Part 6 Sennheiser PRO TALK with Colin Pink and Gareth Fry
Colin and Gareth talk about their career highlights as sound designers and future aspirations.
Video Transcript
Colin: “I think I’ve been lucky enough to work with a lot of people and favourite productions for me I think, working with Hans Zimmer is kind of the peak because you know the music’s great, the production values are epic, he’s a perfectionist and his band are the best in the world and you bring those factors together and it’s just it’s not work it’s just joy. I’m lucky, I do the Brit Awards and the MTV EMA’s as a designer and I love doing those simply because you’ve got 10 or 11 bands on each show who come with 10 or 11 audio teams and so I get to work very closely with over 20 of the top audio teams in the world. You just learn so much from them and that’s what I love.”
Colin: “I love I guess I love learning but I hated school no I didn’t hate school that’s a lie, but I love learning when you don’t think you’re learning. I mean going back to my days at the National my mentor there was a designer called Paul Groothuis. He was a great person to learn from because he gave you ownership of what you were doing and let you find your way and what I try to do with people is I will never tell someone how to mix something. I will let them mix it their way and then if I don’t like that I will try and steer their thought process as opposed to what they’re doing because I always think you know if someone’s just doing what they’re told you can probably get a computer to do it. I want them to do what they feel, so I just educate them on what I would like them to feel and that way you get the best out of them.”
Colin: “As for dream gigs well, I’ve done the Brits, I’ve done the MTV’s I’d love to do the Grammys whether that’ll ever happen or not I doubt. Obviously there’s some Union issues but that would be a great show to do. Going back in history I would have loved to have mixed Prince. He was quite a musical influence in my upbringing and I just think he would have been a very interesting man to work with.”
Gareth: “I’ve got a little band of directors now who sort of become people that I’ve worked with quite a lot over the years and who I really enjoy working with and quite often it’s because they really enjoy pushing what you can do with sound and challenging those boundaries so and I’ve really enjoyed working with those directors. We’ve done for example Simon McBurney who we did the encounter with recently which was on Broadway earlier this year and you know we did this amazing show experimenting with binaural sound and having the entire audience wearing headphones and things like that. We spent 5 years making the show together and travelling to the Amazon rainforest and doing things like that so that was kind of that was a bit of a dream gig in itself in a way. To have the time to experiment and explore and try out new things and obviously going to the Amazon rainforest and living with an indigenous community for a week is something you don’t normally get to do in your everyday life”
Gareth: “There’s another director called John Tiffany whom I work with a lot and we’ve just done Harry Potter and the Cursed Child in London and we’re in the middle of making that for New York. I’ve really enjoyed working with him, he’s got an amazing musical sense and he’s really very good at bringing teams of people together and letting them create and collaborate together and directing them to create these amazing shows. So that also was a dream gig in a way because it was such an amazing piece to work on and so fantastical and working again as Colin was saying with the top people at the top of their game which makes life really joyful and fun and not so stressful and you can all work together to create something knowing that you’re making good work in an enjoyable way. I think you were saying about you know coming to work every day and it’s a fun thing rather than a work thing and so those jobs where you can come to work and it doesn’t feel like work or always the best ones for me. Whatever the future brings really there’s so much exciting things to do and so many exciting technologies to come out coming out and so many interesting artists to work with you know it’s really exciting at the moment to have all these opportunities of emerging.”
