Tag: Lincoln School of Film and Media

Ken Blair is a sound recordist and recording engineer who runs BMP sound recording. His company deals with recording classical, jazz and acoustic music.

His background is in the relatively controlled environment of recording studios and began for him 25 years ago – He compared the technicalities of the studio with the much more precise sessions in the world of classical recordings, with these recordings tending to be of multiple instruments recording straight to stereo. This requires what might be considered a distinctly old school approach of achieving a good balance of sound at source and live mixing on the way into the recorder which leaves very little room for error on the part of the musicians or the engineer. He also explained that recording portably in venues suitable for classical ensembles often requires unconventional problem solving in constructing a suitable workspace and cable runs.

Ken discussed how important musical academia and the ‘grades’ system is to his business model, as the alterations to the system each year offer the opportunity for regular, repeatable business. He also focussed some of his talk on the more mundane day to day work for his business, and moved on to dispense some advice about presenting yourself to potential employers and clients. He made the point that CV’s are often overly work-based and that it’s worth adding a little character to the front page rather than overloading it on skills and experience, which was particularly useful to me as I was in the process of updating my own at the time and recognized that tendency in my own.

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Katia Isakoff is a composer, producer, mix engineer, studio owner, academic and prime mover in the Women Produce Music organisation around which, along with the wider issues facing women in the music business, this guest lecture was centred.

She described WPM’s role as one of promotion and collaboration of female music producers, and Katia used several examples of the way in which even very big name female record artist’s (Bjork is an example) work on their own records is often marginalised in favour of the male collaborators in the eyes of the wider industry and the public.

WPM also exists to help eliminate the difficulties in sourcing female producers and academics for academic purposes. Katia explained that the academic aspects of music production mirror the commercial industry with very little female involvement as students or tutors. The industry itself has made some moves to present a changing picture but is currently projecting fairly obvious tokenism to hide ‘business as usual’, and that it lacks any meaningful institutional change – “The old doors are considered closed,”.

Her position is that the key to addressing the imbalance is not to focus on highlighting it or blaming people for it, but to concentrate on finding solutions and engendering real change.

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Dan Shepherd is primarily a radio producer and provider of training and teaching for people working in radio. He runs Far Shoreline Productions.

This guest lecture had Dan showing us examples of some of his more notable radio features, and giving us some insight into the production of these.

The first was an audio ‘feature documentary’ of an Australian train journey, recorded on numerous tapes in the pre-digital era for the BBC. He made the point that certain sounds on the journey were evocative, and capturing these enables the producer to build the world of the experience for the listeners…Interviews with train passengers both tell a story and evoke a sense of place, which is critical to documentary of this type, as well as a sense of the journey itself.  This is so important that some of the sounds used were taken from the library at the expense of authenticity, as it wasn’t always possible to collect the audio to a sufficient standard for later use.

This sense of place is particularly relevant to our film project this term as we’ve been consciously trying to collect as much ‘authentic’ foley sound from our sets, but these have often been unusable due to external factors like traffic noise necessitating their recreation which, in turn, has sometimes led to a better ‘fit’ with the picture than the authentic sound would have achieved. This is different from radio, where sound is all, but the idea of communicating a sense of place is similar.

For Dan, the key differentiating factor with feature’s is their enabling of depth and scope of approach. A ‘good feature will always be greater than the sum of it’s parts’ – a travelogue becomes more than that by telling a story and capturing the experience of others. Where news and current affairs programs condense data, feature documentaries allow the exploration of different dimensions of creativity around an idea.

Dan’s discussion of a second program on ‘cut-ups’, created for Radio 4, touched upon the importance of making your feature for a specific audience. This particular show featured a presenter working in an explanatory role as the Radio 4 audience were likely being introduced to the idea of the mash-up for the first time. For Dan, the question became how to make the subject relevant and interesting for a Radio 4 audience and this along with the prescribed format conventions when working for the BBC narrowed the focus of the show as it was edited. Thinking about this, it occurs to me that our directors for the Semester A film project have not referred to their target audience at any point, and that this would be a useful discussion to have with them.

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