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style. "It's like cutting a 55-58-min- ute movie" for each episode, he says. "I get about 10 minutes more story time than network or basic cable, and I don't have to build in artificial climaxes for commercial breaks. That extra time is gold: I get to let emotions play out." Goldman works on the 20th Century Fox lot along with the show's two other editors, Joe Hobeck and Terry Kelley. Homeland shoots in Charlotte, North Carolina on Alexa. During a film break on set they ship digital dailies to Keep Me Posted to be colored and trans- Editor Jordan Goldman celebrating his co-Emmy win for his work on Homeland's pilot. the enemy and now threatens his homeland. Goldman just won an Emmy Award for co- editing the Homeland pilot with David Latham. He also took home an ACE Eddie for Best One-Hour TV/Non-Commercial category. The fact that the series is a non-commer- cial production airing on pay cable actually makes a big difference to Goldman's editing coded to Avid DNx36 1080p for Homeland assistant editors, Shon Hedges and Garret Donnelly, to ingest. Keep Me Posted syncs the audio and archives the master ProRes material for the conform. Hedges and Donnelly receive the first half of the dailies on a hard drive the next morn- ing. They load them, plus sound rolls, contain- ing all the separate recorded tracks, into the Avid Media Composer. Then they organize the clips to the editor's specifications and check the dailies to ensure there are no issues with footage or audio. The following morning they get the rest of that day's dailies along with the film break from the next day. "We start editing on the second day of shooting the episode," Goldman explains. "One editor can't keep up with camera for a whole season because it takes about a month in offline to get through an episode. So we have a rotation system where each editor cuts every third episode." Goldman tackles the dailies armed with the script supervisor's notes and perhaps a phone call from the director. The editors get "a lot of creative input," he says, "to find the best way to tell the story with the footage. The crew does an amazing job, and Home- land has wonderful actors and directors, so we get fantastic footage." continued on page 46 TODD-AO HELPS GIVE HBO'S 'GIRLS' ITS SOUND HOLLYWOOD — HBO's new hit, Girls, which follows a group of 20-somethings living in New York City, was quickly renewed for a second season soon after its debut last spring. Inspired by some of creator Lena Dunham's real-life experiences, the dramedy is shot in the Big Apple but all post production is done in LA. Sue Cahill is the show's supervising sound editor at Todd-AO in Hollywood (www.toddao.com). She teams with dialogue editor Jivan Tahmizian, sound effects editor Ed Coblentz and mixers Chris Minkler and Kevin Carpen- ter on the show. For Season One, after the picture was locked, a spot- ting session for the episode got underway. "It's a dialogue- centric show, the writing is brilliant, so you're most inter- ested in the story," Cahill says. "We use sound effects to add fullness and life to the soundscape without distracting from the story." Soundscapes have been established to reflect the different neighborhoods depicted in Girls. "There isn't one generic New York City," she explains. "Every neighborhood has its own sound and feel: Green- point is a nice neighborhood with kids and less traffic; NoLita is trendy, expensive, busy with a lot of traffic." Sometimes sound effects play up the comedy. In one episode, the girls meet a guy (played by Chris O'Dowd) in a bar. He invites them back to his place where he demon- strates his hobby of creating mash-ups from sound effects and music, such as "Steal My Sunshine" with sounds of 28 Post • October 2012 www.postmagazine.com children playing. When he starts to make a move on two of the girls, who are kissing, the sound editing team craft- ed its own mash-up adding sound effects to "Slave To Love," which O'Dowd left playing on his turntable. "We talked long before we started on the episode about what to add and landed on a combination of goril- las and monkeys — hoots and hollers that build as the scene builds," she reports. "We did a lot of playing around with placement for the best comedic timing. The right sounds matching the faces of the actors and their actions really made the scene funnier." ADR was typically done by ISDN since talent is scat- tered across the country. Editors work on Pro Tools sys- tems; music editor Scott Francisco cut in both source music and score. Edited tracks were uploaded to a server shared by the mixing stage at Todd-AO West, where Min- kler and Carpenter work on a Euphonix console. Cahill supervised the mix sessions with Girls co-producer Peter Phillips; Lena Dunham also attended. "It's a group pro- cess," says Cahill. "Lena makes everybody feel they're an important part of the process. When you're appreciated like that it brings out the best in people; it inspires every- one to be the best they can be. "It's such fun working on Girls," concludes Cahill, who was previously supervising sound editor for HBO's Big Love and Hung. "People come up to me and say, 'Oh, my God, I love that show!'" — Christine Bunish