We met with Ella Melanson to chat about the role of an assistant re-recording mixer; managing hybrid sessions with Louper; and working on The Handmaid’s Tale with re-recording mixers Joe Morrow and Lou Solakofski.

Ella, can you share a bit about your background and your role as a re-recording mixer?

I’ve been working in the post-production industry in Toronto for close to a decade. I started out assisting, more recently I have done some mixing, and I’ve shifted into an administrative oversight role for the mix assistant and deliverables department. For The Handmaid's Tale I was working out of Formosa’s Toronto office, which has now been incorporated into Picture Shop. We get to do some cool prestige TV shows that come up from LA, we do post finishing for work that's been shot around the world, but we also work on a lot of Canadian TV shows and independent films. 

As an assistant, you’re the support person for the re-recording mixer, you’re the bridge between the mixing side of things and the technical department, and between client relations and management. If clients have a question, you're the person that they ask. But mainly you’re supporting the mixer - you set up sessions, deal with any additional material that comes in during the day. You get to know everything about their setup: their scroll-wheel settings, what color they want their ADR tracks to be, the keyboard shortcuts. And if you're training to become a mixer, you eventually start premixing for people and taking on smaller independent projects. Frequently you'll go into effects mixing and then you'll start to do more dialogue mixing and at that point you’re pretty well-rounded and able to do everything. 

The view from New Bethlehem

Besides the technical skills, I’d image an important aspect of working under a re-recording mixer is mastering the soft skills of how to run live sessions, present to clients, and manage different personalities in the room.

Yeah, especially in something that's as client-facing as mixing - the interpersonal relationships are incredibly important. Working under pressure, working with stress or time sensitivity, all these things. Lou Solakofski always impressed on me how our role is to fulfill what the client wants: we're trying to fulfill the vision that they bring to you. Of course you can get excited about the projects that you work a few weeks or months on, but you're working on a project that for someone else has been years. So trying to understand where they're coming from, what their relationship to this project is, and helping them realize this dream they've been carrying around in their head for all this time is important, because it's a culmination of something larger for them.

Let's look at The Handmaid's Tale. When did you join the series?

I joined about halfway through season three, so I've done a couple of seasons of Handmaid's Tale. It's a cool show to work on - a lot of thought goes into it and it’s got all the social critique. It's an adaptation of a very well-known novel, written by one of our big Canadian authors, so as a Canadian it’s always cool to work on something like that.

Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski) and Commander Wharton (Josh Charles) dance in the street

There’s a scene between Serena and Wharton where they dance in the streets of New Bethlehem at night. It looks like a romantic moment, but there’s so much tension in that scene. Can you talk about how the mix can contribute to the tension of a scene, and the series as a whole?

That scene made me really uncomfortable - you can identify with Serena's uncertainty, even though I question how much one should be identifying with Serena sometimes! Obviously a big part of that scene is due to her performance - you can see the warring feelings she’s experiencing. But sound is one of the big things that you can use to heighten the sense of discomfort. The final mix has a lot of control over that. In this scene we hear the shuffling of their feet on the tarmac. By letting that bleed through, it creates the sense of awkwardness. We’re not just floating away on the romance of the music, which is frequently what will happen if you're going for a more traditional romantic scene. It's very grounded in this physical reality, which isn't always perfect. So I think that works in that scene very well.

Trailer for Season 6 of 'The Handmaid's Tale'

Another important element in Handmaid's Tale is the music. Handmaid's Tale has this strange sense of temporal displacement. Gilead is very technologically advanced in some ways, but it rejects a lot of modern technology in its day-to-day life, creating this sort of religious-throwback environment that everyone has to live in, and it evokes a mindset from a particular period in America, which isn't current to the timeframe of the show. You could lean in with music choices to reinforce that, or you could use more modern pieces of music to be a counterpoint to it, which Handmaid's Tale does to great effect. The composer, Adam Taylor, really played with dissonance in the music: slightly detuned or warbled, where you're sort of swimming between notes. It really heightens the uncertainty and sense of dread. I think a big part of the sonic tension in Handmaid's Tale comes from his music.

One of the scenes that Lou and Joe worked very hard on is the scene where June gets knocked over by a truck. And they use Kokomo, the Beach Boys song. There's this moment where the truck's approaching her and the song's playing on the radio. The truck runs over her arm and there's that moment of agony because her arm’s just been broken. Usually in a scene like this, you'd have the song playing in a clear version, and then you'll go into a distorted version when the big impact happens. But here, they actually did the reverse - so the music starts out playing diegetically from the truck, and then it goes a bit dreamier and more warbled. And then at the moment the truck runs over her arm and she has this big shock, they play it full scale, very straight. So it's a moment of brutal clarity, which I found was really effective for the scene. 

Janine (Madeline Brewer) in the dressing room at Jezebel's

How does the art direction of a space affect the way that you’d approach the soundscape of a scene? For example the contrasting spaces at Jezebels?

From the mix perspective, one of the big things is the sense of space, what reverbs you're choosing. At Jezebel's, upstairs is much more close quarters, more intimate-feeling. A lot of the dialogue is quite low or almost whispery. But you’d undercut it for the more public areas which are spatially more open. You can get a lot more reverberance out of that space, which emphasizes the contrast, especially when you're cutting back and forth between the two rooms. So you can get a real sonic signature for the different locations. And obviously that's always steered by what is going on on-screen, what the art direction is, what the location is, what its sonic qualities are, and what thematic elements you want the sonic qualities to enhance.  

Commander Lawrence (Bradley Whitford) is promoted

Why were remote sessions necessary for The Handmaid’s Tale, and when did you start using Louper?

Handmaid's Tale was one of those shows that got interrupted by the pandemic. The pandemic changed the expectations of remote work in post-production. The demand for people being able to listen from home while we mix live has exploded, it’s become a necessity since then. 

At the time, we actually made our own boutique version of Louper. One of our engineers created a streaming system with integrated chat and a little window where you could send the mix out and see what was on our projector screen. So that was how we survived those early days of the pandemic. But the clients on Handmaid's Tale got used to that workflow, so we needed to find something similar to continue working with them in future. When Louper shows up, with more features and more development and proper software support, it was great! Changing the Handmaid’s Tale clients over to Louper was essentially seamless. A really good transition keeping the same functionality, and it worked really well.

Can you talk about the differences between live Louper sessions and doing async reviews?

It's just so much more efficient to do approvals in real-time. People are more satisfied with the result because if you're sending off a mix and getting feedback later, there's that disconnect between what the mixer is doing in the room and what the client might actually want. With real-time feedback, you can explore nuance and tweak finer details. It's a much faster and more convenient way to get to a result.

Dressed as Handmaids, June (Elizabeth Moss) and Moira (Samira Wiley) prepare for war

How did you technically set up live-streaming the sessions on Handmaid’s Tale? Were you sending a binaural feed or was it straight stereo?

In The Handmaid's Tale, there's some spatialization, but a lot of it is very dialogue-driven and music-focused. There are some big action scenes, like the plane bombings, but we found streaming stereo was ideal for Handmaid's Tale. From an assistant perspective, the setup for Louper is straightforward. We have a machine room with a massive patch bay where you can patch feeds from our theaters into other theaters, or into a computer running LDE that streams to Louper. From our end, it's literally: hook up your patch cables, copy/paste your stream key, and hit ‘start stream'. Obviously you can set admin privileges in Louper, so as an assistant you log in, see the channels of all your active shows, click the one you want and go. It’s also super easy for clients to use. And some clients are joining from home, so you want to make things as streamlined for them as possible. 

The lag time is also really small on Louper compared to other platforms we’ve tried. It just keeps the flow of the conversation going and prevents people from getting derailed by that delay. It keeps everyone focused on the ideas that they want to convey, focused on the constructive criticism that they want to make. It just keeps things running smoother. We've been using Louper for a while now and it's been working really well on all of our projects, it's basically what we're using across the board.

The Wedding

What do you enjoy about the work that you do?

The beautiful thing about being in the mix room is that the final mix is sort of the last stop: you're there the moment that it all comes together at the end of this journey for your clients. You get to see the finished project and the culmination of all the people who have worked on it, which is a great part of working in this particular corner of the industry.

Ella and the team at the final playback for 'Handmaid’s Tale' - Season 6 (L-R):
David McCallum, Krystin Hunter, Lou Solakofski, Wendy Hallam Martin (behind), Abby Austria (front), Yuri Gorbachow, Jane Tattersall, Corrie Gudgeon, Ella Melanson, Joe Morrow, Kathryn Blythe, Sheila Hockin, Brennan Mercer, Dustin Harris

Ella Melanson is a re-recording mixer at Picture Shop.

She assisted re-recording mixers Joe Morrow and Lou Solakofski on three seasons of The Handmaid's Tale while at the Formosa Group in Toronto. In January 2026, Formosa Group Toronto was integrated into Picture Shop, an award-winning, global post production company offering comprehensive services including editorial, color, sound, and mastering.

The Handmaid's Tale - Season 6 was produced by MGM Television. Distributed by Hulu. Executive-produced by Bruce Miller (series creator), Warren Littlefield, Eric Tuchman (co-showrunner), Yahlin Chang (co-showrunner), Elisabeth Moss, Steve Stark, Sheila Hockin, John Weber, Frank Siracusa, Kim Todd, Daniel Wilson and Fran Sears.

Cast: Elisabeth Moss, Yvonne Strahovski, Bradley Whitford, Max Minghella, Ann Dowd, O.T. Fagbenle, Samira Wiley, Madeline Brewer, Amanda Brugel, Sam Jaeger, Ever Carradine, and Josh Charles.

Ella and her team use Louper to stream their mix from Pro Tools. See how to set up a livestream from Pro Tools using Blackmagic Hardware, or a Pro Tools Audio Bridge. All Handmaid's Tale Season 6 still images and trailers courtesy of Hulu.