Tina Kakadelis
CBS’ Survivor is one of the longest-running television programs in the United States. Fifty seasons, over 700 episodes, and 751 castaways have competed to outwit, outplay, and outlast the person next to them. It’s a series that has evolved over the years. The gameplay has changed, the competitors have adapted, and the location varies. Few characteristics of the show have stayed the same, but host Jeff Probst is one of the mainstays of the series. Another is Terrance Dwyer, re-recording mixer. He’s been part of the show since the very beginning and has worked on over 750 consecutive episodes. Now in his 50th season, Dwyer reflects on the journey of Survivor, as well as those of other reality TV series that have come along the way.
I want to start with the path you took to arrive at sound remixing. Does that come from an audiophile or a film interest?
Terrance Dwyer: In the very beginning, for a dozen years, I owned a music recording studio. Television just sort of fell into my lap. The company I’d been doing work with said, hey, you know something about sound and we need somebody who knows how to set up a room.
Next thing I know, I’m working on a show called U.S. Customs Classified. Stephen J. Cannell was the host back in ’95. That’s where it all began. I was like, I love this. They pay on time. [laughs]
It’s very different to go from a controlled room of a studio to something like Survivor. What was that transition like?
The difference between TV mixing and music mixing is really technical. You have to meet a Quality and Assurance standard every time you submit a show. There are a lot of protocols that don’t exist in music. Music is pretty freeform in a way. You don’t really have anybody telling you that’s too loud. Nobody tells you when you’re mixing a piece of music, how loud the singer needs to be.
In a TV show, you need to hear the dialogue, right? As simple as that sounds, that actually is a very difficult thing to do week to week to week. You have a very narrow margin to meet that dialogue specification. Incredibly narrow margin actually. It’s kind of a bummer that it’s like that, because TV standards really limit the dynamic range of TV shows.
If you’re mixing feature films, you don’t have the same kind of dynamic limitation. You certainly have a much greater dynamic range. You can have a 20- to 30-DB dynamic range. Whereas, in television, some of these reality shows, you’re looking at a five-decibel dynamic range. You can only make dialogue so loud, which means you can only make music so much louder. It was a very different world in that sense.
Has streaming changed the technical side of things at all? Any wiggle room?
No, it hasn’t really. It should, and I suspect that somewhere down the road some of these things will change. What streaming did was change the listener’s side of things. All of our shows are mixed in 5.1 surround. The funny thing is, I don’t know how many people actually use it. I don’t know how many people I know who actually have a real 5.1 setup in their living room.
When you’re mixing stereo, it doesn’t really matter. Before about 2009, it was pretty much all stereo, at least for what we were doing. If you’re listening on the computer, a phone, or whatever, the stereo file will play.
When you get into 5.1, you have this more dynamic experience that doesn’t really translate well to other mediums. You don’t know what people downstream are doing to mix those speakers together. You never know what anybody is listening to. It’s very tricky. People are listening on little teeny weeny speakers. I’m in the studio with a $50,000? speaker set-up and I’m the last guy who’s ever going to hear that this way.
It’s speculated that about 50% of the people are listening either on computers or cell phones. Certain things will disappear. I can watch some of these mixes that we’ve done and I know there’s Foley all the way through the show. There’s a lot of detail on those shows and I listen to them and go, I don’t hear footsteps. I don’t hear a thing here, because that frequency is just too stripped out. They’re not being reproduced at the same level. Other frequencies are being reproduced and they’re all top and bottom. There’s no middle, and a lot of this stuff lives in the middle.
You kind of have to factor that in and begin to think that way. If you get too subtle, you start getting into the margins, cutting that too thin. You’re wasting your time, because it’s going to get lost on television. It’s going to get lost on the little things people listen on these days, so don’t make it so subtle that we can barely hear it here.
You’ve been with Survivor since day one. It’s impressive to be with a show from day one and be on Season 50 now. I want to focus on what an episode of Survivor sounds like when it comes to you.
When we first started doing Survivor, there was no definition as to what a reality show was. I had previously done I Survived a Disaster and all these odd shows. If there were car crashes, we’d build car crashes as much as we could in the time given. Even when the clients didn’t particularly want us to do it or didn’t care if we did it, we were doing it anyway because we just thought that’s what’s going to sell the show, whether they realize it or not, that’s important to the show.
When Survivor came in, I was already well into this sort of idea of authenticity. I decided to treat it like a feature film. I was going to do Foley, seamless backgrounds, and all kinds of detail work on it, because I thought it’s a reality show, you should hear everything. If you’re watching a movie, you can get away with it. You can strip it clean or you can add more for the dramatic effect.
Reality shows are different. They have to be authentic. If you go beyond a certain point, it becomes a cartoon very quickly. Those big John Wick punches that they have, if you put that into an impact on a show like Survivor or Fear Factor, it doesn’t work. You have to be very, very, very conscious of the authenticity, because you’ll hear it immediately. People always say, if you can hear our work, we’ve screwed up.
To me, it’s often harder to build a big scene in a reality show than it is in a film. It’s really not so much the budget and time as much as it is the skills involved. We’ve spent a lot of years training editors, developing techniques and ways of doing this that work specifically for this genre of TV. It wouldn’t work elsewhere.
Our editors have to work so fast. We brought in film editors many times over the years, and they just threw their hands up and said you can’t do it. And then, you know, sometimes they were right. We did not succeed. Sometimes it didn’t work.
How quick is the turnaround for you all?
Survivor’s turnaround…I mix it for about two-and-a-half days now. The editorial is about five days from beginning to end. That’s for dialogue and effects. It’s a fast turnaround. It used to be a lot faster. I used to do a Fear Factor on Monday and Tuesday and a Survivor on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.
Is it the dialogue that’s more time consuming than the effects?
The hardest part, the longest part, of the mix is the dialogue. I hate to use the term, producers hate when I mention this, but the Franken-bites can be difficult sometimes. It simply comes from the fact that they’re cutting down a 24-hour filming episode into 42 minutes to start, and now 1.5-hour episodes. That’s a lot of cutting and it’s a lot of time collapsing. There’s a lot of moving from scenario to scenario. They were here, but now they’re over there. They start the conversation in the jungle, they finish it on the beach.
Friends of mine do shows like The Bachelor, where they actually have interiors and they’re cutting between the exteriors, and I’m just thinking, better you than me [laughs].
There are a lot of tools that make it so much easier to do. I rewrite those files in a way to make them sound uniform, as if they were all done in the same place. We don’t have to go that far, generally speaking. Across Survivor, it’s a question of surf noise for the most part. The jungles are fairly quiet there. Fiji’s been pretty forgiving. Some of the earlier locations were horrible because of cicadas and all kinds of other noises. Cicadas were the worst. For the first ten years, the cicadas were a nightmare. It probably took us three or four years to figure out a way to get rid of the cicadas.
I imagine the longevity of Survivor has taught you so much that can be translated to other reality shows. Is there something you cracked early on in your Survivor tenure that has made life in the other jobs so much easier?
It kind of goes back to what I was saying about authenticity. It’s knowing what you can do and what you can’t do. Knowing what will work and what won’t work. That’s the difference between my many reality shows and feature films. In a feature world, they might want to hear five different examples of something they want. They have an editor sitting next to the console ready to try new things. We don’t have time for that. We have to figure out what the client wants and try to hit that mark every week. Otherwise, we’re going to be there all night.
I haven’t been in there all night in 15 years. Believe me, I put in plenty of them. Not so much on Survivor. On Fear Factor there were some long nights, but I loved the guy who was behind that, Rupert Thompson. I’m not sure he even got paid to be there. I think he was just doing it because he dug doing it, but he loves audio and we loved him. It was just a matter of, we were going to take every one of those things as far as we could take them.
We did some pretty awesome shows, I think. You really have to hone in on what can get done in the period of time you have. Over the years, you kind of figure it out. You frustrate enough editors, you have enough people throw up their hands, they’ll walk out on you. You kind of go, okay, let’s not do that again.
Of all the unscripted TV shows you’ve worked on, which one do you think you would either have the most fun on or that you could win?
I was out in Fiji last summer, and I tried one of the challenges from Survivor for about ten seconds and realized it was a lot higher than it looked. My operations manager, Lauren Alvarado, went out to Fiji with me, and she did a couple of the stunts and she actually finished one. Those things are hard.
I think I’d rather be on Fear Factor, but I don’t like heights either. Come to think of it, I’m good where I am.
