Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/830490
36 S P R I N G 2 0 1 7 C A S Q U A R T E R L Y MEET THE WINNERS TELEVISION NONFICTION, VARIETY, MUSIC SERIES OR SPECIALS GREASE LIVE! by Matt Foglia CAS J. MARK KING: PRODUCTION MIXER So, how did you first get into this crazy world of sound? In college, I was a singer in a Christian rock band. We (the band) recorded a demo and I became curious and interested about the recording process. The recording engineer and I became friends and I started hanging around his place when- ever he had a session. Lack of motivation caused me to flunk out of college after my sophomore year. Late that following summer, I was contacted by one of my friends from the afore- mentioned Christian rock band. He had left that band and had decided to take a year off from college to tour with another Christian singing group. He told me that the group was a week away from leaving on tour and they did not have a soundman. Would I be interested? Needless to say, I jumped at the chance. Within a week, I had learned the PA system and set list and off we went. We toured for 10 months all across the US and western Canada. Were you living in California? No. I'm originally from Nyack, New York, a little town north of NYC. While on tour, we had performed at a church in Long Beach, California. El Dorado Park Community Church used to televise its morning services and, while the church had its own video cameras and control room, the audio was lacking in both equipment and competent operators (mixers). The pastor asked me if I would consider moving to California and becoming their full-time soundman. Again, I jumped at the opportunity. So in 1974, when the tour ended, I moved to California and became their soundman for the next seven years. Were you focusing on work relative to the church or were you trying to pursue other engineering jobs? I was taking anything and everything I could. The church music director, Don Marsh, was a well-established composer/ arranger and he would often have record- ing sessions to which he would invite me. One of the studios he frequented was Martinsound Studios in Alhambra, California. It was a new studio owned by a young Joe Martinson. (The readers may recognize that Joe is the inventor of the Flying Faders Automation system.) Don eventually asked me to engineer a vocal overdub session at Martinsound. I had no second engineer and no other help. I simply bluffed my way through the session, but Joe had taken notice of the job I had done and began hiring me as a freelancer to engineer demos and to second on bigger sessions. So that got you into the music studio, but how did you end up getting into the non-worship broadcast world? Chris Donovan, the Director of the Television Ministry at El Dorado Park Community Church, was an actual direc- tor and technical director in the secular world. He had his own remote video truck and gave me several opportunities to work with him on commercial gigs and industrials. He then began recommending me to other television producers and studios. You also worked on the re-recording side, correct? Yes. I worked at Complete Post as a post mixer. I was always freelance and did post on nights and weekends while working production sound on sitcoms during the week. I wanted to do post work in order to better myself as a production mixer so that my deliverables would be better. You know, we always heard the phrase, "We'll fix it in post." I wanted to understand what could or couldn't, or would or wouldn't be fixed in post so that Grease Live! audio crew Grease Live! audio crew The bump out VO of Act 3 in Grease Live! announces: "Eight weeks of blocking scenes, creating characters, memorizing lines, rehearsing it again and again—until, finally, it all comes together." Grease Live! combined the theatrical and film elements of the iconic musical and re-created them for a live broadcast. Working on a live program that is so heav- ily scripted requires significant choreography—and not just from the cast. I was able to chat with production mixer J. Mark King, music mixer Biff Dawes, playback & SFX mixer Eric Johnston, and Pro Tools playback music mixer Pablo Munguia about their work.