Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1491103
46 S P R I N G 2 0 2 3 I C A S Q U A R T E R L Y PREP AS PART OF PRODUCTION Technology, delivery mediums, genre, and other elements greatly affect how we approach a project. As a result, not all sound mixers are doing prep in the same way or as would have been a regular part of the job "back in the day." Pondering this, I reached out to some fellow production sound mixers to get their thoughts on "preparation as part of the production," and spent time with four. CAS Career Achievement recipient Jeff Wexler CAS is retired but spent most of his professional sound life working in film. Tod Maitland CAS has more than 100 credits, primarily in film. Phillip W. Palmer CAS spends most of his sound time working on high-level television programming. And Scott Farr CAS, with more than 150 credits, runs the gamut of television projects from scripted to run-and- gun to reality to documentary, seeing a different landscape every month. The more we talked, the more I could see that prep really is production. Inevitably, we wound up telling production war stories. While these chats may be better suited taking place with a comfortable beverage in hand, I've compiled some of the advice and takeaways from this really cool crew of production mixers. Some of the contrasts are stunning. It starts with the script… Jeff Wexler CAS: I try and read the script first, just as I would read a novel or short story, just to get a sense of what the end product should be. There were some jobs that I rejected because I just wasn't interested in being involved with the story at all. But for the most part, I would never turn things down just because it wasn't my politics or my feelings about society or whatever. Next, I would go into the interview and they would ask me questions about certain scenes they had already decided might be trouble. "How would you do that thing…" In the early days, I would try to give them some sort of coherent answer to not lose the job. Later on, when I would get those questions, I'd had enough experience where I almost always had a really good answer because there wasn't any scene they were proposing where I hadn't already done something similar. Then, if I actually got the job, I would start to break down the script for sound, highlighting every area where I might have to have a discussion with the art department, music department, or director to see what they have in mind for a particular scene and that would let me know who I needed to speak with. I would try to have those conversations as early as possible. Sometimes I would have conversations with the picture editor, who was usually on the job, but rarely with the post sound people because they usually hadn't been hired yet. Later on in my career, I wound up working on movies where we had a lot of the same people in post. There is some value in that, where everybody is already thinking about that one scene that might be a problem if we do it this way as opposed to that way. I was talking with some younger mixers and even some veteran sound mixers who ended up doing mostly episodic TV, which is different kind of work from feature films. [However], they are somewhat merging now, which is not necessarily a good thing, as the direction feature films are going is toward episodic TV. I asked one person about their script breakdown and they asked, "What's a script breakdown?" because they'd never done it. Another said, "I read it and I count the number of people in each scene, because I want to make sure I have enough wireless." That's something I never did. In 46 years and 80 feature films, never. b y G . J o h n G a r r e t t C A S Jeff Wexler CAS