normal social experience, the things that affect you in everyday life. I come across many examples of sound that I find increasingly worthless, because they don’t give you anything. I appreciate a good sound editor by his awareness of reality. And not all of them are aware. Sound varies from situation to situation. One has to think of how to achieve the right atmosphere. For example, when it comes to different seasons, or if it’s afternoon or forenoon, if it’s evening or morning ... what is it that makes you recognise the differences between these specific times? This is what I mean by having an awareness of reality. It’s not something you can learn, you are born with it. Of course, one can always gain more experience, but feeling is a question of talent. Voices must be given their own character, so that you can experience them in their own personal environment. When you move in a room, especially when you move three- dimensionally, that is into the picture, you experience a different reverberation. The voice must develop, it must change. So if you’re speaking up or down, sideways or back, the character of the voice changes constantly. Even if the location recording is 100% and sounds even, you would still have to work with spatial dimensions and reverberation in the mix. So if people are at different points voice must have its own distinct character, it’s own reverberation. And that’s really to create the sense of credibility and the right emotion. there are many ways of achieving that. Actually, it is more difficult to achieve the same variety outdoors because there isn’t as much reverberation in the voice there. But still, one experiences it as if there was a distance. Sometimes it’s a bit like magic. I’m not always sure how to do it, but you have to do something. And it doesn’t really take too much extra time to create a good dialogue mix. I’d rather spend more time on the dialogues than on other sounds because you gain so much from it. Some things you can do routinely and it can be a fast process. But dialogue is no routine job. It’s difficult.

People sometimes ask me to point out the pluses and minuses of non-linear sound editing, since I often work on a digital workstation. Non-linear offers more speed, accuracy, fidelity, flexibility, portability, repeatability and cost-effectiveness. The minuses always involve my enslavement to equipment obsolesce and technology one-upmanship. On a manageable level, I can almost

keep up with software and hardware updates so that my equipment is state of the art. What is maddening is that on any given day, one of my competitors may have gotten the momentary technology advantage by purchasing the must-have ‘Sonic Turbo 4 Gigabyte Quintaphomc Stereoizer’ with the 3.0 beta software, and I'll be losing ajob because of it.

One must remember that sound design is, first and foremost, a forum of ideas, not technology. Chance are that any company or individual that attempts to keep up with the Joneses will not last long. What makes great work is the artist, not the paints or the canvas. I remember years ago being humbled by the work of Frank Warner. At a time when I was feeling pretty smug about using state-of-the-art tape recorders and samplers, I heard Frank’s work on Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and Raging Bull. He was still using good old 35mm mag, fundamental tape manipulation techniques and sounds from a venerable library to turn out the most striking soundtracks around. Frank was a genius in his day because he understood drama and pacing, mood and colour, not sample rates or frequency response or bandwidth.

A sound designer’s relationship with an editor should, essentially, be a very close one. The film editor is my most direct connection to the psyche of the director. The editor often spends so much time with a director that he or she gets to know just what it is that the director wants. Sound technology has been evolving at an amazing pace in the past five years. The focus is mainly on the developments and implementation of digital recording and reproduction. The technology is working towards putting more tools of post production in the hands of fewer users and towards reproducing the dubbing stage experience more accurately in theatres.

There is a lot going on in the research and development departments of equipment manufacturers to create faster equipment with higher fidelity. However, I think these developments are incremental compared to the huge leaps that we have made in changing and rethinking of the entire film making process as we enter the digital world. I think that the entire post production process will be turned on its ear in the next decade as digital mass storage and transmission technologies are improved. I see shorter post production schedules, multiple dubbing stages, longer hours, higher salaries, confusion and charlatans by the bus load.