Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546135
68 FA L L 2 0 2 6 I C A S Q U A R T E R L Y that could touch it: a CEDAR DNS 1000, which cost $10,000 in the year 2000. What reality house spends that? Wild Woods did. It tamed the surf but couldn't lay a finger on the cicadas, the crunching leaves, and the other gremlins of the jungle. Dialogue was, and is, every producer's focus. So, job one was taming the noise, and that began a seesaw battle with the elements. The cicadas were the worst of it— crews used to whack the trees with sticks to shut the buggers up—until Season 4, when I finally exterminated them. Pest control was my business. I demo every plugin, and I'd been fooling with a CEDAR music plugin called ReTouch, a $4,000 tool I had no intention of buying, when I found it could lift the cicadas out without touching the dialogue underneath. A notch filter couldn't do it usably. ReTouch nuked them. Our equipment sales rep saw me using it and mentioned it to Mark Ethier, who came by to see for himself—he'd just founded a company called iZotope, and this was up his alley. We talked through the noise-reduction strategies I was hoping for down the road, and he later sent me a rare ANR-B reduction box as a thank-you. For years, that box furthered our quest for quiet. It's still in my rack. On the operator's instinct: "A great reality sound operator becomes a story hunter— tracking activity beyond the frame, positioning microphones where the next moment is likely to happen. Success comes from being present before the story reveals itself." On the scale of it: "Survivor is one of the most demanding wireless environments in television—as many as 99 transmitters, a single challenge running more than 40 simultaneous sources, through saltwater, heat, rain, and remote jungle. We don't stop for weather. Some of the most important moments happen when conditions are at their worst." Scaling the Model: Fear Factor If Survivor proved the approach, Fear Factor tried to break it. It was an FX monster, and its director, J. Rupert Thompson, set the design bar on day one. Our very first episode—number seven—ran about 20 hours in review, almost all of it FX adds and rebuilds. We'd met our match. We went through a number of editors. A few left babbling, their minds broken by the pace and the density The DNS 1000, the ANR-B, and ReTouch became the chain that quieted the show. iZotope's many tools, such as Dialogue Isolate, came later—though still with their own issues when signal-to-noise is bad. So, we run NR in parallel and keep some of the original underneath to mask the artifacts. Reality Production Sound Another gift on Survivor was, and is, a large and deeply dedicated production sound team, headed for many years by Rian Engelen. Here, he provides some thoughts on reality from the production side. On what makes reality unique: "In reality, there are no second chances. Our job isn't just to record dialogue, but to anticipate where story is about to emerge and be ready before it does. We don't get a second take." iZotope's hardware noise suppressor, the ANR-B Production sound mixer Rian Engelen