I worked next on the Brenda the Exterminator series. (and another called “The Job” that I unfortunately cannot find) I worked several audio post jobs due to the size of our class: I mixed the dialogue and music, recorded and edited the walla/looping, ADR, and foley, and was the music supervisor and music editor. The dialogue mixer is probably the most important position at the console on a sound stage. We have a saying in the sound industry that “dialogue is king” and that is definitely the truth. A sound mix for a film is separated into three parts that all have different tracks and routing: dialogue, music, and effects. On larger films, there’s usually a dialogue mixer who mixes dialogue and music and a sound effects mixer to mix sound effects, often separated into subcategories such as backgrounds, sound design, and foley. The dialogue mixer will level and attenuate all the volume set to the dialogue, meaning the dialogue will always sound the loudest and come to the forefront of the mix. The dialogue mixer also has to make sure the dialogue sounds smooth using different software plugin tools like equalization (EQ) and compression. The mixer is also responsible for making sure the dialogue sounds “in the space” of where the scene is taking place, including any ADR (automated dialogue replacement) tracks that contain dialogue that was re-recorded in a studio to replace non-desirable dialogue lines from production. For example: on Brenda, there’s a scene where she starts talking while in an enclosed area that used ADR lines, so I added some reverberation at that moment to create a sense of realism that she’s actually saying what she’s saying in that space. I also had the added fun of deciding what kind of filter I wanted to use for all of the phone calls. In the biz, we term that as “futz.”
I have to say, re-recording mixing was unlike anything I have ever done in the profession. It felt like an extremely unique, complex, and organic process, one that was constantly changing and expanding due to the nature of replaying certain parts or scenes over and over again while using automation to write and re-write volume, pan, or any other parameter for a plugin that the mixer would design. We each mixed four short films and a final project in a span of four months as part of our curriculum; I truly wanted to work another year, hell, two years, just to understand all of the nuances of re-recording mixing and the editing-> mixing pipeline process.
Check out Brenda Part II here: