You’ve been involved in the UK post scene in London since 1993. What made you decide to move into post as a career?
I started in the music industry in a semi-professional way and then got involved in Cardiff, which is where I’m from, in some very low-budget films. I was doing location recording and decided I preferred films to music, there were more options. I then went to the National Film and Television School and did a sound course there. That’s what I did before I worked professionally.
 
What was the process of setting up your won company like?
After I left the National Film and Television school I worked freelance for 18 months as a location recordist, mixer and sound editor so I did all those jobs. Then I joined Videosonics in 1995 as a staff sound editor then rose to become Head of Sound Editing. 
 
What do you think were the main challenges in establishing PD as a successful facility?
I left Videosonics in 2000 and became freelance and I always had an ambition, really, to set up my own sound post production company, and to run things the way I wanted to. So I bought my first workstation in 2001, and that was the start of me setting up my own company.
 
Just looking back at some of the films and projects you’ve been working on up to now, are there any favourites?
Some of the early films I worked on were also some of the most fulfilling, like   Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar. And John Maybury’s Love Is The Devil. Morvern Callar was the first film I did on my own workstation. Since then, obviously the two Stephen Frears films Mrs Henderson and The Queen, both tremendous films to work on. There was Kinky Boots, also a fantastic film. The Jacket by John Maybury was also another highlight, especially the challenge of sound design on The Jacket. I was also very satisfied with The Proposition, [directed by John Hillcoat and written by Nick Cave], a film that maybe didn’t have great commercial impact but was very well received and satisfying to work on in terms of its sound.
 
It seems that there’s quite a resurgence of British film at the moment, with British actors and projects receiving a noticeably large number of wins and nominations at the 79th Oscars®, for example.
There is a bit of a resurgence, obviously there are a lot of very creative people involved in the British film industry. There have been great difficulties as well. This resurgence comes after a very difficult time in terms of the change in the UK tax credit laws and the recent adjustment, which has caused a fall-off in the number of films being produced. Certainly from what we were experiencing a couple of years ago, for example The Queen was the only film we worked on last year. In the industry generally, the hope is that with the new tax credit system in place since the beginning of January 2007, there will be an increase in the number of films being produced.
I mean, we also work in TV as well, with quite prestigious projects such as The Wind In The Willows and Dracula that have been landmark productions over the past year. TV has been our "mainstay" recently, however we are about to start work on two new films, one "Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel", a British Comedy (in the vein of "Shaun of the Dead), and "Eichmann" a more serious historical film about the Nazi war criminal, which will be mixed in Belgium. In fact, we already have a film booked in for January 2008.
 
What are the main technological trends in post right now?
Obviously the impact of desktop systems, be it Nuendo or the other one, they’ve both had a tremendous impact in that it’s lowered the costs of people who want to set up studios, which has also been in response to the fall in budgets particularly in television, it’s become a very competitive environment. It’s a challenge to small independent facilities in TV particularly against larger facilities who can offer sound and picture together. And the technology is enabling facilities to set up dubbing studios much more cheaply than they could before. And there’s many freelancers, too, many individuals. It’s a plus and a negative at the same time. The reason I was able to set up as well is because the cost, the value which you get from Nuendo has facilitated the rise if small places as well. Pete Baldock’s company, Art for Noise, are taking advantage of Nuendo. My first workstation was an AMS Audiophile, which cost an absolute fortune. Setting up in digital editing was once restricted to larger facilities who could afford GBP 40,000 a workstation. And now, of course, you can take advantage of the mixing and the editing being on the same platform, which is a very, very powerful feature that the new technologies like Nuendo offer us in that we can get more creative in sound editorial work than we were before, we can get more involved in what would traditionally be thought of as part of the mixer’s job. We’re not mixing here as such, but we’re certainly able to do a lot more than comparatively recently because of what platforms like Nuendo offer us.
 
What specific tasks are you using Nuendo for?
We’re doing everything from Sound FX, sound design and editing, and ADR editing, that’s what we’re using it for specifically at PD Sound Design. A company we work with very closely is Clarity Post Production who also have Nuendo, and they premix in a smaller room, and then hire a larger sound stage for the final mix. And this makes for a very efficient workflow as well because we can just do our work, take a FireWire drive round to the likes of Clarity. I know that Pete Baldock also works closely with Clarity as well on Goldplated, so we’re working in a very efficient way.
 
So you’re just taking a drive to Clarity with your project files?
Precisely, it’s opened in Clarity’s Nuendo system and they can mix straight from that. We also work more conventionally as well, for example The Queen was mixed partly at Clarity and partly at   De Lane Lea more traditionally. The Queen was partly mixed on the Harrison at De Lane Lea. With Mrs Henderson Presents, we’d just take our Nuendo system along with us. We’ve been to   Twickenham,   Shepperton and De Lane Lea on other projects. It’s quite straightforward; we hook it up with a PCI MADI card into the DFC. So we work both ways, we work conventionally and non-conventionally when we work with Clarity.
 
You’ve been using Nuendo systems for quite a few years now. How many Nuendo stations are you running?
I bought my first Nuendo system at the end of 2002, which was still Nuendo 1. Now we’ve got six licenses. For The Queen, we’d have about four people working on the project at the same time, which is quite a small crew by Hollywood standards, but on a British film, four or five people would be typical for that size of medium-budget British film. We did sound design, which I looked after myself, and a dialogue editor, an ADR editor and an assistant. Foley was done at Clarity.
 
What were the reasons you decided to purchase a Nuendo back then?
We looked at a number of systems. And between myself and Tim Alban [of Clarity Post in London] we really liked the ease of the editing interface and also the mixer. It was the ease of use and flexibility we were attracted to.
 
With The Queen being your major film project last year, tell us a bit more about your general workflow on that project and how long you were working on that project.
We were on board from January to July 2006, The reason was the amount of recutting and there was a little bit of reshooting along the way and at least two previews. So obviously one has to prepare for that.
Once it’s conformed from a hard disk, we export the conformed audio to Nuendo with an AAF. Interestingly, around 30% of The Queen was shot at 25 frames a second, and the main portion was shot at 24 frames, so we had to pitch the 25 frame audio which we used a Nuendo plug-in for. So then we started to prepare dialogue, and then in consultation with the editor and the director we spotted. Then we started to prepare the sound effects. So obviously we went out and did some sound effect recording on location as well to build the library. So we were using a mix of specially recorded sound effects and stuff from our own library as well. From then we did track lay for the first preview, and you often get feedback from that and make adjustments and changes, that’s the basic outline. From then on it goes to premixing.
And The Queen was sound edited and premixed in Nuendo then finalled on a Harrison, using Nuendo as a playback engine at De lane Lea with Adrian Rhodes.
 
What are the specific advantages of Nuendo for you in your work?
It’s flexibility in terms of the ease of being able to take a computer with a fairly affordable PCI card into the machine room and being able to play that back straight into a mixing console. And that’s without the many hardware boxes. The clip history, too, so you can take off any off-line process, that’s a very, very powerful feature because that encourages experimentation while still enabling that process to be adjusted or the individual effect taken off at any stage later on.
 
Throughout your project, you’re obviously having to interact and connect with a lot of other hardware and software, from the first AAFs you get, through to the video playback hardware to playing back into a console. How would you characterize Nuendo as far as integrating with other devices is concerned?
It’s been very straightforward and transparent. We’ve never had any problems with Nuendo chasing time code form a Beta deck or a film projector. We use a Rosendahl interface. I know that mixers, especially, have been impressed with the fact that with Nuendo you can see that the timeline runs backwards when the machine runs in reverse. That impresses a lot of mixers who’re not familiar with Nuendo. Because the find that very helpful when it visually goes back. It might seem like quite trivial thing, but I know that mixers have been very impressed by that.
 
Let’s talk about The Queen for a second. Were you surprised by how successful the film turned out to be?
Yes I think we all felt it was a very good film, and we thought it would be successful in the UK. The truth about films is, and this is something I’ve also heard from other people, that no matter how good you think it is at the time you’re working on it, you’ve no idea about how it’s going to go down with an audience. There were films we’ve worked on that we thought were going to be very successful and haven’t been. We thought The Queen was a very good film, but we were unsure how wide a market there was for it. I think that people have been very pleasantly surprised by the amount of interest from outside the UK.
 
It has been very successful in Germany, too, and obviously seems to have struck a chord in the US…
I think the producers always firmly believed in it as well, ad Miramax were fully behind it, and they could see that there was potential. It was obvious that producers and director thought the potential was there, but you never know, do you…
I’ve worked on two projects now with Stephen Frears, namely The Queen and Mrs Henderson Presents. I was introduced to him by Lucia Zucchetti, who was the picture editor for The Queen. I’d worked with her before on Morvern Callar, and she also worked on The Merchant of Venice. So there’s an established history there, and when she was invited to edit Mrs Henderson Presents, she recommended me. And when Stephen [Frears] came to The Queen, there was already an established team there that he felt comfortable with.
 
As a supervising sound editor, you’re also obviously also in touch with the directors…
Yes, the directors always come in periodically, looking through sound FX and ADR performances, the state of the dialogue tracks, and what we’ve put down for ADR. So they’re working with the dialogue editor and the FX editor. Our team is on constant touch with the picture editor working with our team every day. So there’s a constant liaison with picture editor and director there, what with previews, and producer screenings and so on. There is constant feedback.
 
Are you using the networking features in Nuendo?
Not yet. I know that Clarity are using the networking a lot. We are very interested in that, though, and we’ll be using that in the future.
 
Paul, thanks very much for your time.