September’s Featured Sound Designer: Paul Davies

After enjoying a wonderful month with Tim Nielsen, it’s time to move on to our next great guest here at Designing Sound. It’s a pleasure to introduce this month’s featured sound designer: Paul Davies. Based in the UK, Paul has a long, impressive credit list, working as sound designer and supervising sound editor, and he will share articles, tips and thoughts with us.

Bio

Paul Davies was born in 1961 and first became interested in sound design through a passion for electronic music. Ran a small music studio in the mid-eighties, based in Cardiff, South Wales, and through this he became involved in the local filmmaking scene.

Enrolled in the sound department of the UK’s National Film and Television School in 1988. After graduation worked as a location sound recordist, sound editor and re-recording mixer on a variety of productions. In 1995 joined Videosonics, located in London, where he soon became head of sound editing and design.

Here he did several significant movies like Ratcatcher by Lynne Ramsay, who has since then become a key collaborator for Paul – one of his most recent works is Ramsay’s We Need To Talk About Kevin which competed at this year’s Cannes Festival and is shown this month at Toronto International Film Festival.

Paul left Videosonics in 2000 to set up his own sound design/editorial company, and these days he’s once again establishing a new company, The Project. The last few years, Paul has gained recognition for his work on acclaimed films like The American and Hunger and is currently working on a new Luc Besson sci-fi production, Lockout. At the same time, Paul is in discussions about developing a production music library project utilising Paul’s roots in ambient music.

We’re happy to have you here, Paul!

Nominations and Awards

• Bafta TV Award Nomination for Best Sound (1998) – Touching Evil
• Bafta TV Award Nomination for Best Sound (2003) – Shameless
• Australian Film Institute Nomination for Best Sound (2005) – The Proposition

Selected Works

• Love is the Devil – John Maybury – 1997
• Ratcatcher – Lynne Ramsay – 1999
• The Hole – Nick Hamm – 2000
• Morvern Callar – Lynne Ramsay – 2001
• The Jacket – John Maybury – 2004
• The Proposition – John Hillcoat – 2005
• The Queen – Stephen Frears – 2006
• Hunger – Steve McQueen – 2008
• The American – Anton Corbijn – 2010
• We Need To Talk About Kevin – Lynne Ramsay – 2011