Jen Ralston is a sound editor for film and television, with credits on everything from The Big Lebowski, to Hedwig and the Angry Inch, to David Simon’s HBO series The Wire and Treme. While a lot of her work involves creating sounds to match the action we see on the screen, her work also sends her out into the field to make sure all the sonic details of a place are as realistic as possible.
Ralston met up with KALW’s Julie Caine to talk about the work she did to bring post-Katrina New Orleans alive in the show Treme.
Jen Ralston: Some people told me that as people were returning to the city, if it was a neighborhood where only one or two people returned, the people in those houses would make it a point to be as loud as possible. As if they were almost trying to assert that there is life in this block, and if you're looking for something to steal, or looking to make trouble, there are people here. So everybody had a dog that was very jumpy and would bark at anything that moved because there were very few things moving, and everybody that was home had a generator and a radio playing and a TV or music-- they were just making as much noise as possible to sort of assert their territory.
Click on the audio player above to hear the whole interview.