Game Over, Man! Is a Resounding Team Effort for Technicolor and Netflix

• The filmmakers enlisted the Technicolor Sound team to make Game Over, Man! as sonically entertaining as possible.
• Netflix approaches their streaming projects like theatrical releases (see the case study for Seven Seconds, for which Technicolor provided end-to-end services).

Netflix continues to evolve the content creation world with Game Over, Man! – a movie made for streaming but produced like a big screen feature film. One aspect of that was getting the sound mix just right – a sonic balancing act between the movie’s comedic hijinks and explosive action.

Technicolor Supervising Sound Editor Elliott Koretz has had a long working relationship with picture editor Evan Henke, and was also known to John Wiseman, the head of theatrical post at Netflix. So when the two spoke, they quickly agreed they wanted Koretz to handle the sound for their streaming film project.

“This is a movie that features very extreme action visually,” said Koretz. “Sometimes on films like this, directors are hesitant to get too crazy with the sound; they don’t want things to get in the way of the dialog [for example]. I’ve often experienced them wanting to back off a little [with the sound] or tone some things down.”

Not so on this film.

“One of the first things he [director Kyle Newacheck] said to me was: ‘I want you to go for it! I want this to be over the top! I want the sound to be insane!’ And that was music to my ears,” continued Koretz. “It was just large-scale opportunities to do extremely entertaining things with sound.”

So, taking their lead from the director, how did the team amp up the sound without letting the dialog get lost? For while this is an action movie, it’s also a character-driven comedy. Rather than sustained, large action sequences, there would be high action punctuated by dialog throughout the film.

Technicolor Sound Re-recording Mixer Andy Hay gives due credit to Henke. The pace of the film and the way it was cut allowed the sound team “to really go big and stretch out – to be ambitious and be this big, bodacious action movie and then quickly pull back, focus in on the dialog, protect the joke, and then come out the other side and go big again,” explained Hay.

The scenes in this film, such as the DJ-fueled party at a posh LA hotel, are a real collaboration of music, sound effects, and dialog. The mix is in constant motion and evolution – and that drives the attention, the ear, but also the eye, to certain elements that move the story forward. Getting it just right is the art of the mix. Coming up with sounds that aren’t beyond belief but are perhaps hyper-real – enhanced enough that they help sell the emotional content of the scene.

The party scene is also a perfect example of the various roles between sound editing, design, mixing, and so on. “Elliott and I provide all the props, all the actors, all the background, in terms of sound,” explained Bruce Barris, Technicolor Sound Editor and Co-Sound Supervisor on the film with Koretz. “Andy and Marc are more like cinematographers, in that they focus the lens of sound on what they want us to hear from moment to moment. It’s a very subtle craft – shifting the focus, adding filters like a cinematographer would do – but also very important in directing the audience’s attention and how they react to the film.”

“What I take away from these kinds of experiences are the weeks of pure joy and fun that we had working with one another and just enjoying each other’s company and respecting each other’s work,” concluded Technicolor Sound Re-recording Mixer Marc Fishman. “That’s really what makes it worth getting out of bed in the morning.”

Watch – and hear – all the madcap mayhem in the official trailer for Game Over, Man!, now streaming on Netflix.