Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/908245
C A S Q U A R T E R L Y F A L L 2 0 1 7 49 repair shop, with traffic and busses passing by. The location was just so busy that the mismatches and tone differences made it impossible to use the live vocals, but the number starts with Charlie going right out of a line of dialogue into a cappella singing before the music joins in, and this cross was just too abrupt and obvious. Our solution was to use Charlie's first couple of live-sung lines for the a cappella intro, and then switch over to the prerecord in a longer pause at the point where the music comes in, allowing us to feather down the noisy production track with the backgrounds and the rest of the world. I used a combination of the usual EQ and compression tricks, along with iZotope's EQ Match module in RX5 to make the studio vocal sound more like the production track. Since subtracting can frequently be simpler than adding, this approach of thinning the warmer studio track worked well and the cross is barely noticeable. It also helped to maintain the approach throughout the episode of having the music mixed to sound like a full studio recording, while the vocals were mixed to sound like they are live, in the moment. This made for an interesting effect where the vocals are sort of disconnected from the music, almost as if the music is imaginary, and for the audience's benefit, and the gang is just spontaneously singing like crazy people in the real world—which is how anyone they meet during their adventure reacts to them. J-TG: My approach to mixing effects begins with establishing a sense of place or environment. I prefer to mix the backgrounds so they are "felt" and don't overpower the dialogue or call attention to themselves. For a show like Sunny, which often shoots on location in Philadelphia, the city sounds often get recorded within the dialogue tracks, which can make for a noisy, but useable recording. For instance, when the gang is standing in front of the repair shop on a busy street, there are buses going by, people talking, cars with horns, all of which are being recorded with the dialogue. When we shift between camera angles, the sound shifts as well, which is noticeable on the dialogue tracks. Using the elements of the backgrounds and hard effects tracks, I try to blend them so the "shift" is undetectable and/or minimized. Moving car bys to coincide with a noisy clip of dialogue helps to heal the sound "bump" of a noisy track. Combined with noise reduction on the dialogue tracks, we end up with a nice cohesive scene. For a normal show with score or source material, it's pretty straightforward, but for this episode, having live singing and prerecorded music together creates holes in the ambience. This missing ambience was noticeable, so weaving in and out of the songs was a delicate matter and took some finessing to fill in the gaps. As Cormac mentioned, the other tricky scene was Frank and Dee under the bridge. Despite best efforts to make the production singing work, we ended up going back to the prerecord during playback on the mix stage with Glenn and Charlie for both technical and performance reasons. It was a pretty last-minute judgment call and it turned out we needed one line from Kaitlin (Dee) due to an overlap that we couldn't get around. Kaitlin shot the line as a loop after the rest of the mix was done and we dropped it in a few days later. This wouldn't be the only tweak we'd make. There is a line in the first scene where the gang is discussing how America had its first black president "before the orange one." The line we had in the cut originally was a reference to Hillary Clinton being president. But when the 2016 election happened, we had to go back in and swap the take out for the one the guys had shot in case it went "the other way"…! All told, the episode was a great success due, in no small part, to all the preparation and attention to detail from start to finish. It was also a great learning experience, as any mix should be, but particularly in this case because of the unique scenarios and requirements of the show. If I were to do another episode like this, I'd strive to be involved earlier in the process in order to make some suggestions and considerations that I know would eventually become relevant in the mix. I'd add that perspective toward the end to get the most cohesive final product possible. Even without this perspective, though, the episode was a pleasure to work on and mix, and the end product is a favorite of all the things I've worked on. •