Todays lecture was conducted by Helen McCarron who is a Careers and Employability Advisor and Claire Butler who is the Student Enterprise Co-ordinator. The lecture was an introduction into freelance and Self Employment Working.

This lecture was extremely useful to me as I’ll probably be working freelance for a while after University in order to build up my client list and creative portfolio. Both Helen and Claire provided some very useful information about registering as a sole trader with the HMRC, book keeping and tax, what you should be charging, business expenses, accountants, invoicing and VAT. They also recommended that it could be a good idea to look into getting a business account at the bank and it’s probably to wise to work with a media accountant as they have a better understand of how to claim your business expenses.

They then went on to list some of the Pros and Cons of working as self employed. These were as follows:

Pros

• Freedom to work around requirements.
• Cost of commuting.
• Variety of projects – portfolio working.
• Being your own boss.
• Flexible for the creative industries – high % of freelance workers.

Cons

• Initial start up costs.
• Security – e.g. maternity/ paternity, sickness, paid holiday etc.
• Switch off time from work.

To finish up the lecture, they then provided some great info and links which we can use when setting up our business. They mentioned that Student enterprise can offer a £2,500 start up grant, 30 hours of support via workshops and mentoring, virtual office and tenancy spaces, information resources and UoL enterprise networks. They also showed us the free lance toolkit as well as the creative toolkit.

Today’s lecture was given by Lucy Johnstone who is a freelance sound editor and re-recording mixer.

To begin, Lucy spoke to us in depth about some of the technical sides of recording voice overs and the best ways to capture and edit them. She suggested that some of the good ways to improve the overall sonic qualities of voice overs was to use VO trim, remove breaths and to remove lip smacks. She also recommended to use a small buffer size when recording voice overs to avoid echo and latency issues for the actor/narrator and that it is more important to spend more time on perfecting the dialogue as oppose to the SFX. In these scenarios, its 30% what you know and 70% how you are with client.

She also spoke to us about some of the other technical aspects of her job with regards to SFX, ambience and track laying/organisation. For ambience, she recommended that it’s best to have them in stereo so they can immerse the viewer, never loop the beginning of an ambience track, use different takes and clips for background sounds to prevent them from sounding repetitive and that Izotope RX can be a great tool to help match different takes and ambiences. For spot effects, it’s best to keep these in mono so it leaves you with more options and finally for track laying, she recommended putting tracks in banks of 4 or 8 to help organise the session. She also recommended that you ask the offline editor for handles, never cross two pieces of music and to speak to the director if you’re unsure whether they prefer long or short fades.

Aside from the technical side, she also gave some advice on how to get into the industry and what it can be like once you are in the industry. She suggested that work experience is crucial if you want to get a job in the industry and that finding small companies are good for moving up, however they may produce less high-profile shows. Working in house at these companies is also a great way to gain and experience and credits making it a lot easier if you decide to go freelance. This is also the route that Lucy took.

When working on a production, it’s important to fight your corner if you feel passionate about something however, at the end of the day it’s the director who makes the final decisions and knowing when to back down is important as you won’t be putting your job in jeopardy. A good thing to know is that dramas normally prefer to use boom mics and documentaries prefer clip mics with documentaries having a much faster turnaround of programs compared to drama.

I felt this lecture provided a great insight in the world of sound editing and re-recording within the industry, especially from a freelance perspective. The tips Lucy gave were very useful as freelance working is something i’m looking at once I leave University.

This week’s guest lecture was given by Lol Hammond who is a music supervisor for Vertigo Films, a music composer and occasionally works as a free-lance music supervisor.

I found this lecture very informative as I’d briefly heard of the music supervisor role, but never really understood the full extent of it. Lol went on to explain that the main premise of his job required him to source different pieces of music that were needed to be featured in films and TV shows. He needs to contact the record label, publisher and sometimes the artist to then work out a deal with them for their music to be licensed. The majority of the time Lol mentioned that getting the music required is usually successful however sometimes there are a few artists who demand too much money or refuse to have their music broadcast on films and TV.

Sometimes parts of the job can be more creative than others. There are times where the music supervisor can even work with the editor and be heavily involved in the creative process of choosing the music. However, there are other times where the music supervisor has no creative input and is only there to liaise with the label, publisher and artist.

When giving some tips on how to become a music supervisor, Lol said that it’s always good to have a wide knowledge of music and to immerse yourself in as much music as possible to avoid boxing yourself in. Another way to get into the industry is to cut your teeth working with independent companies on short films as they are an important part of the industry and are a good way of building up your contacts. This has never been easier due to the influx of social media and film makers being able to showcase their work to a massive internet platform. He also suggested that it’s always good to know a bit of video editing so you can show directors/producers/companies your choice of music for their project.

This week we had Luke Pickering come in to have a talk with us about his job at Church Studios in London. Luke is the Assistant Engineer to Paul Epworth, the in-house assistant and engineer for the studio and he also taught us for half of a semester in our first year.

Luke began by explaining that his career began at Church Studios by contacting Miloco and offering to complete a month of work experience there. During his first month, he didn’t really get hands on with much of the technical and creatives aspects of the studio and instead, was doing mundane tasks such as making drinks for people, sweeping the studio, emptying bins, filling fruit bowls etc. However, Luke made a strong point that completing these seemingly mundane tasks to a good standard is a vital part to moving up the ladder in the studio. If the producer can’t trust you to provide good cups of tea how can they trust you with all of the expensive equipment? It took him two years of being a runner to acquire his role as assistant engineer.

To get a job as a runner in the first place, he explained that its best to explain why you’d be a good runner and not to call yourself an ‘engineer’ or a ‘producer’. This is because they are looking for a runner and not an engineer, it will probably annoy the person reading it and producing is probably still a hobby at this moment in time. Whilst you are there as a runner, you need to have a strong initiative, be switched on, not annoy the other people working there and have an understanding of what people above you want.

Luke explained that the way it works at Church Studios is very traditional and that there is definitely a hierarchy there. You have to being willing to prioritise it over almost everything as it is more of a lifestyle than a job. You have to really want to do it as it involves working for as long as the producer/artist wants during unsociable or unstructured hours, working for poor pay, working long hours on your own terms as well as for people in different time zones and being prepared for almost anything.

I found this lecture very interesting and useful as I would love to work in a studio like this one day and getting this insight into the studio really provided me with some good knowledge of how get my foot in the door.

This week’s guest lecture was conducted by Jez Riley-French who is an experimental sound artist whose work focuses a lot on field recording. A lot of today’s lecture consisted of Jez showcasing some of the different work he has done, all of which was recorded in variety of interesting locations. He began by playing the sound of teleferica cables being blown about by the wind in Italy which he had recorded with some contact microphones he had made himself. As he continued to showcase his work, he discussed the different skills and techniques he’d used to capture them as well as the different microphones he’d used such as hydrophones, ultrasonic recordings and infrasound. One of his pieces I really enjoyed was Height Of The Reeds where he’d placed contact microphones in the roof of a building to capture the sound of an orchestra. This led to the piece sounding really eerie whilst simultaneously sounding extremely musical and rich. This is an experimental technique I may now use in my music production and is reflective of Jez saying that you should treat the recording space and the microphone as an extra instrument.

Jez also gave some tips and hints into the world of experimental sound recording which were; to try and record things for as long as possible as short recordings may get perceived as sound effects, technology is the least important tool and its more about how you use it (also mentioned by Dean in the previous week), always try to record at low gain levels to avoid unwanted compression, there’s always a market for your work if you specialize in a certain area, make you sure you have good quality head phones, acoustics are crucial when presenting a sound design piece and a lot of sound recording is all about the experience.