Glenn Berkovitz

Though the same fundamentals of recording location sound apply toboth feature films and television, the pace of work on seriestelevision is faster and the budgets are smaller.

“Anybody who works TV will tell you it’s definitely avery long day,” comments veteran TV production sound mixer GlennBerkovitz. “The exception is to have something under 12 hours perday.” Berkovitz, who did production sound last year for thepopular series Crossing Jordan, and whose other credits includework on such series as Freakylinks, Resurrection Blvd., Clueless,Chicago Hope, Lois and Clark and Dream On, as well asvarious TV movies and feature films including Zero Effect, Freejack,Young Guns 2 and Robocop 2, explains that “usuallythere will be a template for a show where you’ll shoot eight daysper one-hour episode. A lot of times it will be five days studio andthree days on location.

In episodic television, the chain of command is usually somewhatdifferent from the way it is in feature films, because directors aregenerally hired guns for each episode, and the overall look, feel andsound of the show has been established over previous episodes - oftenin the pilot. “Quite often, the individual episode’sdirector is gone after shooting,” Berkovitz says, “and themachine of the show operates without a director once it gets intopostproduction. Editors cut the basic picture of the show per the stylethey’ve refined. Then the postproduction department takes over:If the sound supervisor, who usually works for the sound house that iscontracted to the show, thinks a scene is dicey from a sound point ofview, or there are scenes that they think they can make crisper, theywill spot those lines for ADR.

“It varies from series to series how much ADR is usually done,which usually happens about a week-and-a-half after you wrap anepisode. They get an ADR list together and then they walk in theactors. The guest players usually don’t mind [often, they getanother day’s pay], but the featured actors who are working everyday usually aren’t anxious to go over to the looping stage afterwork or during lunch. On Crossing Jordan, they started outlooping a lot, but by the end of the season the actors were less eagerto accommodate; they would loop for technical fixes, but not forperformance. In features they will sometimes loop a line forperformance, but in TV, if you don’t get the performance oncamera, you usually don’t get the opportunity to massage it inpostproduction.”

Berkovitz, who got his start in the business in live sound andlighting for rock ’n’ roll, was a studio engineer before hemoved into audio post. He transitioned into production sound full-timein the mid-’80s, and has also worked on a pair of reality series:MTV’s Real World (Los Angeles), and Making theBand, which traced the creation of the popular boy-band O-Town.This is grueling work in a different way: Generally, each of theprincipals in a reality series will have a two-person crew assigned tohim or her - camera and sound - who unobtrusively follow the“actors” around on a ten-hour shift, stopping when theactor stops, moving when the actor moves. If there are four principalsin a room together, there might also be four crews out of sight, witheach sound person responsible for different coverage of the moment.

“Usually, you stick a wireless mic on each person - actually,they often put it on themselves; it becomes second nature: They wake upin the morning and put on a mic. And then you run a boom aswell,” Berkovitz says. “When I worked on Real World,it was occasionally difficult when you’d have several crews in aroom together, but it’s easier now that they’ve got somevery good frequency-agile audio gear. Each actor gets their ownfrequency, and each sound person will have three or four receivers ontheir little walk-around sound rigs, and you dial it in: You say,‘I’ve got actor B,’ and you touch B on your receiverand suddenly you’ve got their audio. It really worked well [onMaking the Band], and that’s now become the norm.

“I understand that all of Survivor is on booms, so thesound folks must get in as close as possible, gauge what their cameraand potentially what any other camera is seeing, focus on the actionbut also know the camera might leave the action for something else.You’ve got to stay with the meat of the dialog, and then when thecamera moves, get a coherent sentence before the audio leaves - so itcan be edited with decent continuity - and then follow the camera.It’s fun, but it’s also hard. You have to think and youhave to be physical.”

For his regular production sound work, Berkovitz’s gear ofchoice includes the Deva, with a Nagra 1/4-inch as a backup, an 8-inputCooper mixer, Sanken CS-3 short shotgun mics and pair of Schoeps micshe uses for stereo: “I do as much stereo work as I can; sometimesit’s just splitting channels for foreground and background, butif there’s a street scene and it kicks into somethingthat’s not dialog - I don’t really run stereo dialog -where I can get away with putting a stereo pair up there, Iwill.”

Of the Deva he says, “On the three series we’ve donewith Deva, that choice was always driven by post, and I thinkit’s an excellent way to go. The machine itself could be furtherrefined - it’s clunky. Physically, the box sits on the cart oddlyand is somewhat fragile in its connectors. The ergonomics are notgreat, but it records very, very well and very reliably. They’reconstantly updating their software, which is nice. The postproductionguys like it because they can load the sound files of our day’swork, and they don’t have to do it in real time, and they can goback and check something immediately without having to shuttle througha tape. That’s why we used it on CrossingJordan.”