Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546135
66 FA L L 2 0 2 6 I C A S Q U A R T E R L Y Everything the pre-reality years had taught me—that brutal schedules demand purpose-built workflows— suddenly had a stage worthy of it. Building the Reality Template It was obvious at first watch: This show was epic. Beautiful, alive, gorgeously shot, a score and a theme to match. And then there was Jeff Probst, pulling it all together. I argued that the location itself should play like a silent contestant—that the audience should feel the grit, the grime, and the splendor of the beach—and EP Craig Piligian agreed. I pitched the classic approach: Foley, effects, backgrounds. Not the ever-present whooshes- and-a-hit-here-and-there that passed for an effects job. It was an epic show. The sound should be equal to it. The show's execs agreed, and it became their directive. And so, the first of our action/adventure reality shows launched, with me in the mix chair. And I've been there ever since. But how do you pull off the show we'd imagined in a single week, ingest to review? What follows is the template that answered that. It began with Survivor, became company policy while I was the company's supervising re-recording mixer, and went on to shape the many seminal reality shows we mixed in those years. It's still how I work, 25 years later. The key was a streamlined editorial process. No mixer did everything, and no show changed hands week to week. All the reality series the company did had a dedicated mixer and a dedicated edit team. This was my policy, and the company adopted it as theirs. We needed dialogue editors who were fast, which meant the table had to be set for them before they ever sat down. Track management was its own art, and I wanted my editors editing, not sorting the 100-track OMF's of bedlam provided us. All of it depended on clean, constant communication between the production company and the dub stage. To the client: provide only what you want in the show. If we need more, we'll issue requests. It's worth saying why this was unusual. The custom of the era was to hand a mixer the OMF and a deadline—"16 hours to client review"—and let the mixer do everything. But it was terribly inefficient. There really weren't meaningful workflows for "reality" shows early on. Mixers didn't get what they needed from editorial, and editors didn't know what mixers wanted, so mixers quit trusting the handoff and did it all themselves—ingest, editorial, mix. We were cowboys. It tied up the most valuable real estate in the building— the mix stage—with work that didn't belong there and turned the highest-paid person in the room into a very expensive assistant. Rule: Use the mix stage for mixing. Rule: Mixers mix. Editors edit. So, the process starts with the mixer sitting down with the client to understand the client and their goals, as I had done with many shows. Not the owner or the machine room manager. In doing this, I was amazed at how little many clients asked of us. It could have ended there with "Okay, that's great, we'll clean up your temp and give it back to you," as some would. But we had a trusted standard with action shows, and if we wanted second seasons, we knew the way to go. Or we thought we did. We weren't going to force our "approach" on anybody, but it was usually accepted, and it ultimately defined us. Survivor knew what it wanted, and it wasn't small ball. Rule: The mixer is team leader. Sound supervisors don't play that role in reality TV. Rule: Each re-recording mixer developed an editorial team that worked consistently with that show. Rule: New editors and mixers were required to sit with a "staff" mixer for half a day to understand what was expected. Experienced editors often did more or additional things than was needed, and green editors didn't do enough, so that half day settled it. It isn't batch fades, kids. Editing dialogue in noisy reality settings requires its own bag of tricks. New mixers also had to understand and embrace this philosophy. More often than not, the mixer sitting with the new talent was me, since I was supervising, so I had a good look at the incoming. Maintaining those teams was a constant slog. In reality TV, you're often working with newly minted talent, and once trained, they wander. And soon the editors we'd trained were all over town. But there was a lot of work, and everybody was happy.