Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1541592
66 M PS E . O R G very, very well prepared. I came up with a technique that I used when pitching and it really surprised every director and producer I used it with. It was quite a simple idea in hindsight, and no one taught me to do it, but I think I adapted it from a picture editing technique I read of by Walter Murch. It involved 'marking up a script for sound.' When meeting with the producer and director the first time, one of the first questions is usually what did I think of the script? At this point, I would make some joke about the huge creative potential, and I'd pull a printed copy of the script out of my bag. I will have read the script a couple of times, just to experience the flow of it and how it affected me. And then I'd crawl through it again, but on this pass, I'd stick a coloured tag wherever I identified a specific idea or potential for sound. I'd use the colours like food groups, e.g., AMB blue, VEH green, VIO red, FX yellow, VFX orange, CREATURES pink, etc. The script I pulled out in a pitch meeting would be absolutely covered in hundreds of brightly coloured tags and it always got a great reaction! It worked partly as a visual prop, but more importantly, it was an infographic. It was real and practical evidence of me having already started work on the project. I didn't do it as a spotting session or to preconceive ideas; it was more to get a feel for the scope of the film and its potential and to be able to discuss specific aspects with the director. But it was also useful practically, for example, I could total up how many of each coloured tag I'd used, and I could easily skip through every vehicle scene in the script or every interesting or unique location for ambiences. I have always offered to do field recording as time in lieu, as I know how beneficial it is to gather ambiences or access vehicles and props from the shoot, etc. It also helps to visit the production sound team and appreciate their challenges and provide support in any way possible. Each of these techniques and ideas represented the deliberate choices I made to progress my work. I note on your filmography you have also worked as a composer on a few feature films. How do you make space for both your music and sound to shine on the same film? What opportunities do these projects provide you with? I have always loved collaborating with composers and music editors on films, and, working on many projects, you get to witness a lot of different scores and see how people work. I also saw this collaboration as another profoundly positive aspect of being brought onto a project early. It means we can swap temp mixes of scenes and have a feel for what the score is doing at specific moments, and vice versa for the composer. As much as it helps prevent conflicts, it also helps each play to their strengths. One tactic which helps in a seemingly oblique way, but encourages deeper thinking, is that I always liked to discuss the 'shape' of the film's soundtrack with the director. For example, speaking generally and thematically, I'd first ask where they thought the loudest part of their film was likely to be. This is usually an easy question to answer because it's likely to be the scenes with the most action, the most VFX, etc. Such scenes are expensive and will have been heavily discussed and considered. Then I'd ask them which scene they thought would be the quietest. And that usually leads to some very interesting discussions, often revealing where the strongest writing and emotional moments reside in the film. I'd have a few candidates in mind, but I wanted to learn what was most precious to them, as they know the script better than anyone. I'm proud of the fact that in quite a few films I've done, the quietest moment in the film is a moment of complete silence, of complete intentional stillness. Sometimes the director and I have identified and temped it long before the mix. One example is Gaylene Preston's film Perfect Strangers (2003), on a fishing boat during a raging storm, we transition to total silence, and it has such emotional heft! Sometimes the director and I have discussed it, and we try it in the mix, such as Taika's Boy with the 'dead' ambiences. And sometimes it hasn't Tim's marked-up script for Black Sheep 2.