Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/757053
30 F A L L 2 0 1 6 C A S Q U A R T E R L Y Ben also talked about recording his own sounds. "I do a lot of recording for my shows, which is what makes it special." He explained that sometimes this process results in interest- ing sounds other than what he was trying to capture. "I'm always listening to how a place sounds. It might not relate to the project you're on, but maybe there's something special about how it sounds or how it was recorded." Paul: "When I start a new project, I will try to source out a lot of different things instead of one thing at a time. Sometimes when you're going through sounds for one thing, you come across something that you think would be a really cool sweetener for something else that you wouldn't have thought of or found if looking for it. It's one of those happy accidents and they happen all the time for me." Harry: "When you're working on a lot of films in succession, you become an expert on whatever the movie is about for the time that you're working on it. Then you move to the next and there are still all of these sounds in your head from past movies, and that really helps." Harry discussed the variety of inspiration for the film Deepwater Horizon. "We researched a lot on YouTube. We used our library, recordings that we made, and morphs—like taking fire and morphing with ani- mals. We were researching the sound of deep-water drilling rigs and watching a lot of videos. That gave us an inspiration of what it would sound like. The director's vision was to make it very spatial, dramatic, and we took a lot of inspiration from him as well." Paula: "You get a lot of information [about the director's intention] from the guide tracks that you receive. I always use those as markers for points that the director is thinking about." Paula talked about her unique work on the recently released film, Hands of Stone. "I was on this movie for two and a half years and what I realized close to the end was that, essentially, what I had just participated in was creating the sonic heart of Latin America—which had never really been heard before. He had scenes where there were a million things going on at once and you shouldn't have been able to under- stand any of it and somehow you could understand all of it. I really had to listen to what the director was saying and real- ized that we were creating these tornados of sound that were cacophony. It's something we (outside of Latin America) are not used to hearing—we have a very different way of hearing the world. That's what's truly exciting when you can help pull forward the voices of other cultures. It was a huge lesson for me because it really was about sitting back and trying to understand an entirely different set of ears and different ways of hearing the world—and then channeling that." Paula also discussed her approach and mindset to sound design for the dragons on Game of Thrones. "I inherited the dragons when they were toddlers. Each year, they would have to have new characteristics, as they would go from toddlers to teenagers to grown-ups. I had to maintain the voice—the original voice—yet make them grow. I tell stories to myself when I'm designing that often have nothing to do with the movie. When you create a story for itself, it's not necessarily the same story that the viewer is going to see but there is an overarching logic to it. My story with Drogon is that he's her hot lover from Season One and the other two dragons are like Beavis and Butthead. I have to make choices—sounds are absolutely limitless so you have to have some kinds of parameters for yourself."