Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1487730
o'clock in the morning, using a computer for the first time in my life and being so frustrated because I could not work out how to put a sound effect in sync with the picture. And then I discovered the return button! When I hit that button and the sound fell in sync, the whole world opened up. It was the most extraordinary revelation. After Strictly Ballroom, I said to Libby, "I've just seen the future." And that was the beginning of Big Bang Sound. Libby and I invested in our first Fairlight which at the time cost $70,000 (Australian dollars) per machine. LV: Those machines cost the same as buying an apartment in Sydney! I think we could see that digital was the way of the future. There were more visual effects in films, and picture editors were starting to use Avid and Lightworks. It creatively gave much more latitude to sound practitioners, so we were just moving with the times. WP: All of a sudden, you had a database of sound effects at your fingertips. When you were cutting on film and you needed two minutes of babbling brook, you'd have to go down to the transfer suite and transfer your quarter-inch tape to film. Then you'd take the film back to your cutting room, fit it to the scene, get the sticky tape out and start splicing it into your tracks. With digital, you could now carry a database of, say, 30 different babbling brooks to choose from. The ability to work in this new sonic world was incredible. LV: The fact that you could do a digital fade as opposed to using chemicals on film. As a dialogue editor, it was a revelation. And being able to see the waveform! You could zoom in and visually see what you were hearing. Things were moving incrementally at first and then exploding. It was a whole new world of possibility. JW: It was a tricky time, those early days of digital. There were different eras of equipment which needed to talk to one another, such as playing out the Fairlight tracks in real-time onto 24-track tape using cables snaking from one side of the building to the other. Do you remember any film as being difficult during that era? Wayne demonstrates cleaning the heads of a Nagra, BBS, Fury Road (2010). Photo by J. Ward Wayne doing loop group remotely, Elvis (2021). Photo by BBS ADR prop recording at BBS. Photo by BBS