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The Sound of Justice

Jul 1, 2004 12:00 PM, By Blair Jackson

Mixing Real and Surreal on The Jury

Drama series production continues apace and may be on the rise again, thanks in part to the increasing importance of scheduling new programs during the normally fallow summer months. Fox, an apparent leader in that trend, introduced a number of new series last month, including The Jury, a dramatic series that examines violent crime cases from the jurors' perspectives. The program starts with the jury's deliberations, and then the crime unfolds as jurors reflect on trial testimony and the case itself, all depicted in flashbacks. The jurors argue the evidence, joke around, become annoyed with each other, form alliances; a lot goes on besides the facts of the case.

The program comes from executive producers Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana, the duo who brought us the gritty Homicide, The Beat, and Oz. The show is that rare series that is both shot and posted in the New York area, and veterans from past Levinson/Fontana productions serve on the technical crew. In a sense, this new series already had a well-oiled production machine in place.

“We all know each other,” says Frank Stettner, production sound mixer, “and there's a certain understanding about what needs to be done, not only from my point of view, but from the rest of the crew's point of view and from postproductions' point of view. Tom [Fontana] is really good at gathering people that understand each of these categories.

“On a lot of shows I've worked on, I might be here [in NY] in the field, and then post is usually in California. We don't really speak to them; we only hear from them if something's not right. Here, I know the supervising sound editor, Tony Pipitone. I know Grant Maxwell, the postproduction mixer. I know the producer, Irene Burns. It really is almost like a family.”

“We're in tune with each other,” confirms Maxwell, who works on a Neve DFC console at Manhattan's Digital Cinema, around the corner from its parent company, Sync Sound, which has posted most of the Levinson/Fontana shows. “There's a level of consistency you get to that makes everything run more smoothly. Like, at this point, we all know what Tom likes and doesn't like, so we venture away from the things we know he isn't going to go for. It saves us all a lot of time from trying things that ultimately won't work.”

Each episode is shot and posted in about two weeks: eight days of production, six to seven of post. The bulk of the interiors — the jury room and court scenes — are shot in Bayonne, N.J., on sets built in warehouses on a decommissioned army base, the Military Ocean Terminal, where the last two seasons of Oz were also shot. Of the eight-day shoot, Stettner says that typically three days will be in the jury room, two and a half in the courtroom, and another two to three in the field — often Manhattan, Newark, or other locales in northern New Jersey — shooting the flashbacks.

“It's almost like there are two styles on the show,” Stettner says. “There's what goes on in present time, which has one look and feel, and then anything that happened in the past has another total look and feel in terms of the style, and that helps the audience understand where they are, because it does jump around in time. The deliberation of a case by a jury is always present time. But then some juror will say, ‘Yes, but you remember when the medical examiner testified,’ and you're suddenly in the courtroom during the trial, or we might see a snippet of what happened during the crime.”

But what happens in the jury room is the backbone of the show, for both sound and picture: a two-camera structure and the convention of 12 people around a table speaking. “The system we've worked out [for the production sound] is we bring an extra boom person in that day,” Stettner explains. “So we're running three booms, and using the sports analogy, we use a zone defense. We divide the table into three so we can cover the area. Each boom operator only memorizes four or five people's dialogue; each of us has his own system of keeping track of it. Then, in addition to the boom coverage, there might be a couple of characters who are wired [with RF mics] if they're going to walk around, or something.”

Booms are Sennheiser 416s; the RF mics are by Audio Ltd. Stettner uses a Nagra IV-S recorder and mixes his mic inputs on a Cooper 208 8-channel mixer. Although many film and TV mixers have switched to the digital Deva 4-track recorder in recent years, Stettner says, “I'm quite happy with my analog Nagra. I guess I'm from the old school, and this comes from working in television — in film you have a little more time to do splits and fancier things because they're going to have a month or a month and a half of sound editing and a month of mixing. Here, Tony [Pipitone's] going to play out the tracks in a couple of days, and they're going to mix in a day and a half. So you keep it simple — you give them a fat mono dialogue track they can manipulate, and then Grant can spend his time putting in the music and sound effects and getting the overall feeling he wants.”

Perhaps more challenging than the jury scenes are the field-shot crime recreations. “Those of us who work in New York are used to crazier things and having a little less control,” Stettner say, chuckling, “so we pride ourselves in saying, ‘We're going to try to give [the post mixer] something you can use in almost any circumstance. Occasionally you do get skunked, and you have to do a little ADR, but I'd say what you will hear on the show, maybe 96 or 97 percent is production track.”

The elements of the show that require sound design are the domain of supervising sound editor Tony Pipitone, who is also the primary effects designer, and mixer Grant Maxwell.

“When we're in the courtroom and the jury room, we do it pretty straight,” Pipitone says. “It's dialogue-driven, and it's very basic. But in this show there are also a lot of flashbacks, and the direction was to not necessarily be literal with them, but to have some fun with them. So we get to do some creative sound work there.

“I should also say that one of the first directives we got was to try to not use sounds we've used before in Oz and Homicide. We have huge libraries we developed for those over the years. So while we do use them, we always alter the sounds. I have a MIDI rig that I use with Reason and a keyboard, so I'll load some of those old sounds into a sampler and screw around with them, change them around so it's not readily apparent that we'd used it before. And of course now we're also making new sounds for each episode. We also do a complete Foley on each episode [at Sync Sound] with [Foley editor] Dow McKeever, who's really good.”

Sound design creativity includes the show's composers, Blue Man Group. This is the New York-based percussion performance troupe's first stab at scoring, but they've been in Levinson's and Fontana's sights for a number of years. “Barry and Tom had talked to Blue Man about Homicide a number of years ago,” says the BMG's general manager, Seth Fried. “I got the impression that at that time they weren't ready to try it, but a lot has changed since then.” Indeed, BMG is now an international phenomenon, and their adventurous approach to percussion — creating many of their own instruments — can be taught to other players and translated to TV scoring.

“Barry had directed the pilot,” says The Jury's music supervisor Chris Tergesen, “and he temp-scored it with something that had very rhythmic vibe, so when the show got picked up, we were looking for composers in that vein, and we demoed quite a few. For whatever reason, we didn't feel like we were getting what we wanted. And then someone brought up the Blue Man Group idea. Since the show is shot and posted in New York, some people thought the composer should be from New York, too, so that was a consideration. Part of Barry's original concept was that it be a rhythmic score because it's not an action show really; there's a lot of people sitting around, but you see some action in the flashbacks. So you need to bring some energy to it.”

According to the BMG's Fried, “Most of the scoring has been by the original founders of the group — Chris Wink, Matt Goldman, and Phil Stanton — along with some our musicians, like Chris Dyas and Larry Heinemann. We have our own studio in Alphabet City [on Manhattan's Lower East Side] that is a pretty huge performance space/recording studio. Our first two albums were made in that building as well.

“The process is we sit down, either in person or on the phone with [Chris Tergesen], and go over the specific cues, and then our guys camp out in the studio and record music and synch it up to the picture. It's all improvised, and it's all new for each episode. There are a few signature pieces that are used over and over, but they're writing, recording, and synching up all in the same day.”

“I get a copy of the [picture] lock,” Tergesen says, “they get a copy of the lock, and then we sit on the telephone long distance and talk about the cues; deciding where we might use music, talk about the length of each cue, the emotions we're trying to get to. Some of the episodes have had up to 20 pieces of music, some very short — five or eight seconds — others longer. They settled into the process almost immediately; it turned out to be very natural for them.

“We let them do what they do,” Tergesen adds. “I don't want to hire Blue Man and then make them score like somebody else. From the outset we let them do as much Blue Man as they can do, and my intention was if they missed here and there, we'd rethink it, but they've been doing such a great job. I think they were a little nervous at the front end because they thought, ‘Oh, people are always intrigued by the idea of the Blue Man, but then when they actually get us into a project, they want us to be something else.’ I think they had a bad taste in their mouth.”

The group delivers its self-engineered and self-produced music to mixer Grant Maxwell on 16 premixed tracks of Pro Tools sessions. “[That] is a lot less than the 80 or more tracks [per song] we sometimes use for our albums,” Fried says with a laugh.

Why 16 tracks? “For flexibility,” Tergesen says. “Sometimes, all [Maxwell] has to do is line them up. But by virtue of having them split out, if we run into a problem we couldn't predict — say with a sound effect that hasn't been put in, or some word that's whispered — he can grab a track or two and pull them out, or rearrange things so that everything fits better.”

It's certainly an unconventional score, heavy on propulsive rhythmic moments and light on traditional melodies. It also turns out, not surprisingly, that some of the BMG's more atmospheric music has some of the character and feeling of sound effects. “Sometimes it's hard to tell where an effect ends and the music begins,” Tony Pipitone says. “The Blue Man Group has given us a bunch of sounds that I'm allowed to use as I see fit, along with all the other [effects] I have. I also have some of their drum loops, so occasionally I'll make some Blue Man Group music cues in conjunction with the stuff I put in.”

Tom Fontana generally comes by on the last day of the mix, and he occasionally has some suggestions about the sound or music. Generally, though, he trusts his team to make the decisions, big or small.

“One of Tom's great gifts,” says Tergesen, “is that he'll hire somebody in a particular field whose work and talent and judgment he respects, and then pretty much let them do what they want. Obviously he'll look at it or listen to it, critique it, and if it's outside the parameters of what he wants, he'll try to bring it inside those parameters. But he's a guy who wants the people around him to do it the way they see it. And for that one reason everyone likes to work with him. It's also a reason why almost everything he works on is really good.”

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.