Peter Baldock and Nuendo: A BAFTA-Winning Team
Peter Baldock is among the UK’s most sought-after audio post professionals, with a long list of credits including Blade Runner, The Beach, Cracker and Severance. Peter was awarded the UK’s highest honour in the film industry in 2007, scooping the BAFTA award for his role as sound effects editor and supervising sound editor on 9/11: The Twin Towers, the acclaimed BBC documentary dealing with the terrorist attacks on the USA in 2001. Peter talked to us about his career, his Art4Noise post facility and his experience as one of the UK’s first post production professionals using Nuendo - since version 1.0.
Adele Fletcher, Ben Carr, Peter and Nick Baldock. And a BAFTA award.
Nick Baldock
Art4noise Room 1, with WK Audio ID Controller
Still from 911: The Twin Towers
Still from 911: The Twin Towers
Still from 911: The Twin Towers
Tell us a bit about your background and how you moved to audio post...
I first started work in features as a picture assistant on the first Alien and then after that on Bladerunner. I have always been a big science fiction fan and some friends of mine offered me a sound job on an early Micheal Winterbottom TV show for kids which was about time traveling and I thought ‘why the hell not’ and after that it all seemed to fit into place. I found myself working with sound and getting a great kick out of it!
What have been your personal highlights from all the projects you’ve been involved in?
I've worked with many talented directors including Roger Mitchell, Chris Smith and Anton Corbjn, and it’s been fantastic to have worked with all of them. There have been many highs on the projects that I've worked on and I could mention them all but the two that probably have been both the hardest and the most rewarding are Milcho Manchevski's Dust and Vincent Ward’s River Queen both of which are epic films in their own right, and who's directors trusted me and inspired me to be creative with sound.
What are the major current trends within the industry, technologically, commercially or artistically?
At the risk of being boring I feel in some respects the industry has changed for the worst. It’s a great business when you're working but when you're not it can be very hard and cruel, you just have to take a close long look around Soho and see how many people have fallen by the wayside to understand that. Part of the problem is the perception that technology makes things easier and thus quicker to do so the job that took two months to do three years ago now only needs 2 weeks, when what it should do is give you more time to refine the art of sound and more time to be creative. But the big constraint these days is financial: everyone wants to do it cheaper and do it better and most of the time those two requirements contradict each other.
As to the future, certainly this year is looking healthier. The trend of one-stop post facilities is continuing and this is part of the problem, that small post houses can’t compete with a larger competitor who offers a sound "package" for half the price as incentive to do all aspects of post with them. I've always tried to maintain quality over quantity and tell people not to put all their eggs in one basket. But its’ always the client’s choice.
Which specific tasks does art4noise specialize in (FX, foley, ADR etc)? We hear you’re using Nuendo for all of them…
We have always been Nuendo's number one disciple in the UK We've grown a bit over the years and our recordist Ben Carr used Nuendo in our studio to record ADR on Control, 9/11, Venus and the Channel 4 TV series GoldPlated. Our Sound editors Nick Baldock and Adele Fletcher use Nuendo for sound FX x tracklaying, dialogue editing, foley editing. For temp mixing we use the WK ID controller. We record our own sound FX on every film when we have the chance, which contributes to our ever-expanding FX library. We've also hired out our Nuendo systems for other films such as Alien vs. Predator and The Constant Gardener.
What was 9/11 like to work on – were their any particular technical or artistic challenges there?
With 9/11, I suppose the hardest thing was integrating the archive footage with the dramatic reconstruction without losing the raw quality of some of the original sound recorded that day. Fortunately the production company, Dangerous Films, showed a lot of faith in us and we got a lot of license to be creative with the tracks. For instance, the collapse of one of the towers was described by a witness as sounding like a runaway train approaching and we used that metaphor as an element of the sound design. One advantage we had was that we work very closely with the Cinephonix composers group involved on the project. Each of us at every stage knew what the other was doing even though the composer was based in Sweden and we'd be continually exchanging files of FX and sound design mixdowns and music files via our ftp site, to make sure everything was working for us before we went into the mix. It was the first time I'd worked with the mixer Cliff Jones, and it was great to mix with him as he is a talented guy and his ability to mix for TV is unquestionable and nothing was a problem for him.
Do you take Nuendo systems with you to mix at a different facility? If so, how do you integrate Nuendo there? Which studio was used to mix 9/11?
Last year we did the mix for the Chris Smith’s horror film Severance at Lipsync Post in Wardour street and we took in our own 2 systems to mix off in their Studio1 with Paul Cotterell. Our systems work off MADI but when we first started mixing off Nuendo we used to take banks of convertors with us, a mix of Apogees and the Nuendo's hardware. 9/11 was mixed at Cliffs old Studio Sound Monsters in Fitzrovia which was a dedicated Nuendo Studio, so all we took to the mix was our hard drives.
Which parts of the project were done at your facility on Nuendo?
All the track-laying and sound design was done at our facility as well as most of the ADR. The foley we shot at Mint Post straight into their Nuendo system, which meant they could give us a project on a pocket drive. That allowed us to start editing straight away.
You’ve been using Nuendo systems for several years now. How and when did you switch, and what made you switch to Nuendo in the first place?
I'd worked with AudioFile and AudioVision and of the two AV was my favorite because its interface was so user-friendly. When AudioVision came to a sad end, I had to look around for the software that gave me the same connectivity and ease of use and after a lot of searching I came across Nuendo in early 2002, and found a system that was easy and quick to learn but was also visually straightforward and I knew that it would work for me and not against me like some systems.
What are the specific advantages you’ve found in Nuendo over other systems?
That’s tricky, obviously there are some advantages to be had with other systems, i.e. I cant walk into every studio in the world and expect them to have a Nuendo set up and that would be very arrogant if I did that, so it’s hard to make comparisons but we all have to keep the "devil" in our back pocket just so we can bring it out when we absolutely have to! I know that I am using the best system for audio post around at the moment. I think being able to drop multiple QT's into the timeline years before anybody else was a big plus for keeping feature reels in one timeline. But the major plus for us is being able to have multiple projects open at the same time so you can cross reference previous versions without stopping the workflow.
Peter, thanks very much for your time.