‘Masters of the Air’: 5 artisans celebrate their Emmy nominations at special FYC event [WATCH]
Gold Derby recently honored five of “Masters of the Air’s” Emmy-nominated artisans at a special rooftop FYC event in Culver City, California. Those in attendance for the nine-part, WWII-themed Apple TV+ limited series were composer Blake Neely, co-supervising sound editor and re-recording mixer Michael Minkler, re-recording mixer Duncan McRae, supervising dialogue editor Dave McMoyler and scoring mixer Thor Fienberg. Watch our interviews with all five of these Emmy nominees below by clicking each name.
“Masters of the Air” follows the men of the 100th Bomb Group, also known as “The Bloody Hundredth,” as they conduct perilous bombing raids over Nazi Germany and grapple with the frigid conditions, lack of oxygen and sheer terror of combat conducted at 25,000 feet in the air. The wartime epic stars Oscar nominee Austin Butler as Major Gale “Buck” Cleven, Callum Turner as John “Bucky” Egan, Anthony Boyle as Lieutenant Harry Crosby, Oscar nominee Barry Keoghan as Lieutenant Curtis Biddick and Nate Mann as Lieutenant Robert “Rosie” Rosenthal. The series was the third link in the wartime trilogy produced by Playtone and Amblin Television from executive producers Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman that previously featured six-time Emmy winner “Band of Brothers” (2001) and eight-time Emmy victor “The Pacific” (2010).
“Masters” composer Blake Neely – nominated for his Original Main Title Theme Music – admits that the textural rhythm of that theme was “really hard to find.” He adds, “We wanted it to be in the vein of ‘Band of Brothers’ and ‘The Pacific’ but different. Since I had worked on all of them, it just felt like more burden, more weight, more responsibility. I wanted it to have the elegance and the honor of the men but I also wanted this one to be sort of more exciting and to literally take flight.” But Neely emphasizes that he had plenty of help. “It was a massive collaboration. When you send it off, you hope they’re gonna love it. And they did.”
Duncan McRae and Thor Fienberg, nominated for Best Sound Mixing for a Limited or Anthology Series, reveal that the nine-parter that consumed more than a year and a half in post production was quite the massive undertaking from a sonic perspective. “We were working om all nine episodes concurrently,” stresses McRae. “We didn’t finish Episode 1 and then move on to Episode 2. It was constantly evolving and quite an elaborate effort. As the beautiful visual effects were coming in for one episode, we had a team of editors working behind the scenes to enhance and improve on what we had and create new sounds. We were able to enhance the texture and feeling and emotion by portraying each scene in a different way through mixing.” Fienberg, who worked on mixing the musical score, teamed with Neely to “let the action of war and the great sound effects they created come through.”
Michael Minkler, nominated for both his sound mixing and sound editing, and Dave McMoyler (honored for sound editing) had their hands full. Minkler headed a team that spent four days recording the sounds of the B-17 bomber alone. “We did it very elaborately with 60 microphones in the air, on the ground, everything that moves and makes noise on a B-17,” Minkler, a three-time Oscar winner, describes. In the numerous battle scenes, meanwhile, he nots that “there’s everything that could possibly kill you going on, between the flak and the gunshots and planes crashing into one another, people falling out of planes…It was very horrendous, and it took a lot of work. We obviously tried to make it (sound) as dramatic and exciting as possible.”
McMoyler, in charge of dialogue editing, describes “Masters of the Air” as “probably the most difficult project I’ve ever been involved with just in terms of the task that was before me.” That task included recording some 216 actors and close to 3,000 ADR (automated dialogue replacement) lines spread out over the nine installments. “It was just really huge,” he concludes.
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