Top soundman Gene Martin, who has worked on audio for many commercials, including big spots for Lexus, B.F. Goodrich and the military, has recently been working as the production mixer on the new Spike TV show The Factory. “It’s about four guys who work in a factory, and it’s all improv and on the fly,” he reports. So far, Martin has done six episodes using two JVC HD 110 cameras, which is shot on stage in Santa Clarita, as well as on location.

 “The big challenge is that as it’s all unscripted, you don’t know what’s going to happen next,” he explains, “and in addition to the four main characters, the show features up to eight characters. They all have to be mic’d and they can also send them into a scene without me knowing. So I rely on two Marshall monitors, side-by-side [because] without those, I’d be dead. Nothing ever looks the same and it’s almost impossible to boom with so many characters. We also moved around quite a bit on location, with a lot of walking shots on a long road.”

Martin used eight Sanken COS 11s along with six Countrymen B6s. “We relied mainly on the Senkens and then used the B6 if it was sheer clothing, as it has a smaller wire,” he adds. For his mixing board he used a Cooper 208, “always using all eight channels for every scene. We recorded everything onto a Deva V Zaxcom unit.” Because the JVC HD cameras don’t have a time code function, Martin also sent a mix track to each camera using the Zaxcom stereo wireless.

Martin began the show using a Lectrosonics Venue system. “It’s a rack-mounted unit but after a couple of weeks, we realized we had to be able to go mobile off our cart and into a car or onto a golf cart, which is a trademark thing in the show,” he notes. “So we changed over to the Lectrosonics Six-Pack, which is a mobile unit that holds six individual receivers and combines them to work off the same power. That set up makes it far easier to do mobile work.” For transmitters, Martin used Lectrosonics’ 400 hybrid series. “We had six of those, and then we also had four Lectrosonics SM series transmitters,” he says. “It’s basically the same system as the 400 but the SM series is much smaller pack for the actors to wear.”

 “The big difference between doing an HD show and film is that I’m able to record it onto tape,” he says, “but as far as while we’re shooting, we still have to slate everything, as the JVC cameras can’t accept a time code. Theoretically, if I hadn’t sent a track to each camera, they’re still syncing it as if it was film. So if they need to do anything in post, they’re still doing it the old-fashioned way.”