We caught up with Leslie Gaston-Bird, an award winning American freelance re-recording mixer and sound editor, and owner of Mix Messiah Productions. Gaston-Bird has worked on titles including Good Grief, Infinity Chamber, Feral, Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist and many more. She is a voting member of The Recording Academy and sits on the on these Audio Engineering Society (AES) committees: Board of Governors, Awards, Conference Policy, Convention Policy, Education, Membership, and Co-Chairs the Diversity & Inclusion Committee with Piper Payne. She was a tenured Associate Professor of Recording Arts at the University of Colorado Denver. Leslie also is Co-Director for SoundGirls U.K. Chapter and SoundGirls Scholarships and Travel Grants. She has worked in the industry for over 30 years.

Gaston-Bird was inspired to get in to sound by American multi-instrumentalist, singer, songwriter, and record producer Todd Rundgren. “He is a big inspiration for me. He is a great songwriter and also a ‘wizard’ in the studio. His music was a big part of my life as I began studying audio in college. And Leslie Ann Jones of Skywalker Sound, I saw her in front of a console and thought, ‘that is so awesome, I want to do that!’” 

Gaston-Bird has been working in the industry for over 30 years in radio, picture sound and higher education. Her first gig was at National Public Radio headquarters in Washington, D.C. where she worked on shows like ‘Morning Edition.’ She then moved to Colorado Public Radio where she earned the Radio and Television Digital News Association’s Edward R. Murrow Award for Large Market Documentary. Although she loved working for both NPR and Colorado Public Radio, her passion was sound for film, and it was not easy for her to get her foot in the door.  It took her over four years to find someone who would take a chance on her. Her gratitude for this opportunity goes to Patsy Butterfield, David Emrich, and Chuck Biddlecom at Post Modern Company in Denver. She started her career in post-production restoring soundtracks for classic films dating as early as the 1930’s. “I did a lot of film soundtrack restoration for Sony / Columbia Picture early in my career and saw that as a great way to prepare. I spent a lot of time editing finished film stems (dialog, music and effects) and seeing how they came together. It seemed like a logical transition.” However, she found the transition from radio to picture sound a little awkward at first. “Radio is about creating theatre in the mind and I was creating Foley sounds too loud; for film and television, the sounds have to match the perspective of what’s happening on screen.”

She has recently found herself working on a lot of horror films which she finds funny as she won’t watch horror by choice. “I found myself doing a documentary about how ‘The Exorcist’ was made including sound techniques, so after all of these years avoiding it, I had to watch the film!” What she likes most about working on films is the meditative rhythm of finding and selecting sounds, shaping the sounds, and giving the film a sense of realism.

As for her favourite projects, she enjoys working on music videos. Future Jazz Project’s song, ‘Give Them What They Want’ was an opportunity for her to edit audio and video together in a process she called ‘Music Video Vérité’. “I coined the term 'Music Video Vérité' to define an emerging style of music-video production. Instead of lip-sync'ing, musicians perform in real time as the performance is filmed, and audio from each take is recorded to multi-track and edited along with the final video, even if the filming locations change. In tribute to cinema vérité (and, specifically, the rules of the Dogme 95 movement), I use the term 'vérité' because the process of making and recording music is not hidden from the viewer.”

Gaston Bird moved to the UK in 2018 and started Mix Messiah Productions. In her studio you will find Pro Tools and the Dolby Atmos^® Production Suite. Her kit includes the Waves^® Platinum Bundle, Izotope^® Rx7, Fab Filter^®, Avid’s Space^® reverb plug-in, and a number of other custom plug-ins.

One of her biggest career challenges has been restarting her career at 50 but now that she works for herself she sees the challenges as personally rewarding. “Moving to England was equal parts confidence and insanity. I have always believed in risks, but at age 50 I still feel the need to prove myself. I’m doing a Ph.D. at the University of Surrey, but I have a feeling that women – more than their male counterparts – feel the need to seek higher academic qualifications in order to compete in the job market. It’s something I hope will change.”

We often hear about discrimination and harassment from women working in audio. She Co-Chairs the Diversity & Inclusion Committee for the AES. “I proposed the AES D&I Committee in 2016, and have served as its chair since that time with Piper Payne. We’ve encouraged a new dynamic at our conferences, and from mentoring workshops with SoundGirls, workshops with Women’s Audio Mission, the African Americans in Audio panel, Hip-Hop and EDM tracks, we have really seen major changes from the ‘old days’ of white-male dominated events. I think there are more women in the industry, and I think people are more aware of the issues facing us. There are many supportive networks that weren’t there before. Things may be different and better but I don’t think each woman sees themselves as part of a larger network, and that’s very isolating. It’s important to find and utilize networks and mentoring. There is still discrimination and harassment and it’s important for women to know ‘it’s not in your head’ and be able to talk about experiences and have access to resources for help.”

Gaston-Bird looks at the work of some of the most inspirational women in audio in her book ‘Women in Audio’ “It’s been great. Writing Women in Audio was transformative. It started as a research paper but I realized I had to do personal interviews. There is history living among us and the untold stories were very moving; stories of motherhood, of financial gain and tremendous loss, of obstacles and unfettered success.”

We have seen many changes in post recently but as for how she sees industry changing over the next 5 years, “I think the further adoption of immersive sound is promising. And I hope to see more women and underrepresented groups gain more opportunities to work in the field. We are fortunate to have networks supporting women into sound including those such as SoundGirls.org, Women’s Audio Mission, Beats by Girls, the Creative Suite and Gender Amplified.”

www.mixmessiahproductions.com