Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1529890
C I N E M A A U D I O S O C I E T Y. O R G 43 My Evolution in Documentary Sound b y K e i t h H o d n e C A S It was an awkward, ill-timed joke, "Well, now we know why other cultures bow!" I said this to Jason Hehir, director of HBO's The Last Dance, as we said our goodbyes after coming up with our "shelter in place" plan. We needed to complete eight more episodes of the series. I was in the studio mixing Episode 102 in early 2020, and we all felt what was coming. The Last Dance was a super large-scale audio production—especially in terms of documentary work—with major players possessing vastly conflicting opinions on mixes. It was the biggest mix I had ever been on, and now we were taking it to our homes. Working on documentaries most of my life, I loved the challenge. Don't get me wrong, it was very tough, but it was so rewarding. In the case of The Last Dance, we had all the pieces of the puzzle that you would typically see in a union scripted production for audio. For me, it wasn't always like this. But where Netflix, HBO, Apple+, and other streamers have taken from the in-person theatrical feature sector, they have given to epic docuseries and feature- length documentary projects. But how the heck did I get here? After graduating, I started working at an NYC post house, where most of our work was reality TV and documentaries. I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time for the reality TV boom. Prior to that, my earliest long- format jobs were working on multiple A&E Biography projects, featuring