Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1538144
0 Scott Gershin Awards, Roles and Credits Awards and Honors • G.A.N.G. Lifetime Achievement Award • 11× MPSE Golden Reel Award winner • 34× MPSE Golden Reel nominations (est.) • Berklee College of Music Distinguished Alumni Award • 1× Emmy Award winner • 1× Emmy nomination • 1× TEC Award nomination • 3× G.A.N.G. Awards • 1× Clio Award • 2x HPA Award nominations • 1x Lumiere Award • Contributed to 12 Oscar-winning or nominated films for Best Picture, Sound, or Sound Editing: (Air Force One, American Beauty, Born on the Fourth of July, Braveheart, Cliffhanger, Gladiator, Glory, JFK, The Last of the Mohicans, Legends of the Fall, GDT's Pinocchio, The Perfect Storm) • Contributed to seven BAFTA- winning or nominated films for sound with a nomination for American Beauty Notable Film and TV Credits • G.I. Joe (Animated TV, 1983–1986) • Wildfire (Animated TV, 1986) • Beauty and the Beast (Live- Action TV, 1987–1990) • Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989) • Born on the Fourth of July (1989) • Glory (1989) • Home Alone (1990) • Madonna: Truth or Dare (1991) Pushing Past Comfort: Inspired by Insecurity "That nervousness, that discomfort—it means you care. I never want to feel like I've got it all 'figured out.'" After such a long and successful career, what continues to inspire and push you creatively? Scott: I have been doing what I do for a long time. I have had a lot of exposure, but like anyone who cares about their work, there is always that voice in the back of your head going: This is really hard. What if I fail? What if it sucks? What happens when they find out … blah blah blah. That kind of insecurity. There is a part of me that is always figuring it out as I go. I do not sit there thinking, you now have to be brilliant. I am just doing the work, feeling uncertain, trying things out, and hoping it connects. Honestly, I love that insecurity. I tell students the same thing: embrace it. That nervousness, that discomfort—it means you care. I do not want to ever feel like I have got it all figured out. I am experienced, sure, and I have a lot of experience to draw from. But when I am working on something new, it is that insecurity that sharpens my focus. It makes me push myself. I have had peers say to me, You have won awards, you have done amazing stuff. Why do you still care so much? And the answer is: because I do. I still love this. I still want to grow. I do not think in terms of being the best. That doesn't really exist in creative work. But I hear what other people are doing, and it inspires me. It makes me want to do something that is just as cool. Take GDT's Pinocchio, for example. I worked really, really hard on that, even though it was not flashy or creature- heavy. It was subtle. And I did not expect anyone to notice. But I cared. I had a vision. I have always admired Guillermo del Toro's visual artistry and his imagination to tell stories his way. I felt the sound design for the film needed to be at that same level of detail, subtlety, imagination, and humanism. I wanted to bring something meaningful to it. I just did what I thought was right for the film. Sound as a Guide in Spherical Worlds "Sound becomes the navigator. It tells you where to look, where to move, where to focus." Given your experience across so many mediums, do you also find yourself doing a lot of work in VR or AR? Scott: Yes. When I left Formosa and went to Technicolor, the main thing I focused on was VR. I thought it was going to be the next big thing. I had already done games, movies, and streaming, but never VR. That made it exciting because I had no idea how to approach it, which meant there was something to learn. So, I jumped in. I started working with people from companies like Two Big Ears, Facebook, and Oculus, and even with Valve on the Vive. Technicolor also jumped in fully. We worked on conceptual VR projects for theme parks. The big challenge was figuring out how to do it. How do you pan in a fully spherical space? Not being able to see your tools or your workstation inside the goggles—it was brutal at first. The team from Two Big Ears created a tool where you could point to something—a set of pixels—assign a sound, and it would track automatically. I remember thinking, This is great. Can we get this in Pro Tools? I wanted to be able to point to something on screen and have the sound follow wherever that pixel cluster moved. It was an exciting time. The main issue we ran into with VR was that the technology wasn't ready to fulfill the hype that consumers expected. As an early technology, it worked, but it needed time to evolve. 52 M PS E . O R G Photo by Cindy Gershin