Continued From previous page.
You are brave, Maxine, much braver than your brother, but in the end, who are weak and fragile, just like him. Like All the rest of them.
But Jamie’s voice is very, very strong. Do you want to get every chance possible to have these different sample rates? If you wanted to give him a really scary deep voice? We could pitch without it getting all crazy sounding but we didn’t have to. He’s just incredible.
Timothy Muirhead 7:44
Wow. So Korey and Jill, when you’re cutting the episodes, is that processing in your template? Or was that all done later on?
Jill Purdy 7:52
Well, for me, I was brought on very late in the process to help out with these monster, No pun intended, episodes. So I mean, it was a thrill for me to be asked. And from my standpoint, I mean, everything all the Vecna processing was already in the sessions that I received. I didn’t have anything to do with I didn’t cut those. They were already in place already processed and good to go from my standpoint. So I just focused on the production dialogue.
Timothy Muirhead 8:18
So is Vecna all ADR then?
Ryan Cole 8:20
oh, no, that was the only ADR that was added was if there was a line that got you know, a wet, slippery footprint on top of it, which wasn’t a lot because he’s not talking and moving a lot of the time, or if they wanted to change some of the wording of something that he said, but it’s almost entirely Michael’s recordings from set, I’d send prints of his voice chain to picture department once Craig had already established that. And again, we didn’t change anything. When Craig came up with something, we just had it playing in our sessions to hear it as we were cutting it, because it does it will accentuate little mouth clicks or certain things like that. So we found it very the best case to hard cut everything for him.
Michael Clark 8:59
The one of the hardest things on set was to try to isolate him from the efforts of the people he was killing. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those were ADR and I knew going into it. I mean, we would ask the actors to to kind of hold it back a little bit, but I mean, how can you ask them to hold back fear and a lot of them it was genuine fear.
Ryan Cole 9:19
Oh, yeah, we record I mean, we did build a library of efforts of ADR efforts for Vecna because those on set you know he does these kind of muffled growls, which don’t necessarily project well on set, but I don’t know Korey, I mean, yeah, I think our hardest job was cutting around the different the scared vote, you know, Max crying while Vecna’s talking to her. So Max is crying doesn’t go into the vocal chain of Vecna. Yeah, and that sort of thing.
Korey Pereira 9:44
Yeah, absolutely. So I came in for Episode Four on this season. So kind of in the middle of introducing Vecna as a character so as an editor, definitely went through and took all of Michael’s tracks and tried to isolate it as much as possible and kind of do all the cleanup and And then once it sounded as clean as possible and kind of removed all the kind of junk, yeah, just drop it down to those processing tracks and then all of a sudden you get nice LCR Vecna.
Timothy Muirhead 10:10
Amazing,
Ryan Cole 10:11
Even the actors that were doing the, you know, the scared efforts, we’d have so many takes that a lot of it wasn’t even ADR, we just be able to take efforts from other takes and pop them in.
Korey Pereira 10:21
So yeah, definitely a little bit of piecemeal. Because, again, Jamie is such a great performer. It’s just about finding that performance and making a play with what you have. And then kind of Ryan would come back with ADR on the back end and kind of fill in the gaps we couldn’t fix.
Timothy Muirhead 10:34
As I mentioned in the intro, this show has a huge cast. And there are scenes where there are a lot of cast members, all making a lot of noise at the same time. And I was wondering if we could kind of pick a scene and talk through how that was captured and how it was edited. Michael, let’s talk about the scene where Max is first being invaded by Vecna and she’s raised up in the air and all the other characters are on the ground screaming, and they’re looking for cassette tapes, there’s a whole sequence there where everybody’s making huge noise. How did you go about capturing that on set,
Michael Clark 11:01
when, when a great scene well as standard practice for all production mixers, everybody gets a wire, and then we boom as much as we possibly can as well. Thankfully, that scene was very contained in terms of spatial. So you know, I’m hoping they use a lot of boom, but a lot of times when we have a lot of overlapping that one boom tends to be the good choice. But you’re gonna have to ask the editors how they actually cut that scene. chaotic scenes like that I feel tend to play out a lot more on on the body mics are actually wearing because you can kind of get less phasing interaction between the microphones. But ultimately, when when I mix it, I tend to mix one boom on set, because I don’t have to deal with the phasing. I can’t control who’s seen what. And if I throw up every single fader you’ll get that phasing kind of creation on set. And if it works, then I’ll leave it if it doesn’t, then I try to play one microphone for those types of situations.
Timothy Muirhead 11:55
Korey, did you cut that scene?
Korey Pereira 11:55
Yes, I did. So yeah, I think it’s the process of going through each of the mics. So I think the blessing and the curse of this show is that Michael and his team did a really good job of micing all the actors and getting us a lot of choices to choose from that being the curse, you then have a lot of tracks to go through and not a lot of time. But for that scene in particular, it’s all about going through and finding the best bits, and using auto allign posts to make sure everything is going to sync up. And then really finding the narrative and a scene like that, like what characters are saying things that impact the story in that moment. And then trying to weave them together in a way that it sounds chaotic. It sounds busy. But it has some sort of narrative line that you can kind of feel between the different characters without it just being a bunch of noise.
Timothy Muirhead 12:42
And Ryan, how did you go about organizing those sessions.
Ryan Cole 12:46
It’s the same as what Korey and Michael, were just saying, We just kind of go through the mic one by one and take the best and you know, and a lot of the time and avid, they’ll layer them all up on top. So you might have a section where Steve is talking on top of himself three times. So it’s a matter of us going through and finding what works best and while still keeping the chaos because we love the chaos and that stuff. That’s what keeps the energy going. And there were in that particular scene, there were little bits of ADR to fill in blanks if we had a section where Yeah, where there’s the same character talking on top of himself to fill that in, or to add in a couple extra tape names and that sort of stuff. Fun stuff.
Timothy Muirhead 13:21
So as Corey mentioned, he started on episode four. And Jill, you said you came on during the production as well. Ryan, how do you go about making the process easy when you’re bringing someone onto a plane that’s already flying at full speed?
Ryan Cole 13:35
Yeah, I mean, I will say we had Dave Butler, Polly Mackinnon and Rob chan on this show as well. And just because of the beast, you know, it is it’s nine movies. And two of those movies are real life, or one of those movies is a two and a half hour movie. Right? So I just try to keep and I do this with anything I work on is I try to keep it as simple as possible. And Jill and Korey can tell you whether I succeeded or I didn’t. But I just have a template and just say, hey, here’s your section. Here’s your section. Everyone go we’re all pros. This is when we need it by Let’s go. And it’s just about keeping open communication, checking in, Hey, anybody need anything? Not cool. All right, you know, and yeah, we started it back in December with everyone and we just try to keep the same template. And it’s the same it helps with Mark Patterson mixing as well. Because if we were to change it up every single time that we handed over an episode, he’d be pulling his hair out, and I wouldn’t be on show anymore.
Timothy Muirhead 14:29
Jill you want to talk about your experience on jumping on this train?
Jill Purdy 14:33
Sure, I mean, Ryan, I mean, your organization just insane and you reaching out to everybody like constantly checking in and even individually checking in it’s just unsurpassed. So it was a pleasure working with you and for you. I’ll say that upfront.
Ryan Cole 14:46
Thank you.
Jill Purdy 14:47
And then the I mean, the template as well was very well organized, very easy to follow. Everything was color coded. I mean, there was a whole legend even said legend, I think of colors in terms of you know alts and if anything had been RX’d or sync changes and that sort of thing. So I mean, once you just wrap your head around what was going on, it was really, really easy to follow and to get through. And yeah, so I came on episode 407. So I worked on 40 minutes of seven, I think and then 20 of eight and nine each. And yeah, it was it was a well oiled streamlined process by the time I got to it. So there are very few questions and everything. I mean, every question that I could have had for Ryan was already kind of outlined in that session. So it was a pleasure. It was easy from that standpoint. Yeah. And the tracks Michael, the tracks were awesome to work with, I got to say like it was there were some tough exterior scenes, and they all cleaned up like so well. So
Michael Clark 15:38
thank you very much. I’m, I’m actually in awe of what can happen on your end in terms of taking care of on set nuances that we have absolutely no control over sometimes.
Timothy Muirhead 15:49
Korey, what was your experience jumping on board?
Korey Pereira 15:52
Well, I’d say one of the biggest takeaways from this discussion should be the value of having a good experienced dialogue and ADR supervisor, because again, we really did make nine movies. And somehow we had different editors coming on and leaving. And it sounds consistent, like you watch the final product. And it feels like Ryan was sitting there in a room by himself for a year and a half doing it himself. And in honestly
Ryan Cole 16:16
Not all the case!
Korey Pereira 16:17
Not at all. But I mean, that’s the big thing is I mean, Polly and, David helped out for the first three episodes I came on, did a few myself. And then the schedule, of course, compacts. And then we had David Gil and Rob jump in. And again, it was all very seamless that we could kind of hit the ground running, ask you a few questions here and there to Ryan, but pretty much have the autonomy to do our thing, and then move on to the next one.
Timothy Muirhead 16:42
So Ryan as dialogue supervisor there, all the different dialogue editors are handing you back their session? And then you’re making a master session? Correct?
Ryan Cole 16:51
Correct. And it’s all they’re all everyone’s all working in the same template. But even if they don’t, none of us are so uptight that needs to be done a specific way. And we all do it fairly similarly. So, you know, we’re all pros. So we just work it together. And then and then I combined it all into one and even an out for Mark, essentially.
Timothy Muirhead 17:08
And are you doing anything to make them all uniform? Or I guess, as you say, they’re coming in that way already?
Ryan Cole 17:15
I guess probably, but I think everyone has, because everyone has their own style, but I’m really not chained. You know, I’m not going through and being like, look, you know, like anything like that. It’s just we all have our own way that we like things laid out. But I have to say we at least Korey, Jill and I all work very, and Dave and Polly and Rob, we all work in a very, very similar way. And part of the template is that I keep it pretty tight. And try to keep it pretty simple. So you can’t get because, you know, there are scenes where there’s nine or 10 people with microphones on all talking, you know, there’s never a case where you need nine different microphones necessarily playing at the same time. If you give that to a mixer, they might want to murder you. But we do need those nine channels from Michael because at some point we’re going across from this guy who’s talking to this guy, that’s now we’re panning back to the other room, or the back of the RV where these other two guys are talking. So we need all those microphones. So it’s just about going through and organizing and Michael stuff was laid out great. We all work very similarly, I would say and I will say also, which is a testament to Michael’s tracks, there is very little at considering how much material there is, which is about 13 to 14 hours. There’s very little ADR in the entire show, considering how many hours of media there is.
Timothy Muirhead 18:26
Wow. So Michael, do you want to give a shout out to your team? You are recording Lithuanian? Is that correct?
Michael Clark 18:33
No, no I was Ilana you are the Atlanta okay, we did we did the meat of the show. Yeah. Okay. And a lot of the Russian stuff came in about Season Episode Five when Nimrod came on when Hopper ends up in I can’t even I can’t even say the name of the prison but when he gets to the pit that when he gets to that move to come Chaka yeah when he gets to that prison that all moves to the Atlanta unit. Yeah, my, I had I had actually a huge team, I started the season off with Robert Maxfield as a boom operator and Amon fey as my utility and then after Christmas that all switched, and I have Brenton stump who finished out the rest of the year from January to July. And Stokes Turner who was my utility do does all the wiring and those two just really really rocked it. It was great.
Timothy Muirhead 19:23
So I was speaking with Korey the other day and he said a great thing that you do is you’re using Zaxcom transmitters that the transmitters are recording as well. Yeah. Do you want to talk about what’s been using those for a long time or
Michael Clark 19:35
I you know, it was a transition we had to make I didn’t most of my career. We use Lectrosonics we want to get into name throwing and whatnot. But the RF spectrum gets got squashed by the FCC when all the telecom companies bought all our spectrums up and what Zaxcom does great is that you can fit a lot wireless into a very narrow band and they also have the recording capabilities at every transmitter. So this was actually my first show of trying to manage everybody’s transmitter and make it organized so that if Ryan needed it later, during a take where I use the boom throughout most of the scene, which we tend to do a lot of thankfully, because the Duffers have a great respect for dialogue as well as sound, that we don’t shoot in a traditional way of shooting three cameras at a time, which is where I came from prior to this the show. So I’m not listening to every single track, I can’t possibly listen to every single wireless that’s out there. And that times you get wireless hits, or dropouts. And I organized it all out into my sound report. And I sent a big massive email to Ryan and said, Hey, if you dig deep into these tracks, and you hear it a wireless hit of some sort, and you want to save that don’t do ADR, here it is it’s on a recording separate recording, he was able to go track this huge, I think it had a terabyte of information, for sure. Where they could just grab that transmitter and pop it right into their timelines. timecode sunk same frame rates. And there, I mean, I’m hoping it all worked out great. He had mentioned a couple times he needed to dig in there and it all lined up.
Ryan Cole 21:14
Those were probably the only times I ever we ever went looking for them. I mean, I don’t know, Korey or Jill. I don’t know. Did you guys ever have to go digging for the backup recordings? Like maybe five times in the whole season?
Korey Pereira 21:25
Yeah. And I think maybe at about three cues
Michael Clark 21:27
That is beautiful.
Korey Pereira 21:29
But it makes a big difference when it’s an important line. And there’s no alts you can go in there, grab the file, and drop it right in. It saves the day sometimes.
Michael Clark 21:39
Yeah. Yeah. So that was the first time I’ve ever really used in my first full on 100%. I had a mixed in before, but this was the first first show where I dove 100% in and tried to make everything a backup.
Timothy Muirhead 21:53
Well, yeah, I can imagine in that moment, when you’ve got the line that’s not working to have that in the back of your head that you can go find it would be an awesome safety blanket for sure. So I mentioned also in the very intro about how there’s various planes of existence, I’m not really exactly sure how to describe it. But um, did was the dialogue treated differently in the upside down or within Vecna’s mind?
Ryan Cole 22:17
Yes, I can mention that for Mark did almost all of those treatments. Mark Patterson, our dialogue mixer who’s not here. And but the Brothers definitely wanted to differentiate between the two we’re you know, not not just two, there’s the upside down. There’s 11s kind of Blackwater mind reading room, there’s Vecna’s layer. Then there’s 11, in Max’s mind when she when Madeline she’s going through Max’s dreams when she’s skateboarding when she’s younger. So all of them had different treatments and And Victor creels memories, too, I will say Victor creels, memories were probably the more straightforward of them all. Whereas the biggest ones would have been the upside down. That was a you know, because we spent a lot of time with characters actually just walking and talking and the upside down. And then another part was kind of the cross dimension, you know, with the light brights and all that. So Mark in season three, and in the previous two seasons, they had kind of established what the upside down and what the Blackwater rooms were going to sound alike. So I grabbed what he did in season three, and presented it to him in season four. So we had a reminder of how he did the plugins, and how he did the different treatments and he tweaked them further. And one thing we do is we will print reverbs in our edit for Mark to use if he wants, they’re usually just to reference what’s happening in the guide track if they did a stinger, or you know, every cut to black ends with a big reverb at the end, just to say, Hey, you don’t have to listen to the guide track, this is what they do. And Mark can either take that or dump it and do his own thing. But often he likes it because he’s then reverb being a mono reverb, you know, so makes it more natural as opposed to something just all of a sudden spreading to stereo. So we did that a lot. A lot of that cross dimension stuff was idea, you know, kind of reverse ideas that we came up with that then he took further.
Timothy Muirhead 24:06
So there are a couple scenes where two dimensions are talking to each other. There’s a scene where there’s two types of even versions of that, that are happening. There’s the times when they’re on the other sides with the rope, the blanket rope, and they’re talking to each other directly. And then there’s other times where there’s voices filtering through “something” to get to them. Do you want to pick either one of those, someone and talk about how you tackle that?
Ryan Cole 24:35
Yeah, so that kind of the idea from that was kind of piqued by Poltergeist kind of that reverse reverb sort of idea, and then kind of making it a bit more what is it Stranger Things-y, for lack of a better description. I really I found a couple reverbs that I really liked, reverse reverbs, and it’s a lot of printing and then as well as using some slapper to kind of give it room and I find with, with that sort of stuff, and with most personally with futzes, you can make it really messy really easily. And, and all of a sudden, you can’t understand anything. So I tried really hard to make a very clear reverse reverb using the LX 480. And then so I had that kind of as the baseline. So even like it would ramp into the word and then But then the words would be pretty clear, even though you’d still kind of get that sort of sound. And then underneath it, we had a VSS 3 longer reverb, and I print them and then I’d hard cut them so that they weren’t playing the whole time to keep them clean. And I would even stretch them or compress them to kind of really give it a quick ramp or a longer ramp. And then Mark would then take it further and process it within the world. And in that place. Like where Steve is hearing Dustin’s voice, but not sure Mark could then take it and pan it around, which really, you know, put it in the 3d dimension, which was really fun.
Timothy Muirhead 25:55
Well, it was really effective.
Ryan Cole 25:58
That’s my favorite thing that was one of my favorite parts to do. And it’s such a fun moment. And it’s such a sweet because they’re doing it using the light bright. It’s, you know, it’s very, it’s not E.T. But it’s, you know, there’s like there’s the lights and the colors, and everyone’s smiling. It’s a nice, happy time. I really enjoyed it.
Timothy Muirhead 26:13
It’s THE happy scene and Stranger Things.
Ryan Cole 26:21
My favorite scene in the whole season is a scene where that’s almost three minutes long where no one talks, and they just pass cards back or they just write on words and hold them up to each other. And that’s my favorite scene in the whole season. And there’s no talking at all. I don’t think it is not. I don’t just like it because there’s no talking.
Timothy Muirhead 26:39
Well, speaking of scenes where people aren’t talking, this season has had a massive effect on the pop charts, because it’s brought back songs that weren’t on the charts for decades and decades. I’m wondering how those songs I’m thinking specifically of Running Up That Hill and Master of Puppets. Michael, if you want to talk about how you dealt with those songs on set, and then maybe how we brought it through the Edit afterward.
Michael Clark 27:07
Yeah,on set, while running up the hill wasn’t really used a lot on set. Obviously, Master puppets was used to great lengths on shooting that scene, which was one of my favorite parts of shooting because I never thought in my entire life I would ever be shooting a Master of Puppets music video. And that was just awesome. And a cool little note was we shot that one day past the 35th anniversary of the release of that album. We were actually scheduled to shoot it on the day that it was going to that it was released. But we had a rain delay and we had to push the schedule but one day and then that that was awesome on set to kind of, you know, reminisce about, you know, that was just played a lot. And on that day, obviously. And Joe was amazing at he, what was being played in his ears because we had earwigs for Dustin as well as Joe to play the music back. Because there was dialogue happening at the same time. And so we couldn’t have the overlapping music playback with the, with the dialogue. But we actually had a little bit of a bleed through from his personal amp, which we had on top of that trailer that he actually played, and people could actually still hear him playing which he was pretty spot on. I thought I thought he did an amazing job for somebody who only played as a kid. But music in general is a huge part of our onset presence. The brothers love to use music to pull emotion out of the actors. During the scene when there is dialogue or when there is no dialogue. They are they are masters, and I always have a speaker hooked up and they have a Bluetooth right to it. And they’ll just play music during the scene all the time. And that’s always a challenge. I’ve I think I reached out to Ryan at one point going to ahhh, it’s gonna be all right. And it’s like “I’m used to it”. The Duffers had full control over that, so they knew when to stop it. They knew when to start it. So you know, like I said before, they’re they’re great at preserving the dialogue, but I love how they use the music as an emotional impact for the actors.
Timothy Muirhead 29:17
And so Ryan, when you got the scene, the Master of Puppets scene, how did you go about tackling it?
Ryan Cole 29:22
When he’s playing the guitar? There’s not actually any music going on. And then I was gonna sit when there’s other music happening. I guess when Dustin’s yelling, he’s yelling. So if there is any music on set, we can we can, you know, hit his voice pretty and with that sort of noisy bits, we can hit it pretty hard. Plus, there’s tons of bats and heavy metal music playing in the background. So even if there was onset music, you don’t really have a chance of hearing it. But I don’t actually particular in that scene that move because there isn’t a lot of talking right between Dustin and Eddie in that scene. I heard it more and I’m sure Korey did as well in other scenes. You get it in emotional scenes where there’s music playing in the background, and either the actor will be crying. Or it’ll be a very soft moment with music playing. So we, you know, we use RX music rebalance is great, dialogue isolate, great Waves Clarity came out when we were doing this. And that helped. And it’s just about going in and hard cutting those bits, taking out any tones. And you know, a lot of reverb helps it a lot as well. But I mean, even I don’t know how many things we queued for ADR because there was music onset, I would say, almost zero, not even efforts. If the actor gave enough of a, like, a loud enough performance, we did not. Well, unless it was to get additional effort anyway. But it would have been very few it was if they had enough gain we use what was there?
Michael Clark 30:51
Yeah, that’s amazing. Because I tried to fight for that onset as much as I possibly can thinking, did he want to bring them in on this emotional scene to recreate crying, especially especially those heavy emotionals?
Ryan Cole 31:04
Yeah, I will say that I will say the biggest scene we had to redo all a lot of the efforts on was the bat fight at the beginning of reel seven, which I think Jill you cut, is that correct? At the beginning of the lake bed, and I think you just saw that it was cute. All right. Because you could turn it on to AC DC or Yeah, go
Jill Purdy 31:23
ahead. Sorry. You said skip the bat scene. So I started after that.
Ryan Cole 31:28
But you heard all the music and the actors, they’d come in, and they’d be like, why are we doing Oh, I know why we’re doing this. That’s because, yeah, we all wanted to get in it. We wanted to listen to ACDC while we were pretend killing bats, and we’re fine with doing our efforts. A lot of them are very used to knowing that they’re going to have to come in to do a lot of that sort of stuff. But that would be the biggest one where we had to replace the most. But even then we are still stealing the production efforts that worked because they’re in sync. And a lot of the time you can’t beat what they do on set, you know,
Timothy Muirhead 31:57
for sure. So Korey, do you want to tell me what was your favorite scene to work on of the episodes you cut?
Korey Pereira 32:03
Ah, that’s a really hard one. It’s a lot of content. And I think a lot of it was challenging and fun. At the same time, I’d say one of the more rewarding scenes was at the end of Episode Four and kind of bled into Episode Five, where there’s kind of a shootout at the house in California, and they all pile into a van. And it’s just a really chaotic scenes, there’s a lot going on there. There’s people yelling on top of each other. And I kind of like challenges like that, like you just have a massive track. So you first listened to it the beginning of the day, you just kind of like exhale. And then you start digging into the tracks. And then after a while you kind of piece it together. And I know one of the notes I had on that scene going into it was The Duffers wanted it to be more intense. So it’s finding little bits in the handles and alternate takes to kind of piece it together and keep the intensity going. When some of the actors kind of drop off when they’re off camera. So that was a really fun one where it’s a lot of work but when you go and play it back it’s really rewarding just to kind of hear it all go from being just cacophony into something that actually makes sense.
Timothy Muirhead 33:37
Jill did you have a favorite scene?
Jill Purdy 33:40
So many favorites. I did the card scene with Max and Caleb. And I spent an enormous amount of time I don’t even know why but just finding sync pen scribbles or the writing scribbles but I mean I’ve worked with with Sadie before so it was it’s you know anything with her I love to work on the pizza the pizza scene where you know the pineapple on the pizza that one and the scene with Will and Mike in the car. And you know where was crying at the end of that scene? And like, hey, wait a second. I think I know what’s going on here because I haven’t seen I wasn’t I was cutting episodes ahead of where I’ve actually watched the series too. So a bit spoiler alerts for me, but I was pretty exciting. It was a pretty exciting
Timothy Muirhead 34:23
Ryan, what was one of your favorite scenes?
Ryan Cole 34:27
I mean, I do love the light bright scene, just because it was very fun and it was really funny as well. I love everything episode four, you know Max sitting at Billy’s grave and talking again like Jill was saying anything Sadie does and but they’re all great and I mean you know 11, Hopper speech there’s there’s just so many really, really great and fun scenes in it. The Poultergeist you know, the cross dimension talk, I would say was one of the more fun and reward like after you kind of play back Oh, I think actually made that sound kind of cool. I mean, Michael then take it and make it even better but yeah, I was pretty happy with how that one turned out.
Timothy Muirhead 35:49
Awesome, Michael?
Michael Clark 35:50
my favorite scene actually was the Eddie and Chrissy scene drug deal, mainly because Eddie’s character shifts there and he his performance are was amazing. And he added so much to that scene that just wasn’t written, you know, his flip off the back of that park bench and popping up with with leaves all up in his hair was all him and then we had to figure out a way to continue to keep leaves in his hair. And just that dynamic between those two was was really great on set as well. And I remember even telling Joe like, Man, that was a point where I went up to him and I was like, You’re just killing this character. It’s beautiful what you’re doing. I have to agree that the you know, the Max at the grave was was was good because Sadie in anything Sadie did this season was just phenomenal. And it was amazing to watch her perform. I know that that was that was that was a good scene those are challenging scene. But because because we we shot a lot of different wides on that. And I wanted to capture that dialogue consistently. And you know, because we knew it was going to be played in so many different sizes. So we use a variety of plant mics and booms and wireless and I think they ended up using the booms and most of that, it sounded great.
Ryan Cole 37:09
Yeah, unless it unless it was a real, real wide shot.
Korey Pereira 37:12
Yeah, I think there were maybe two shots that there just wasn’t usable. Boom. But yeah, it sounded really good.
Ryan Cole 37:18
Yeah. And I have to say, Michael, the the other favorite scene that chokes me up every time was the Eddie spoiler alert, the Eddie Dustin death scene? Oh, which is just gut wrenching to watch. And must have been pretty intense to record as well.
Michael Clark 37:33
Yeah, we actually, we actually had some issues on that one. In the beginning, the very first couple of takes on that one, Eddie was laying on his transmitter. And I lost all audio to him on, you know, obviously, we had it recorded. But you know, I have to make the dailys sound good and have duffers have to be able to hear what he’s seen. And it was a frantic move to, you know, get somebody who’s lean on the ground who’s already in this space that he was in, to grab a microphone off of his leg and move into a different position to where I could actually get good RF signal on that. And now that’s a little bit chaotic. But what a great scene.
Timothy Muirhead 38:11
Yeah. Awesome. When you have a massive amount of material like this, how do you go about prepping things as much as possible so that the mixer can get through it quickly? you mentioned some processing some reverbs? Are you doing any panning in your edit sessions? Can you just talk about ways that you try and make the RE recording mixers job a bit easier in your sessions.
Korey Pereira 38:34
So for me, I think the biggest thing we can do as editors to kind of help out the mix stage is trying to make our tracks as concise as possible. So looking at with everything you have, and then kind of boiling it down to the least number of tracks, you need to get the story told. And then also, I think trying to leave breadcrumbs using the color coding that Ryan set up is really helpful. And you can kind of look at something, you know if it’s been processed, or if it’s an alt, and then beyond that, I think trying to lay things out in a way that makes sense for you if you are going to be mixing it. So do I need to separate these tracks in some way so that they can more easily process them and then you can kind of do that as necessary. And then I’ll let Ryan kind of talk to more our approach to adding effects and doing a little more than you maybe would on other shows to help Mark out with these quick mixes.
Ryan Cole 39:24
Well, I think that the way, Korey and Jill cut it and the way I cut it, we’re all fairly, you know, there might be tiny differences in our preferences, but we’re all pretty consistent with one another and it’s just keeping it consistent for Mark. I didn’t do any panning. I leave that to the mixer except for maybe some very rough panning and group for loop group. I do print reverbs if I think it’ll help Mark or if I think it’ll help sell the ADR a little bit but then it’s just going through and trying to bring everything up to a certain level and I mean like actual like volume level gain level for Mark so that Mark isn’t you know, because he’s having to hit the Netflix spec and if you listen to the show the dial I guess right front and center. And one of the best compliments we’ve gotten on the show is that people don’t really have to ride it to hear the dialogue, because the dialogue is so upfront, but also natural sounding. And just getting it at a starting point for Mark, that makes it easy for him to push it further and kind of push it up against his compressor. But Jill and Korey and I’ll do it, it’s not like I’m sitting there and changing lots of things. We’re all like I said, we’re all professionals. And we’re all very similar work very similarly. Or at least on this show, and it just kind of slotted in like magic, I would say for the most part,
Timothy Muirhead 40:33
Can you give me some examples of your color coding that you’re passing on to the editors?
Ryan Cole 40:38
I know I sound really uptight, I have what is it, there’s green, if it’s an alt orif it’s something brand new, I just like I kind of leave the tracks default color unless something has changed pink for sync. So if you can tell if something has Sync has radically changed green for an alt, yellow for if something’s going to be ADR but I early on, I realized kept it but marks tracks are all yellow. So that kind of defeated the purpose for that. So Mark would have looked at it and be like, Oh, everything’s gonna ADR great. Which was not at all the case. And then, like a light blue for RX. But I’ve since then, I’ve gotten way less uptight about my color coding. And I like knowing if something’s in alt, I like knowing if something’s Sync has changed every I can you can look at the name really quickly to see if something’s been RX’d or cleaned up or anything. For me at this point, anything other than those two things I don’t really care about anymore. Because I can just look at it and see
Timothy Muirhead 41:34
Stranger Things has beaten it out of you.
Ryan Cole 41:36
Hopefully it wasnt to much of a pain for Korey and Jill?
Korey Pereira 41:38
No, not at all.
Timothy Muirhead 41:39
I think you’re being defensive. I don’t think that sounds like you’re being overly picky. I think it sounds really smart.
Jill Purdy 41:45
It was I thought it was great. I mean, it was a very, you know, like I said, well organized like it consistent from editor to editor, just knowing that that was what you were going for. And in my case, I mean, it was great, because I asked if I could, you know, I’m a little wary of how to present things if I haven’t worked with a mixer before or with, you know who before. And then once that first episode is passed, it’s like, okay, you can settle into it. But I did ask if I could take a listen to an episode or two prior just to see what I was getting into and what what the what the bar was what the standard was. And when I checked the tracks, and Like Ryan said, you can tell if something is RX’d or whatever. And a lot of the same plugins that I use were used, and we’re already in those tracks. And I was like, Okay, this is this is great. This is in Like Ryan said, I mean, I was I was pleasantly surprised that the tracks were very similar to how I normally cut and so that was a big relief, you know, stepping into the, this stranger things world that’s been so well established. And you know, I mean, you can’t say enough about it, really. So just knowing those shoes were kind of big to step into, and being able to, to have that, that guide ahead of me and be able to kind of dip into it before actually cut was was amazing. But Ryan, I mean, you, you know, you’re self deprecating, and you’re, and you’re you’re not too insane. And you’re not too detail oriented. And you’re not crazy, because, you know, it was extremely, extremely helpful and very well thought out. I thought.
Ryan Cole 41:45
Okay, just try to make it easy for everybody. For sure. Easier considering what we’re dealing with. Oh, yeah. Yeah, they were all lovely people. I mean, every single person that came in for ADR, the picture department the sound to like, it helps that ever, you know, you’re doing this big, crazy show. But everyone’s friends are and everyone’s nice and professional. It makes it really easy to go to work every day.
Timothy Muirhead 43:27
Awesome. Well, considering that the series actually changed Netflix stock prices. Like it’s It’s insane how popular the show is like, it must be amazing to know that everybody is seeing what you’re actually working on. Congratulations on the fourth season, and I’m looking forward to what everybody’s got up next. Thanks a lot.
Ryan Cole 43:49
Thanks.
Korey Pereira 43:49
Thank you.
Jill Purdy 43:50
Thanks.
Timothy Muirhead 43:51
Well, that was part one of our Stranger Things season four coverage. Next week, we will be releasing part two, where we interview for people from the talented sound design team. It is a really wonderful talk. So please make sure you check it out. Thanks for listening, everyone. I’ve been your host Tim Muirhead and to send us out of this episode. Here’s a teaser with Craig Henighan, the supervising sound editor on Stranger Things telling us about why he loves working on this series:
Craig Henighan 44:16
I think for all of us if you’re gonna do it, and you’re working in sound, you kind of just really want to go for it. I know that’s sort of always been my thing you know that I just if I’m going to work I want to work and I want to be part of something that’s is special is I want to be part of something that treats sound with the utmost respect. That gives us the room to play things we’ve all been on projects where we you know, kill ourselves on certain things. And then it doesn’t get played in the mix. This is not that show. This is the show where the Matt and Ross turn around and go okay, what else you have, what more can we add? What other things can we do? So yeah.
Narrator 44:57
Tonebenders is produced by Timothy Muirhead, Rene Coronado and Teresa Morrow. Theme music is by Mark Straight. Send your emails to info at tonebenderspodcast.com. Follow us on Twitter via @thetonebenders and join Tonebenders Podcast on Facebook. Support this podcast. You can use our links when you shop at Amazon or b&h or leave us a tip. Just go to tonebenderspodcast.com and click the support button. Thanks for listening.
Timothy Muirhead 45:27
Are you looking for more audio related podcasts to listen to? Tonebenders is part of the Audio Podcast Alliance featuring a handpicked selection of the very best podcasts about sound. Be sure to hear the latest episodes from our friends in the community at audiopodcast.org
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