Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/757053
C A S Q U A R T E R L Y F A L L 2 0 1 6 33 What do you do to find inspiration when you have "sound block"? Paul: "There's almost no wrong way to start. You put a sound to the picture and, if it's the wrong sound, you can ask yourself, 'Why is this the wrong sound and what should it be?'" Will: "The most useful thing is to work as fast as possible to get something in there (even if it sucks) because then you can, at least, say it sucks and figure out why. Something I do is mute everything and try to imagine it in my head. That's the easiest part. I can hear it in my head and then I have to figure out how to do it. Sometimes it's making the sounds with my mouth." Mark: "I would turn everything off but the dialogue and the picture and just watch it that way. That helps me think clearly." Paula: "It's very hard to get from what you hear in your head and to find or make those sounds to create that sound that you imagine. One thing I noticed earlier on in my career was that the effort it took to spit out what was in my head was so long. If you do something difficult and worked very hard and the director says, 'No, I don't like that ...' it's the hardest thing because you have to go back and figure it out again. It's easier for me now to get in that place so I can tap dance faster when I'm wrong and have to shift gears. It's not as terrifying because I know I will find my way again." Harry: "I use samplers a lot that you can tie to various parameters like sliders and wheels. I use vocoders, a morph plugin, so a lot of times you're shaping a sound with your mouth. I turn on the recorder and just let it run and you can find your way to something interesting. You only have to get the sound once because you're recording." How do you deal with criticism and approach changes when you've invested a lot of time in your work? Mark: "Try to get something out fast. The faster you work, the less precious you are about it. Work simply and work your way up to something more complex. Explore your ideas and progress with the filmmakers so you don't go 180 degrees. Instead, you get about 45 degrees and get an idea and then have to redirect a bit. The process is very collabora- tive—you don't show up at the end and say 'look what I've done.' It's involvement throughout." Harry: "What we do is art but it's art in the service of some- body else's vision. You might have an idea of what you should do, but if it doesn't jive with what the director wants you to do, you have to throw it out right away. You have to garner from the director what it is about the scene that excites him and you have to try to find that." Paula: "We are artists. We all have points in our career when you work very hard on something and are disappointed if it's not received in the way that you hoped. If you are so compelled to make something beautiful and to make a sound sculpture that you like—another strategy is to find another way where you are in complete control of what you're doing. I try to pursue my own work. If you're an artist that's always in the service of other artists, you have to chew on your ego and swallow it many times. It's part of the job." Other audience questions. Paula brought up that "sound design" is still a new term. "Our job and what we do is basically the same as what a composer does, but we are not afforded the same amount of sacred space to work on it." She suggested that it's an issue that needs addressed because of the expectations placed on sound designers for the time given to work on a project. Harry answered an audience question about working with directors in an immersive audio environment. "We have to retrain ourselves—let alone a director—to use space appro- priately. There are times when it's completely appropriate to take a theater and turn it into a theme-park ride. There are ways to use the space in a more subtle way. We're all just finding our way." In regards to mixing for virtual reality (VR), Will com- mented, "VR makes you feel like you're there in a visceral way, but it's not so great at making you feel emotions the way film is so good at. We're doing a film called Passenger and tak- ing the same sounds in the film and putting them in the VR world. That's the challenge for VR: How do you get the best of what VR does (the tangible sense of physicality)? How do we do this from a sound point of view when we don't have control of the mix? Mixing is one of the tools that we use to make things abstracted a bit more and make you draw into the film in an emotional way and not an intellectual way. It'll be interesting as it evolves as a medium—how do we make it more emotionally impactful?"