‘Daisy Jones and the Six’ sound team on creating a stadium crowd noise for the band’s final show [Exclusive Video Interview]
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While the fictional band Daisy Jones and the Six take the stage inside a sold-out Soldier Field in Chicago for what will be their final show, the “Daisy Jones and the Six” series actors and production team were hundreds of miles away from the Windy City. For the big concert in the Emmy-nominated show’s finale, the Amazon Prime Video series shot scenes in New Orleans – and used Tad Gormley Stadium as a stand-in for the famed home of the Chicago Bears.
“A lot of times when they were performing and the cameras were pointing right at the actors, they were playing to an empty stadium,” Chris Welcker, the “Daisy Jones” production mixer, tells Gold Derby in an exclusive video interview. “It was just the crew standing out there, the electricians and stuff, and our music supervisor and producer. But then, of course, we had the moments where we turn the cameras around and had to fill in the crowd portions. So when we got to those opportunities, that was an opportunity for us to put mics out on the stage, put mics in the crowd, to try and capture as many different perspectives as possible.”
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Welcker and re-recording mixers Lindsey Alvarez and Mathew Waters are among the Emmy-nominated sound team behind “Daisy Jones and the Six,” the acclaimed adaptation of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s beloved novel. The trio – Welcker is a first-time nominee, Alvarez and Waters won Emmys last year for “Only Murders in the Building,” and Waters has two other Emmy wins as well – were responsible for helping to create the sense that the fictional group at the show’s center was as accurate as possible. It’s a task, Alvarez says, was “easier said than done” – particularly during the final concert when the sold-out crowd at Soldier Field sings along to a Daisy Jones track, a feat that was accomplished with only a hundred or so background actors.
“It takes layers and layers of material from my side,” she explains. “I was so thankful that Chris was able to capture the crowd singing. Because we were just like, ‘Oh, how are we going to do this with group and effects?’ But we had the fabulous sound from production, and then, at one point, when we were mixing this, we just set up a couple of mics on the mix stage and just did it ourselves [as well]. Just so we had a few more individual voices that you could layer on top.”
From there, she says, Waters worked his magic to make the live crowd feel as real as possible.
“You just don’t want it to be white noise. You want it to react and to act as if they’re in a concert,” Waters adds. He estimated the entire concert footage in the finale totals roughly 25 minutes. The goal, then, was to make sure the crowd sounded raucous at the start of the show and elevated from there. “It was super fun but it’s not just ‘let’s just play the track,’” Waters suggests. “It was a lot of work. But it’s really fun.”
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