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Filed under: GentryMedia Sites •ProVideo •Market Served •Cinema •Sound in The Field •Mixing •Recording •

Martini 2.0

Not the author.

It never fails: everyone’s beat, the lead actor has finally gotten through that tongue-twisty sequence in the dialog without flubbing, and you’re about to lose your light. The director calls “Cut!” with more enthusiasm than you’ve heard all week, and everyone springs to their feet, invigorated by the prospect of impeding libation. The AD announces on walkie that it’s a wrap on today. Huzzahs all around!

And then you stand, dropping your cans on the cart, waving your arms. “Hold it, hold it,” you say to the AD, whose face has now deformed into a rictus of realization, since he or she knows what you’re about to say.

“We still need room tone” you croak, thus cementing your latent reputation as “Captain Buzzkill, Esq.” The crew groans, expelling air like a room full of leaky beach balls.

Yeah, it sucks. But it’s our responsibility to get it, in the moment, as close to the conditions of full picture takes as possible. It becomes invaluable in post.

The problem isn’t getting the tone itself. Once you’re locked up, it takes a grand total of 40 seconds (including the verbal slate) to complete. The issue is that we need to re-think the nomenclature.

Currently, “martini” means the last shot of the day. Once you’re cut with a circled take of the martini, you can go home. But it’s not the true end of the day until you get tone. So what I propose is this: the last picture shot of the day is the new “Abby Singer”; the last room tone of the day is the new “martini.”

When the AD calls out that “this is the Abby”, we’ll all know that it’s the last shot. When they say that it’s “the martini”, we will know that we’re, at most, one full minute from walking away. Then, saying wrap will be true in full, and there will be no more defusing of that last burst of energy we all need at the end of the day.

As mixers, we don’t like having to interrupt the impending wrap either. We want to power down and go home as much as anyone else, but we have a job to do, and we wouldn’t be professionals unless we continued to be diligent and tenacious. Rethinking the jargon could help mitigate the mood of the set, and keep the notion of room tone as de rigueur, rather than as a perceived inconvenience.

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