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Scarpetta Sound Editor on Show's Audio Journey Across 2 Timelines

Supervising sound editor Bryan Parker (The Pitt) spoke with us about working on Prime Video's Scarpetta, handling two timelines, and more.

When Bryan Parker took the supervising sound editor job to work on Liz Sarnoff's Scarpetta, the TV series adaptation of the popular Patricia Cornwell procedural crime novels, he had the tall task of not only creating the authentic forensic experience and audibly building Kay Scarpetta's world, but he had to do it in two different eras. The first is the modern-day incarnation, with Nicole Kidman in the lead role, and the other is her younger 1990s counterpart, played by Rosy McEwan. Parker, who's also worked on hits like Disney+'s Star Wars: The Bad Batch and HBO Max's The Pitt, spoke with Bleeding Cool about meeting the challenges head-on to capture the Prime Video series' dark, gritty nature, and repurposing older audio equipment to recreate the 1990s to its period accuracy.

Scarpetta Sound Editor Bryan Parker on Telling a Story Audibly on Two Timelines

What intrigued you about 'Scarpetta,' and how did you get involved?

Parker: I got involved with 'Scarpetta' because I've made a handful of films with the producer in charge of post; her name is Alison (Balian). She and I have a good working relationship, and I like the balance of this show between the actual crime investigation and the family components. I think the balance of those two things is handled quite well. The pacing and handoff between those two things are handled really well on this show, and I found that interesting.

Were you already familiar with the Patricia Cornwell books, and what's it like working with Liz Sarnoff as a creative?

I was not up to speed on the books before this opportunity came up, and I found that I didn't want to have too much of a bias toward the text-only version of these stories. I didn't go deep on the books the way a lot of our fans, the ones who have read all 29 of them, that wasn't my approach. I wanted to get in tune with what Liz wanted to do with the show, first and foremost, and working with her has been great. She's got a sense of what she's looking for and has given us a lot of trust to take the sound aspect where we think it's going to serve her overall vision the best. Yeah, it's been a real joy to work on.

Was there, like, a specific approach you have when it comes to these procedurals, especially when it comes to challenges compared to maybe other genre work you do?

In general terms, I think this show wants crime-driven procedural elements to feel a little larger than life at times. There are a lot of big personalities in the show. I think that the sound work wants to show that slightly larger-than-life version of Lucy's (Ariana DeBose) computer rig, her vehicles, and stuff, but for this show in particular, a lot of the visuals are very gritty, very messy. My perception was that a lot of the imagery reminded me of, like, a [David] Fincher's 'Se7en'-kind of a vibe, and I wanted our designed textural sound work to convey a similar sense of grittiness and messiness.

There's a lot of uncertainty in our show, both figurative and literal digging up of things in our show. Since one of the timelines is set in 1998, to achieve that grimy, messy thing, I built a bunch of components from older technologies that we used for transitional elements between scenes, for textures inside of the moody scene, reenactment, recreation scenes, and things to complement the music. To go along with the music or transition into the music I built from analog tape and older technologies like that, so I used these tape echoes, these actual analog tape echoes, and drove them into distortion and self-oscillation to make that gritty texture that I think enhances the visuals of some of the more shocking things we see particularly surrounding the body they discover on the train tracks in Epsilon and so forth.

I was going to ask how you were going to contrast the way the present day and the past portrayed the sound, and the distinct way you did it.

Everything in the 90s was a little louder than now [laughs]. I think these folks have some money. Our characters live a pretty charmed life, and a big shift among people who live with some comfort or luxury is that almost everything does what it's supposed to do, quieter now than it did 30 years ago. Fridges, cars, air conditioners, computers, and everything, so you'll hear that. The newer, current, present-day timeline feels more polished overall, and there's a big difference in the cameras, because they're all digital cameras now. I did a custom recording session and workup and took some digital cameras and recorded with the lenses off and recorded way back in there. I did a full workup of one or two digital cameras. My friend, Matt, came over with some film cameras, and we did the same thing. So, in 1998, there are film cameras, some of them hand-wound, some with an auto-advance motor; those are very different between the two timelines, you'll notice, and we try to keep that as accurate as possible, and there are differences in some of the office ambiences, different keyboards; obviously, all that small-scale tech has changed quite a lot as well.

Was there a particular sequence this season that took a little while to scrounge together more than the others? Or did it have consistent ebb and flow?

I don't know that we are "scrounging," but I put a lot of work into the two reenactment scenes. Both of my effects editors did a good job building those. There's one in episode 102 and one in 106 where Kay and Marino are at the crime scene, and Kay says, "Okay, walk me through it. What would you do if you were him?" They walk the actual locations, talk it through, and look for details. Those beats are really cool and great scenes. It came over well from picture editorial, but I think that we did manage to elevate the sound aspect of them, and my effects editor, Josh Adeniji, did a good job.

I took a little bit of extra time and put some of those tape distortion, rhythmic textural things on and established that eerie "put yourself in the shoes of the killer" mood in 102, and then followed up and did a similar shot in 106. Those definitely took some time, but my favorite thing that we did was in episode 107, where Kay is running the archived 911 calls from the reel-to-reel tape, and instead of using, like, a plug-in foots to make those voices sound like they were on the tape, I actually took those voices and ran them to my Nagra. I actually put them on quarter-inch tape, and then for the transport, I used my Otari half-inch machine. It was clunkier. It has a nice, really satisfying [makes affirming sounds], but it has a nice clunk to the button stops in the transport.

Scarpetta, which also stars Bobby Cannavale, Jamie Lee Curtis, Amanda Righetti, Jacob Cannavale, Simon Baker, Hunter Parish, and Savannah Lumar, is available on Prime Video.

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