Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1353865
56 I M PS E . O R G with stories of films they'd just been working on, or great characters that they'd worked with. I do remember that my first film ADR session as an assistant at Central was with a wonderful old British actor, Denholm Elliott. It might seem silly, but I'm really pleased that my first post- production mixing was actually on film and that I got to experience working with mixing charts, projectionists, and sepmag sound followers; just like my 'proper' feature film mixing heroes at the time would have done. Central was definitely the place where the work ethic was instilled in me and that no matter what else was going on in your life, 'the programme' or 'the film' always took priority. For many years, I missed all kinds of unrepeatable family events in support of the cause, and I suppose what first introduced me to routinely working through the night was the audio post-production that went into every episode of a weekly satirical TV puppet show called Spitting Image. It was built from scratch each week by a sound editor and a mixer working together at a console (a Neve Necam desk with 'flying faders,' that stored its mix data on Winchester disks) which in turn was linked to two Studer 24-track machines. The scripts that the look-a-like puppets would perform to in that week's half- hour show would be recorded in a voice session on a Saturday by an assistant sound editor (happily) often me, recording some of the best comedy scripts and impressionist talent around at the time), and the edited quarter-inch tape would then be played into the television studio over the following four days, as the puppets were shot moving and miming to their voice tracks. There was a great deal of detail that went into the Spitting Image track lay and mix, not least of all because the puppets were so human-like; and a complication was the inclusion each week of an up- to-the-moment, politically topical sketch. This meant that even though the show aired late on a Sunday night, and there were six very long days allocated to track lay and mix the show, it was always a race against time to get the show finished and laid back to the master VT tape in time for transmission. On one memorable occasion, time did run out on the night: the layback had to be aborted and the show went to air live, with pictures coming from a VT playout machine two floors away from the audio post-production suite, whose two 24-track machines were locked to the pictures with Adam Smith 2600 synchronizers. I didn't then, and I don't now, find that kind of thing exciting though— the anxiety of something going badly wrong far outweighs the headiness of an adrenalin rush for me! Actually, the other thing that comes to mind, thinking back to my days at Central and learning that ethic of sheer hard work, was an awareness of a highly regarded dubbing mixer called Colin Martin. I never met Colin (and still haven't), because he was a mixing god working in his own London studio and I was just an assistant in Birmingham—but he had a huge influence on me because Colin's dubbing mixer credit seemed to appear on absolutely everything interesting that appeared on British television; and the word from the film freelancers that I met was that Colin never, ever left the dubbing theatre. I was young, keen, and impressionable and thought how wonderful that must be to be so in demand and to be asked to work on all the best programmes… Colin, if you get to read this, I want to thank you for unconsciously lighting the fire that sent me on my path of wanting my own studio, too; I don't think I quite managed your output, but I had a good go at it for a while! Dr. Neil Hillman, University of York Hillman with long-standing assistant Jonny 'Boom' Boothroyd