scene. We had to fi nd the right balance of classy with a hint of Beatle-mania." The crowd reactions and applause were a combination of production recordings and loop group recorded at Wildfi re Post. With the loop group, they were able to get specifi c call-outs, such as 'we love you Rodrigo,' that were fea- tured in the mix, reinforcing the idea of Rodrigo's fame. Barnett cleaned the production dia- logue using the iZotope RX3 plug-in. The goal was to avoid doing ADR as much as possible, mainly due to the actors' availability. "I had just gotten iZotope's RX3 right when I started cutting the production au- dio," says Barnett. "It really helped elim- inate noises that would have otherwise required us to do ADR. It was invaluable." Barnett and co-supervising sound editor Sax handled all the sound eff ects, backgrounds, crowds and Foley. "We had to bring real oboes, fl utes and other instruments onto the Foley stage to get the sounds of the instruments being put together, and also to get the sounds for the movements of the keys," Barnett notes. Re-recording mixer Shatz mixed the pilot in 5.1 on a Harrison MPC 4D mixing console on the South Stage at Wildfi re Post. He also created an Lt Rt for online. A major consideration during the mix was how the pilot would play back on a variety of devices. Since it's streaming through Amazon Prime's instant video, audiences could be listening on home theater 5.1 setups with a huge subwoofer, or tiny speakers on a tablet. "We played back the mix through the big speakers in the theater. We also listened to it on a TV monitor and on a laptop," says Barnett. "It's hard to make the mix sound perfect for every medium, but those were the three that we focused on." DEADBEAT Adam Parrish King at Shapeshifter (www. shapeshifterpost.com) in Los Angeles, is the sound eff ects editor/re-record- ing mixer on the Hulu Original series, Deadbeat. In addition to the audio post, Shapeshifter also handled the color, VFX and online picture edit for the program. Shapeshifter is a full-service post company that provides creative services to the fi lm, TV, digital and advertising industries. They have two audio suites capable of 7.1 mixing, voiceover, ADR and sound design. Past work includes Craft in America, Modern Warfare 2 and Ameri- can Chopper. Hulu recently ordered a second season of Deadbeat, a supernatural comedy that follows medium-for-hire, Kevin Pacalioglu, as he attempts to help ghosts resolve issues that prevent them from transcending to a fi nal resting place. King notes the series is a unique blend of humorous and scary, which posed quite a challenge for sound design. "It was easy to go very dark with those ghosts, but then we realized that it wasn't playing as funny," he says. "The trickiest thing was balancing those two elements: the horror and the humor." There are many diff erent types of ghost on the show, such as a Grudge-like girl ghost with a fl ickery, static-look; a big subway tunnel machine ghost with a me- chanical, robotic sound; and possessed baby dolls. "All those provided new and interesting sound design challenges. Each one had to have its own unique character," says King. King recorded his eight-year-old daughter for the possessed doll vocaliza- tions. Starting with Avid's ReVibe plug-in, he used presets like Beyond and Baser Tunnel, and tweaked the parameters until he achieved the desired eff ect. "I had to create something between an infant and a teenager, and my daughter's voice was just right," he notes. King had four days per episode to complete the dialogue and sound eff ects edit, as well as the pre-mix, including music. To keep on schedule, many of the sound eff ects were added during the picture edit. They pulled eff ects from commercial libraries, as well as recorded their own on the spot. In one episode, King notes, the story involved a syn- agogue in New York, so they needed synagogue-specifi c sounds, like prayer services in Hebrew. "While they were editing, one of the guys knew Hebrew, so he got a group together and recorded them reciting a service using an iPhone," says King. King then took that phone recording and, using reverb and EQ, made it fi t with the production sound. He also had to match lines of ADR recorded on a phone. "I used EQ matching in iZotope's Ozone 5 as a starting point," King explains. "I really exercised certain skills I've never employed before, like making that phone match a Sennheiser." Once an episode was edited and pre- mixed, King spent two hours with the clients fi ne-tuning the mix. "It was such a rapid process. It was so fast that we didn't have time to do a Foley pass until after it delivered to Hulu," says King. Shape-shifter's King working on Deadbeat. The Deus Ex sound team of (L-R)Bowler and Jimenez. CONTINUED ON PG 44