Audio for reality TV: audio pros are finding these programs challenging on multiple levels

Post, Jan, 2005 by Christine Bunish

the reality TV trend has not diminished. In fact, a growing number of broadcast and cable shows are keeping mixers and composers busy from coast to coast. Los Angeles-based Russ Landau (www.russlandau.com) was a composer for television dramas prior to writing "Ancient Voices," the theme for the long-running Survivor series. Music for reality TV was "undiscovered territory then," he recalls. "I created my score for most of the first season of Survivor, combining orchestral music with ethnic elements. Once it became a hit, I suddenly became thought of as a reality composer. Everyone wanted to hire me for their reality show."

In addition to all the Survivor installments, Landau has penned music for every season of Fear Factor and Average Joe, plus MTV's The Assistant, NBC's The Restaurant and USA's Eco Challenge.

Each season, Landau revises "Ancient Voices," which includes elements of a 1,000 year-old Russian chant, to reflect the changing geography of Survivor. "I look for the ancient voice of that location and blend it in," he says. "I may collect the music in person, with a crew, or fly people from that location to my studio." For Survivor: Africa, Landau visited 17 villages in Kenya, He took his kids along to collect sources for Survivor: Amazon. Pacific-island natives of Vanuatu visited Landau for the season that just aired. He recorded them into one of his three Digidesign Pro Tools systems with an Emagic/Apple Logic Pro front end.

"Each field collection is slightly different," he notes. "I record with Earthworks mics direct to hard disc with my PowerBook G4 and run a back-up session to HHB mini disc with two sets of stereo pairs. I'm looking for ancient songs passed from generation to generation. I walk the delicate line of: Do I want to teach them to sing? Or, do I work with what they've sung and craft it into my pieces?"

The tenth instalment of Survivor, whose music Landau is now working on, will take place in Palau, another South Pacific locale. "With similar cultures like Vanuatu and Palau, it's harder to bring an autonomy to each place," Landau points out. "That's where my poetic license comes in." The composer will call upon history to lend a distinctive sound to the Palau series: One of the biggest naval battles in World War II took place in its waters. "I'll combine the musical elements of the ancient voice of Palau and the poignancy of those ghosts of World War II," he says.

For each season of Survivor, Landau creates "a body of work ahead of time so the editors have something to cut to. It helps make the pictures pop. Then we often re-score to fit the scene. Each challenge is usually scored fresh--that's six to nine continuous minutes of music." Landau enjoyed working on The Assistant last year, which "spoofed other reality shows, including the ones I do. I got to spoof myself and other reality theme songs."

While he still scores dramas and films, Landau says the reality programming he does tends to be more "wall-to-wall music. My music budgets are higher than most of the other reality shows so there's a lot of good live-music recording going on. I think people feel that depth in the music; it's richer than shows that load up with a lot of library music. Custom music helps identify a show and gives it a personal signature."

TODD-AO

Rick Norman, re-recording mixer at Todd-AO Burbank (www.toddao.com), calls Unscripted, the new, 10-episode HBO reality series from George Clooney, Steven Soderbergh and Grant Heslov, a "hybrid." Chronicling the lives of a group of real-life aspiring actors in Los Angeles, the scenes are shot preconceived but the dialogue is all ad-libbed. "All the actors are miked with lavaliers, so I'm dealing with radio mic interference problems, rustling noises and sound-quality issues while I'm sorting through tracks of six or more people talking at once in order to focus on the specific dialogue that follows the story line when they all get together socially and at classes," Norman points out.

Norman, an Emmy Award-winning mixer whose recent reality credits include Casino on Fox, Scare Tactics on SciFi channel and $25 Million Hoax on NBC, is encountering the usual sound issues of reality shows with Unscripted--"uncontrolled locations, noisy street traffic, no possibility for ADR"--as well as one that seems unique to the new series. "Most reality shows are wall-to-wall music," he says. "That makes it easy to hide poor-sounding dialogue and rough edits, and you don't have to worry as much about matching ambiances cut-to-cut. But Unscripted has no music at all. I have to match ambiance character-to-character in a scene, and I'm constantly scouring production sound rolls for ambiance fill to glue everything together."

Due to the smaller track count on Unscripted, Norman works on only one of his stage's four Pro Tools|HD rigs with Control 24 surfaces. He also uses an external Cedar processor and occasionally a Urei 565 notch filter and Dolby's CAT 430 noise suppression, re-recording back into Pro Tools "to keep everything virtual."