The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences has nominated Damon Trotta for his work on History Channel’s 102 Minutes That Changed America, a two-hour documentary special about the events of 9/11. Recognized for his “Outstanding Sound Mixing For Nonfiction Programming,” this is Trotta’s first Emmy(R) nomination.
Produced by New Animal Productions‘ Nicole Rittenmeyer and Seth Skundrick, in conjunction with Siskel/Jacobs Productions and History, the documentary uses footage collected from a wide range of sources, including amateur citizen journalists, emergency dispatch radio recordings, and local news outlets to tell the story of 9/11 in virtual real time, from a personal point of view.
“Everyone remembers where they were on 9/11,” explains Rittenmeyer. “The goal behind the film was to give the viewer a sense of what it was like to be in New York City on that day, watching those events unfold right in front of them.” Using over one hundred sources, the team gleaned material from various locales: a parking lot in Staten Island, the New York City subway, the Manhattan Bridge, Times Square, and the streets of Hoboken, NJ to create a narrative that accurately portrayed a city coming together in crisis.
Trotta, a New York City native, showed immediate interest in the project. “I felt compelled to work on it because it was such an important archive of American history,” says Trotta. “While the subject of the film was obviously something that held a personal connection for me, from an audio perspective, the nature of the film itself was laden with technical difficulties that also piqued my interest.”
Because of the sheer volume and diversity of the footage, the audio complications ranged from “over-modulated screams to video heads dirtied in the debris, to lost tracking causing dropouts and digital clipping, to cameras dropped in a moment of overwhelming shock that lost audio all together, not to mention an excess of other unique sound problems,” continues Trotta. Rising to the challenge, Trotta’s mixing resulted in a uniform and nuanced soundscape that captured the terror, shock, awe, and unsettlement of the piece.
102 Minutes That Changed America is History’s highest rated documentary special since the channel’s inception in 1995. The film garnered four Emmy nominations this year.
The Emmy Awards take place on Sunday, September 20, 2009.
