Inside Chris Polczinski’s sound journey: from Craigslist jobs to Hollywood features

Chris Polczinski’s extensive portfolio includes the feature film Fall, upcoming wrestling biopic Queen of the Ring, and utility and second unit work on The Offer and prestige sci-fi series For All Mankind. He also just wrapped feature film In Memoriam, whose star-studded cast includes Marc Maron, Sharon Stone, and Judy Greer. 

Most recently and closest to his heart, he co-produced and mixed Nadine, a short about an actress first trapped and then rejected by the studio system of 1950s Hollywood, written and directed by his creative and life partner Tash Ann. Here, Polczinski explains why Lectrosonics gear was essential on the most important project he worked on in 2024…

His Lectrosonics wireless journey spans his entire career, beginning with legacy UCR100 receivers and LM-series transmitters, moving through the Digital Hybrid Wireless family including the SSM micro-compact transmitters he still uses today, and culminating in the latest end-to-end digital kit such as the DSR4 and DSQD four-channel receivers and DBu belt packs.

“I started in post-production in school,” Polczinski reflects. “I was really into sound design in school and got into Foley. Ultimately, that led me to being behind a computer 12 hours a day, and I wanted to move around more. Because I already had some mics and recorders, the manager at the Foley studio I worked at recommended me for a feature. It was low-budget and something not a lot of people would take on, but I was just excited to get out of that tiny room.”

Even at this early stage, Polczinski knew he wanted professional audio equipment he would grow into, not out of.

“I went a little hard into credit card debt back then,” he laughs, “but these were the days of getting jobs on Craigslist. Productions that were getting like 50 emails a day from people like me wanted to see keywords like ‘Lectrosonics’ and ‘Sound Devices,’ so those were usually in my subject line! You wouldn’t be taken seriously if you had prosumer-level gear.”

Polczinski’s investment in Lectrosonics quickly yielded professional performance to back up the pro image. “There was this short I did called Refuel – gosh, it’s got to be over ten years ago,” he recalls. “One sequence had two people walking down a beach in conversation. I was way up on some cliffs above the beach, and even with my legacy Lectrosonics gear, I couldn’t believe how cleanly I could hear them. I remember we didn’t lose them until they were at least 300 yards away.”

Fast forward to today and Nadine, the Kickstarter-funded short film he describes as the most important thing he did in 2024.

“Because of the shoestring budget, nothing was allowed to go wrong,” he elaborates. “We were packing a lot into each day, and I trusted my baby with Lectrosonics. On Nadine, all the audio had to fit into a bag rig. There was a music and dance number, and we were shooting on a studio lot where every dollar and every minute counted. So, we moved very fast.

“The DSR4 was a perfect fit for Nadine because it packs so much punch, not to mention four channels, into a single slot-mount space,” Polczinski continues. “Because the DSR4s scan for frequencies so quickly, I could be up and running in as little as 10 seconds. 

"The clicky hardware buttons make it easy to navigate the menus with absolute confidence about what I’m selecting at a given moment. Besides that, I never get dropouts, and they’re backward compatible with a huge range of Digital Hybrid transmitters as well as the newest Lectrosonics digital stuff.”

That compatibility comes into play when Polczinski is using one (or rather, a great many) of his favourite transmitters, the Digital Hybrid SSM. “Actors just love those things because they’re so small,” he enthuses. 

“On Queen of the Ring, which was about the first women championship wrestlers, we used a slew of them because of the tight costuming and athleticism of the ensemble cast. My receivers were the DSQD at the time, which are also four channels each but in a larger half-rack space, and compatible with the SSM. 

"I love to test out the newest gear, so in the very near future I’m looking forward to trying the DSSM, which is the all-digital iteration of the SSM. I’d like to do a large ensemble-cast shoot, like a comedy TV series, to see just how many channels I can fit into the ever-shrinking limits of the RF spectrum here in L.A.”

When shoots push those limits, Polczinski calls upon Lectrosonics Wireless Designer for frequency coordination. “I love Wireless Designer and use it all the time,” he says. “It’s such a fast way to scan, then have command and control of all my wireless. I have the FreqFinder app on my phone, but Wireless Designer is just aware of so much more. It finds radio stations. It finds the second unit’s mixer bags. It finds basically everything that’s in the air and then coordinates around it. That’s amazing.”

Of both his gear purchases and career decisions, Polczinski has few regrets. “I suppose I might go back and tell myself to ease off on the credit cards and rent more,” he reflects. “But looking back, I made a lot of right moves that I didn’t know were right moves at the time. Committing to Lectrosonics early on was certainly one of them,” he grins.