Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546135
70 FA L L 2 0 2 6 I C A S Q U A R T E R L Y 170 or so episodes. Again, I never missed a mix—and I don't think anyone inside the show doubts how much its sound did to move the series forward. Action needs big sound. As with Survivor, we were blessed with great composers, and again with a great friend of audio post, director J. Rupert Thompson. A believer. Every one of these high-energy shows runs into the same wall: television's narrow dynamic range. Fear Factor Seasons 1–6 were analog broadcast, and getting the mix to land the same everywhere is one of the hardest things we do. Those broadcast limiters could be brutal, but as every Beatles fan knows, heavy compression isn't necessarily bad. Embrace it. So I emulated the Optimod "wall" the networks used and "played" into it for reference until I heard what I wanted. I also ran the music stems through a Neve Series 54 console I kept around, with a touch of top and bottom added. We mixed Fear Factor Monday and Tuesday and Survivor Wednesday through Friday, with Survivor airing the following Thursday. That's a reality schedule, and down the road it only intensified. Those Rogan-era Fear Factors still put a smile on my face. Is There a Line You Shouldn't Cross? There's a boundary in reality I don't cross. Suspension of disbelief is generous in a feature. John Wick's punches can be as big as you like because it's make-believe. We know they don't sound like that but we love it! Reality gets no such grace. The instant a sound is too big, it tips its hand and reads as fake. Maybe I'm crazy, but it's something I pay attention to. And that makes for a very delicate FX mix. Stars Earn Stripes A short-lived Dick Wolf/Mark Burnett series, Stars Earn Stripes, may have been the most elaborate reality show ever attempted—director J. Rupert Thompson again, with Fear Factor alum and showrunner David Hurwitz. It was the first of the special-ops-meets-celebrity shows, featuring Chris Kyle, the real "American Sniper," and a host of other Special Forces operators, and narrated by Gen. Wesley Clark. The production mixer, Curtis Rohm, went where few reality production mixers go: second unit audio. He spent a day with the armorer, handling and firing guns, and built an amazing weapons library for the show. One sequence featured live fire. The cast had to swim to and