"Changing Ends" recreates comedian Alan Carr's formative years in the 1980s, where he navigates a masculine world of lower league football under the management of his father, Graham. This semi-autobiographical series explores Carr's journey, capturing the essence of the era.
Produced by Baby \cow productions for ITVX, the series was fully post produced at Splice.
Dubbing Mixer, Jules Woods’ Creative approach
Building the soundscape for Changing Ends was a fun, creative experience, and we loved collaborating with the director, Dave Lambert throughout the project. The 80's is such a characterful decade triggering nostalgia for many of us, so we played upon this with the sound design of the series. Specific period sound effects, and true to life processing and treatment of sounds supplement the fantastic 80's score to create an exciting and immersive audio experience.
The series was approached with the same scale and detail as would be expected from a feature film, or high end prime time period TV drama - with full foley, crowd recordings, and lots of supplementary ADR to help build rich and vibrant sounding environments.
ADR and VO for the series was recorded in house, at our Nile Street facility. Using COS-11 radio mics, a Sennheiser 416 Boom, and a U87 for Alan's VO sections.
The Chameleon 2 plug-in from Accentize made blending the ADR into the variety of locations within the show a seamless experience. We also made use of Altiverb XL for reverbs, Slapper for exterior delays, iZotope for noise reduction, and Speakerphone for 'futzing'. Youlean Loudness Meter Pro was used for live metering during the mix and kept us on track for the R128 loudness specifications.
Elliott Bowell and Michal Maletz were the in-house supervising sound editors on the project, while Jules Woods mixed the series in our flagship Dolby Atmos Studio, Sound 1 at our Nile Street Facility.
Colorist, Adam Dolniak’s creative approach
Achieving a celluloid-Inspired Retro Look for the 1980s in ‘Changing Ends’ was done through focusing on interplay between The Setting and Concept and with technical focus on the tones and highlights.
The series was set in the 1980s, which provided an exciting opportunity to create a distinct aesthetic that reflected the era. The art department had already established a retro look with the set design, costumes, and props, and it was up to me to ensure that the colour grading matched this style.
We wanted the look to feel nostalgic, with a focus on warm tones, selective saturation and pleasing colour contrast. In particular, we embraced the shifting of the tones into more tobacco yellows, greens and reds to enhance the retro feel.
For tones and the highlights: we found that edging into warm tones really complimented the work of the art department and locations, specifically nudging into yellow and green tints. Throughout the series, there was also never a pure white or pure black point.
Highlight tone was specifically always made more creamy, slightly tinted towards yellows or greens. This was combined with filmlight's 'texture highlight’ tool to create a gentle bloom.
Watch Changing Ends now on ITVX.