I would put forth concepts and ideas and we would finesse them and make them better when we were in the room together.
Part of this is me making choices, but also working very closely with re-recording mixer, Diego Gat, who’s really talented. In the case of the “Teddy Perkins” episode, we wanted to get this sort of cold air in this house that was devoid of technology to make you feel the vastness and the coldness and the emptiness of the space. I would take a traffic sound and use tools to and make it sound like it was in that space. It’s not really a crazy concept, but the choices that I made were very thoughtful. In Atlanta, say you are in a parole office and there’s some really interesting traffic in the background that makes you feel like you are really in that space. It’s about making really good choices about what you want the viewers to hear at a specific time. It’s not necessarily an absence of sound.
To my perspective, quietness is an isolation of sound. The quietness is something I’ve been talking about quite a bit. I thought it was important to feel real and be immersive. I didn’t do season one – season two was mine. It really needed to feel authentic throughout the season. Was that the effect you were striving for? When someone walks across a room, their footsteps across the floorboard almost sound like they are happening in your room. One of the things I noticed about the sound on the show is how quiet it often is and how natural most of the sound seems. I’m very thankful for having the opportunity to tell stories with them. We did season 2 of Atlanta together and we recently did a fun, interesting project called Guava Island – a kind of fairy tale story with Donald Glover. I was in the right place at the right time. Hiro Murai, and Donald Glover, and Kaitlin (Waldron), and all the different people in that production. One of my first months on the job they told me they had this really interesting project that they thought I’d l be a great part of and asked me if they could set up a meeting with the filmmakers. They noticed some work that I did and wanted me to be a part of that family. Formosa is an independent group, but I think of it as an elite group of sound designers and sound editors and recording mixers – a huge pool of talent. I put my hands on maybe a little more than one hundred different films then took the next step in my career with Formosa. I had worked in the field for a smaller company in L.A. How did you come to the show?įour years ago I got connected to a new sound company called Formosa Group. I wanted to focus on three of your most recent projects for our chat.
These conscious decisions about how to make these sonic soundscapes for the piece of entertainment. What’s important about my job is to make choices to be able to tell stories in a certain way. They kind of mean the same thing, but sound design sounds fancier. Doing things to sound with specific tools. Sound editing is more of a specific idea of cutting and moving and cleaning. Sound design is the concept of building a soundscape with some kind of conscious decision about how to put forth that sound. When we are talking about the difference between sound editing and sound design, what would you say is the principle difference? We’re basically in charge of putting a soundscape together for the viewer.
To be really basic in explanation of what we do, everything you hear in film and television that isn’t music is put together by us.Īll the dialogue, all the background ambiance, all the sound effects, and other things that you hear that you might think are natural that are created.
Our job is to be a storyteller in film and TV from a sonic standpoint. I think a lot of us who loves movies and TV might not know exactly what a sound editor does. We discuss his most recent projects in detail, while also speaking on the art of his craft, and the underappreciated value of silence. Gates won his first Emmy in 2018 for the “Teddy Perkins” episode of Atlanta. Trevor Gates is the Emmy-winning sound editor of Atlanta, The Haunting of Hill House, and Jordan Peele’s Us. Emmy Winning Sound Editor Trevor Gates on Atlanta, Hill House, Us, the Sequel to The Shining, and the Value of Silence