Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1525020
26 PRODUCTION SOUND & VIDEO – Fall 2024 dialog inside, while it pulled into the Emergency Entrance, the breezeway that had the big elephant doors to the stage dressed to resemble the entrance to the ER. The patients would be off- loaded, the EMT's would describe the patients' ailments, and the camera would follow the doctors and actors into the ER and usually into a trauma room where the scene would continue. There were also lots of walk and talks down corridors. The early seasons depicted the series stars as intern doctors, the five interns following the chief resident into patient rooms where they would describe the patients' condition. Sometimes there would be ten or more actors in the room, including the patient, their families, and all the doctors. The main challenge to these scenes were the real medical devices running, including respirators, X-ray machines with video displays (and interior fans). Sometimes the windows would have rain falling outside. A typical episode would be a 9- or 10-day schedule, working out to about 6-8 pages a day, depending. Remember that the patients had to be hooked up to the IV's, and other devices, there could be blood spurting, lots of prosthetic makeup to touch up and reset for the next angle or take. This was and still is very time-consuming. The OR scenes were very detailed with real bone saws, respirators, video screens, and actors wearing headlights with fans. The saving grace, of course, was that they were wearing masks, so most scenes we did wild tracks of all the dialog without the machines running. Wild tracks of the machinery, too. Grey's Anatomy was probably the last show to abandon film cameras and move to electronic cameras. This didn't happen until season eleven in 2014. Alexa cameras replaced the film cameras. And with that, another thing became history: the "rollout." When a film magazine ran empty, the take-up reel would spin with a TWACKA TWACKA, and even the most determined director would have to yell cut. Here's my wish to the Alexa people: Could you install a small speaker on your cameras, and when the memory card is full, it could play the TWACKA TWACKA again? Is that too much to ask? When the Alexa cameras arrived, I retired the Schoeps mics and began using the Sennheiser MKH 50's on the booms, both inside and outside. The old Schoeps were becoming more susceptible to interference from the Alexa camera-mounted transmitters. Somewhere around that time, the DAT format finally died. And by died, I mean there were simply no more functional DAT machines, and the "double up" mixers were struggling to find one that worked. The "backup" DAT was replaced with the