Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1011374
27 Top: Shooting in Downtown Los Angeles. Above: Marydixie Kirkpatrick and Crew Chamberlain on the docks in San Pedro in December 2017. in late 1987. I started covering for Roger on the week- ends when Pytka would fly a small group up to Santa Rosa to do "Bartles & Jaymes" commercials. Simple shoots: A Nagra, a 415, and a radio mic. Only one of the two actors spoke. As much as I loved booming, the handwriting was on the wall and by the end of 1988, I bought two used Nagra 4.2's and a stereo Sela from 20th Century Fox, a Lectro Quad Box with 195's in it and six Comteks. I already owned two Schoeps MK 41's. So there I was, a Commercial Mixer. Hard to believe it was ever that simple. I continued to cover for Roger most of the time but I soon got new clients of my own. We were working nonstop and I learned so much about being a team leader because Roger was my sign post and guru. As a mixer, I rely on my boom ops to run the set and I run the gear, get the calls, baby-sit the production people, agency, and clients. I have been fortunate to have so much help from my boom op friends when I started, pros like Steve Bowerman, Randy Johnson, Jim Stuebe, Mychael Smith, later with Pam Raklewicz, Dan Kent, my brother Moe, Alenka Pavlin, Anna Delanzo, Peter Commans, Bryan Whooley, and for the last eighteen years, my niece Marydixie Kirkpatrick. My two sons Case and Cole even boom for me now and again as they are up to speed in our unique world of production sound recording for picture. With that kind of help, it has been easy and fun to do my end of the job all these years. I want two qualities in a teammate, a good work ethic and the ability to find the humor each and every day in the absurd work we do. These women and men are all champs in this regard and I owe them my successful career. While we had some killer days, it never seemed like work, always an adventure. The work. It is really no different technically than film or TV. This is as true in today's multitrack workflow as it was with a mono Nagra and a boom, maybe a radio or two. The biggest difference between long form or episodic media creation and the thirty-second epic is that sound is a two-person department 99.9 percent of the time. To do our job successfully, we have to pull together to get whatever needs doing done so that "waiting on sound" is never heard. The division of labor is equal, running/wrapping cable, putting down sound blankets, etc. We have to be ahead of the curve as much as possible. On any given day, the cooperation with other departments gets limited due to the time con- straints on all of us, so when help is needed, we have to request it early when it can be accommodated, not after we set up a shot. This is true for all the departments in commercial production. With only a storyboard and a few confused conversations with an often overwhelmed production manager, we all show up at a location with sixty-five other craftspeople and make a commercial. We work not only for the director (like films and TV), but also the ten to twenty agency people and clients. This aspect of the work is what took me a long time to come to terms with. Often these fine people have little or no filmmaking experience or just enough to be dangerous. If you let it, this fact alone will make your life hard, perhaps joyless. Communication is essential in our commercial world as we try to put their fears to rest and assure them it will be great. Then we tear it down and do it all again the next day with a different crew and for a different director and client in some high-rise or on nasty a pig farm. Like our brothers and sisters in TV and film, we work at every location imag- inable. Hot or cold, often both in the same fourteen- to eighteen-hour day, as we do our best to make it sound like it looks. It still surprises me that this system works as well as it does.