Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/681510
34 S P R I N G 2 0 1 6 C A S Q U A R T E R L Y I t was a delight to talk to the winners of the CAS Award for Television Series – Half-Hour, Modern Family "Connection Lost." The entire episode was filmed primarily on iPhones and the story was told using only visuals from iPads, computer screens, and iPhones. It was inventive and so much fun. The winners, Stephen Tibbo CAS for production mixing, Dean Okrand CAS and Brian Harman CAS for re-recording mixing, and David Michael Torres for Foley mixing, let me in on how they approached this challenging show. (Of note, due to scheduling issues, we were unable to conduct an interview with Brian Harman.) Stephen Tibbo CAS: Production Mixer Congratulations on your win! Thank you very much. The show's been a kind of surreal dream for all of us. Modern Family was kind of lightning in a bottle and gave us all of these challenges. I was really happy with the way "Connection Lost" came out. When I read the script, I didn't know how it would come out and I thought it would create a great challenge on set, which it did. I bet it did! Well, you know, we shot the episode in a day and a half. That meant we were shooting four sets simultaneously. So Claire was in front of a green screen (she was supposed to be at the airport), she starts talking to Phil and then Alex pops in (at the Dunphy household)—all four sets were on the same stage. We were able to set up in the middle of the stage with the director and the whole technical crew. Then we had the Mitch/ Cam/Lilly set and also Jay, Gloria, Manny, and Luke were on the other set. Steve Levitan said he really wanted to keep it live for all the actors, so I said, "That's interesting … OK! But you are going to have to get behind me. I'm going to ask for a lot of gear and a really large crew." The first day, we had seven boom operators and another person doing IFB. Each actor needed to hear everybody else over an earwig, but not be listening to themselves because of feedback. So there were four different feeds there plus a feed to everybody else, camera operators, the director, ADs, every- body else that needed to listen. Then my boom operators were on a private line with me and the IFB. We did wire everybody, just in case, because you never know in comedy if you're going to get some kind of ad lib that's going to be really funny, and you have to capture it! The earwigs were Phonak invisitys. Thank God for Robert Anzalone over at Location Sound who really helped me coor- dinate all those frequencies. He tested all the equipment and gave me what frequencies to put things on. And it worked— that was the big thing. Another thing was Steve Levitan being in the control area and needing to be able to talk to the actors. So I had him going through the board with the script supervisor so that they each had their own handhelds so they could talk to the actors anytime they wanted. I set that up on a little mute group so I could un-mute it whenever I saw them talking. That helped so he didn't have to go out to each set—he could flip open the mic and start talking. For mics, I use Schoeps CMIT5U blue shotguns primarily and mixer-wise for most episodes I'm on a Yamaha O1v 96i. For this episode, I took advantage of the Behringer ADAT analog to digital converter, which gave me eight additional ins and outs, and for recorders, I used a Zaxcom Deva 5 and a Sound Devices 788T, both of which I was feeding analog for the mix and digital AES in's for all kinds of iso's and so forth. And then I had an additional Zaxcom Nomad for additional iso's. I had a lot going on! The only thing that we didn't do on those first few days was the second unit shoot with Dylan on the street, spinning the sign. Steven Morrow did that second unit, as it couldn't be done live. Everything was done on the booms, for the most part. The only thing off the lav was when Haley comes in the background behind Phil, so there were two feeds. It was really complicated—you can talk to Dean (Okrand) about that— what perspective do you mix to? I think he did a great job blending the two. David (Michael Torres), too, with the Foley work added a lot—all the mouse clicks and the keyboard stuff—that was all him! I do want to mention who helped me out. All of them are awesome and I'm so lucky to have really good boom operators on this episode in particular. Because I had so many things going on, I didn't want to have to worry about "Is this person going to be on axis or not?" My normal number one boom operator is Srdjan "Serge" Popovic. William Munroe is on second boom, then I regularly have Peter Hansen, a third boom operator on big days. And then Ken Strain, Corey Woods, John Sheridan, John Hayes, and Noel Espinosa. And I'm going to give you 10 names because they were not consecutive days and not everyone could come back. There was Brian Whittle and Devendra Cleary CAS who handled the IFBs. They are all very talented and I couldn't have done it without them. TELEVISION SERIES HALFHOUR MODERN FAMILY "Connection Lost" by Mary Jo Lang CAS From left: Presenters Phillip Palmer and Mo Collins, Penny Coghlan (supervising sound editor), David Michael Torres, Brian R. Harman CAS, Dean Okrand CAS, Srdjan "Serge" Popovic (boom operator), Stephen A. Tibbo CAS, and William Munroe (second boom operator) Photo: ©Ana Gibert 2016