An altered audio reality: posting audio for reality TV just might be the toughest kind of work these pros encounter - Industry Overview

Post, Jan, 2003 by David John Farinella

Terrance Dwyer, chief engineer and lead re-recording mixer at Los Angeles-based Wild Woods, laughs as he says: "I think everybody who does reality sits back and says, 'Geez, I wish I could do a show like ER where they don't have to do anything." Dwyer should know. He is an Emmy Award-winning mixer for reality TV behemoth Survivor. Over the run of the show Dwyer has had to battle all of the audio post elements, but none as challenging as this year's blend of beach sounds, such as surf and bugs.

Truth be told, perhaps the networks should start looking into these audio post houses for their next wave of reality programming. After all, where could you find grown men and women hunched over a computer screen trying to decipher one word of dialogue for hours and hours? Not to mention the facts that these pros are working under tighter deadlines and lower budgets.

"Reality TV is the hardest stuff I've dealt with." admits William Levins, re-recording mixer/sound supervisor at Todd-AO Burbank "Your would think a feature would be harder, but on a feature if I have a problem we do ADR and I'll loop a scene or a couple lines of dialogue that has a bad noise in it. But in this stuff, you've got to make it work with what you've got, and it's quite challenging. But I enjoy the reality of it, because you're telling somebody's story."

WORKING ON A MONSTER GARAGE

In LA, Original Post (www.origprod.com) mixer Bob Bronow works on Monster Garage, a Discovery Channel show hosted by West Coast Choppers' owner and mechanic, Jesse James. During the show, James and a crew of mechanics take a car, say a Geo Tracker, and turn it into something new, like a hot air balloon. "They have seven days to do it, and if they accomplish the task then everybody gets a $3,400 set of Mac Tools. If they don't, they get nothing. So far only one has failed," Bronow explains.

"This is probably the most hostile environment for recording any sort of production audio I've ever worked in;' he says. "Basically it is a huge cement box, then you put five or six people in there with lay mics, a bunch of DV cameras with their own built-in mics and you give these people really loud power tools:"

Bronow says the on-set mixer, who provides him with between two and four tracks of dialogue, helps. His first step is deciding which channel has the best sound audio; it's usually the lay mics. "Unfortunately the lay mics are often really low, so when we boost it up it also has lots of noise in the back. When we can't use that we have the camera mics, but then we have all the room reverberation to deal with. So, they each have their own set of challenges."

Every piece of dialogue, he reports, will be treated through the Waves Restoration bundle in a Digidesign Pro Tools/HD2 system with a ProControl mix surface. Specifically he turns to X-Noise and X-Crackle, especially for the tracks collected via lay microphones. "There's always a lot of loud noise through them with slight over modulation," he says. "That pretty much takes a lot of it out and makes it smoother."

Other than the Waves plug-ins, Bronow uses the Focusrite C4 and Bomb Factory's Bombfactory la-2a. "We use a whole host of plug-ins to get the stuff sounding nice;' he says. "I like to add some of the Renaissance Bass plug-in to tracks for motorcycles and engines. It adds some extra guttural sounds."

After he's done cleaning up the audio, Bronow works on music and sound design to give the show its own audio personality. "When it's a dark part of the show where they're talking about something that has gone wrong, I really like to beef that up with a lot of underlying drones or other types of elements to sell that and bring it home," he says. "Then there's a lot of goofing around, so I'll try to add things that help that as well. I really try to avoid making it too silly, because they are big guys with tattoos."

A LOGICAL CHOICE FOR JAMIE KENNEDY

Above and beyond the challenge of mixing a reality show, Post Logic Studios (www.postlogic.com) mixer Fred Howard never knows what kind of audio he's going to get from one week to the next when he works on The Jamie Kennedy Experiment for The WB Network. "Sometimes it's not bad and sometimes it's really not good;' says the Hollywood-based Howard. "The variables are largely dependent on the bit they are doing and the rooms they are doing them in." Because it's a hidden-camera reality show, having microphones in prime spots is a practical impossibility, but mics are placed on Kennedy and on most of the other accomplices and actors that appear in the episode. "Sometimes you get what you need; sometimes you don't," he says. "So, the big challenge is if you're in a room where logistically you can't put a mic close to someone then how are you going to get that sound? Sometimes you end up with a mic on a clipboard or you might depend on Jamie to stay physically close to his person so you can hear them through his mi c.

"It's not uncommon for us to lose lines or have RF interference, or have mics just stop working;' he adds. "You have to start out with the highest intentions, because you know you're going to take hits."