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www.postmagazine.com 30 POST AUGUST 2016 AUDIO FOR STREAMING SERIES And since streaming series aren't sub- jected to the complicated chain of signal compression that happens in the broad- cast system, King Soundworks is confi - dent the audience will hear the mix that left their dub stage. "In the broadcast chain, the audio is out of our hands. It goes through many generations of tech- nology, from equipment from the '70s to brand-new equipment for the ATSC spec," says Greasley. To that King adds, "With the streaming method, it does not. It is nearly a direct pipeline and that is a great advantage." THE GET DOWN Coming to Netfl ix on August 12th is a musical drama about the birth of hip-hop, called The Get Down, which takes place in the Bronx in the '70s. The show melds mu- sic, dialogue and eff ects into a symbiotic symphony that propels the story forward. At Technicolor-PostWorks NY's new Leroy St. facility (www.postworks.com/tech- nicolorpwny), supervising sound editor/ sound designer Ruy Garcia and re-record- ing mixers Martin Czembor (dialogue/mu- sic) and Eric Hirsch (eff ects/backgrounds/ Foley) collaborate with series creator Baz Luhrmann, experimenting to fi nd the best way to weave the music, dialogue and eff ects together. "We are always following the direction of Baz creatively, but there was a very welcoming environment for creative contribution. We never had an opportunity like this to experiment so much with sound. Baz loves it. Sometimes we would do three diff erent versions of a scene, one with more music, one with more eff ects and one with a mixture of both," says Garcia. If the sound team needed anything, including guidance from hip-hip legends, they got it. "We literally had Grandmaster Flash come here and supervise our scratching eff ects to make sure it was authentic. He explained to us how it would work so that what we were doing with our sound eff ects and music matched what he was doing at the time," says Garcia. The show's music is a tapestry woven from source music from the era, original songs and score. Czembor notes that some songs sound like the originals that have been rewritten or rearranged, with the musicians of those times doing new versions in combination with music done by musicians from our time. The music isn't a side note; it's used as part of the narrative of the show. Single lines of dialogue develop into fully pro- duced songs. "There's usually two or more stories coming together and each will have its own musical identity. As you are watching the show, you hear the music be- ing created. You see it changing from one scene to another, and it grows to become these big moments," explains Garcia. Weaving all the elements together was a complicated task that started in the design phase, with Garcia's sound team working closely with the music depart- ment. "We would give some of our eff ects to the music department, so that they would be tuned to the music, like some- times a door would close to the beat, or a piece of dialogue would become a line of a song. It all plays together." On the dub stage, Czembor says, "It was challenging to get to a point where it all works. You know you're going to get there, but it takes time and fi nessing to work it out. When it all comes together it's quite fascinating." One tool he used to help blend dialogue and music was an Echoplex emulator, such as Universal Audio's EP-34 Tape Echo plug-in. One of the series' real life characters, Kool Herc, used the Echoplex often in his music and so that was incorporated into some of the music on the show. "On some of the music and the dialogue, the processing becomes transitions. Baz was very big on making moments out of those transitions. It wouldn't have to be a huge event. It could just be source music coming out of a speaker, but there are so many of these things pushed to the front of the mix." One advantage of delivering The Get Down as a streaming series was being able to look at the story arc across the entire season. "Sometimes with network TV you get one episode at a time and you don't know what's happening on the next epi- sode. When you have all of the episodes at once, you can develop an arc," says Garcia. In an interesting twist for Netfl ix, only half the season of The Get Down, just six episodes, will be released on August 12th. The other six are planned for later release. MARCO POLO Netfl ix's ambitious original series Marco Polo, which released Season 2 on July 1st, takes viewers back to the peak years of the Mongol Empire under Kublai Khan's rule. Visually, the period-detailed sets, the opulent wardrobes of Kublai's court and the masses of warriors and horses in full battle gear are signs that Netfl ix is seri- ously invested in this series. On the sound side, award-winning re-recording mixers Garcia and Czembor (top) are working on Netfl ix's new series, The Get Down.