‘Pachinko’ Re-Recording Mixers Luciano Vignola & Martin Czembor On Creating Authenticity Through Sound

Pachinko tugs at you, because it feels so real. There is a lot of beautifully made television on right now, but the Apple TV+ drama series ensnares your mind and intoxicates your senses so much that you can almost smell the fish market or hear the rain cascading down in the woods. For re-recording mixers Luciano Vignola and Martin Czembor, the biggest concern was transporting the audience in a subtle and authentic way.

Vignola (who also served as the Supervising Sound Editor) and Czembor talk so enthusiastically about this project, and that clearly goes into the care of the show. In order to honor the characters and story, they pulled a lot of inspiration from the original scripts.

There are a lot of sequences throughout Pachinko that totally immerse you. The pair was excited to talk about the pachinko parlor and break down how they recorded a vintage machine. At the end of a pivotal chapter, sound plays an important role in tying together the past to the present, and then chapter seven includes a shocking recreation of The Great Kanto Earthquake. It could’ve simply been a series with walls of sound, but Vignola and Czembor take their time to quite literally plop us down in this unfamiliar time and place.

Awards Daily: I love the show so much. One of the things that really kept hitting me was how huge Pachinko is in terms of scope, but the story itself is very intimate. How do you support that with the sound mixing?

Martin Czembor: Luciano had read the novel, and the language has such a respect to the character. One of the first things Soo [Hugh] said that she wanted her show to be felt. At the same time, it’s a huge show. How do you find the little details of, say, a bowl from 1915 Korea? I want to hear that in the foleys. It goes through so many things, but you have the detail of the little sounds of texture, whether it is the bowls or the water or the wind. A lot of the epic-ness comes from the visuals and the sound supports it. The same with the score. It doesn’t all have to come to the surface, and the whole process of working this out, you try to let it all have its voice to speak.

Luciano Vignola: A good example of that is when we are in the noodle shop where Isak proposes to Sunja. How do we fit an epic thing in a pinhole of a moment. It is transformative. The effort to get it there is huge. How do we establish this moment to let the performances speak for themselves. That one thing culminates everything we talk about with Soo. Give it time…and then let one piano note hit so everyone can start fucking crying.

AD: I think my favorite moment of the show comes at the end of chapter four. Solomon hears Geumja tell her story before she is supposed to sign away her home, and it’s cut with the scenes of Sunja on the ship. There is that singer on the upper deck performing for the crowd before singing defiantly a capella. There is so much going on there, so, please, tell me all about it. 

MC: It starts with the performance. Sunja is downstairs in the ship and the migrants on the ship. She is about to be sick with the pregnancy, but it feels like she’s about to give birth. The rich people are enjoying the entertainment, and the aria trickles down sonically to the bottom of the ship.

AD: It feels like the sound goes top to bottom and bottom to top.

LV: The most effective thing about that sequence is that we set up this huge back and forth. It’s a moment in the season where we are doing some intense cutting. It begins as a straight. The moment, for me, where it turns is when her voice spills, momentarily, into the office. There is a long reverb tale that bleeds in. All of a sudden, the banging from the hull of the ship creeps into that modern time period. You have this merging of themes, and then I knew it was brilliant storytelling.

MC: In the ship, everything moves. All the financial people are just waiting for one signature. The reverb from the singing comes in, and she stops before she refuses to sign.

LV: We were asked once was how we remain identities of these characters and continue continuity. This sequence was an active decision to make it feel very different and then slowly have it merging happening. We go from loud, noisy hull to a crisp office space. When the music starts to take over, there was a conscious effort to make it feel like the office space was the boat. Then Solomon runs downstairs, and it’s full on. The intensity from the ship has permeated into this time period.

AD: They crash together. The way he is running down the stairs–with the editing and directing–he is running at one pace and his tie is falling at another.

LV: He’s making a choice.

AD: I love that sequence so much.

LV: The reaction you are having now was the reaction we had. We were speechless. One of the most enjoyable things was getting our sound team ready for this. We were in the middle of COVID and it was very hard to find good people. I had to just put people down and make them watch this section, and they would be crying and agreeing to do the show.

AD: How did you want the different marketplaces sound different from one another? A lot of key things happen in these seemingly ordinary places.

LV: There’s a lot that goes into those. Maintaining historical accuracy was important on this kind of show. They spent so much time recreating these sets and locations and using the right construction and textures. Those were one of the best guiding principles. From there, we take it and get creative with it, as it were. In episode one, we are establishing the fish market and the pachinko parlor. It starts with thinking of what you may have heard. The big challenge is with places like fish market or the train station is hearing the voices. What did they sell back then at the market? What would they have hocked? We had loop group recording sessions in both South Korea and Japan. We had dialect coaches and translators. Since we are native English speakers, there was another layer to that in terms of routing. Trying to accurately portray this picture really drove us. Our ADR editors, Deborah Wallach, is one of the foremost ADR directors in our industry, and she did the principle ADR and loop group. There was a constant back and forth between her and Filipe Messeder, our sound designer. Once it got to the mix stage, it was a conversation of balancing it with music and focusing the viewer.

MC: You see the cinematography is incredible. A lot of it is taking the sound from the mix and pairing it with the cinematography or the camera movement. We wanted you to feel very immersed.

LV: The pachinko parlor is a good example of that. Those machines have changed over the years, so you can’t just walk into a modern parlor and get the same feeling. We were sent an authentic, vintage machine, and we recorded all the mechanics from the machine using different microphones and different angles. The show was mixed in Dolby Atmos, so there is this cool walkthrough. We get to walk you though, both sonically and visually, through this pachinko parlor. It’s an onslaught of sound.

AD: With places of the parlor or the marker, I thought I got a good sense of the size. I got a great idea of how deep the parlor went back. Being that close up to the machine will sound different from when you just step into it or poke your head in.

MC: Absolutely.

AD: They probably changed the pachinko balls over time or maybe they changed the style. It’s both showy, but it’s not?

LV: There’s a fine line between fetishizing these moments and letting the viewer soak it up to indulge. One of the impressive things about this show is that Soo is showing you this world that you have never seen before. Indulging for just that extra second makes it feel very special.

MC: On top of the visuals and the acting, adding the sound with this richness and precision, I think it adds to our understanding of the scene. It makes it more authentic, and you feel more connected to the story.

AD: Since I am so unfamiliar from this world, the realism of Pachinko is so on point that I think people could mistake a lot of this for a documentary.

LV: Without it being contrived.

AD: Yes. Episode seven is terrifying. There are shots of Hansu after the smog descends on them, and it felt like I couldn’t move. You don’t know what’s going to come at you. It’s a very visceral thing connecting the viewer and the story, and I am desperate to see that episode play in a movie theater. It starts with the abacus shaking and then it just explodes. Tell me all about that.

MC: In a way, the whole genesis of episode seven is so deliberately different. The formatting, how it’s told, how it’s almost black and white…when we saw the first cut, it was entirely green screen. The actor playing Hansu had to emote everything against nothing. It’s incredible difficult. The burden was scary, to be honest. We mixed that as the last episode, partly because of other reasons. It ended up being a great thing, because we had all the other episodes in our minds and memory. Also, what do we do when it goes to black and white. Luciano and Filipe came up with the idea of narrowing the sound down frequency-wise. At first, we did a mixing pass through it that was more raw. Once we put that on there and fiddled with details, it felt so much more connected to the image. It felt like we changed the experience of watching it when it goes to black and white.

LV: In hindsight, what we realized we were doing was we were breaking our own language. Up until that point, we were so set on retaining the realism and keeping the reality of these worlds. We want to feel immersed the whole way through. For episode seven, we needed to tonally set it apart from the other episodes, but we also wanted it to come out in a really interesting way. We were breaking our own language and, for a lack of a better phrase, emulating an old film. Let’s put a little distance between the viewer to help you get thrown into the world. It’s funny that you mentioned that you were thrown off, and that was a huge thing that Filipe was trying to do with the sound design. I’m so glad you picked up on the incidental timing of what happened, because I cannot tell you how many hours we spent on one tiny moment. What do we want to hear and how do we want to hear it? How does it relate to what we see? That was a wonderfully exhaustive process. For so many weeks, we were working on an entirely different show, and we had to figure it out together.

The abacus starts the rattle. When we come back in the follow-up sequence where Hansu is running in slow motion, Filipe had a last-minute strike of genius when he added in the air raid siren. The siren starts when we are in the American family in the distance, but it takes us into the sequence. The cycle and the pitch of the siren is following the camera and the motion on screen. It was this interesting culmination of texture and elements. It’s the least literal moment of this show. They are raw ingredients, and we had to paint a picture.

Pachinko is streaming now on Apple TV+.