Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1545202
48 S U M M E R 2 0 2 6 I C A S Q U A R T E R L Y Once Matt exits the limo, there's a long continuous take where he has a brief encounter with a red-carpet influencer, witnesses a Zoë Kravitz television interview, and a walk-and- talk with the late, great Catherine O'Hara in one shot. What results is a continuous two-and-a-half-minute shot with multiple wired actors, one live mic, hundreds of extras, and 360-degree camera work. Once the episode moves inside to the Golden Globes ceremony, the episode is "contained" but keeps a rocket ship pace. Robinson notes, "All the actors are wired, as many as 12 at a time. We had a practical mic on stage, but I didn't want to depend on it, so everyone up there are on wires too." Considering the physicality and varied vocal range of the performers, sometimes whispering and sometimes shouting, to get such well-balanced clean dialogue tracks is an amazing feat by Buck and his team. The episode becomes a symphony of frenetic camera movement and performance by the cast taking the tension to remarkable heights. In the end, Sal Saperstein, Matt's junior executive, gets all the credit Matt felt he deserved. Unthanked and dejected, Matt takes the long walk back to the limousine he arrived in. One of the great challenges for the production team on all the episodes of The Studio was RF integrity. "Production granted us a few RF scout days. Nick Allen went out to the various locations with Lectrosonics Wireless Designer [a spectrum frequency scanner that identifies RF in a given area] to take a look at the environment and get a fairly accurate picture of what we were going to be looking at when we got there. Even so, the RF spectrum in Los Angeles can be unforgiving. There were locations where we would be inside of a house for a scene and then we would move outside and do a scan, and it would be a 'big black wall' on the RF scan [meaning no clean frequencies]. Sometimes it took every trick we could pull to get two clean channels. With continuous shots and no coverage to fall back on, it was occasionally nerve-racking. In the end, we did everything we could to ensure success, and it all worked out." The costumes of the Golden Globes episode also presented a challenge. Possibly the toughest challenge a production sound team—and subsequently the dialogue mixer—will face are actors wearing ball gowns and tuxedos. Sequin dresses and starched shirts with tapered coats and snug polyester ties can be a nightmare when you're dependent on the wires buried under all of that to capture usable dialogue. Buck took the costume issue in stride. "Washing a tuxedo shirt can do a world of good to soften it up. The show's costume department was very accommodating, and utilities Rachel Schroder and Kelsey Nie did a great job with the wires." The Studio's dialogue and music re-recording mixer was Lindsey Alvarez CAS. She is a three-time Emmy winner, one of which was for The Studio. Her credits include Only Murders in the Building, Daisy Jones & The Six, and Predator: Killer of Killers. She refers to her duties as creating a convincing audio environment of the Golden Globes ceremony from scratch, complete with music in the background. The first brushstroke on the blank canvas is the dialogue. "All the actors are wired, of course, and the boom may catch elements of the dialogue. Though it can also be helpful to record the sound of the room when the boom isn't able to get in close due to the movement of the camera." Alvarez continues, "The big hurdle for dialogue re-recording mixers is making the lav sound natural. However, with Buck at the helm and my contribution of EQ and compression, we achieved a nice, warm sound." On the dub stage, Alvarez ensured that every line of overlapping speech, red-carpet chatter, and backstage whispers remained intelligible, often blending production