Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546135
C I N E M A A U D I O S O C I E T Y. O R G 65 Then the dam broke. I landed at a small, ambitious post house called Wild Woods and mixed dozens of these pre- reality shows, including I Survived a Disaster, When Disaster Strikes, World's Scariest Police Chases, World's Nastiest Neighbors, In the Line of Fire, Doomsday Plan. Disaster everywhere. I felt like a first responder. There were so many of them, the genre got its own parody, When Cars Attack, which I also mixed and was narrated by Richard Belzer. There was music in the mix, too: Dick Clark's Your Big Break, in 1999, may have been the first of the music- competition shows, and it handed me my first run at a box just out of the gate—the Antares ATR-1 Auto-Tune. I took to the action because I loved building and mixing effects, and because I came to it with a conviction carried over from film: A proper soundtrack has a full plate; dialogue, effects, Foley, backgrounds, and music. All, not some. That's the classic approach, and it's how I've worked ever since. I don't think we ever thought of these as "reality" shows. We mixed features. Clients were forever surprised by how much detail we layered into shows with no budget, but they liked the result. The shows got better, and we got popular. Those programs came alive in the details we cut, even when the producers couldn't see the value. No one reading this needs convincing—you live in those details. But this is my reality sound story—35 years and some 1,400 episodes in. I'll highlight a few that defined the reality genre. The hardest part of reality sound is always squaring ambition with the budgets and turnarounds reality allows. The early shows were filler and priced like it. But better shows were coming, and so were EP's who understood what good sound was worth to an audience. Survivor: The Foundation I was mixing a series called Worst Case Scenario—scored by David Vanacore—for an EP named Craig Piligian at around the same time a special called Dave Barlia: Extreme Stuntman, hosted by an unknown named Jeff Probst. When we wrapped Worst Case, Piligian said, "I've got something good for you coming up. See you later." A few months later, that something walked back through the door carrying Piligian, Probst, and Vanacore in a new package. Wild Woods CEO Derek Luff told me Craig had been in with a new show called Survivor—with my name on it.