[Supervising sound editor and re-recording mixer, Steve] Giammaria says Season 4 features “horizontal sounds,” like “simmering and bubbling and dishwashing.” Background noise is less in-your-face. “If they’re in the office, it’s Sugar and Richie talking about something in the office, it’s maybe not as chaotic outside the door as it would have been in Season 3 or especially Season Two during construction,” he says.

Compare that to Season 3’s “vertical sounds,” which is what Giammaria calls percussive noises such as “forks clinking, pots clanging.”

One of Giammaria’s favorite sound moments from this season doesn’t involve any loud clashes. In Episode 5, Carmy tries one of Marcus’s new desserts. It’s a delicate green pudding with some crispy textures on top, presented in a scalloped white bowl. And in a delightful reveal, Marcus uses a spoon to fracture the bowl, showing that it’s also edible.

Putting that scene together involved working with a foley team at Alchemy. Assistant sound editor Craig LoGiudice recorded the breaking of chocolate bars.

“There’s probably about 10 or 15 layers to just that simple crunch of that thing going through that first initial bite, and then when he cracks open the surprise of the bowl, that the bowl is edible too. Those are the kind of things I really like digging into because you want to make sure all those layers are specific,” Giammaria says.

“It would have been a different scenario if we had been shooting in the winter or if we’d been able to take in fall colors, but our film was scheduled for a summer shoot,” Deakins recalls. “I had to find a way to desaturate the greens and give the images we were going to shoot the feeling of old, hand-tinted postcards, [which was the look] favored by Joel and Ethan.”

Some of the negative from the [test shoot] was scanned into digital format with a Philips Spirit DataCine at 2K resolution using a proprietary look-up table developed for this application. Deakins viewed the digital images with Cinesite colorist Julius Friede. Together, they worked on manipulating the saturation of the images, and in particular selecting the greens of the trees and grass and turning them into dry browns and yellows. At that point, Cinesite recorded the digital file onto the same 35mm Eastman EXR color intermediate film (5244) that labs use for making internegative and interpositive masters for release printing. A Kodak Lightning film recorder with a high-intensity laser light source was used to convert the digital files to analog images on the intermediate film. The film was then processed by Deluxe in Los Angeles, which also made a work print.