Guest lecture – Sound and Music Production

Guest Lecture – Lucy Johnstone – Sound Editor

Blog post by L3 AP student Sam Jenkins.

Lucy Johnstone graduated from the University of Nottingham in 2008 with a degree in Classical Music. She started as a runner at Envy Post Production and progressed to become Audio Assistant Manager. After a few years in the machine room, Lucy was promoted to Tracklayer, whilst also running voice-over sessions and providing fully mixed Sound Design for television.

Lucy’s presentation was targeted towards Post Production Sound for Factual TV. She began the talk by explicitly informing us that the presentation we were about to observe was focused on what had worked for Lucy personally, conveying her own experiences and practice in the industry. She stated that this could be completely different to other specialists within the same profession.

Lucy focused on the main Post-Production Sound categories of dialogue (and voice-overs), atmos and Foley+SFX. When overseeing a VO session, she suggested that 30% of work is what you know, but 70% is how you are. This meant that although the engineer could be an expert with Pro Tools and their DAW, those who have greater personal skills will be those who are hired. This is something I am aiming to improve when working professionally on set. I hope to improve my personal, professional and communication skills while working with the client, giving me greater experience for the real world.

When dealing with atmos and SFX, especially when on a tight timescale, Lucy suggested a couple of tips to help speed up our process. The first is acknowledging that we do not have time to add every single sound effect, so prioritize the most important. Also, there may not be time to Foley everything, if at all, so either invest or go out and record sound effects, such as footsteps and create a library. Secondly, if we do use our own libraries, try to add variation: do not use the same two footsteps throughout, or 10 seconds of the same crowd noise. Ask the offline editor for handles but use effects such as time stretch or pitch shift to alter the sounds slightly, which stops the sound becoming repetitive and predictable. And ALWAYS keep a copy of the original tracks underneath, in case the editor wants to use them or something goes wrong. It will be very useful to use this method of prioritisation when working on Cognition.

Finally, Lucy offered some real world job advice with regards to this industry. Firstly, she stated that work experience is essential and will help a long way to persuading a company to employ you. Secondly, within this role expect to be making drinks on a low wage as a runner for a while, getting your foot in the door with a company – just because we have a degree does not mean we should just land a high-end job, we still have to work for it! Next, that an in-house role would likely be the best route for graduates, as freelance work requires knowing enough, having enough (good) credits, and knowing enough people – contacts. This brought the presentation succinctly to an end, where Lucy suggested using Twitter, LinkedIn and emails to network on a 1-to-1 basis, if approaching a large group of people and introducing yourself is not one of your strengths.

I was very impressed with the presentation and learned most about just how different the real world is, compared to university work. For example, being given only one day to complete a Factual TV soundtrack, ensuring you network with enough people to build up contacts, and the importance of speed and competence once you have a job. I also picked up useful skills such as prioritizing jobs (dialogue/foley/sfx/atmos) and the importance of personal, communication skills.

Finally, I am pleased that guest lecturers, such as Lucy, are working in the real world right now, as they give us much advice and direction, and tell us how it is right now, rather than what it was like ‘in their day’.

June 10, 2017 Audio Post Production, featured posts, Guest lecture, Industry, TV 1 Comment

Guest Lecture – Mark Hills – Sound Engineer

Blog post by L3 Audio Production students Jack Webber.

This week we were fortunate enough to receive a guest Lecture from Mark Hills, a Lincoln University Media Production Graduate and sound engineer in a highly reputable audio post-production house in Soho, London called Soho Square Studios. Soho Square studios are a Dolby approved studio and focus on audio post production for Advertisement, animations, feature films, and voice recordings for games.

Mark began the lecture talking a bit about his background and how he got to where he is now. He explained how similarly to most sound designers he fell in love with electronic music at an early age. He took media at A-Levels and then became a Lincoln University Media Production Undergraduate in 2007.
I won’t go too much in to detail about his background as he has personally blogged about it, this can be found here.

Mark then talked about the challenges of getting into this industry and working in a studio like Soho Square Studios. He explained the importance of ‘running’ and how although we have (will have) a degree, we will still be expected to start from the bottom as runners. He explained how it’s better to go for a running job at a smaller studio with around 10-15 people, as the opportunity to grow, learn and promotion is higher. Whereas the larger companies, you could find yourself being a runner for many years and not get anywhere.

He also gave us some advice for our CVs. He said that the studio aren’t always that interested in how many student films you’ve worked on, what they want to know is, if you have a degree; and have some real work experience. What he meant by that is customer focused work experience e.g. working in a pub. The studio likes this as it shows you can deal with, and work well with clients.

The Lecture gave a great insight to what it’s like working in an industry we are all passionate about, but also gave us all a bit of a reality check in regards to the amount of work it takes to get to his position. This was a slightly different approach than most guest lectures give, however I felt like it was good for us to get a bit of a reality check to push us more to where we want to go.

The day after this lecture myself and another AP student, Matt Jones went to London and visited Soho Square Studios to interview Mark and his manager Tom Mackewn for research in our R&D case study module. We arrived at the Studio and saw Mark in action finishing up a session, where we were quite impressed by the speed of his Pro tools skills. He then gave us a tour of some of the studio rooms and showed us some of his previous work.

When we interviewed Mark, we asked questions about his role as sound engineer and what he does day-to-day etc. I was interested to find out how the working hours were 9am to 6pm Monday to Friday, as most creative industries involve working unsociable hours. He told us that they don’t have ‘official lunch breaks’ and work around their daily schedules to fit in lunch, and also about some of the perks of the job – he said how he loved being able to do a hobby for a job and that you get to work with some amazing high status people.

March 7, 2016 Audio Post Production, featured posts, film sound, game sound, Guest lecture, Pro Tools, sound design, Students No Comments

Guest Lecture – Dan Shepherd – Radio Producer

Blog post by L3 Audio Production student Gareth Bailey.

Dan Shepherd is primarily a radio producer and provider of training and teaching for people working in radio. He runs Far Shoreline Productions.

This guest lecture had Dan showing us examples of some of his more notable radio features, and giving us some insight into the production of these.

The first was an audio ‘feature documentary’ of an Australian train journey, recorded on numerous tapes in the pre-digital era for the BBC. He made the point that certain sounds on the journey were evocative, and capturing these enables the producer to build the world of the experience for the listeners…Interviews with train passengers both tell a story and evoke a sense of place, which is critical to documentary of this type, as well as a sense of the journey itself. This is so important that some of the sounds used were taken from the library at the expense of authenticity, as it wasn’t always possible to collect the audio to a sufficient standard for later use.

This sense of place is particularly relevant to our film project this term as we’ve been consciously trying to collect as much ‘authentic’ foley sound from our sets, but these have often been unusable due to external factors like traffic noise necessitating their recreation which, in turn, has sometimes led to a better ‘fit’ with the picture than the authentic sound would have achieved. This is different from radio, where sound is all, but the idea of communicating a sense of place is similar.

For Dan, the key differentiating factor with features is their enabling of depth and scope of approach. A ‘good feature will always be greater than the sum of its parts’ – a travelogue becomes more than that by telling a story and capturing the experience of others. Where news and current affairs programs condense data, feature documentaries allow the exploration of different dimensions of creativity around an idea.

Dan’s discussion of a second program on ‘cut-ups’, created for Radio 4, touched upon the importance of making your feature for a specific audience. This particular show featured a presenter working in an explanatory role as the Radio 4 audience were likely being introduced to the idea of the mash-up for the first time. For Dan, the question became how to make the subject relevant and interesting for a Radio 4 audience and this along with the prescribed format conventions when working for the BBC narrowed the focus of the show as it was edited.

February 8, 2016 featured posts, Guest lecture, Radio, Radio 4 No Comments

Guest Lecture – Suddi Raval – Game Sound

Blog post by L3 Audio Production student Barney Oram

Today we were lucky enough to hear from Suddi Raval, a legendary acid house producer and a game sound designer/composer, working currently as the audio manager at the Warner Bros. game studio, TT games (responsible largely for the ever popular LEGO games).

Audio manager is essentially the highest audio position in the games industry – the audio manager works with the upper echelons of the game development studio to create a fully cohesive and well delivered soundtrack. The audio manager is involved with both creating audio for the project (Suddi talked about how he generally likes to work in VO, both recording voiceover for the project and using audio content from an existing IP, usually a film), as well as managing the sound designers that the studio employ. Suddi mentioned the studio employ 7 full time sound designers, as well as up to 2 more on contracts. This is a comparatively large number of designers – even considering TT Fusion is technically a AAA studio, with many AAA titles having 2-5 sound designers at most. Suddi did however mention that the number rises all the time.

I was so engaged with what Suddi was saying (and had a million questions popping into my head) I didn’t make any notes on the actual content of the lecture, so this post is mainly key points. However, I found myself nodding in agreement and hearing so much affirmation in what Suddi was saying in relation to my own work and journey into the industry. I’d contacted Suddi about a month before the lecture, and had asked him a few questions and sent him my showreel. He very generously called me out by name and commented on my work, offering me feedback and advice as well as answering a lot of questions that I posed to him after the talk.

There were a few things Suddi mentioned that I want to draw attention to – as they relate in many ways to my project.

He spoke about FMOD, Wwise, and some of the games engines i’d demonstrated ability in on my reel: he talked about how TT use their own proprietary sound engine for implementation, that they generally taught junior sound designers as they join the organisation. He said however, that learning middleware like FMOD and Wwise was important, both for understanding the implementation process and to show that you’ve taken the time to actually learn something for your work. This is helpful and important for me, as I plan to use FMOD to implement my sounds into the game for my project. As I already have some experience using it independently, spending time using it in a game engine would be hugely beneficial.

I also asked him about junior sound designer positions, and the fact they are rarely advertised. I also later asked about the best route into in-house work, to which his response covers both questions – essentially, through work experience. Suddi said that a number of the people working at TT now came in through work experience: they’d proved themselves to be committed and easy to work with during the few weeks that they’d work at the studio, and they’d been asked to join the team full time. I think that work experience is something I should really look into further.

I’ll probably remember a lot of other things that stood out to me from the lecture, but i’ll leave this post at that. A fantastic opportunity to speak personally with someone high up in the audio world of the games industry, I learned a lot and found much of my ideas and preparations confirmed as being on the right track.

February 2, 2016 careers, featured posts, game sound, games, Guest lecture, House Music, sound design, Students 1 Comment

Guest Lecture – Katia Isakoff 2015

Blog post by level 3 Audio Production student Charlotte Mellor.

Katia Isakoff is a singer, songwriter, music producer (Add N To (X) for Mute Records), mixer (John Foxx) and sound designer who came to talk to us mainly about her new and upcoming project ‘Women Produce Music’. Although WPM is Katia’s latest project, she’s also worked on a huge scale of other things such as the co-founding of the West London studio UNIT20 with producer Steve D’Agostino in the mid-90s, lending vocals to composer and musician Barry Adamson, and doing various guitar performances which have featured in a Stephen Spielberg TV series. She also co-authored a conference paper with Richard Burgess (Women in Music Production: Education, Representation and Practice) delivered at the ARP conference.

Katia began the lecture by introducing women produce music as this was her main topic of conversation. Women Produce Music, although possibly misleading by name, isn’t a feminist works only project. Katia stated quite early on in her lecture that a high percentage of producers involved with the project are men, and over 50% of the WPM Twitter followers are in fact male too. Katia continued to explain how WPM involves academia as well as the industry, and the project aims to provide the support for music producers.

To establish WPM Katia talked about how they presented findings gathered from a ‘women as music producers’ research project, to various organisations around the UK. She also talked about the importance of building a social media presence before the launch of WPM to initially spark and establish interest from female and male music producers, and anyone else interested in music – the main platforms being Twitter and Facebook.

Katia spoke a bit about the state of the media and its cultural attitudes to female music producers in the music industry, and how the media tend to raise questions such as “so what’s it like to be a woman in such a male dominated industry?”. She also talked about how the media tended to focus on asking women’s opinions on the inequality of the industry, rather than focus on their talents – the main reasons why they’re at these panels etc in the first place. So she made it clear in the lecture that she’s happy to get controversial about those issues when raised.

On a personal level I found this lecture to be very inspiring due to the fact that Katia’s achieved so much in so many different parts of the industry. She comes across as a very strong and determined female, which is something I personally love to see and hear about, given that a lot of the industry is very male dominated. Also, the fact that she’s been involved in such a vast variety of projects over her career gives me confidence that possibilities within the industry don’t feel so limited.

January 5, 2016 gender, Guest lecture, Industry, Students No Comments

Guest Lecture – Danny Roberts 2! – A&R Decca Records

Blog post by L2 Audio Production student James Woodliffe.

This week Danny Roberts gave a talk to myself and my course peers about his career, day to day roles and the music industry from the perspective of a record label.

Danny is an A&R representative for Decca Records who are a subsidiary of Universal records. He discussed about the two types of A&R, artists past and present, the impact of major labels and his connection with them. It was interesting to hear Danny talk openly about his day to day runnings with the label he works for and his colleagues. It was also interesting to hear his opinion of major/indie record labels from an inside point of view and it was refreshing to hear a talk from an A&R representative who clearly has a love for music. I felt that Danny really understood his business and although money is a crucial factor it isn’t the be all and end all of his job.

Personally, I found his talk very interesting and it confirmed some of my thoughts about the music industry previously to the lecture. It also taught me new concepts and ideas that are currently present within the industry, such as how he sees potential within an artist and what stages he goes through before signing them. Overall it was very enjoyable.

Addendum:
Danny’s recent signing Aurora has just been selected as the artist for the John Lewis TV ad campaign 2015

October 29, 2015 bands, careers, featured posts, Guest lecture, Music, Music Industry No Comments

Guest Lecture – Neil Collymore – Dubbing Mixer

Blog post by level 2 Audio Production student Daniel Marnie.
Photograph by Chris Hainstock.

My fellow Audio Production students and I, recently received a guest lecture from BAFTA and RTS nominated Dubbing Mixer and Sound Designer Neil Collymore. Neil’s credits include the critically acclaimed TV series Spooks, as well as Hustle, Law & Order UK, and the films Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Billy Elliot, and Chicken Run.

During his lecture Neil talked us through his workflow when beginning a project, using his own Pro Tools sessions from an episode of Spooks and a promo for the E4 TV channel. As he worked though the project file he would outline the sort of state a project might turn up in, and showed how he’d get the best out any situation. He was at all times open to questions, of which there were several!

He spoke at some length about some of the restrictions TV faces compared to film; discussing how the new loudness format (R128) provides a little more technical freedom over its predecessor (PPM6). It is hoped that this new format could help combat the high audio levels that companies request in their ads in order to stand out from the competition. Neil also stressed that the projects he works on are not his, and that the Director always has the final say in any decision.

Neil gave us a fascinating insight into his work, and closed the lecture off with an excellent Q&A session in which we learned about his time as a freelancer, his working preferences and workflow, as well as the kinds of costs involved with sound work.

October 26, 2015 Audio Post Production, featured posts, film sound, Guest lecture, sound design, sound editing for visual media, Students No Comments

Guest Lecture – Lol Hammond – Music Supervisor

Lol Hammond visited Lincoln to talk to 3rd year Audio Production students about his role at Vertigo Films as a Music Supervisor. In this highly entertaining talk, Lol drew on his experiences on working on films such as Bronson, Monsters and It’s All Gone Pete Tong to give a fascinating insight into how he works with film directors, editors and composers in order to create a soundtrack to help bring a film to life.

He explained to students how the choice of songs and score can be critical to the success of a film, particularly when trying to create the right feel/vibe or drive the narrative along. Mediation and translation of ideas between the director and composer is a crucial aspect of Lol’s role, as is keeping up with day-to-day administrative tasks and negotiating fees with artists, publishers and record companies.

This was a hugely enjoyable and informative talk, which gave students a much clearer understanding of the role of the Music Supervisor.

October 22, 2015 featured posts, film sound, Guest lecture, Industry, movies 1 Comment

Adrian Bell – Feature Film and TV sound recordist

ADRIAN BELL

We get all the best visitors to Lincoln School of Film and Media.

This is Adrian Bell, a Film and TV recordist, just back from filming the new DaVinci Code film ‘Inferno’ directed by Ron Howard.
Check out his CV at www.adrianbell.net He won a BAFTA for best sound in 2014 for Dancing on the Edge

He’s in town to be interviewed by BBC Radio Lincs tomorrow about the feature film ‘Everest’ he worked on earlier in 2014 Directed by Baltasar Kormakur, and yes I tool the oportunity of giving him a tour and collared him to come back and talk to students some time soon. He’s on BBC Lincolnshire sometime after 11.00am tomorrow

Adrian lives in London but is originally from Lincolnshire. He has a wealth of experience and is keen to come and contribute to the Audio Production course content if he can.

here’s a short photo slideshow

October 14, 2015 Audio Post Production, careers, Dialogue, field recordings, film sound, Guest lecture, Industry, location sound No Comments

Guest Lecture – Howard Young

Hull might seem like an unlikely place to set up a successful audio post-production company, but that’s exactly what Howard Young of Engine7 has done.

After studying an intensive sound design course at Full Sail in Orlando, and gaining some valuable industry experience at post-production houses in the States, Howard returned to his hometown of Hull and began a career in local radio. He soon used his contacts here and developed what is now a very successful company providing many different aspects of audio for various media.

Engine7’s clients are based mainly in the local area and come with a wide range of needs – from online explainer videos, to sound design for rides and attractions, to corporate work, to radio ad voice-overs. Some of this work might not seem the most glamorous but it still requires great creativity, technical skill and the ability to work closely with clients to build up a trusting relationship.

Howard emphasised this in his very interesting and enjoyable lecture, and gave the students a fantastic insight into a diverse portfolio of work and the daily activities of running a media business.

February 17, 2015 Audio Post Production, featured posts, Guest lecture, Industry, sound design No Comments

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