Graduate Spotlight: Creative Specialist

It’s always nice to catch up with our graduates to hear about the exciting things they’ve been up to so we were thrilled to speak to Archie who now works in Frankfurt as a Creative Specialist for DJI.

Archie graduated last year from BSc (Hons) Audio Engineering and now applies many of his sound design and production skills for use with DJI’s drone video content. He says:

“Basically, my everyday work is audio post production for video and my best friend is Pro Tools. The work consists of sound designing for picture which means putting different kind of sounds under the video and crafting the sound ‘picture’, which often helps to support the story.

Mostly, different sounds are taken from the sound library that we have (around 200 GB) but very often I have to record sounds myself (breathing, claps, grunts, hits, impacts, gravel sliding, ball kicking) and it can be either inside in the studio or outside in some quiet places out of town. In the picture below are screenshots of my main Pro Tools session and how the final result looks like after the job is fully done. This one is a ‘behind the scenes video’, which includes more talking and is more interview-style work.”

"The usual workflow for a project would be:

• Planning and producing the shoot
• Shooting video and audio
• Wrangling all footage on our servers
• Editors cut and edit the video
• After the picture is locked, they give the video to colour graders and to sound design and audio post-production (me!)
• I do all post-production. Sometimes I gather some sounds in advance, when I know what I will need as it saves time during the main post-production stage
• After all sounds are in their place I do mixing, apply automation for volumes and panning, check all channels and plugins to fix any clipping
• Then check if everything looks and sounds good to the editor
• After his approval I master and bounce the track, checking loudness, peaks and true peaks.
• Finally I export a single WAV file and hand it in to an editor who puts it under the video and renders the whole film.”

As people in post-production usually say – if video is the body of the film, then audio is the soul.”

See below for some early examples of Archie’s work with DJI:

If you are a Solent media technology graduate and would like to talk to us about where your career is taking you, please contact Paul Bourne.