Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1538125
SEE PAGE 46 25 F A L L Q 3 I S S U E F E A T U R E CineMontage caught up with some of the LA-based team to find out how they worked together to create such an immer- sive, emotional, authentic experience for the audience. CineMontage: Tell us about how your relationship with John Wells helped you land this job? Strand: John and I have worked togeth- er on and off for about eight years now. The first series we worked on was "Animal Kingdom." We also worked on "Shameless" together and we worked on "Emperor of Ocean Park." Co-executive producer Terri Murphy — John's post producer and my friend — invited me to join "The Pitt" and work on this with him. Having John ask for me specif ically is always a really, really nice boost. We are both connected to the same style of storytelling. "ER" came out when I was in college, when I was fully examining and watching television and movies with the notion that it would be my career, so it's interesting that John's show was such a big part of that and my growth. And then to finally come around and start working with him and some of those sensibili- ties, playing a part in creating it, has been great. Eifrig: I got involved with the show having worked with John and Terri previously on "Maid." P a r k e r : T h e f i r s t t h i n g I worked on under the John Wells umbrella was the pilot for "Rescue: HI-Surf [sic]." Terri Murphy brought me on to that and we worked well together. From there, Terri and I did "Mrs. Davis" together, then she brought me back for "Emperor of Ocean Park," and we continued to get along well. There's a sort of alignment of values with everyone on this team — for instance, what's our tolerance for noise versus our tolerance for ADR — and for Terri, that ended up being a big thing. One of the reasons we got along well is we're similarly calibrated that way. When "The Pitt" came up as a potential project, and with the sound opportunities she saw in that, she thought of me and brought me on board. Reinisch: I have worked with people in John's orbit, but I never worked with him before this show. I had interviewed with him for another show he was doing, and during that interview, "The Pitt" came up. That's when Terri reached out to me. She and I have some mutual post-production acquaintances, and through interviews and then talking to Scott, I ended up on the show. CineMontage: The action in "The Pitt" feels chaotic at times, but I understand the prep for the show was quite meticulous? Strand: While some of our shooting is untraditional, it is not even close to chaotic. One of the great things about working at John Wells Productions — for John, Scott, [producer] Mike Hissrich, and Joe Sachs, who is the medical advisor on the show — is that those guys have done a lot of work together. They created a system for how to write the medical stuff effectively and get the actors on board with it before they show up on set. Because this setting is one huge space in which everybody has to be there all the time, and because all these things are going on in the background, everything has to be meticulously planned. When they start shooting, in order to get everybody aligned so the extras will be falling in the same place and all the behavioral action will still be matching, rather than do more traditional pickups during the middle of scenes, they started doing full resets. The shooting ap- proach was designed for the fastest way to make this work in order to get a show that is this kinetic, this energetic, and that many people feel is more authentic and less "TV." It isn't shot the same way TV is, so there is more energy to it. My assistant editor, Emily Merriman, was critical in building the temp sound- scape to define what the show would feel like in the pilot episode. Specifical- ly, when Robby enters the hospital for the first time and removes his headset to reveal the chaos of the waiting area, and then transitions into the ER space for the first time, it was a particularly important sound transition that needed to quickly establish the never-ending workload that waits just outside the doors. Parker: What Mark's talking about aided our sound department immensely because instead of camera setup C starting with a line halfway through a scene, we've got full scene takes for almost all scenes and setups. So pulling takes to avoid ADR, pulling a clean syllable here, a clean word here, meant I had a lot more options to work with. CineMontage: Can you talk about the COVID flashbacks from a sound- and picture-editing perspective? S t r a n d : T h e s e f l a s h b a c k s p u s h themselves forward and confront Robby throughout the day, so editorially speaking, that's what we're doing. We're trying to make it a sudden departure from those soundscapes and sound bases, which feel very real and of that moment; suddenly, we're pushed into this other space where a lot of the atmosphere, tone, and mood defining that departure have been created P H OT O : WA R N E R B R O S . COST OF CARE: Noah Wyle and Krystel McNeil in "The Pitt."