Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1353865
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S I 53 Dr. Hillman, please do tell us a littleabout yourself. I left school at 16 and studied mechanical and electrical engineering as an apprentice with American machine tool company Cincinnati Milacron (and in doing so, I became one of the very few people in the UK able to correctly spell the name of that city in Ohio…). My academic studies in electronics were completed at Aston University and it was here that I became involved— and fell in love with—presenting university radio programmes. This experience made me re-appraise what it was that I wanted to do with my life once I qualified, and so shortly after graduating in 1981, I joined a major UK television broadcaster, Central Independent Television. Although I had originally trained in mechanical and electrical engineering, my long-held love of film made me restless to be involved with sound production, rather than working in industrial manufacturing. At Central Television, I benefitted from a tremendous training programme that covered all aspects of film and television sound operations. When I left the station in 1990 to become freelance, I carried on with the areas of sound that I had enjoyed working in whilst on staff: location sound recording, post-production mixing and as a studio and outside broadcast sound supervisor. After a decade as a freelancer, I founded, built, and led the audio post-production facility The Audio Suite. We quite quickly went from a start-up company to preferred supplier status with All3Media, the UK's largest production group, whilst at the same time, supplying our audio services to series television work for the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, National Geographic, and Discovery. The Audio Suite also delivered the full soundtracks for features: providing all the editing and mixing on low-budget films such as Soul Boy (2004—a Royal Television Society winner) and The 13th Day (2009—a New York Festivals Gold Medal winner for sound design) and contributed ADR services to much larger movies such as Anthony Minghella/Shekhar Kapur's New York I Love You (2008), and Steven Spielberg's Lincoln (2012). We went from a one mixing room setup to within four years moving premises and operating a facility with a Dolby mixing theatre, supported by two further mixing rooms. As we grew, I remained operational as the senior mixer, insisting on final mixing everything that left the building; and that, along with my increasing commercial responsibilities as the managing director, started to noticeably impact my personal life and the direction I wanted my career to take. By 2012, The Audio Suite had managed to survive the economic downturn and financial white knuckle ride of 2008 and 2009; but in response to the subsequent changing market for audio post houses in the UK—as well as my desire to return to a simpler and purer way of working—I steered the reverse engineering of The Audio Suite from a substantial three- studio, high-end audio post- production facility with a great Thoughtful Design Sound for Moving Pictures: The Four Sound Areas with Neil Hillman MPSE BY BAYLON FONSECA MPSE Neil Hillman is a highly experienced sound designer, production sound mixer, and scholar who contributes to both multimillion-budgeted feature films and crowdfunded indie movies. His PhD investigated emotion within sound design and considered enhanced audience engagement through the thoughtful use of the soundtrack.