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 71 board a rubber boat, land on a beach, shoot live rounds at targets, and run through a muddy field to rescue a downed soldier while Hueys flashed overhead, Apocalypse Now style. FX and Foley cut to match. This is reality TV? Yes. Who knew? The arsenal ran deep—a .50 cal, every modern military automatic, Kyle's sniper rifle, a lot of guns. It's one of the few times reality and feature work truly merged for me. And the iZotope ANR-B I mentioned earlier saved the day again, this time on the command-center tent scenes with Gen. Clark, where the lighting fans were a problem that magic box solved. Curtis provided the production audio for Fear Factor, Wipeout, Stars, and many others I mixed. The Other: Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience As we headed into a Christmas break, a beautiful PBS feature documentary arrived: Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience. It earned an Academy Award nomination and won the whole sound team Emmys—my second. We used the same approach for this that we did for all the reality shows. Wipeout and American Gladiators Wipeout was a tough show. Its "Wipeout Zone" had impact-machine sounds—like the punching machine landing blows every two seconds for the first 20 minutes. And we cut every machine, every blow, every footstep. American Gladiators was a similar story, this time in 5.1, with ball cannons bouncing off the surrounds. Director J. Rupert Thompson wanted to see what the boundaries of surround reality were—it was great fun. This one was climbing rigging, body impacts, and crowds. By 2009, I had a weekly show on ABC, CBS, and NBC—three a week. Reality Today We'll end here with these shows, but my company, Mixers Post Sound, recently completed Survivor's 50th season—and I'm still in the chair, 800-plus consecutive episodes and counting. We've done many, many other shows, but I think the longevity of a show speaks to the effectiveness of sound done right—everything done right—and I play my part to the best of my ability. Regardless of genre, great sound moves audiences and we can all be proud of our contributions. A contestant on Wipeout being pummeled.