Janiger's sound cart—based around a Sound Devices 788 recorder and CL-9 mix controller—is simple and uncluttered. |
Production sound mixer Robert Janiger has done it all, ranging from working on low-budget cult classics like Surf Nazis Must Die to the gothic horror of Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula and seemingly everything in between. We caught up with Janiger recently and chatted about the life and role of an independent location sound pro.
CineSoundPro: How did you get started as a sound mixer?
Janiger: I began in the 1980s, mostly doing low-budget, nonunion stuff, with gems like Surf Nazis Must Die. I had a mono Nagra 4.2 and my own gear, so I could get the rental for that as well and make a decent living. I didn't even own any radio mics for the first couple years. If we needed them, we would rent them.
CineSoundPro: What kind of mics were you using back then?
Janiger: I was fortunate to get good advice when I bought my gear, with a Neumann KMR 82 long shotgun and a Schoeps CCM 41 [small-diaphragm supercardioid condenser]. I still use those mics today. Later, I purchased a Sennheiser MKH 816. In terms of lavaliers, I've pretty much standardized on the Sanken COS-11s. I've got a slew of those. They're pretty bulletproof, sound good and are easy to hide. I also have a couple Sennheiser MKH-2s and a couple waterproof Countrymans that I use when near water. Microphones are the backbone of the whole recording process, and if you don't have good microphones, it won't matter how good the rest of your rig is.
CineSoundPro: What projects have you been doing lately?
Janiger: In Los Angeles, a lot of the feature-film work has gone away, which mandated a move to the TV world. In the past few years, I did a series for TNT called Raising the Bar; I did the pilot and most of the first season of Lie to Me and then the first season of Hawaii Five-O. That was a difficult job, with a lot of fast-paced action and a furious working pace. The tropics are a great place to vacation, but not such a good place for sound-mixer work, with the rain, trade winds, high humidity and occasional boiling heat.
CineSoundPro: Did you have problems working with condenser mics there?
Janiger: I knew the Schoeps wouldn't be very useful in that high humidity, having worked on Speed 2 and some other projects in the Caribbean. So I used my Sennheiser MKH 70 and MKH 50 mics [which employ a humidity-resistant RF condenser design] and my Neumann long shotgun in a zeppelin with lots of fur on it.
CineSoundPro: When did you move to digital recording?
Janiger: It was back in 1990, during the production of Coppola's Dracula. Sony had just come out with its portable DAT machine, so I ran that and a stereo Nagra. I did a couple more movies with the DAT and Nagra and then used just the HHB PortaDAT machines. Around 2005, I went to a Mac laptop-based system using Gallery's Metacorder software for my iso tracks and ran my mixed tracks into a Sound Devices 704—all from a Cooper Sound analog mixer. Just recently, I moved to a Sound Devices 788 and CL-9 mix controller. I'm enjoying that, and it's working very well. I used it throughout Hawaii Five-O—it takes 30 pounds off the cart, operation is fast, and I don't have to run a second recorder. I've gotten great comments from postproduction on the audio quality, and it held up in a tough tropical environment. When I need to run off and grab a wild track or something simple, I'll go straight into a [Sound Devices] 702. It's easy and a wonderful tool.
CineSoundPro: In these days of multiple iso tracks, how important is the location mix?
Janiger: I've always worked hard on my mixes, and the mix tracks are what everybody—including executives, the networks and the post crew—hears on dailies. And even though the post-sound people will pull various track elements from the isos, a lot of judgment calls are made on those mix tracks—making them very important.
CineSoundPro: What was your most challenging sound gig?
Janiger: It was probably Mike Figgis' [2000] feature Timecode, which was shot in real time, in a single take, with four video cameras shooting simultaneously for routing to a quad split screen. We had 23 actors on radio mics, and the entire movie was ad-libbed. There was a basic outline laying out when action would happen. The actual dialogue was not written, and there was no video feed to me, so I was working completely blind and having to guess at mixing the 23 actors during each live 93-minute take. It was kind of an extension of the groundbreaking work that Jim Webb had pioneered along with Jac Cashin for Robert Altman.
CineSoundPro: Seems almost like Hitchcock's Rope.
Janiger: It really was. Figgis said he got the idea because there were digital video cameras back then that were capable of a 93-minute load. He had also worked on an earlier project with video assist that displayed multiple cameras running at the same time, and those factors were his impetus for the project. We shot the movie 15 times in 12 days. They ended up using the very last take we shot.
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