'RHOA' Premiere Sets the Stage for Kenya Moore's Exit With Testy First Interaction With Brit Eady
For the first six episodes of Paradise, audiences mostly could only imagine the mayhem that unfolded when a carefully selected group of 25,000 American citizens were relocated to a man-made underground city in Colorado following a global natural catastrophe. But in episode seven of the Hulu thriller, viewers not only witness the fear, panic and civil uprising that characterized "The Day" with their eyes, they hear what it sounds like when people realize the end of the world as they know it is near.
"We did a whole 180 on ourselves editorially," says sound effects editor Cormac Funge. "Usually we dig into sound mixer Michael Krikorian's tracks and we've got the boom [mic] and the characters' isolations, but in that episode, we left a lot of it as the raw mix track, so it has that documentary, rough feel like things are just happening."
Though most of the episode takes place on the White House grounds, the scale of calamity is vast: President Cal Bradford (James Marsden) is tasked with informing the American people of the cataclysmic events that have transpired via broadcast from the Oval Office, while Xavier (Sterling K. Brown) frantically tries to ensure his wife and children will make it to the bunker location safely, as advisers and staff members, realizing they're among those who won't be transported to paradise, turn into an angry, violent mob.
"The big thing that we did for that episode was a lot of group recording," explains Funge. "The main sound effect that exists in that White House sequence is us recording new voices specifically so that their intensity would build slowly, that you would feel the change in the day with how the group changed, with how the sound of the background changed as they get more and more frightened and unnerved."
The challenge in building that tense sonic environment was that all of those voices were recorded in the same space on set and needed to feel like they were coming from different rooms within the White House.
"It could've easily just been monotone throughout the whole thing, but [creator Dan Fogelman] and the editors and directors gave us the elements and the room to let it not be just a radio play with just the dialogue and nothing else, so that it feels alive and dangerous and like something intense is happening," says Funge.
The process of capturing the multitude of voices was nearly as eventful as the scene being filmed, says Krikorian. "My boom guy, he's 6-foot-7, so when people get in his way, they kind of get pushed out of the way. It's a lot of moving around and making sure you can make those moves and get around the corners."
The effort was a stark contrast to much of the other editing and mixing work on the series, which calls for dramatically limiting outside noises. "Boy, was I glad I had read the scripts beforehand, because we had to build a city that feels like it's a small town to not give away the gag, but there are no dogs, there are no sirens, no helicopters. There are none of the natural sounds that we think of as existing all the time," says Funge. "Even things like birds and bugs, we had them prepped so that when we mixed them, they would stay on specific sides of the screen to feel a little different than we normally do, and we organized them so that we could run them through noise reduction so that they're all strangely clean. There's no wind, there's no traffic. We're getting rid of all those things to make it feel normal."
For Krikorian, nailing the show's crisp dialogue and audio tracks is rooted in trust among the mixing team. "This crew has been together since This Is Us," he says, referencing Fogelman's NBC drama on which Brown also starred. "I've been working with these guys for over 10 years now. We barely talk to each other because we just know what needs to get done. I always say, if you're working with good, fun people, and they all know their job, it makes life easier and more fun."