by Beau Baker CAS
So, let’s get this out of the way right now. Yes, working twenty-one seasons on the same TV series is hitting the jackpot, the lotto, the blue ribbon at the Holy Wow Cow County Fair. Especially if the TV show in question happens to be filming in your hometown, and really really especially lucky if you are able to be in your home to watch your kids grow up. And that decision to “do TV” instead of pursuing the “feature” career, was simple: If I wanted to live in LA, I’ll be “doing TV.”
And this decision was a fairly easy one to make. After booming three features in a row, for just about a year, all out of town, my then 3-year-old daughter said this upon my return: “Are you going to stay in mommy’s house now?”
Friends, that’s called a guilt grenade, and it went off in my face. I was therefore ready: physically, emotionally, and spiritually to “move up” to Production Mixer, and that simple sentence was the Universe shouting: DO TV, STAY IN LA WITH YOUR FAMILY.
So, I did.
In early 2005, I was mixing a 13-episode series called The Inside. From day one, the crew was looking for the next gig, and I heard about a new TV show called Grey’s Anatomy. The first season of twelve episodes had been shot, and the show premiered as a Sunday-night mid-season replacement that March. Obviously, the show became a sensation, and I heard they were “crewing up” for the second season. I pulled out all the stops to get an interview, and for some reason (maybe they were tired of interviewing sound folk?), I was offered the job before I drove a block from the studio.
What makes this a story to be told is that, in these twenty-one years, the technology and culture of filming a TV series has evolved and I moved along with gear upgrades, producer regime changes, a pandemic, the collapse of the network TV series paradigm, several strikes, and the ever-growing frantic desire to “shoot quick.”
To begin this rambling saga, 2005: I had a HHB Portadat and a Sound Devices 744. I turned in the CF card and the DVD-RAM, plus the DAT “backup” tape. The 744 gave me two ISO tracks, as well as the L=0vU/R=-10vU. I had six Lectrosonics SMV transmitters, Schoeps mics, Sennheiser 416 mics, and a Mackie 1402 mixing panel. Maybe eight of the old crystal Comteks. I used the Schoeps mics indoors, the 416’s outdoors. I used the Wideband Low Field Venue for wireless receivers, then added the Venue rack mount receiver, still in use today. I still had a quad box of the 187 Lectrosonic VHF receivers and four of the transmitters. They worked, though the quad box had to be on the edge of the frame for reception. Good news: They did not get ruined.
History lesson: The DAT (digital audio tape) system was a small cassette with varying lengths of a very thin magnetic tape. It recorded two tracks of digital audio, a generational leap from the analog reel-to-reel system that the venerable Nagra recorders delivered. The DAT recorders were not without their quirks. The digital tape recorded in a linear fashion, so transferring the audio was a “real time” affair: a five-minute take took five minutes to transfer. The cassettes were fragile, and prone to mechanical failure after storage. Still, IT WAS DIGITAL.
At that time, there were two cameras, the Arricam that used these long reels of plastic with holes in it called “film.” The B camera was typically used as a Steadicam, rarely were there the “wide and tight” nightmare setups. With a three-perf pulldown, a 1,000-foot camera mag runs about fourteen minutes, and there was hardly ever a take that ran over five. We only put body mics on actors for un-boomable shots, usually the Steadicam walk and talks down numerous corridors. The camera video tap was transmitted over a system that had rock-steady reception, but with a three-second delay. I had an audio delay box for the video village Comtek send, and a second Comtek transmitter for “live” sound. This way, the sound was in sync with the delayed video at the village. The delay would annoy the actors if they could hear a delayed Comtek “leak” on set; on occasion, the wrong Comtek would be grabbed and the special effects people would get embarrassed when their dialog cue to open an elevator door came three seconds too late!
This particular video system was abandoned by the second season, and the camera video was transmitted over a UHF TV channel. The picture was crappy but at least it was “live.” The second season of Grey’s was twenty-eight episodes long: Four episodes were held over from the first season, since the reveal that McDreamy had a wife (“So, you’re the woman that’s been screwing my husband!”) was a great cliffhanger for season one. We shot twenty-four episodes. The Veterans Hospital in Northridge had built a new shiny outpatient building constructed after the Northridge earthquake, and we used as much of it as we could. The iconic catwalk with the vast window wall was a trademark Grey’s Anatomy setup. It had a cavernous interior, open to three floors, the bottom floor housed the outpatient clinic, open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and the place sounded like Union Station, or, on some days, like the Chicago Board of Trade. We could not interfere with the VA (Veterans Administration) business, so the catwalk scenes always had a, um, “stadium” feel to the dialog.
The hours were long, we worked on weekends occasionally. The scripts were sometimes more than sixty pages for a 42-minute show. At the beginning, there were seven principal actors, and a lot of elaborate scenes, and extremely accurate operating (OR) scenes. Often the medical terminology in the OR dialog wasn’t vetted yet, so, the actors, with masks on their faces would utter filler dialog like this:
DOCTOR 1:
He’s about to medical! I may need to remove the medical—
DOCTOR 2:
No! If you medical the medical, he might medical! Clamp the medical while I stitch his medical!
One of the early season’s DVD boxed sets included a behind-the-scenes vignette of the “medical medical” scenes. It’s quite amusing to watch the actors emote, “HE’S GONNA MEDICAL!”
By the fourth season, I upgraded to a Sound Devices 788, with the DVD-RAM burner connected to it. The HHB Portadat was still the backup recorder. The DVD-RAM was a non-cartridge disc with 4.7 gigabytes of storage. The 788 could record in real time to the internal hard drive, the CF card, and the external DVD-RAM drive. We did a “film break” at lunch and of course, at wrap. There were still paper sound reports, though with multiple tracks, I graduated to the full sheet reports so I had enough room for track notes. My mix now included Boom ISO tracks and some wireless tracks.
I upgraded to the Mackie 1642VLC mixing panel. The Mackie board had the ability to pull audio out of the insert jacks, so I could now record six iso tracks with the two mix tracks. A Velcro strip along the bottom of the channel faders allowed me to make track name stickers that could be moved around. And by season five, the interns became residents and five more actors were cast as interns. A couple of new attending doctors were cast, so the scenes were more and more populated. Another innovation: We began “doubling up” episodes, another crew would start the next episode while we finished the last one. So, countless extra sound crews came in to do these double ups. This helped with shorter days, and of course, a shorter shooting season, and I can’t list all the names, but my eternal thanks go out to all of them.
This was the happy setup for the next couple of seasons. Then the world changed. In 2007, the Writers Guild struck on November 1. Grey’s was one of the first shows to shut down and one of the last shows to resume production. That season, we shot seventeen episodes.
Netflix premiered House of Cards in 2013. Before that, HBO had original programming, along with a few others, but episodic TV was still raking in the ratings. Since Grey’s then aired on Sunday nights, it became the must-watch water cooler show for the Monday morning at work recap. To give you an idea of how ratings have changed, the Grey’s episode that began right at the end of the Super Bowl that aired on ABC, more than thirty million people hung around and watched. (I’m sure the cold opening that presented a fantasy scene with the four leading ladies naked in a steamy shower might have helped.) When Netflix premiered House of Cards, the world of streaming took off, and with the rise of smartphones and iPads, sitting in front of a TV on the night the show aired became increasingly irrelevant. So the vintage Nielsen ratings became less than an accurate way to determine how programs were watched. But Grey’s was now streaming past seasons on Netflix and every year, a new batch of young viewers had to start from the beginning. As of late, Grey’s is still in the top five streaming shows, crazy, but true.
To create the energy of a busy Seattle hospital, there would be around fifty background artists a day, pulling gurneys, IV racks, etc. We did elaborate shots, say, of a camera in an ambulance, dialog inside, while it pulled into the Emergency Entrance, the breezeway that had the big elephant doors to the stage dressed to resemble the entrance to the ER. The patients would be off-loaded, the EMT’s would describe the patients’ ailments, and the camera would follow the doctors and actors into the ER and usually into a trauma room where the scene would continue.
There were also lots of walk and talks down corridors. The early seasons depicted the series stars as intern doctors, the five interns following the chief resident into patient rooms where they would describe the patients’ condition. Sometimes there would be ten or more actors in the room, including the patient, their families, and all the doctors.
The main challenge to these scenes were the real medical devices running, including respirators, X-ray machines with video displays (and interior fans). Sometimes the windows would have rain falling outside.
A typical episode would be a 9- or 10-day schedule, working out to about 6-8 pages a day, depending. Remember that the patients had to be hooked up to the IV’s, and other devices, there could be blood spurting, lots of prosthetic makeup to touch up and reset for the next angle or take. This was and still is very time-consuming.
The OR scenes were very detailed with real bone saws, respirators, video screens, and actors wearing headlights with fans. The saving grace, of course, was that they were wearing masks, so most scenes we did wild tracks of all the dialog without the machines running. Wild tracks of the machinery, too.
Grey’s Anatomy was probably the last show to abandon film cameras and move to electronic cameras. This didn’t happen until season eleven in 2014. Alexa cameras replaced the film cameras. And with that, another thing became history: the “rollout.” When a film magazine ran empty, the take-up reel would spin with a TWACKA TWACKA, and even the most determined director would have to yell cut. Here’s my wish to the Alexa people: Could you install a small speaker on your cameras, and when the memory card is full, it could play the TWACKA TWACKA again? Is that too much to ask? When the Alexa cameras arrived, I retired the Schoeps mics and began using the Sennheiser MKH 50’s on the booms, both inside and outside. The old Schoeps were becoming more susceptible to interference from the Alexa camera-mounted transmitters.
Somewhere around that time, the DAT format finally died. And by died, I mean there were simply no more functional DAT machines, and the “double up” mixers were struggling to find one that worked. The “backup” DAT was replaced with the CF cards from the 744, so I was turning in BOTH the CF card from the 788 and the 744.
Also, the paper sound report sheets were getting harder to find, and various software options for creating electronic sound reports began to be available. I started with Sound Report Writer, and still use it, though I believe support for it has ended. It also generates a PDF file, which the post people found more accessible than the CSV files generated by the 788. The other casualty besides DAT was the DVD-RAM. The blank discs were increasingly rare. The post house had to move to a different archival protocol, since they no longer had access to hard media. The CF cards were sent to the post house, copied, and returned to be reformatted and used again. I installed an external CF card reader/writer, with the 788’s firewire output. Now I could turn in three CF cards, one from the 744, two from the 788.
The original crystal Comteks were getting long in the tooth. When I sent one in for repair, the note came back, “THIS WAS MANUFACTURED IN 1978!” So I replaced them with the 216 MHz models. As we have all discovered, no matter how many Comteks you carry, there always seems to be demand for more. I have fifteen now. My request for the next generation of IFB receivers is to contain a GPS chip so they can be tracked. Or the capability to be geo-fenced: They let out a screech if they are accidentally taken home … just a thought… I upgraded to a 664, with the 788 as backup. I replaced the Mackie panel with the Sound Devices CL-12. I now had the ability to create a separate private Comtek feed for the sound crew.
Then the world changed again.
When COVID hit, we were in the middle of episode seventeen, in the middle of a scene. Mid-day on March 13, 2020, we were sent home and that episode was the last that aired that season.
In a typical year, we would start a new season beginning late July or early August. With COVID, we didn’t begin until September, after several weeks of Zoom meetings to figure out a safe filming protocol. The COVID restrictions brought along major changes to the way we worked. Firstly, they added a third camera on a telescoping crane. All the Camera Assistants were separated from their cameras and worked the focus remotely, away from the cast peering at small video monitors. The third camera made it necessary to wire all the actors all of the time, since the third camera made booming a scene nearly impossible.
The storyline that season involved COVID in the lives of Grey-Sloan Memorial Hospital. The actor doctors had to wear a PAPR mask: PAPR=powered air purified repirators. The entire head was covered with an inflated mask, the front was full-face visible clear plastic. On the belt was a battery-driven air pump, about as loud as a hair dryer. The air came up the back through a wide tube, and spilled out over the actor’s forehead. If the blower was turned off, the clear front would fog up almost immediately. To mic these actors, it was determined that “ear set” mics were the only option. There simply was no place to hide a lav in the mask where it would not be seen or hit hard by the incoming air. It became necessary for the actors to wear earwigs to hear each other. The ear-set mics had to be taped to the inside of the masks since they shifted a lot if hung over the ear, making matching difficult. Surprisingly, this setup worked, as the isolated mics inside the masks so close to the actors’ mouths, eliminated most of the fan noise. The only time the fan blowers were a big problem was if the masked doctors were around a patient’s bed, who wasn’t wearing a mask. We did what we could with turning off mask fans if possible, but with three cameras and three different angles, this was also challenging.
When the COVID season brought the third camera, I was able to bring in an extra utility person. They were sequestered with the cast in a separate area and were wired there. We still use three cameras and I still have an additional utility. Three timecode slates, last-minute camera moves, a very large contingent of background artists that may need to be foot foamed, all of the Comtek’s, all of the mic’ing of actors all the time continues to keep the entire four-person sound crew busy.
Following the COVID season, the storyline moved on, though on the set, protocols stayed. The actors would block a scene, and the crew watched the marking rehearsal from a ring-style “surveillance” camera off a remote monitor. The second team would rehearse with the cameras and when the cast returned, filming began without a rehearsal. My collection of body mic transmitters had by now grown to fourteen, and I upgraded to the Sound Devices Scorpio recorder and the CL-16. I am using that to this day, and it’s a great tool with easy track naming and assigning. (Since COVID protocols forbade the distribution of physical media off the studio lot, the SD cards are now uploaded to a hard drive with the camera media and that hard drive is sent to the post house.) I also have one Lectrosonics DSQD receiver for the two digital boom mic transmitters; I am still using most of the SMV transmitters, but replacing them slowly to all digital transmitters. The last few years has seen major changes in other departments. The set lighting is now mostly networked LED instruments. It is a bit surreal to see a SLT walking in with a lighting instrument already lit!
And so the beat goes on. Due to last year’s strikes, season twenty is only ten episodes long. There are about six people from the season two crew left, and, as one put it, “I intend to ride this pony till it dies, then carry it the rest of the way.”
