Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1512183
74 M PS E . O R G HELEN MACALLAN worked as a television floor manager in Aotearoa/ New Zealand in the 1970s and studied film and media in Sydney in the early 1980s. She holds a PhD (Film Studies) and is currently a Visiting Scholar with Media Arts and Production, the School of Communication, the University of Technology, Sydney. Helen and Andrew Plain's friendship dated from their student days. They were also writing partners—see, for example, the chapter, "The Filmic Voice" in Vocal Aesthetics in Digital Arts and Media (The MIT Press, 2010). ▲ Sounds as Shapes ndrew Plain gained his national and international reputation as one of Australia's most distinguished film sound designers because of the high quality and innovative nature of his work. To read the long list of directors with whom Andrew worked is to read a 'Who's Who' of eminent figures in Australian cinema, while the high esteem in which his peers held him is also evident in the number of nominations and awards he received from the film industry. Andrew graduated from university with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and worked as a government psychologist for two years. However, his long-held interest in film—he had participated in the founding of a flourishing film society at university—gained impetus when the New South Wales Institute of Technology, now the University of Technology, Sydney, implemented the Bachelor of Arts in Communication, the first of its kind in Australia. He was part of the degree's initial intake. Andrew is widely regarded as one of the first of the 'moderns' in Australian film sound because from the time of his early soundtracks in the 1980s, he reconceptualised the role of sound in feature films. Whereas traditionally sound A Children of the Revolution sound crew, 1996: Antony Gray, Matt Villa, Peter Duncan (Dir:), Phil Heywood, Gethin Creagh, Jane Paterson, Libby Villa, Andrew, Jenny Ward, and Nada Mikas. has played a subservient role to the image, his innovation was to pay detailed attention to the relationship between the sound and image tracks, giving sound equal status. While such a relationship is now common practice, it was an approach that brought a new freshness and depth to Australian films in the pre-digital era. Although he had comprehensive knowledge and a love of film history and global cinema, he was also well known for his unwavering commitment to keeping the Australian film industry strong and onshore. Thus, while a career elsewhere would have allowed him to enjoy much larger budgets, he chose instead to support the Australian film industry by gathering a group of highly talented, award- winning film sound personnel around him at Huzzah Sound, the company he created and co- directed with his partner, Adrienne Parr. Andrew began his career in sound in the cinema's analogue age and was a pioneer of the digital era. He made the transition with ease, aware that his grounding in analogue practice bought with it invaluable knowledge of both the benefits and the limitations of digital technology. Among the pluses was the technical opportunity to deploy sound precisely to individual speakers