Todays lecture was conducted by Helen McCarron who is a Careers and Employability Advisor and Claire Butler who is the Student Enterprise Co-ordinator. Their lecture was focused around freelance work and self employment work. Both Helen and Claire provided some very useful information about registering as a sole trader with the HMRC, book keeping and tax, what you should be charging, business expenses, accountants, invoicing, VAT and etc. I found this to be very useful information as I would like to be self employed after University, Not only in sound but in film and surprisingly in Graphic Design (I’ve already made a Graphic Design Company in my past time, which of now in third year is never). They even showed statistics relating to freelance work that allowed us to understand how accessible freelance work can actually be. they shows stats like 30% of people working in creative media are freelance’. Creative Skillset Workforce Report 2014 and 67% in Audio, Sound and Music. They then went on to list some of the Pros and Cons of working as self employed. These were as follows

Pros

• Freedom to work around requirements.
• Being your own boss.
• Variety of projects
• Being your own boss.

Cons

• Initial start up costs.

I didn’t get enough time to write down the rest of the bullet-points*

In the end of the lecture they explained how that everyone in the class are all eligible for a £2500 grant to help us become freelancers, and we will also be given support from a mentor.

I really liked this lecture the most out of them all as this would help further my goals in being self employed.

For this weeks lecture we had a visit from a post production sound engineer Lucy Johnstone who has worked on shows such as Eastenders as a dubbing mixer and sound editor. This lecture was heavily focused around the steps Lucy takes as a freelance sound editor, her relationship between her and the other members and staff and so on. I really liked the lecture as it was a great insight into whats it’s like to be a sound editor and she said some great stuff including when she was talking about how to deal with recording ADR. I’d Like to get into sound editing but for anime films and tv series. She also suggested that some of the good ways to improve the overall sonic qualities of voice overs was to use VO trim, remove breaths and to remove lip smacks. Lucy also spoke to us about some of the other aspects of her job SFX, ambience and tracklaying/organization. For ambience, she recommended that it’s best to have them in stereo so they can immerse the viewer, never use the beginning of an ambience track, use different takes and clips for background sounds to prevent them from sounding repetitive and that Izotope RX can be a great tool to help match different takes and ambiences. Lucy mentioned the importance of conducting yourself in front of directors and respecting their wishes even if you don’t always agree. As Lucy has worked for both a company and as a freelancer, her insight into both worlds was very interesting.

I feel Lucy left a lot for me to think about when I came down to thinking about what exactly I want to do when I leave university.

This week’s guest lecture was given by Lol Hammond who is a music supervisor for Vertigo Films, a music composer and occasionally works as a free-lance music supervisor.

He spoke with us about his IMDB profile and about each of the movies and how he approached them for a while and it was kind of intriguing to see how Lol took different approach with each movie he had done and tailored that to the genres of the films. He spoke about how he prefers to contact artists to work on the soundtracks for films opposed to using more conventional orchestration. 

He gave interesting advices while speaking, one of the things he said was that the more producers, the more engineers & etc… the more problems that will occur and that it’s always good to have a wide knowledge of music and to immerse yourself in as much music as possible to avoid boxing yourself in if you want to become a music supervisor

As a whole this lecture did intrigue me as it’s a role that I never thought about and being a person that is into music and film, I believe music plays a great part in a film as it can provoke emotions if done correctly.

This week’s guest lecture was given by Luke Pickering, Luke is an alumni from the University Of Lincoln and Luke was there in my first year and taught me in my first semester of university, but Luke came today as the studio assistant at the church studios in London and assistant engineer to Paul Epworth who co-wrote and produced Skyfall with Adele. 

Luke began by talking about his job at Church Studios and how it got started, Before Luke was working with church studios he said he was struggling to find relevant work and did a lot of little things to keep him busy this included free lance work and being a lecturer at the University. However on his first month with the studio, he didn’t get hands on with much of the stuff in the studio and instead was doing very boring and mundane jobs like making drinks for other people, cleaning the studio, clearing out the bins and so on.

Luke said we do anything and everything we can and take any opportunity if one should present itself. and really stressed the importance of being persistent when trying to land a job.