This year’s Gemini nominees for best overall sound in a dramatic program or series range from a police drama with homegrown sounds to a period piece shot in Montreal but set in 1940s Germany.

On the Alliance Atlantis Communications miniseries Nuremberg, a team from Toronto’s Tattersall Casablanca had to keep the period top of mind in the audio suite. That meant listening carefully for anything out of the ordinary that might have found its way into the mix during the shoot.

‘It’s a period piece, and to us that means you are not allowed to hear highway traffic and modern vehicles leaking into production sound,’ says TC’s Lou Solakofski, Nuremberg’s lead mixer, who is nominated alongside Ian Rankin and independent Montreal recordist Claude La Haye. ‘It’s a great challenge for the sound editing team. These people all worked together to put the cut soundtracks together, so they had to put a lot of thought into post-World War Two – what kinds of airplanes would be flying overhead and what kind of environment they would find in Nuremberg.’

For authenticity’s sake, the team’s dialogue editor, Rick Cadger, flew to Europe to record the European accents and chitchat heard in the background throughout the film. Solakofski points out that care also had to be taken in the film’s courtroom scenes.

‘The stenographer in the courtroom was working a manual machine, so Donna Powell, the foley artist, got a special key taps sound like from one of those 1940s machines,’ he says.

The sound designers also sought this level of detail on the Haddock Entertainment/Barna-Alper Productions Vancouver-based cop drama Da Vinci’s Inquest. Supervising sound editor/lead re-recording mixer Michael Colomby says his team at Creative Audio Post have to make the show sound like the real Vancouver.

‘As per [creator/executive producer/head writer] Chris Haddock’s direction, we’ve kept it sounding pretty natural,’ says Colomby. ‘We do a lot of recording of our own ambiences and make that into a reality, which we’ve become really good at. A lot of the show is shot out on the street and we have to make all that stuff work.’

Colomby says it is refreshing for the Creative Audio Post group to work on something set at home.

‘It isn’t like most shows, where you are trying to be somewhere that you aren’t,’ says Colomby. ‘That enables us to go out to places locally and record stuff. It’s not an opportunity you usually get.’

Both shops used Digidesign Pro Tools to edit their audio. (Creative Audio Post also mixed ‘This Shit is Evil,’ the nominated Da Vinci’s episode.) In the case of Nuremberg, Solakofski says TC also utilized the shop’s custom-made Lafont surround mixing console. The shop has since added a Harrison Series 12 digital console, which it is using on a number of projects.

The Da Vinci’s Inquest and Nuremberg audio teams are vying for the Gemini in this category against those from After the Harvest, Heart: The Marilyn Bell Story and Robocop: Prime Directives: Dark Justice. The TC team has already won an Emmy Award for Nuremberg.