Los Angeles, CA (August 17, 2026)—After working with the great film score mixer Alan Meyerson, Eva Reistad says, everything else was “a piece of cake.” At varying levels from 2020 to 2023, Reistad assisted and worked beside Meyerson on projects including Mulan, Planet Earth III, No Time to Die, Dune and Dune: Part Two.
“My brain and my organizational skills exploded after working with Alan because you just know the communication is on point,” she says. “How you watch out for the materials is on point, your delivery speeds are on point. and just the minute it’s done, you get it out.”
Reistad recently finished mixing season three of HBO’s hit series Euphoria, which came about when the show switched composers to Hans Zimmer. Reistad was given great latitude on the mix and thoroughly enjoyed the creative adventure, but what was going to be one-and-a-half days per episode became three.
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Reistad explains that her usual goal as a mixer on a score is to keep the mix fairly close to the composer’s vision and the mix received, because the director has already approved it. Nonetheless, after mixing Episode 1, Reistad listened on the Warner Brothers stage with the music editor, who said it was good, but that he wanted “more.” What did that mean? A completely unconventional mix. A mix in 7.1.
She says that prior to this project, her boldest move might have been to use Energy Panner during a big action scene, which “spins stuff around the room,” but now she was being invited to make creative decisions she had never made on a score before.
He told her he wanted instruments all the way to the right and all the way to the left. He wanted to be sitting in the orchestra instead of the usual mix from the conductor’s perspective. Oh, and he said the kick drum could be moving. “That was a lot,” Reistad says with a laugh.
It was a bit nerve-racking for Reistad moving forward to Episode 2 “Typically, we don’t pan things all the way to the rear,” she explains “There are a couple reasons for this. We don’t always want signal all the way in the surround because it ends up being very loud back there, especially if we’re doing Atmos. It’s now coming out at the same level, which, typically, in film, would be a bit distracting, because when they’re mixing everything together, they usually want that a bit free to give you the scope of what’s on the screen—not just the music.
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“This also affects the stereo crash I send to the composer because I have to deliver mixes for approval that are stereo mixes,” she continues. “These mixes are derived from a full 7.1 mix, and they get crashed down in a way where the sides and the rears are actually pulled down further than the left and right or when I’m printing the stereo mix, because oftentimes it’s reverb in the back. We use reverbs for upmixing, and this is also why we don’t pull full signal all the way to the back or all the way to the sides, because now we’re going to be losing signal in our stereo mix because of the way it’s crashing down.
“So, this was very interesting, because when I was pulling the marimba or the guitar or something all the way back to one speaker, now we had that source in my stereo crashdown leaning to the side, where it was all the way at the front, but not so present. So, the imagings on the stereo crash sounds were very interesting.”
Reistad says on this show she actually printed the stereo crash sounds so they could take those stereos, if they weren’t happy with the panning, and move them wherever they wanted in the Atmos field or in the surround field and they didn’t have to be married to her actual surround track. “We didn’t lock them into my madness,” she says with a laugh.
