AUDIO POST SKILLS
POST
At Envy Post, co-founder Nathascha Cadle is on the ScreenSkills Select advisory board. “It’s very important to work together with not just universities, but with any educational institutions,” she says. “Universities do great work, but there is a massive gap still between education and the real, working world.”
One initiative to address this gap is the government’s T-level, two-year screen skills qualification, (an A level equivalent), which launches later this year. “It will be interesting to see if that makes a huge difference,” says Cadle.
The T-level might give runners a head start, but they will generally be given a thorough training anyway. At Clear Cut Pictures, the runners have a six-month introduction where they’re taught a variety of skills so that they are “industry ready,” as Rowan Bray, managing director of Clear Cut Pictures, puts it. Then they are introduced to operations. When they show an interest in a particular area, they will be mentored by the senior team, which can be from day one. Audio is the most popular choice.
Senior industry figures remember their own runner experience as tough but rewarding. “I was going in after the mixers and watching what they had done,” says Nick Fry, the Head of Audio at Picture Shop. “I would remix it myself, or start from scratch. Evenings and weekends, which I think for management was great to see that you’re keen.”
“I had a piece of paper that told me that I knew what I was
doing. I knew the theory, I knew which buttons to press, but I had no idea how to work as part of a film-making team.”
Helen Miles, Re-recording Mixer at Molinare
LEARNING THE SOFT SKILLS
Fry is one who sees new entrants lacking soft skills. “While university graduates might have technical knowledge and understanding of specific aspects of audio, my issue is that they can lack an understanding of the real world, of dealing with clients, of understanding and reading a room, which are skills that you learn over time as a runner,” he says.
Helen Miles, Re-recording Mixer at Molinare, did a four-year degree, followed by a Masters in Sound Design before entering the industry. At the time, she was confident of her qualifications. “I had a piece of paper that told me that I knew what I was doing,” she says. She stands by the value in her Masters, “an element of physics and rigorous audio engineering,” but had hands-on experience of its limitations. “I knew the theory, I knew which buttons to press, but I had no idea how to work as part of a film-making team.” Richard Addis, Content Services Engineer at Dolby Laboratories, did an acoustics-based Masters. “I went through a period of being quite dispirited and had to get taught from the ground up the creative side, but as I started moving towards operations and technical management, more of an engineering role, I found how applicable the foundational, theoretical stuff was.”
Miles is now working with a runner turned audio assistant. “He doesn’t come with a degree, with experience in Pro Tools, but he
Last November Televisual hosted a Future of Audio Post Roundtable that was largely reported in Winter’s issue. The discussion that evening also explored the extent to which further education was truly vocational and the degree to which university curricula matched the requirements of audio post employers. Our panel’s observations inform this report. Our thanks again to Avid and Jigsaw24 Media for supporting this event and to Dolby for hosting it.
Shine TV’s Disney+ doc Finding Michael, posted at Envy Spring 2023
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