Oh, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Welcome to Pluribus, the official podcast, an intimate insider conversation about the making of the Apple TV series with the cast and creators behind the show. My name is Chris McCaleb. I'm one of the editors of Pluribus and the host of this podcast. And this is our eighth bonus episode. These are typically one-on-one conversations, often cast and crew who aren't in Los Angeles where we record the podcast. But today we're shaking up the format. We have three guests on this bonus podcast and we're having a focused conversation about sound and creating the sonic landscape of the show. I really enjoyed this. I hope you do too. So without further ado, please welcome our guests, production sound mixer, Philip W. Palmer. Hi, this is Philip. Rerecording mixer, Larry Benjamin. Hi everybody, it's Larry. And our supervising sound editor, Nick Forshager. Hello, everyone. This is Nick. Awesome. Thank you guys for being here. Today, it's kind of a focused conversation about sound, which before you get into filmmaking and doing this, you don't necessarily know that it's at least half of the experience of watching a TV show or watching a movie is the sound. And hopefully when things are going well, you almost don't even realize it. This show has a lot of particular challenges, given that it's a world without sound in so many ways. I mean, especially after the first couple episodes. Do you guys want to talk about what were some of the unique challenges of capturing and creating the sonic landscape of this world? Yeah, the capturing portion, which was difficult because people don't realize how loud the world is until they put a set of headphones on and they think, wow, I didn't realize you could hear that highway so clearly or that aircraft that keeps flying over or things like that. People don't really clock that. We call it masking where we get used to sounds in our brain. The best sound noise reduction system on the planet is a human brain. and so the brain goes you don't need to worry about that anymore and you just stop paying attention to it and when you put a pair of headphones on your headphones do not care what your brain says it does not care one bit and it just plays everything at full volume into your ears and so our main set where carol lives is in albuquerque we built a beautiful neighborhood complete with dog park and luckily it's up on a sort of a rise so we do get a bit of distance from a lot of sound but i will say that we just do our best to get as tight a sound as possible and give a clean track for larry and nick's team to be able to play with later yeah and as far as uh you know editing the sounds for that i mean philip does a great job i mean he's underselling how awesome he is about not getting a lot of that background sound and definitely underselling totally underselling so we have a lot to work with to start with especially having lovs and booms and whatnot when we do get the tracks and we do have those situations where we have this landscape where there's not a lot going on between our editing tricks and being able to clean that up so we have a good starting base larry kind of takes it from there and really gets us over that last hurdle and makes it sound the way we want it for every scene yeah and to build on that, it's so critical. I can't stress enough how important it is to have really good material to start with. And we always go to the same kind of cooking comparison, how having the best ingredients makes the best meal. So starting with those tracks, you can build the rest of the soundtrack around that. It's so rich and full, it can withstand a little bit of judicious EQ and some maybe noise reduction if need be. And then we can build our worlds. And the team can build the worlds that Carol's living in. And I try to put her in a space to solve that emptiness. So maybe at Bilbo our airport. Philip emailed me in advance as we have a very good communication. He was concerned about the reverb. I heard about this. Yeah, I was able to kind of reduce some of the tails that were natural, but Vince kind of wanted to lean into that. And we even added a multi-channel reverb that I could control, Stratus 3D, to kind of put it in a space. So we leaned into that. And anytime Carol's in a warehouse or the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, a little bit of reverb helps solve the emptiness and the loneliness of the world. Yeah. Talk about that airport, episode two. Yeah, episode two. So she gathers with the English-speaking others in Bilbao. The exterior is Bilbao Airport, but we couldn't really shoot the interior of the airport. They wouldn't let us have it empty. And so we found another space designed by the same architect, but an even larger space in Oviedo, which was this massive convention center. When we got in there and doing the scene, you couldn't be eight, 10 feet away and hear anybody speak because the sound just went away. It just disappeared. It was like an acoustical nightmare for me. That's crazy. Yeah, it was real weird. So at the end of the scene, I just asked if we could get everybody really quiet. And I did an impulse response, which is we just clap the sticks really loud and then let it trail off. And it trailed off for about seven or eight seconds. And after that, Vince was just his eyes were huge. He's like, I had no idea. So that's kind of, I think, why he leaned into it, because it was kind of cool. And it actually sold the space. to that end though this goes to show what philip can do i mean the loves on that were terrific i mean even with loves buried in their clothing we still had quite a bit of reverb and using the booms to kind of draw out the space we were able to get clean recordings there's not a ton of adr in that scene there's a couple of added lines which was hard just to try to match into that space oh but as a whole everything i'd say 99 of that scene is the actual production and larry was able to reduce a lot of the reverb on the day, but then what ended up happening is we felt like we lost the idea of the space We had to put the reverb back in and like he said he modeled it to give us that you know Atmos space and all around us But the recordings were really really clean Because we were worried about it, because Philip had sent us that impulse response. We were like, oh, crap. But once we got to the tracks, we were like, we're going to be good. You know, impulse responses are interesting because we use what's called a convolution reverb. So, for instance, AltaVerb is one that we use. Stratix is one. They're basically impulse responses, as Philip said, even from the clapsticks. The old day, they might have used a starter gun or a pink noise burst. And it's basically capturing the tail, the acoustical properties of that space. And then you can apply that to your own recordings not recorded in that space. So now we have that space that whatever the shooting space was, we could now take that impulse response, sample it, put it into a revert, and apply it to whatever dialing we want, even if it's not shot there. How common is that? I've never heard of an impulse response. I mean, you're saying it goes back decades, maybe a century even, to whenever sound started. Yeah, I mean, the technology for using impulse responses has been around for a couple of decades. But yeah, the reverbs that I use to model real spaces, I don't know if you've ever seen me up on the screen, the little GUI, there's pictures of the actual devices that those impulse responses were captured. So the Sydney Opera House, for instance, or Disney Hall or Gymnasium, I can use those various spaces. Wow. In one of the seasons of Saul, I used a warehouse that was very similar to the warehouse that the Germans were building the lab. Yeah. They're hard to create because obviously you need them to be silent all the way through. So there's no additional clouding or, you know, artifacting in it. So sometimes you can create your own impulse responses. So we didn't actually use those because we knew it was just going to be too long. But like I said, he had such good booms on that already that we could already kind of mimic it. So if we were shooting in a hangar and we could get it silent, we could actually create an impulse response and use it in one of those plugins like Ultiverb or whatnot. To put an editor perspective on the importance of great production sound, when you're presenting a cut, every edit matters. And if you have bad sound without throwing anyone under the bus and it's nobody here, sometimes production sound can be so bad that you can't even try to present a version of a scene without heavily treating it. You know, on this show, we did have to do some. We use the isotope RX filters in the Avid, which are very helpful because, Phil, you provide us with just generally immaculate tracks. But, you know, like you said, this is a world populated by people that we're shooting in and we're trying to recreate a world and repopulate a world that doesn't have any people in it. I just wanted to express my gratitude to you about that. And then I wanted to ask a question. What is the difference between sound editing and sound mixing? Building off of our cooking comparison, the editing is really like the sous chef, right? Kind of taking the quality ingredients. So Nick will go to the farmer's market and pick the best possible quality ingredients that you could imagine in a meal and then prep them. So cut them, julienne them, shave them, whatever, however you want to shape food so that it could be prepared. And then my job as a mixer with my mix partner, Tim Hoganacker, we will then take those ingredients and blend them, creating whatever dish we're creating under your guidance in Tutelage and under the producers, Jen's and Gordon's and Vincent Diane's, and take those well-prepared fresh ingredients and make great meals. So our job as mixers is to blend those ingredients, and Nick's job is to oversee and then kind of prepare the ingredients. So it's the preparation and then the mixing, the blending of them all. In the past, back in the olden days, the 1900s, pre-digital, re-recording was engineering. It really was. You had to be an engineer to be able to run a room. You had to understand signal flow and how you patch things and how the signal is going to move in the space and to its recorders and whatnot. So editors were editors, much like a picture editor. We would go out and record the sounds and gather sounds and present the sounds. But then really you needed this re-recording engineer to be able to put them in the space and record it for a movie or television. And so that's why they were two separate disciplines. And I think as time now has evolved, the lines between editor and mixer has slowly evaporated. And so we do a lot more mixing in pre-mix and they do a lot more editing while they're mixing. This show is on a whole different level because we really have nowhere else to hide. It is just this empty world. And I can't tell you how many people have reached out as they've now discovered the show and talk about the sound and how much it helps people feel like they're in the story. And it's been quite rewarding. I was going to ask you that, Nick. Where do you source your sound effects from, especially in trying to create a world of not silence, but a world that is so radically different than ours, so much quieter than ours in many ways? Yeah, this one was a lot of experimentation, trying to find the right pieces, you know, because if we go back to the beginning of when we started spotting the show, Vince obviously has great ideas and amazing concepts and very specific tone of what he was trying to create sonically. And some of them, you know, we tried them all. And but sometimes when you get to stage, they don't quite always work the way you had anticipated. so a lot of it was experimentation and that came down to a lot of the stuff that we had sourced Todd Toon who's our sound designer he went out and recorded a lot of like hums and stuff because we still had things like air conditionings and we still had lights and we still had these things and environments that that we could play off if we needed to so we we did do a lot of that but a lot of it was just experimentation really going through the library and finding those little things that could really you know pop out a scene and the idea originally was you know have this big world, everything's happening, and then it goes to silence, and it's basically nothing. And then from that, the world starts growing around her. We started with this isolation of her being alone, and the world was very very silent And then the world would start coming back and we have more bugs and we have more birds and we have more creatures around it to fill in the space But we found though if we used too much of anything it took us out of the scene. So we began to strip it back even more, and we found that that isolation of silence was really what was carrying the tension and really making the audience connect with Carol much more so. So it's kind of a lack of sound, but when you did put it in, you had to really look for those small little pieces that would really fill in those moments, you know? Yeah. Very intentional, specific pieces of wildlife, but treated in a way that you could sell the distance and the specificity of the wildlife was important. And, you know, same thing, again, treatment on Carol's voice in spaces to show the loneliness as well. How is using Atmos, the more immersive audio technology, how are you using that to enhance that? And what Atmos, maybe you can explain what that means as far as placing sounds in certain areas of the theater or the virtual theater. I can think of like the C-130 scene in 102, for example. Exactly. Yeah, that's a great example of the use of the surrounds. Until the Atmos, even more so than 5.1, We now have the addition of speakers that are just not just the surrounds. It's also the wides. We also have the Z axis, the ceiling speakers. So obvious examples would be the C-130. Anytime there's a helicopter, that is very immersive. Even the 737, you know, landing that we see in episode two, I believe. Those kinds of things. Even other ones, the announcement in Barnes & Noble, right? That voice up above, that's in the ceiling speaker. Anytime there's source music playing at the airport or at a diner, Tim will really lean into that for layers of background. So for instance, episode seven, as Manusos is going through the woods in the jungle, he'll have a specific little bug here and then behind us, but not just all behind us, maybe somewhat behind us and somewhat peeled off the screen. There's the other insects here. He can place them in a variety of spaces to create a level of immersion that goes beyond just multi-channel sound like 5.1 or 7.1. It really does feel very enveloping. Very much so. And even to the isolation, like you mentioned, using the reverbs and the overheads. It definitely, on the stage, you really get that sense of loneliness because her voice, when she speaks out loud, is all around us. It's the only thing that she hears is her voice. Yeah, the loneliness. What is the sound of loneliness? It could be the wispy wind in the desert scene. So Albuquerque, Nick can speak to this, he has a whole kind of collection of things new and previous from the various other shows that took place in Albuquerque. That's a loud mufflers. Right. But instead of, you know, human life, we're leaning into the wispy winds and the bugs. And you can hear kind of wolves and coyotes kind of echoing off the canyons and things like that. It can be not the absence of sound necessarily, although maybe it's diminished more than it would be with being occupied by a lot of people. But it's just even the gentleness of the air and the wind moving and the leaves and the trees shaking, those kinds of things. you had to kind of be careful because like anytime we would put in like a wind in a tree or something if it sounded too much like a car we had to you know okay we got to get rid of that one let's try something else yeah again sometimes you know when you get it into the space and you're looking at it how it's going to tell the story in your editing room or even when we're pre-mixing it it sounds great but then when you really play it in context you're like oh that's not quite feeling as isolated as we should so you really kind of try to undulate the sound around what's happening in the scene and sometimes you push it up, and sometimes you have to pull it back to virtually nothing and try to hold the audience that way. And also, it can't be said enough that how Ray sells this performance, it's amazing to watch it. Like, I saw it live, you know? But then to see it cut together, and when we're doing that, you know, she's not there by herself. There's about 100 of us all on the other side of the camera. Right, you know? And we're all trying not to look. And a camera in her face. Yeah, we're like, you know, don't look at her. You know, you know, we're trying to give her her space to do it, but we're all there right in front of her. And so it's just amazing when I watch the show that I don't have a sense of that at all. She is straight up amazing in this performance. And we're able to kind of take it across the finish line because without that, it doesn't matter what we do. If it is not a good performance, nobody's going to care. I always try and get a wire on her no matter what, even if there's nothing, because there's little things she does which are so part of her performance and it's her breath. And there'll be times where like, no, no, Phil's going to want to wire on me. Where am I going to put it? Where am I going to, you know? And she's so great about it. But it's true. It's a part of it all. Well, Phil, talk about further collaboration with all the actors, but Ray specifically. And I know on this show, sometimes we're using like an earwig. Yeah, a lot. That will be invisible to the audience when you see this. A lot of people ask specifically about the TV scene at the end of episode one, which, as we talked about on the podcast, was performed live with the other actor in the other room on a set. Or I think of the Patrick Fabian voicemail. Talk about the collaboration you're doing with that and how it seems very simple, but I'm sure it is not as simple as it seems. Yeah. I mean, it's a technique that's used a lot in production. we put an earwig, which is basically a hearing aid, but it's a hearing aid with a receiver and I can transmit audio to it. So for the scene at the end of episode one, where she turns on the television and, you know, God bless America, and she has this conversation with a gentleman on the television, it was really important that they were able to actually converse and not her play off of something that was prerecorded. So there was, you know, multiple takes of it. And it was a little different every time It wasn just like a you know a pre message and then her trying to generate more performance out of that So it was two performers but two performers in a different space Now the news they do this every day We not set up for that And so we kind of had to wing it. And we had talked about it a little ahead of time. But then when we got there, there were problems that always arise. 50% of my job is, actually 80% of my job is problem solving. And we got there and we put the cameras and there was this delay because they put the camera. anytime you add things into a video stream, you start introducing delay. And the delay was awful. And so we had to move the set. Well, we had it on another stage. We had to close the door. We had to actually isolate the two because they were delayed from each other. So I had to kind of figure out the delay for each one. And each one of them was wearing Neerwick. So he was hearing her and she was hearing him. And we had to kind of figure out the delay for the two. But then once we got it, they were talking to each other and it allowed her to be able to, you know, perform. I love that scene. Yeah. It's the same sort of thing for all of the voicemail, but it was really important to her, to everyone that she had to listen to this voicemail over and over and over again. Yeah. I don't think we ever edited it. It was always played in its entirety every time we used it. So the timing for that was always exactly the same, which was a really unique way to do that. Yeah, and you could tell the longer it went on, the more she just put the phone down and then she could pick it up right at the end. And she had a sense of it. And we played it for her every time. We played front to back. I just always played it into her ear or if it didn't feel like an ear thing, we could put it over a speaker if we weren't doing it. But she had to listen to that thing over and over and over again. Well, and so do we. On one level, it's a little bit torturous, but that's the point. I think when this thing is so squarely in her head, I think it's so important to be living the experience that she's living. And the sort of sonic landscape that you all are responsible for, I think, is a massive part of that. Well, and I think to that, you know, Vince is not afraid to let that stuff breathe. And then that allows the audience to really stay with that character. Like you were saying, you feel her torture. Almost everybody who's watched the show can probably recite that. But it's because we're walking through that process with her every single time. So everything that she does, the audience has to be there right with her. So, you know, we can't cut any corners like that. And going back to like even like the C-130, I mean, obviously we didn't do the full sequence of the C-130, but we did a lot of it. And mostly you wouldn't do that in a TV show. It's just you see them flip the engines, the engines would spin, the plane would take off. We put you in the space. We've walked you through, you know, each engine starting. We walked you through rolling down the runway. We walked you through the whole process so that when you saw that, you're like, why is this woman doing it? And why am I there with her? And so it really takes the audience through the motions that you're really trying to sell on the screen. And that's really unique. We're really letting that stuff breathe and really putting the experience with the audience. And I think that's why they're responding to it. Yeah. I mean, we're big on process. And you're right. It does put the audience in that they've experienced what Carol is going through. But also it communicates to us how choreographed the others are, be it episode three, the whole Sprouts montage, or even two, that C-130. Look how professional Xochitl's character is. She knows exactly how to do this. She's flown a thousand times, you know, the knowledge of all the pilots in the world. Like that's communicated by showing that process. Fun fact. We kind of got in there and we realized she shouldn't wear headphones. A headset. right? That machine is really loud. So we had to use the earwig thing because there's a pilot coaching her. Allegedly. Maybe. And, you know, in her head, that's a real aircraft. That wasn't a set that we built. I mean, when we were done with the day, that thing flew away, right? Another, you know, that 80% of my job problem solving, I had some weird cablage that I was able to kind of jack into their comm system and then transmit it into her ear, which really helped out a whole lot. This has been an awesome conversation. I appreciate you guys taking the time to share the process of creating the sound of this show. And there's one more episode left this season. There's yet some new Sonic challenges, perhaps, in that episode. I'm so excited and so proud of the work that you all have done and that we've all done together. And thank you so much for your artistry and your talent and your skill and your ears. This group we have right here, I tell people about it all the time. It is a unique relationship we all have. And we communicate a lot, which is not always the case, you know, with like from front to back, like I'm starting to communicate when we're shooting the show. Well, actually in pre-production, we're like, I have a thing that I got to do. What do you guys think? You know, and then we communicate pretty frequently and throughout the process. So I'm incredibly grateful for the relationships that we've all been able to forge. Me too. Without a doubt. Absolutely. Awesome. Thank you, guys. Cool. Thank you, Chris. All right. Thanks to Philip Palmer, Larry Benjamin, and Nick Forshager for joining us on this bonus episode all about sound. And thank you for listening to Pluribus, the official podcast, an Apple TV podcast produced by Highbridge Productions and Sony Pictures Television. Be sure to follow on Apple Podcasts to get the next episode in your feed. And watch Pluribus on Apple TV where available. Our editor and mixer, it's Nicholas Sy. Theme music by Dave Porter. Associate producers are Alana Hoffman, Justin Verbeest, and Nicholas Sy. Executive producers are Jen Carroll and me, your host, Chris McCalum. Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts. Bye-bye.
