JUNE 2025
MASA: You’ve worked across a wide range of acclaimed projects, from ‘Game of Thrones’ and ‘Room’ to ‘Normal People’ and ‘Marlowe’. What first drew you to sound design and how did you get your start in the industry?
STEVE: I think that like most people working in the film industry, my path into my work was not straightforward or obvious. My work in sound began from playing music in my teens and then developed into working in radio, live event sound and studio work with music. I was always a big film fan, but didn’t really have a proper concept of how film sound worked and what was involved until I met a wonderful Foley Artist called Caoimhe Doyle. She introduced me to sound post production and through her I gained my first experiences working in film sound. From working with her and others at Ardmore Sound, I became aware of a whole new way of thinking about sound and music in relation to picture and story. It was exciting to see how I could apply and evolve everything I had learned from working with sound into this other medium. I was fortunate enough to earn my initial film credits on some wonderful films working alongside some very experienced, patient and generous sound practitioners. I was 30 when I first moved into film sound post work, so had a lot of experience of other things to bring to it, which I think has been really helpful to the work I do.
MASA: How has your approach to sound evolved over the course of your career, especially as you’ve moved between film, television and documentary projects?
STEVE: I think that I have learned to trust my instincts more over the years. I feel like every project deserves its own unique approach. It’s really important to me to be open to the work, to not be so sure about what I’m doing that I miss an opportunity to explore it in a new and exciting way. If I commit to a project, I want to give it my full attention and to make sure to support the filmmakers that I am working with in the best ways my craft can, to go on a journey with them and try to help them figure out the best use of sound for their film, documentary or series.
Often the biggest difference between projects is time and budget. Film, TV and Documentary all have different budgets and workloads and it’s important to understand what the director and producers behind each is hoping to achieve in the sound work. Knowing what they want to do soundwise, will help me make suggestions for how best to tailor the budget and schedule to make sure we get there. I feel like I have learned so much from working across different types of projects and ultimately am trying to achieve the same level of work on each. It’s all about the different filmmakers, their project and their infectious enthusiasm for what they are trying to create.
Collaboration is hugely rewarding and is at the centre of what we do. Working with a team of invested, talented people is invaluable, so trying to find those people and those projects is high on my priority list when looking for new work. I place my trust in my collaborators; your director is your guide, they know their film and will have instinctive reactions about whether your work is contributing in the best way to their film. Let them help you find new approaches. I try to consider and work through every note I receive, even if some feel counter intuitive. Even if the initial idea doesn’t work, it will often lead to really interesting things that would never have been discovered without that exploration or detour.
I learned early on to never ignore the guidetrack; the director and their editor have put so much thought and work into it as they edit. It’s our job to persevere their intent and hopefully bring it to life for them in new and exciting ways as we collaborate on the sound design and mix of their film or series.
MASA: You’ve said that the best sound work often goes unnoticed by the audience. How do you strike the balance between subtlety and impact in your soundscapes?
STEVE: I think the important thing is to experiment and try to find a unique and truthful sound world for the project you are working on. The best filmmaking is invisible to us as audience members. We might go into a film knowing we are going to be told a constructed story, but once it begins, when it’s good, we’ll be swept away by it. We aren’t thinking about the camera movement or lens choice, or the production design, the writing or the performances; I think that if we are thinking of these things as we experience something for the first time it’s probably a sign that something isn’t quite working, if that makes sense? I think the best filmmaking hides the artifice of the filmmaking process. That doesn’t mean that all of the craft work is not bold or groundbreaking, it just means that while it is those things, it also makes sense for the film and doesn’t announce itself above the film it’s serving.
I will often rewatch a film that I have been blown away by to then analyse what’s going on in the sound work. It won’t be obvious to me on that first experience while I am wrapped up in the story. But, chances are, it will be doing something complex, bespoke and original for the film and it’s only on repeat viewing that I will be able to deconstruct it. It will be invisible in the moment for the first time audience member, because it’s appropriate to the film. It’s only when things are forced or not quite sitting into the picture that we notice them.
With sound and music I often try to think about them as sitting in or on the picture. For me, if something sits in the picture, it feels like it’s part of the film and has a natural place in it that is helpful to the story. If it’s sitting on the picture then it feels like it’s forced, the film is rejecting it and I have not found the right way for it to feel woven into the fabric of the film. If it’s sitting on the picture it’s likely to draw attention to itself in a way that could be distracting for the audience.
It so crucial to find the appropriate use of sound for each moment; what sounds are important here? How are they being heard and from whose perspective? Film is such a magic alchemy. This is a collaborative process with my director. I am offering and sharing ideas with them, taking feedback and developing things further with them.
MASA: Can you describe your approach when it comes to collaborating with directors and composers, especially in projects where music and sound design are closely intertwined?
STEVE: I take a lot of notes when I first read a script or see a cut. I bring these into any meetings or spotting sessions I might have with my director. I find it really helpful to be prepared and to have some ideas percolating. I’ll be making and collecting recordings that I think will be useful to the project. I’ll share these early with the editor, so they have material to work with as they assemble the cut. When we get to talk through a film, I like to get a sense of they’re perspective and to feel out how they are thinking about sound and music. Hopefully, I can then discuss ideas that I’ve had or new ones that come up in our conversation so that we have a good starting point for the work.
I like to send them initial ideas early and often. I always make a point of telling them that I am not precious about what I am sharing, but it would be great to get their feelings on these ideas back as it will help me gauge whether I am interpreting our conversations correctly or not. We don’t have a lot of useful language for discussing sound, so it feels really important to try to get a language going between us where we know we are talking about the same things in the same way. This can take some initial back and forth. I often use the example of someone asking for a scene to feel warm in the sound; it’s a great note, but figuring out what someone’s idea of warmth is in sound might take some trial and error. It’s a subjective feeling. The journey for me is usually about working on the sequence and reviewing it with them to figure out if it’s going in that warm direction for them. If it isn’t, it’s about trying something else until we get to a place where it feels warm to them. In that process I am learning about their taste and their point of view, which is really valuable to the rest of the work that we will do together.
When it comes to music and design being intertwined, I think this is really driven by the director and will need support from their producers. I have been fortunate to work on a number of projects where I have started early in the picture editing process and worked on the sound in parallel with the picture edit. This often means starting in and around the same time as the composer and it means we can share our work in progress with each other. There has to be an appetite from our director for us to be in touch and the composer has to be comfortable with sharing early ideas with me. When we are aware of what each other is doing and our director is feeding back to us, we can begin to carve out space for each other in our work. On a basic level, if the design is craving to take up the low end of the frequency spectrum, then it's helpful if the score is leaving space for this and vice versa.
Having time in sound editorial to experiment with score demos, will hopefully allow us to make early decisions of how design and score can interact with each other. Sometimes having the two things meld to the extent that it’s hard to tell where one begins and the other ends is ideal for a scene or sequence, or having them clash or be dissonant can be ideal in others. Being given the time to experiment with this early in the process is invaluable to how effective this will then translate in the final mix. It’s my favourite way for sound and music to collaborate on a film.
MASA: On ‘Normal People’, your sound design helped create an intimate yet expansive atmosphere. What were some of the unique challenges or creative decisions you faced on that series?
STEVE: The novel the series is based on is completely told from the point of view of the main characters. You're always in their head. It’s much harder for a TV series or film to do this. Lenny Abrahamson and Hettie Macdonald (the second block director), along with the series writers, Sally Rooney (also the book’s author), Alice Birch and Mark O’Rowe, and the producers, Element Pictures, figured out this amazing way to make you feel like you are with the characters in the scene, without having to put you in their head in any overt way. You're intimately in their space and somehow feel like you’re in the room with them.
Having the confidence to sit with characters and observe them, rather than have them talk all the time or have them tell us everything in an overly expositional way, feels cinematic. We're allowed to observe their body language and all those little details that as human beings we use to navigate the world and non-verbally express ourselves. It takes a very special kind of show to do that. It was an absolute dream to be involved in and it presented such interesting challenges because you're starting with material and performances that are so strong.
The series was my fifth time to get to with Lenny, so we are coming to the work with all of that previous experience in mind. I consider what I've learned from the previous rich collaborations and try to develop and re-jig the process based on that. The most apparent difference on Normal People was that it was a twelve-part TV series, rather than a film, which our previous work together had been. We knew that didn't mean that the attention to detail we aimed for on the features wouldn't apply here, we had to approach the twelve parts as we would a single feature. Lenny has a brilliant group of regular collaborators and his editor, Nathan Nugent, always has a big creative input and influence on the sound and music, which is a real gift for us in the sound team.
The sound for a series like Normal People isn't overt in the same way an action or sci-fi series might be, but it is equally considered, designed and crafted. Overall, it has to work in a more natural-sounding, subtler way. A big part of the job is bringing that same care and attention to detail to work that hopefully feels of the world of the show. We want the viewer to believe the sound of the series, for it to work in an unconscious, not distracting, but purposeful way. The important thing is to always ask what would we hear in any given location, whose perspective are we hearing it from and how does that evolve across a scene or sequence. This is a group effort, led by our director.
MASA: ‘Room’ required sound to communicate both the isolation and emotional states of the characters in a confined space. How did you approach designing sound for such an environment?
STEVE: Ultimately the story was the most important thing for us so we were always thinking about what we could do with the sound to aid the story and help the audience have the most experiential version of film. One thing that was really important is that you’re always experiencing the story through Jack and Ma, so it’s their POV of the world, firstly, their very different experiences of the room and then the outside world in the latter point of the film. As you are working through scene and sequences you are always trying to figure out who’s experience we are feeling and then trying to tailor the sound to fit that person’s perspective. A large part of it was being conscious of the subjectivity and whose eyes we’re seeing the world through. From discussing the film with our director, Lenny Abrahamson, we knew we needed to create an honest, truthful sound world that reflected the reality of the circumstances our characters are in, and one that evolved and developed as their circumstances change.
From the beginning we knew the world inside Room would be confined, run down, intimate and not quite usual. For the first half of the film, you’re in this one confined space the whole time but you have to tell the audience (subconsciously) that there’s a passage of time and a change in experience as the day progresses. As we worked in parallel with the film’s edit, we figured out rules such as nighttime sounding different to daytime, so nighttime tended to be heavier ambiences, we worked with more low frequency and just a really subtle neutral room tone. From Jack’s point of view Ma is his whole universe but at night it’s a much darker place and the sound hopefully on some subconscious level is helping to tell that story. The reverbs and panning we were choosing and how we used them were very much informing that idea of the space shifting from open in the morning and daytime to closing down and claustrophobic at night.
The room itself is rundown and you can imagine that all the furniture and fittings, such as, the fridge, air conditioning, lights, have all degraded over time. So, the character of a rattling fan or a cistern overfilling became this great texture for the storytelling within those four walls. The outside world doesn’t get in so the absence of birds singing etc is also part of that story.
We worked in collaboration with Lenny and Nathan Nugent, the film’s editor, to evolve this idea of using lighter tones for early in the day, when Ma and Jack are alone, and then, as we get toward night, the sound gradually gets heavier. We captured numerous recordings of sound-proofed spaces, from the inside of different ADR booths, studios, mix theatres and other almost ‘silent’ places. We would automate EQ across a scene so that the quality of the air is slowly changing, depending on a time, mood, or story-point shift, allowing the room tone to feel lighter in the daytime when it’s just Ma and Jack and then slowing shifting to a heavier, more oppressive feeling as night arrives and Old Nick’s visit is imminent. In addition to this, we captured recordings of rattling air conditioners, old fridges, cisterns, lighting and any other characterful background sounds we could use to express the rundown nature of this confined space.
In the second half of the film, we got to broaden our palette of sounds into the wider world outside. Initially, as this is Jack's first experience of the world, our task was to underscore Jack’s sensory overload by heightening the reality, detail and texture of the sounds he hears. Another key story point outside Room is Jack’s longing to be back in Room with Ma. Life on the outside is initially overwhelming for both of them for different reasons. Jack misses Ma’s full, undivided attention, and Ma’s is really struggling to reconnect with a life that now feels unfamiliar and moved-on without her. Ma’s old family home becomes a new four walled space for them to become confined in. Again, this provided us with some great, challenging sound possibilities. By use of exterior sounds lightly filtering into the interior scenes in the house, we wanted the audience to hear the world continuing outside, full of possibility and new adventure beyond the four walls, but keep Ma and Jack removed from it, unable to quite connect with that freedom awaiting them. It is a subtle detail that we all worked really hard to create, again to hopefully place the viewer in our characters’ headspace.
MASA: For ‘The Listeners’, you explored unique sound elements like electromagnetic recordings and wind turbines.Can you share more about your process for finding and integrating these unconventional sounds?
STEVE: That was definitely a big part of it, but it would be dishonest of me to say that we had it all figured out from the get-go. With something like this, the idea has to evolve with the picture. We had time to experiment with recordings and treatment of sounds to find a palate for The Hum. Again, our design process began early in the schedule. We even got to make some preliminary sounds for playback on set. Janicza Bravo, our director, wanted to engage sound early and have very supportive producers in Element Pictures to make this possible.
Janicza and I had a conversation in pre-production. I had read the EP1+2 scripts, and we talked about them. I had also read the brilliant book the series is based on and listened to some great interviews with its author, Jordan Tannahill, who also adapted it for the screen. We began to discuss what The Hum might be and what it might feel like. Janicza had this really interesting reference from NASA of the sound of a black hole. It’s a really strange, haunting sound. She didn’t want ‘the hum’ to sound like that, but she wanted it at times to feel like that. This was a great “in” for the beginning of our journey in finding an identity for The Hum.
In the scripts and the book, they talk about this idea of feeling like there’s a truck idling outside; that type of low staccato rumbling. It’s not a flat sound. It’s something that has movement in it and therefore is harder to tune out. We discussed the idea of hypersensitivity to sound, too, and the idea that maybe a few home appliances are slightly malfunctioning, like an air conditioner that has a click or some sort of irregular movement in it that you can’t quite tune out. It was helpful to have some ambiguity around The Hum; could it be an environmental sound or is it something else?
The one rule we discussed early on was that we would not synthesize the sound. It wasn’t an electronic source, like a keyboard, or guitar, or something musical. Instead, we were taking field recordings and trying to figure out how to make hums out of them. Or, I’d record things that inherently had a hum quality. Then, we’d experiment with them and see what we could extract and create from them.
It was quite a long journey to find our collection of sounds for this and we made a conscious effort to make sure it’s not just one sound that’s used for the whole series. It’s something that ebbs and flows and evolves. Janicza’s direction on that was that Claire (our main character) is on a journey with this. What starts as something that’s tormenting her becomes something that eventually leads her to a transcendence, with peaks and troughs in between. There are several points in the story where we return to the torment. She makes some breakthroughs with it, but we return to the torment because the breakthroughs often don’t lead anywhere and she goes back to feeling isolated and alone. It was interesting to try to figure that out. So there’s the whole journey to track from that start point of it being a torment to that endpoint of it leading to transcendence.
We we’re working on all four episodes together before we mixed, so things were constantly evolving across our design, each episode influencing the next and also vice versa. When we got to the end of a pass on Ep. 4, that had an impact on the previous episodes. If we used something in Ep. 4, was there somewhere in Ep. 1, Ep. 2, or Ep. 3 that we could hint at it? There’s a bit of a breadcrumb trail throughout, recurring motifs and themes that are building and sometimes falling apart and then building up again and expanding. And so it was a lovely, creative journey for us with the sound design.
MASA: As a supervising sound editor, how do you manage the workflow and creative vision across large teams and complex projects?
STEVE: Each project is different, but I rely heavily on my experience of previous work to try to do what’s best for every new show I work on. The experiences of the rest of the sound team are hugely important, too. Problem solving around schedule and budget are big part of the work, so having collective experience of different challenges will help us navigate any new obstacles we face. Each project will have a different budget and scale. It’s so important to figure out the best way to work in the confines of this for each individual show and to help my director to figure out how best to use our time and resources to make sure we don’t compromise their creative vision for the work.
It’s great if scripts are shared early, so that I can make suggestions on schedule, crew and resources for sound post. It’s really important to have a strong team of creative collaborators. I prefer to work in a small sound team over a longer period, when it’s possible. That way we can immerse ourselves in the work and really feel the picture edit evolve with sound as part of it. I like to start my creative work with what feel like the most challenging sequences and give time to them from the very start of a project, so that they can be experimented with and developed over the longest amount of time possible.
I feel like making sure I have good communication with everyone in the crew and production team is a huge part of the supervisor’s role. It’s so important to have daily conversations about the work with the rest of the sound team and for us to be passing WIP back and forth for feedback. From there, we can share regular work with our director and their editor and get feedback from them and be evolving the work from there. I feel like there is great value with us all being familiar with the sound work all the way through the design process. If we are really digging into things, it helps to make sure that there are no surprises in the mix, which allows time for creativity, rather than problem solving, if that makes sense?
Communication with the post production supervisor, producers and the facility we are working in is also a very important part of the day to day. Trying to keep everyone up to date with our progress and any potential curveballs we can anticipate.
MASA: Are there any recent technological advances or creative trends in sound design that particularly excite or inspire you?
STEVE: It’s so important to keep up with the technology available to us. In recent years, there have been so many great breakthroughs in noise reduction and clean up.Technology is such a huge part of our work, but it’s important not to be led by it. It’s great to be aware of it and to utilise these powerful tools when they feel appropriate.
I love watching films and TV shows. There’s nothing better than getting swept up in a story. I then find myself revisiting these and analysing their sound work, which is a great inspiration for me in my work. My advice to anyone doing this work would be to train your ears to listen, keep recording, keep listening to other people's work, it’s impossible not to be inspired by other people’s creativity. Each of us has a different experience of the world and if we can bring that to our work, it will make for new and exciting experiences for the audiences that see and hear the shows we work on.
MASA: And lastly, what will you be looking for when judging? What makes a piece of work worthy of a Music+Sound Award?
STEVE: I think I will be conscious of how the sound work integrates with the story; does it feel honest to what’s unfolding on screen? I am excited to hear something original, but not sound for sound’s sake; we can all make interesting and unique sounds, but it’s how we use them and incorporate them into a project that allows them to succeed or fail in context. I am mostly looking forward to hearing new work and being inspired by what the sound team have managed to achieve that is unique to their project and to feel it as a vital part of the film or series that they have worked on.
