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Although they're just about the last stop in the post production workflow, sound editors and mixers enhance the television viewing experience in an untold number of ways. They ensure that performances shine through tough location shoots, bring the supernatural to life with edgy effects, hone the sounds of the real world, and give musical textures to the stories of our time. BEING HUMAN A werewolf and a vampire walk into a house in Boston where a ghost is already in residence. No, it's not the start of a joke, it's the prem- ise behind the hit North American adaptation of the British series Being Human, now in its second season on Syfy. The Montreal-produced show features audio post by the city's Premium Sound (www.premiumsound.ca). Having establishing a sound palette and workflow for the first season, the second season has "loosened up a bit," reports supervising sound editor David Gerts- man, but things have also become more complex. "They've put in more VFX and gone further with them — the werewolves are more textured, leaner, more vicious. There's a lot more detail going on, and that takes time." Signature sound effects for recurring super- natural moments use organic solutions, in keeping with one of the mandates for Being Human. "We want to keep the characters as human as possible, even if they're supernatu- ral. We don't want to go over the top," says Gertsman. "The Foley team looked at different natural textures that would work when the werewolves turn and hair starts to grow from their skin. They actually peel fruit as slowly as possible to simulate the hairs erupting from their pores." The Foley artists click and grind rocks and teeth-like objects to create the fangs of the werewolves and vampires dropping into place. Gertsman doesn't use any canine sounds for the werewolves, which are more reptilian in appearance than timberwolf-like. "We want them to be monstrous io for TV but without any canine basis; most of the sounds are processed human voices," he says. When werewolf Josh starts to transform, Gertsman begins with internalized sounds that come from Josh's gut, then move on to bones shifting and breaking inside his body. He affects Josh's cries of pain to strain his vocal chords, then introduces the full-on wolf sounds. He builds onto those elements for wolf attacks, which "have to be scary and no longer have any human context." www.postmagazine.com For ghost disappearances he slows the sound of glass fragmenting and plays it back very high pitched, "like a shimmer but more like particles of air disappearing — without the typical whoosh." The transitions in and out of the evil Reaper ghost are layered with dark vocals that Gertsman manipulates. When the ghosts are integrated into the human world there aren't any footsteps for them or room reverb. But when a ghost scene is fully super- natural — as in season one when Sally met others of her kind in a deserted hospital corridor — Gertsman blended a walla group for the background Being Human: Premium Sound uses organic sounds for supernatural moments, serving the mandate to keep the characters as human-sounding as possible. and added a "weird ghostly wispy" quality to all the dialogue "to give it a creepy edge." The show is pretty evenly split between locations — a hospital, down- town hotel, forest — and sets for the trio's home and other interiors. Dia- logue inevitably needs to be cleaned up from location shoots, especially when remote locations aren't always as remote as they appear: The scene where werewolves Josh and Nora wake up in a field was actually shot along- side a highway. In addition, "there are a lot of very quiet dialogue scenes where the characters are talking about something fairly deep," says Gerts- man. "Trying to get that intimacy is so difficult with traffic noises." Dialogue/ADR editor Scott Donald, who also supervises ADR at Premi- um Sound, notes that sometimes it's preferable "to live with a bit of location sound noise as opposed to doing ADR because we really enjoy the perfor- mances as shot." Donald calls Pro Tools plug-in iZotope RX 2 "invaluable" as a noise/sound suppression tool. "It's remarkable what I can save with it — probably 90 per- cent of the dialogue," including clips featuring background generator noises, Bringing a big-time sound experience to living rooms everywhere. By Christine Bunish Post • April 2012 39