Senior Sound Mixers Alan deGraaf and Lana Marie Hattar of Company 3 Toronto think as one when they collaborate on a mix. The two recently completed work on MGM+ series Hotel Cocaine from showrunner Chris Brancato, co-creator of the powerful series Narcos. It is the pair’s first collaboration with Brancato, who brings the exacting standards and unique vision that helped make Narcos an international hit to everything he does.

Set in 1970s Miami, primarily at the Mutiny Hotel, where hard partying tourists and drug cartel members congregate together, the show presents the glamour and violence of a very specific slice of time.

The sound veterans often work together (as they did recently on the second season MGM+ series From) or teamed with other Company 3 Toronto mixers. For Hotel Cocaine deGraaf handled dialogue and music and Hattar all the sound effects, including Foley and backgrounds for the series. Often, on this series, they’d be working with 500 or more tracks on some of the busier scenes to come up with the final mix.

The process begins with sound editorial, which was handled by frequent Company 3 collaborators — the Toronto sound editing company Sound Dogs — where dialogue and effects tracks were built from production sound, ADR, Foley and well-researched library effects. Then, in the mixing phase, deGraaf and Hattar combine forces to pull the enormous amount of sound together to feel like a cohesive whole for the Dolby 5.1 mix.

EFFECTS + BACKGROUNDS

“It’s set in South Florida,” Hattar explains, “so we have a lot of nature — a lot of outdoor scenes. Some of the action occurs by the ocean and Sound Dogs used audio recorded in the specific part of the Atlantic and with regional birds.”

Likewise, the sounds of motorcycles and muscle cars that would have been buzzing around in the era are all present in the edited audio tracks. Sound Dogs would have worked with the producers, she explains, so that, “if we’re seeing an early ’70s Chevy driving along, the sound is accurate to everybody’s standards. Even the sound of gunfire is authentic. If it’s an Uzi, if it’s a MAC-10, that’s generally the sound we’re working with, although we do get a little bit of license with those. Then it’s our job to make it all sound like it’s coming from the same environment.”

MUSIC

A lot of the action-packed show is set inside the themed hotel, which features a massive dance club within. “They stayed true to the era and got some well-known disco songs along with some more generic disco music,” deGraaf explains that the music itself is sometimes just about setting the scene and other times it can be front and center, in which case the show springs for some very recognizable hits such as “Disco Inferno.”

The series’ music team, including the music supervisor Eric Medina and music editor Lance Povlock would generally observe remotely  and offer their own input about how the music is represented in the scene.

“One of our biggest challenges,” says deGraaf, “was setting up the crazy club atmosphere where people are on the dance floor and dancers are on stage and people are doing cocaine and all kinds of nefarious things on one hand and then we have drug deals going off on the side in smaller rooms. The soundtrack needs to set up the feel of the club as this happening place with the music sounding like it’s coming from the PA with pounding subwoofers and crowds of people dancing and shouting and then all that needs to fall off a bit when people are talking so the sound doesn’t drown out the dialogue.”

EFFECTS + DIALOGUE

The effects tracks would come into Company 3 densely packed with sounds of glasses clinking, bartenders mixing drinks in the background and every other sound you’d here if you were there. While Hattar would bend and shape those sounds to feel real, deGraaf would be doing the same for crowd dialogue, much of it recorded in ADR under the supervision of the show’s dialogue editor Danielle Mcbride for the actors and the Loop Group for most extras and wild lines.

“In the nightclub,” Hattar notes, “you would have people all around you talking but when they shoot on set, only the main actors are talking, so the Loop Group is required to fill the background of the club underneath the principal dialogue. Loop Group can also be used for specific wild lines for background extras. In this particular series, we have both English and Spanish Loop Group.”

From the first episode, the two worked together, supervised by Brancato, who observed remotely from New York, to come up with an approach to making the club as lively and as loud as possible and then seamlessly ducking that all down when it’s time to focus on the dialogue. “If the actors were really in a nightclub with all that going on,” deGraaf observes of the choices mixers constantly make, “they’d have to yell everything they say,”  which might be “realistic” but would be very distracting for the viewer and burdensome for the performers.

BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER

“We’re always working as a team,” says Hattar. “Sometimes the viewer needs to primarily hear the effects. Sometimes the music is most important and frequently the dialogue has to be the main focus. Usually, the picture dictates where everything should sit, and we each make sure the parts we’re responsible for are placed the best way possible to bring all the elements together.”

By way of an example deGraaf says, “We’ll both be at the mixing desk, and we’ll get to a scene where people are talking outside and then a big motorcycle goes by with a guy shooting at another character.  We’ll have sounds of the motorcycle and the gunshots, and some ocean sounds and birds and usually a lot more. Maybe there’s also some score that should drive the scene and then we might decide to duck everything for a moment to hear some dialogue. When you’ve got more than one mixer working on a scene,” he observes, “getting everything right is always a little bit of a dance.”

Hotel Cocaine is now streaming on MGM+.

For more information about this series, click here.