Sound Arts

Interview with Supervisor Sound Editor Tim Harrison.
Tim Harrison is a Supervisor Sound Editor and a Sound Designer. He is a Sound Arts Technician and an Associated Lecturer at London College of Communication. In 2004 Tim Harrison founded Aumeta, a creative multimedia service company specialising in sound design and interactive development. Since then he has designed six feature films, numerouscorporate campaigns and plenty of experimental cinema and interactive installations. Recent clients include the BBC, Disney and SEGA. He studied Computing and Philosophy at University of Leeds. His relationship with sound started with music, recording and mixing bands, he also started producing some electronic music tracks. He got into film because of a friend ask him to do the score for his filmbut then when he started to do it professionally through the contacts he met, he preferred to do Sound Design than Music.
I have chosen Tim Harrison for that assignment because when I started to think about it, I was clear that the person I wanted to interview, it had to be a sound designer or someone involved with sound for film, animation or Computer Games. The reason is because those subjectsare the most attractive for me, as my main interest at the time is to find my path into the sound design industry. I met Tim during a Sound for film lectures he was teaching at my BA on LCC. Since then I felt really identified with his work, methods and skills. Also the opportunity and availability to be the technician and one of the lecturers on University made me decide definitely for him. Sofinally I spoke with him and I arranged a date to make the interview.
Once I had everything arranged for the interview with Tim Harrison, I started to prepare what it was going to be the questions for the interview. Since I have no experience on making interviews I firstly started to make some research about it. I have read a couple of websites giving some tips when preparing an interview(about.com, bbc.co.uk) and I just applied some of those advice as a guide on my task as an interviewer. I have also had a look to many interviews that I found on Internet, especially those with sound designers, foley artist and supervisor sound editors, to find out some common topics and some questions that could work with my individual. I have attached some examples on the references list below.Finally I did some research about Tim Harrison where I found some interesting information to use in my interview, for example I found out that he owes a creative company specialised on Sound Design called Aumeta or that he studied computing and philosophy on university.
After the research that I had done at the moment I felt confident to prepare the question list for the interview. My mains concern atthis stage was the number of question that I should do and how to give consistency between one question and the following one. Besides I wanted to be flexible on the questionnaire because I thought it would probably came up a interesting question during the course of the interview. Finally I decided to make a final list with fourteen questions listed below:

- Is the term sound designer a goodway to describe what you do?
- How did you get into film audio—what was your background originally?
- What are the basic techniques that you typically use when you're manipulating a sound?
- What are some of the sources of these sounds?
- What is the difference between a Foley artist and a sound designer?
- What pieces of technology wouldn't you be without when creating audio for film?
-Can you describe how you typically work with a director on a film job?
- Does not the intense time pressure of today's films make that kind of experimentation more difficult?
- What sort of problems have you faced when laying down tracks and mixing for film?
- What was the first film that you created a surround sound mix for?
- What do you think has been the biggest innovation in film audio?...