Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1277927
14 S U M M E R 2 0 2 0 I C A S Q U A R T E R L Y with camera and he said he was looking for a sound intern. It was a tiny movie and he had a boom operator but no budget for a utility. I didn't know anything about sound, so I probably wouldn't have felt right about getting paid anyway. I remember I was overly-honest and I said, "I know nothing about sound," and he goes, "That's okay! Got your résumé?" Of course, there was basically nothing on it, but he looked at it and he liked that I had worked on at least one show with camera. Jeffree said, "Well, you've at least been on set, not on the fringe, you worked with the camera department and you're not just coming off the street." Anyway, that's what started it all. It was a movie called The Pavilion, shot on Bald Head Island. We stayed in little cottages and all our transportation was in golf carts. It was about a four- week shoot, and everything really clicked for me because I went from never having considered sound to, "Oh, this is perfect for me." So, you transitioned pretty easily? I loved everything about it. It's a department of three. I liked that we weren't on radio, and we had our own little closed-communication system. I wasn't very outgoing so, for me, it was better just working with two people—and I liked the stealthiness of it. It really defined how the rest of my career went because he was the first sound mixer I'd worked with. Jeffree's a great guy and we had a wonderful time. I think something in my brain said, maybe for me, personality-wise, it just seemed to be a better fit. Looking back, if you ask what got you interested in sound, my favorite toys growing up were walkie-talkies, and my dad had this tabletop tape recorder that he had in his office. As kids, we would get to play with it sometimes. I remember it had a little plugin microphone and, hands down, that was the all-time favorite toy; recording things, playing them back. So, there was this fascination with sound that I didn't even really register. At one point, I went through this stage where I had one of those voice-activated micro recorders that I would hide in places and pretend I was a detective and spy on people and then go listen to the tape and see if I picked up any good stuff. Usually, it was my mother discovering it and going "Jenny!" (laughs). So, that film started my professional work in sound, thanks to Jeff Bloomer. It was very busy in Wilmington at the time, and he referred me to another show. I don't think I had a day off in-between. That was a show called O, a modernized version of Othello. It was shot in Charleston, SC. Robert Maxfield was the sound mixer, and that was my first real paid gig. I thought, "This is great, I'm making money!" And then it was onto the next one and the next one and the next one. The film incentives went away in North Carolina and devastated the business. Was that part of your reason for moving to Atlanta? That was 100 percent the reason that I and at least a third of the crew based in Wilmington ended up in Atlanta. I was on Sleepy Hollow with Fox, and when they got renewed for the third year in 2015, they announced, "We're making the move to Atlanta and anybody who wants to move there, you've got a job." At the time, it was so busy in Atlanta that they didn't have enough crew. It's caught up now, but they knew they couldn't crew all the shows. The union local reached out to the Sleepy Hollow producers and said, "Your crews are welcome here, and we will make it a simplified process to transfer into the local and they can continue on with their jobs." I still work a lot with production mixer Michael Rayle, and we all sat down and talked about it. I said, "If you want to make the move, then I'm going to transfer too. We'll be on Sleepy Hollow and that will ease our transition to Atlanta." We were so lucky Using the boom pole to hold down a piece of flapping tin. Not always a glamorous job, but important nonetheless.