Pro Techniques from Scrubs
By Randy Alberts
J.D. is torn over a secret he can't keep, and Turk's engagement ring is having
a bad effect on Carla. Turk and Todd aim to get even with Dr. Kelso
when he purposely parks his car in their pre-surgery hoops shoot-around
half court. A mysterious troubadour appears from nowhere to serenade
the nurses.
Sounds more like General Hospital than must-see comedy T.V., but that's actually an episode abstract from last season's NBC hit Scrubs. Confused? Don't be. The best situation comedies always deal with the grueling emotions and minutiae of life, though "sitcom" is far from an accurate categorization of this show.
"Most people assume this is a sitcom because it's a 30-minute show with comedy. Scrubs is what you call a half-hour single camera," notes Jan Stevens, the show's second season's weekly music composer. "This half-hour show requires more music than most one-hour dramas. For most sitcoms, the composer will record a bunch of bumpers, stings, and bridges and that's basically it for the season. But there's no laugh track or live audience on a single-camera show, so I'm punctuating all the jokes and doing all the scene transitions with music. A laugh track often takes the place of music, but this is a much classier way to go."
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The Scrubs gang |
Now That Was Funny!
Stevens, an experienced composer/musician who has written and produced
music for television, film, and commercials, including Saturday
Night Live, Charlie's Angels, Friends and Hot Wheels, gets to create more
music cues per week than many music composers do in an entire season.
Grapevine, a CBS show he worked on, is another example of a half-hour
single-camera show that doesn't lean on a laugh track. A feast for
any composer, especially one using Pro Tools.
"The show's editors are cutting on Avids and generating OMF files for me with the cues that have been used in the temp score," continues Stevens, who scores from 25 to 45 cues for this 22-minute show every week from his cabin studio and a tidy Pro Tools suite behind his Southern California home. "Those are given to Becca Borawski, the Scrubs music editor working with me, and she translates that into her Pro Tools system and I get a copy, as well. The producer didn't want to use any pop songs this week, for example, so we had a lot of drama to cover. Forty-one cues this week alone, that's two cues per minute and a lot for any show."
Moose Heads on the Wall
Scrubs is on NBC Thursdays at 8:30 PM and produced by Touchstone Television.
Music from Scrubs, an eclectic CD of songs used on the show by artists
such as Shawn Mullins, Guided by Voices, Butthole Surfers, and John
Cale, was just released. It kicks off with the show's theme, "Superman,"
by Lazlo Bane and ends appropriately with Stevens' "End Title Theme".
The latter is an instrumental amalgam drawing on the dynamically different
artistic styles on the disc, an easy task for the talented musician
in his comfy cabin studio that's just blocks from the beach.
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Jan Stevens in his cabin studio |
Stevens' rakish composing and recording setup includes one Apple G4 dual processor with lots of soft synths and effects plug-ins, including Access Virus and Digidesign Reverb One. After years of working in "sterile, uncomfortable studio environments," he's created a super comfy workspace with a decidedly non-studio vibe. Walls of synthesizers and samplers are now replaced by his Mac, one master keyboard controller, Pro Tools, and a unique moose head hanging on the wall.
"I also recently dumped my recording console and now view everything on two Apple Cinema displays," concludes Stevens, who also plans to replace his MIXplus with a Pro Tools|HD system soon. "With a few great mics and preamps and Pro Tools, I have all the firepower I need."
Pro Technique 1 —
Changing Trim's default compression/expansion
settings
Becca Borawski is a film and television editor with MICDI Productions
working on Scrubs and Watching
Ellie, an NBC show starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus
of Seinfeld fame. Before providing two tasty Pro Tools tips, she commented
on how she integrates with the two shows' composers.
"Both deliver their scores to me on CD as Pro Tools sessions," says Borawski between sound stage edits. "That saves me the time of having to record tracks in from digital tape like I used to have to do and guarantees the quality of recording since there is no transfer involved. On Scrubs I also receive an OMF file from the Avid editors with all the temp music they cut for each episode. Frequently Scrubs likes to keep their temp music and it's up to me to smooth out and finesse things. With my OMF Pro Tools session I can see exactly which files the producers used and where they made their edits."
This busy USC film school-graduated editor likes working with Serato's Pitch n' Time plug-in to make quick, subtle compression and expansion changes. She finds the tool valuable for cutting lip sync for playback scenes and offers this quick tip for working with it all the time.
"Serato gives us another tool to help better fit the words into the actor's and singer's lips. Just go to the Setups menu in Pro Tools and choose Preferences and select the Processing tab. Then at the bottom of the window you'll see the TC/E (time compression/expansion) window which defaults to Digidesign's TC/E plug-in. It's not bad, but this window is where you can select any plug-in you want to be in control of TC/E in this window."
Pro Technique 2 —
File naming conventions
Nothing slows down a high-paced Scrubs session more than having to wade
through dozens of random, poorly-named digital files. We've all heard
it at times from fellow engineers before but this time, thanks to Becca,
we're gonna get it. Here's her helpful description of how they typically
might name each element at MICDI, Scrubs and Watching Ellie:
"All of the Scrubs naming begins in our spotting session when Stevens and I each assign a cue number to each piece of music. A cue name might be S101/1M1, the 'S101' being Scrubs episode 101 and the '1M1' stands for Act 1, music cue #1. The next cue would be S101/1M2 and so on. In addition, we'll label the regions as to what instrument they are whether it's a full mix or not. So it might be called S101/1M1^Guitars, or S101/1M1^Final Mix."
Borawski says that Pro Tools saves her from having to hand write cue sheets thanks to Tape, a program from Wild Sync that generates dubbing logs from Pro Tools sessions. She also places a ^ between words because Tape uses that symbol to determine line breaks. If everything is labeled well in Pro Tools, then her cue sheets come out looking nice and readable without much effort.
"Since we use Tape, I can open my Pro Tools session in the program and print out personalized dubbing logs in half the time it used to take me," continues the helpful Borawski. "And I keep everything organized on my FireWire drive according to each episode, too. Every episode has it's own folder with all it's own files in the audio files folders and I never import straight from another show. For instance, if in Scrubs Episode 213 we reuse a cue from Episode 201, then I first copy the actual files from the 213 audio folder into the 201 folder then import them. This way every show can stand on it's own and I know I'll never lose a file."
"I also use the comment/note window when I want to make a comment in Pro Tools about an entire track. If I have an OMF or a guide track that I've imported from digital picture, for instance, I can write the date or any notes about what picture cut it was in the comment/note window. Or, if there's a song that I've cut multiple versions of and I have it on a number of tracks I'll use the comment windows so I know tracks 1-2 are my cut, 3-4 match the OMF, and so on."