Call My Agent — sound case study

Call My Agent is the kind of production in which the entire story rests on the word. This social comedy about the world of talent agents lives on the pace of conversations, interrupted ripostes and dialogues carried on the move — in corridors, in restaurants, in the dense hum of the office. To the viewer it sounds light and natural. To a sound post-production studio it is one of the hardest tasks, because in material like this there is nowhere to hide a mistake: every word has to be intelligible, and every scene has to sound like one coherent space.

Awards and recognition

Awards and recognition: the series Call My Agent! (French: Dix pour cent) won the International Emmy Award for Best Comedy Series (2021, for its fourth season) — an internationally acclaimed French production that has inspired adaptations in many countries. Behind that success stands not only the writing and the acting, but the sound as well: crystal-clear, intelligible dialogue and meticulous post-production are the foundation on which the comedic pace and the credibility of every scene are built.

The role of sound in a dialogue-driven production

In a series where the text matters most, sound post-production starts with dialogue. Production recordings are rarely perfect — there is air-conditioning noise, room echo, crew sounds, or uneven levels between shots filmed with several microphones. The sound editor’s job is to assemble a smooth, clean track from these fragments, one in which the cuts cannot be heard and every line sounds as if it were spoken at the same moment and in the same place.

Where the original recording cannot be salvaged, ADR steps in — re-recording the lines in the studio, cut in sync with the movement of the actor’s lips. It is also the moment when a dialogue-driven production is often localised into other languages: dubbing and voice-over versions demand the same precision as the original. Only on clean dialogue is the rest built: the discreet background of the city, the murmur of a crowd, the clink of cutlery, footsteps. This layer should never draw attention to itself — it should make the world look real.

Olga Pasternak on Call My Agent!

We have a concrete connection to the world of Call My Agent!. On this series, between 2018 and 2020, Olga Pasternak — a sound editor and co-founder of the All In Sound studio — worked as an ADR editor. She was part of a larger post-production crew, responsible for editing the ADR and dialogue: fitting the studio-recorded lines to the picture and blending them with the production sound into a coherent, clean track (filmography on IMDb ). This is one slice of a whole team’s work — the All In Sound studio did not deliver the full sound post-production of the series, but rather this stage of dialogue editing.

This is precisely where it is decided whether dialogue sounds natural. ADR editing is patient, near frame-by-frame work: every re-recorded word has to be fitted to the movement of the actor’s lips and to the rhythm of the scene, so that the viewer never senses it was created later in the studio. On a series built on the pace of conversation there are hundreds of such fixes, and their invisibility is the measure of quality.

The experience gained on productions of this scale is what Olga brings to All In Sound today. We handle the editing and cleaning of dialogue in a room adapted for working with speech, we deliver voice recording sessions — ADR, voice-over and dubbing versions — and we build backgrounds and effects from our own sound library and Foley recordings. It is a craft that proves itself wherever every word counts.

The result of well-done dialogue post-production is a track that sounds effortless. That is the apparent paradox of this work: the better it is done, the less the viewer notices it. All that remains is the impression that everything simply sounds the way it should.

See our other projects or write to us — if you have a series or film in which every word counts, get in touch and let’s talk about sound.