It’s a sunny day in early June in Agoura Hills outside of L.A. and production sound mixer Iain Morgan is hard at work on a new TV reality show titled, The Greatest American Dog, a show that is all about…surprise, surprise: dogs. Morgan is a veteran of reality shows, having also done 30 Days and The Apprentice, and he says that, “While every show’s different, the main challenge is always trying to get really clean audio. You’re basically running-and-gunning with a boom and a wireless and hopefully, you can get to wire the subjects in time. You’re constantly moving around; you never know what’s going to happen next; you don’t know when you might need to boom. Basically, with reality TV you’ve got to be ready for anything.”

 Today’s shoot is a perfect example. Shot entirely on location at a spacious estate, the show has been filming for several weeks and Morgan is on a six-day-a-week intense schedule. “We have various crews working on the show every day ─ over a month or so ─ and getting good location audio is really a dance that you have to have with your camera operator,” he explains. “That relationship is very important, as you have to really communicate with each other about the story and where it’s going. You always have to try and think ahead and second-guess what might happen next.”

 Morgan is using a variety of audio gear, including a Wendt X5 five-channel mixer, “along with various Sennheiser wireless mics,” he says. “I’m also using some Lectrosonics 411 wireless mics for the camera hops, and a Sennheiser 416 boom mic, which is pretty standard. I really like the Wendt mixer, as the five channels let you listen to four people wired for wireless mics at the same time, and then you can also listen to the boom on the fifth channel. And the reason why we use this mixer is because it’s very lightweight – just over three pounds with batteries, it’s very durable, and it gives you five channels, so it’s ideal for this sort of job. We also use some shotguns and some other gear, depending on what’s needed that day.”

 All the audio goes directly to the camera, he adds. “We send two channels of the Lectrosonics wireless mics to the Panasonic SDX 900 camera and it’s all recorded there; that’s your main sound. And then nearly all the audio is backed up on a disk every couple of hours ─ just in case we have an audio problem.”

 “This show is actually a little easier than a show like The Apprentice,” he goes on. “Here, we’re based at this one location, while on The Apprentice and 30 Days we were running around from location to location, which is always tough.” Morgan has also worked on some documentary/reality-style shoots, “where again, you’re trying to follow the actual story as it unfolds. I’ve done some shoots following the Border Patrol down at San Ysidro, Calif. and that’s very much a case of, ‘Okay, whatever happens, happens.’ So it’s challenging work, but I really love it and that element of surprise.”

Lectrosonics
www.lectrosonics.com

Panasonic
www.panasonic.com/broadcast

Sennheiser
www.sennheiser.com

Wendt
www.wendtinc.net