Kind Words

Making podcasts with a fully remote team is hard! How do you manage a lot of tape? How can producers share ProTools sessions? Will one person's mistake undo another producer's progress? Michael had answers to all of these questions, and many I hadn't thought of, when he designed a new remote workflow for Lemonada Media. He interviewed our team members, and used real examples from past projects to illustrate his approach. With his help, we have greatly improved the way we collaborate on big narrative projects. Michael's experience and, of course, his sense of humor, made an overwhelming task feel like a breeze.

Radiolab was growing and we needed to find ways to share files with remote staff without slowing down our day-to-day production, so we hired Michael Raphael to revamp our file management and production workflow. He interviewed our entire staff and designed systems to suit how we work. Now we can easily and efficiently share large Pro Tools sessions across our team, which frees us up to focus on the creative work. Also, the guy has a wicked sense of humor.

Michael Raphael is a mixing machine. For Lost Hills: Dead in the Water, we had a trove of very old, very degraded archival tape that told an epic story of love, money, betrayal, and murder. Simply put, without Michael, we wouldn’t have been able to tell this story. He saved even the worst, most corrupted tape, making it audible and evocative. Then, he mixed our shows to absolute perfection. The success of the series is directly attributable to his extraordinary talent, skill and hard work.

Every time Michael speaks to my students he captivates them. He has this amazing ability to translate his passion for what he does into clear, understandable explanations for us mere mortals (non-sonic wizards like him). It’s why I ask him to speak to my students each and every year. Teaching is hard - but Michael is able not just to explain what he does super clearly, and with great detail, but also to somehow infuse his explanations with a contagious enthusiasm. I’ve never met someone more interested in the way humans speak and thoughtful about how to gently make razor-like cuts to their tape to get it to time, while retaining each person’s unique set of characteristics. He’s like a pied piper. (Either that, or he’s figured out how to pipe an invisible mist into the room which has us all wanting to make audio). Somehow, by the time you leave class you also want to spend all your time editing tape and all my students want to be Michael when they grow up.

Michael was our technical director at the New Yorker Radio Hour. He was a creative, generous, brilliant collaborator on audio projects. He also restructured how we shared work, making collaboration across the team seamless and painless. Honestly, I don’t quite understand WHAT he did--that’s his expertise, not mine--I just know that he made everything about file sharing better, which made our work much easier. He’s also just a great person to have to turn to when you’re in the mud of production, ready with great advice and insight and humor. He also brought excellent care and creativity to making our work sing.