Sound & Picture - Issue 5, 2016

U n s c r i p t e d eachepisode.” O’Leary’s other objective for dialogue was to have smooth tran- sitions between each character’s
lines, and from character to charac-
ter. Working solely with the ambi-
ent tracks recorded by contestants,
O’Leary says, “I take pieces of am-
bient track from somewhere in the
show, even from different episodes,
and cut those in between dialogue
tracks so the sound slides from
one scene to the next. But I don’t
enhance the ambience in any way.
It’s one of those things where we
just want to keep the show as raw
as possible to make everybody feel
what the contestants are feeling.”
Contestants do come face to
face with predatory wildlife, like
wolves and bears, but O’Leary in-
sists that he doesn’t add sound ef-
fects to build drama. What you hear
is what the contestants are actually
experiencing. If there’s rustling in
the bushes outside of a contestant’s
tent, or wolves howling in the dis-
tance, O’Leary explains, “All the
sound for that is what was there.
You don’t need to enhance it because
the drama is already there. We do
add some sounds, though, but only
on the graphics. There are no en-
hancements sound-wise within the
scene.”