Our Staff
My name is Aaron Murphy. I have worked in television for over 14 years. I am the first person to offer training to work exclusively in reality TV.
When I was growing up around Seattle Washington, I remember watching certain films that will be with me for the rest of my life. Rocky was a big one. I saw Rocky 2 and started taking boxing lessons. Later I really got into James Bond films. After seeing Gold Finger for the first time, I decided I wanted to be James Bond when I grew up.
Cut ahead 10 years and I was at the University of Washington and studying Communications. I saved up money from my crummy retail job after college & traveled through Europe alone for 6 months on $3,000.00. Not very James Bond-like but I was having some affordable adventures.
I was in Holland and had just hitch-hiked from Germany to see a Pearl Jam concert when I decided that seeing my hometown band on the other side of the world was a sign. The Universe wanted me to work with musicians. I had always tinkered with tape recorders & loved music but somehow I decided now was my time. I traveled back to the States and got into a 2 year Recording Engineering program at a community college. To pay for school, I worked as a commercial fisherman, put up vinyl siding, landscaped expensive gardens, and made $50 a day as an extra in a feature film. None of this was very glamorous so I was excited when I finally managed to get into a respected studio as a Second Recording Engineer which meant I moved heavy things & made coffee, never the less, I was employed & happy for it.
One day, I met someone at a party who was working on a low-budget film. She said "I could see if the Audio Department needs a Cable Wrangler or something....” I didn't even know what a Cable Wrangler was. I soon found out however, when that person actually got me hired as the un-paid Sound Mixer on the worst film I've ever had the pleasure of working on. Somehow I had gone from being an extra on-set hearing voices behind a curtain shouting “SOUND SPEED” to being that guy behind the curtain hearing my own voice shout “SOUND SPEED.”
I recorded the voices of actors onto a reel-to-reel time code Nagra recorder. I was the guy responsible for the slate with red numbers that is held in front of the camera just before each shot. I learned that the number represented a very accurate clock signal that is recorded onto the audio recorder along with the audio, allowing the film to be played synchronously with it later during editing. I learned how to use a boom pole and I wasn’t moving heavy things in a studio anymore. I knew all about microphones, but now I was on-set with actors and free food from catering trucks and it was, for lack of a better word, sexy.
