Plenty of audio mixers who specialize in spots would love to get their hands on a longform project. But Steve Rosen, of Howard Schwartz Recording (HSR), New York, isn’t one of them. "I don’t think I have the patience to work on the same thing for four weeks, like a feature," he explains. "I get antsy after two days of the same session. So I’m really well suited for the commercial industry."
Indeed, Rosen has been mixing ads for 16 years, and he couldn’t imagine himself doing anything else. "I never know what I’m going to do tomorrow," he says. "I get a little surprise every day."
Typically, he doesn’t get involved with a spot until the day of the mix—after the ad has been shot and edited. But when Rosen goes in, he goes in deep, handling all aspects of sound postproduction, from tech work to troubleshooting to "directing voiceover talent and trying to get good reads out of people."
With several professional relationships that go back to his early career, Rosen tends to work closely and collaboratively with producers and editors. He’s always quick to offer his opinion. "There are people who want somebody to just listen to what they say and push buttons and make it technically okay, and that’s fine," he observes. "There are a lot of people in this business who are very successful doing just that. But I can’t really keep my mouth shut. If I see something that bothers me, or if I see something that I think could be better, I’m going to say something about it."
When he was mixing the recent Avis spot "Guards," directed by Christopher Bean of bicoastal MacGuffin Films, for McCann-Erickson, New York, Rosen had to work with an array of sounds. The ad features two blasé security guards who witness a series of alarming developments at a neighboring building that they are not guarding: An elderly woman crawls on a ledge after her meowing cat; a man climbs out the window of a burning apartment; a streetlight explodes and topples onto another man, who is playing his saxophone on one of the balconies. As a dog howls in the background, one of the guards remarks, "Glad that isn’t our building." A voiceover follows: "Does it ever seem like some people have just stopped trying?" It is then revealed that Avis offers the On Star service in its rental cars, so customers can always get help.
For Rosen—who has never stopped trying—the spot posed quite a challenge. "It’s one thing to play out sound effects in the right place," he notes. "But it’s a completely different thing to make them sound like they’re actually appropriate for the situation."
Since "Guards" features at least half a dozen discernable sound effects, not to mention dialogue, voiceover and background music, making them appropriate for the situation was a real balancing act. "That one was a little busy," he laughs. Fortunately, he was able to communicate his ideas and concerns to the spot’s editor, Owen Plotkin of Editing Concepts, New York. "On and off, I’ve worked with him for probably more than ten years," Rosen reports. "He’s very sound conscious. On the day of the mix, I took some of the ideas that he had, as well as anything that I could throw in, just to make it all work. I think it turned out well."
In the family
Though he wasn’t always sure that he wanted to become an audio engineer, Rosen was literally born into the business. His father, Arnie Rosen, ran his own studio, Audio One, New York, before signing with his son’s future employer, HSR. "Ultimately, I didn’t get to work with my dad because of his health issues," says Rosen, whose father is deceased. "But he was working here at the end of his career. When I came [to HSR], I had known Howie [Schwartz] for a long time. I liked the idea of working for a person rather than a corporation."
It was Rosen’s father who found him his first real job, back in 1984. "He got me a job as a messenger/ assistant at East Side Audio [New York], which was then called East Side Film and Video," the younger Rosen recalls. "I wound up taking a liking to the industry." He learned on the job, and was later hired by Photomagnetic Sound Studios (now Photomag), New York, where he worked as a mixer for nine years before moving "just around the block" to HSR. "Ever since I started in this business, I’ve worked only in [advertising] postproduction facilities," relates Rosen. "There was no music [composing] at any of the studios I worked at—no other diversions. It’s always been all ads all the time."
The ad business has been good to Rosen, who has mixed spots for such high-profile clients as Jaguar, Rolaids and GNC. Rosen works regularly with many large agencies—particularly Deutsch, New York. "I’ve been working with that agency nonstop for about twelve or thirteen years," comments Rosen, who recently engineered sound for the GNC spot "Miscalculation" via Deutsch, and helmed by Jim Tozzi of bicoastal M-80. "I developed a relationship with them when I first started, and I’ve been passed down from producer to producer."
HSR boasts a range of tools, including 5.1 Surround Sound. But Rosen says, "I don’t like to focus on the equipment. I like whatever I can use quickly and efficiently. I’m working towards the sound, and anything that slows me down or gets in my way doesn’t stay in this room for very long."
Still, he adds, his business has benefited a lot from technical advances. "[Recently] I was in a session, and we needed a revision on the music, which was in Nashville," Rosen recounts. "They did the revision down there and put it up on their Web site and we grabbed it. It was really nice to be able to do that. And I don’t miss cutting tape with razor blades at all."
