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44 CINEMONTAGE / Q4 2016 HBO's Game of Thrones and FX's American Horror Story. "By the time we spotted our first episode, we had a lot of music that was working, and identified the spots where we needed to have some new material," Klotz explains. "I created my spotting notes online so that Kyle and Michael could also access them. We would leave annotations for one another, and hence keep track of what had been written and what had been delivered. This is where we also noted that some cues could be re-used again in other episodes. For instance, when Hopper [Harbour] races to a quarry to find the body at the end of Episode 103, I took those stems and re-cut them for the scene where Hopper discovers the Nether in Episode 105." Because the two composers were working in Logic and Klotz worked in Pro Tools, the music editor sent them AAF files of his music edits. "They could then import those AAF files into Logic, add additional elements and re-export all-new WAV-format file stems again," Klotz explains. "But cues for Stranger Things were sparse; some of them consisted of maybe one or two elements. There might be an arpeggiated melody and a pulse for one cue, and maybe just a simple pad for another. Between eight and 10 stereo tracks is the widest we ever got with stems." When the post-production team reached the mix stage for a particular episode, the latest turnover from picture editorial became the guide. "The AAF from editorial had the composer's MP3 files temped throughout," Klotz says. "So when I got the final 24-bit/48 kHz stems from Kyle and Michael, I re-cut them to match the edits in the MP3 files used for the temp. Of course, because those edits in the temp were pretty rough, there was a lot of work to make the cues work the way in which the directors wanted, and yet still sound musical and in time, etc. "For the first four episodes, I had the luxury of time to work on the music tracks," he continues. "But for the final four, I had to finish editing the final elements the night before the dub!" Klotz then prepared his final sessions in Pro Tools and delivered them to the stage at Technicolor at Paramount, where re-recording mixer Joe Barnett imported the music session into his master dialogue/music session. To add ambience effects on source music elements, the music editor used Universal Audio's DreamVerb Room Modeler plug-in Modeler plug-in. "I also needed to remove some noise from the vintage-synth stacks, using the iZotope RX-5 plug-in for Pro Tools." During the 5.1-channel dub for most episodes, music editorial had to conform its master Pro Tools session as visual effects updates were arriving. "Also, the Duffers would have a lot of minor tweaking — starting music cues a little later or a little earlier, for example, or maybe having a certain element in a cue land on a specific picture cut," Klotz explains. "It was helpful having multi-channel stems available to make these kinds of precise, last-minute adjustments! My biggest challenge was matching the cues that came back as finals with the MP3 sketches that often sounded different." He also relates how he had to extend a cue used at the end of Episode 103, when the executive producer wanted to use Peter Gabriel's cover of the David Bowie song "Heroes." Klotz says, "He wanted it to be an instrumental under the dialogue, whereas on the song we only had about 10 seconds of such material," Klotz relates. "I took that section and another 10 seconds from the end of the song, and created loops to generate a much longer instrumental section. It took a lot of work, using between two and three different parts, but it sounded great!" f Jason Ruder, left, and David Klotz. Stranger Things. Netflix CONTINUED FROM PAGE 42