The guests made this seminar is all I can say. I thought that the guests were the most distinctive of any of the other seminars- they were funny, swore and definitely had some insightful, metaphoric, philosophical and poetic things to say about how sound works. What I thought failed in terms of the seminar was a structure, it seemed a bit all over the place, and the questions were rather vague at times. I think the seminar would have worked a lot better if the seminar was better structured and then the questions would be more driven. However, this was saved by the content of the seminar guests and their insights into sound and the industry.
Overall, the guests were very insightful in terms of what they had to say. One of the most useful insights for me was in terms of the strong connection between sound design and film in terms of the livelihood of sound designers. If the film industry gets money stripped away from it so does the necessity to have sound designers. What had becomes so apparent throughout all the seminars is that the idea of having a single role is much in the past and that to get a job you really have to be multi-skilled and flexible because employers want people that can do multiple jobs not just one to save them money. Whilst the panel painted a pretty dire picture of the Australian film industry they pointed out the plus side of working in post production where you don’t have to have face-to-face meetings but can correspond via email and forward the content back and forth between borders. This is incredibly convenient for production companies because it allows the film to be finished quicker due to the 24 hour work cycle of having people work on the other side of the world. It saves them both time and money and can be very beneficial for cultivating international networking.
I really thought this was a lovely point to make and transcends through all industry work becoming relevant, even if you don’t have a huge interest in sound production. Again I think this was another highlight of the seminar as the guests content was not limited to people that were just interested in sound but for those that were interested in other fields because there is such a huge link between sound design and film. Even though the Q&A section highlighted something that we didn’t want to hear through the fish and chip analogy that pretty much every distinctly creative idea that you have will just be copied and become mainstream the seminar held itself through its guest’s insights. And to finish off on a slightly technical note I really thought this group would have benefited from checking all their sound properly first because the animation they showed just after the break was barely audible, which defeats the purpose of showing it in the first place. Otherwise this group did really well and I congratulate them on their distinctive guests.
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