Apr 1, 2004 12:00 PM, By Gary Eskow

From Theater to TV

Peter the Great, if you believe in the hereafter, is out there somewhere smiling down on Serge Ossorguine. A first-generation American and the owner of Serge Audio, a Manhattan-based post facility he opened several years ago, Ossorguine's lineage traces directly back to the Russian emperor.

Early in the last century, Ossorguine's grandfather was a wealthy landowner and the governor of a Russian province. During the 1917 Revolution, his family was dispossessed of property, and his parents later emigrated to the United States, settling in the riverside village of Nyack, N.Y.

The home of artists, composers and writers for many years (William Styron wrote Sophie's Choice while living there), Nyack was Ossorguine's home throughout high school, where he played guitar and ice hockey before graduating in 1975. After a few semesters at the local community college, he attended the University of Wisconsin, where he majored in theater and took a minor in electronic music, which proved instrumental in his career as a theatrical sound designer and later as a sound designer for commercial post applications.

“I studied electronic music with Dave Harris and met Butch Vig at Wisconsin,” says Ossorguine. “I was a pretty good musician, but I really loved sound design,” he says. “After college, I went through a period where I felt that designing sound for theater was the right place to be.”

In the early 1980s, it was one of the only places where consistent sound design work could be found in New York. Eventually, Ossorguine ended up at the Yale Repertory Theater working as an interpreter for a Russian director who was hired to direct a production there. In 1981, he applied to the technical design and production division of Yale and entered a three-year post-graduate program in sound.

The lure of the theater, coupled with that of California, led Ossorguine to head west and become the sound designer to the well-regarded regional theater company, South Coast Repertory. Eventually, he returned to New York, where he mixed live theater and created sound design on Broadway.

Some of Ossorguine's fondest theater memories come from working on 80 Days, a musical based on Around the World In 80 Days that featured songs written by Ray Davies. “That show was directed by Des Macanuff, who ended up directing Tommy on Broadway,” Ossorguine recalls. “We had an orchestra of about 14 players and about the same number of wireless mics. I had to keep track of this mix and have my sampler ready, because there was one moment in the show set in a gale storm out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and I had to trigger a thunder clap at just the right moment. One night, just as I was about to reach for the key, someone grabbed my arm and hit it instead of me…Ray!

“I always wished that I'd captured him one day during the rehearsal phase of that show,” he continues. “With just a guitar, Ray played through all of his songs to the cast, and it sounded great. But we didn't have a DAT machine on hand and the moment was gone.” Not lost, however, is the relationship Ossorguine formed with the actress who played Mrs. Verne, who is currently his wife and the mother of their two children.

“After 80 Days, I continued to get theater jobs, especially Off Broadway work,” he adds. “Those jobs were very important to my later work in audio post because I got to experiment a lot and extend my sound palette.” Making a successful business out of theatrical sound design work involves luck, timing and a business sense, says Ossorguine. “I went out on the road a lot and enjoyed the time I spent, but you can't make a long-term living out of that work. I was on tour with the first road company of Into the Woods and learned a lot about mixing. Michael Starobin's orchestrations were great, and I had to sweat to bring out all the nuances of them. We'd arrive in a new city with half-a-semi full of gear and I'd have 20 minutes to tune the room and learn the capabilities of the local crew I'd be working with. That part of the experience was great.

“But the way to make money in theatrical design work is to hook up with a show or shows that are going to last a while. The way the business works is that the sound designer gets a fee for creating all of the sound systems and recording field sounds if that's necessary. For a short period of time, you're communications central. When your work's done and the show's in production, you receive a weekly royalty payment. If you're lucky enough to have several shows running at the same time, you can make some good money.”

By the early 1990s, Ossorguine started a family and was looking for stable work that would keep him at home in New York. “I began looking for television work and got a job at ABC posting soaps,” he says. “I worked on All My Children and One Life to Live, and then 20/20, Prime Time Live and a lot of sports programs.”

In 1994, Ossorguine took a staff position at ABC and joined the Sound Effects Artists union. “That was really special because the union had been organized by Bob Prescott back in the days of The Three Stooges. Pictures show that Bob had a huge mustache and a great look. We even used some of the Foley props he created back in the days when soaps went out live.”

Several years later, ABC was bought by Disney, which led to an opportunity to de-unionize the shop. “It's really interesting how technology became involved in the move to de-unionize,” Ossorguine recalls. “Disney chose Pro Tools as their workstation of choice because it was classified in legal terms as a computer add-on, not a piece of dedicated audio hardware like a Fairlight. This legal distinction meant that they were able to hire non-union operators rather than NABET [National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians] people. I think ABC would have preferred to purchase Fairlight systems, but they were constrained from doing so for this reason.”

Ossorguine left ABC in 2000, though he continued to accept freelance assignments from time to time. “I knew I didn't have a future at ABC because of the de-unionization issue and for creative reasons. I was getting frustrated at what was required of me, which generally involved cutting and pasting library tracks. There was no commitment to creating an original sound for the network, and I felt that my strength was doing original work.”

Before leaving ABC, Ossorguine was awarded a pair of Emmy Awards: one in the sound effects category for his work on All My Children, and a second for co-mixing an episode of Prime Time Live.

Although he amassed equipment of his own for years, Ossorguine made a major decision before opening Serge Audio to the public. Well-aware that Pro Tools is the workstation of choice for many audio post professionals, he went in another direction — purchasing a Fairlight Dream Station.

“I find that the Dream Station is less mouse- and screen-intensive than Pro Tools, and it's a much faster system,” he explains. “I'm not knocking Pro Tools. There are things I miss about it, particularly the way it lets you drag and push things around, but if you don't grab and place things correctly, there are sync problems, whereas there are safeguards built into the Dream Station that keep time in place.

“I also prefer the control surface of the Dream Station over Pro Control — the throw of the faders is much more natural. In all fairness, I haven't mixed on the new Pro 24 and I've heard that it's better than the Pro Control.

“At the end of the day, there's one aspect of working in the Dream Station that offers the most critical advantage for me and that's file management. I had been using a Sonic Solutions workstation at ABC, which let me copy and paste from regions of an EDL. I'd open two EDLs: one from the show and one from Sonic Solutions. It was easy to move between sessions and copy files, stings for example, that were identical in two different programs. The Dream Station is very adept at this task. It feels very much like a musical instrument. As you're auditioning a voice-over, for example, you can cut and paste it somewhere else on the fly. While scrolling through a waveform, you can cut from a particular point during playback and it will play from the new location. In other words, you can perform edits live, and I like that a lot. The heart of the matter is that the Fairlight has a very solid audio engine.”

Serge Audio, located on Fifth Avenue, is intimately connected with the production and post facility Nitrous. “I formed a relationship with Nitrous when I was at ABC,” Ossorguine says. “I got to know and like the work of their video editors, and when I decided to go out on my own, it seemed logical to hook up with them.

“Nitrous and Serge Audio are networked,” he continues. “If we're working on a show together, they'll put an OMF file on the network. When my work is complete, I either play back to Digi Beta or bounce to a stereo pair on my Fairlight. Then I'll drop this stereo audio file onto the server for them to pick up and incorporate into the final mix.”

These are precarious times for the post industry, but Serge Audio is handling the choppy water well. Recent projects include a package of ABC sports programs, mixing a documentary on Neil Diamond and a variety of industrial and corporate assignments.