Tim Nielsen is an award winning Supervising Sound Editor, Sound Designer and Re-recording Mixer at Skywalker Sound. He has worked on notable films such as Solo: A Star Wars Story, Maleficent, War Horse, Pirates of the Caribbean: At Worlds End, Avatar, Hulk and Finding Dory as well as games including StarCraftII: Legacy of the Void, Overwatch and World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor. He took time out of his busy schedule to talk to us about his career and his approach to sound design.  

Nielsen originally had no intention of working in sound. “I actually wanted to be either cinematographer or a picture editor” he said. But while attending the graduate program at USC, Gary Rydstrom visited for a guest lecture, and brought the film Toy Story, that had just come out. “My eyes and ears were really opened to the power of sound, and I instantly became intrigued” he added. “Fairly quickly I switched gears, and become obsessed with sound. Later I would go on to become Gary’s first intern, and that ultimately led to a job at Skywalker Sound shortly after graduating.”

When designing sound for film there are some key things to consider. “The first thing is always the film itself. It tells you what it needs. Everything we do has to be story driven, our job is first and foremost to support the story. And then I usually think in terms of emotion within a given scene, figure out what the audience is supposed to feel. The mechanics of the cutting come pretty easily once you realize and plan for the intent. Is this is a funny movie, or a horror movie. Fantasy movies bring their own challenges, but still at every point I’m thinking about how I can best help tell the story that the filmmakers want to tell.”

When creating sound effects, atmosphere, sonic texture and filmic ambience that deliver a naturalistic and abstract world for the film story as well as aid the audience emotional and dramatic connection, Nielsen always try to stay in the real world! “I shy away from too much processing or pure synthesis unless I can’t get what I need any other way” he adds. “So even in a Sci-Fi or Fantasy film, most of my design will be done in the recording phase, at least mentally. The goal is to find interesting sounds that go 90% of the work, and then edit and process them for the last part of what they need. So much of my ‘design’ is really just play, experimenting with new microphones and impromptu recording techniques. It’s really a lot of experimentation. But again, all of the work has to support what is on the screen. By trial and error eventually you find something that works. We toss a lot of sound at the screen. A lot bounces off and hits the floor. And eventually things start to ‘stick’.”

When designing, Nielsen mainly designs in stereo. “I’ll rarely design directly into a surround format, but I find stereo offer the most flexibility. It’s easy to drop a channel if you decide you need something in mono, but I find stereo files have a depth to them that mono doesn’t have. I do sometimes also create LCR files, purely depending on what the sound needs to do.”

When creating immersive audio Nielsen is not perturbed by the usual problems that he encounters.  “The main danger is this belief that lots of speakers need to be USED all of the time. The fear I have is that all of this extra potential is used as a gimmick, and we lose sight of the story and our job. Technologies like Dolby Atmos are amazing, and offer an unprecedented opportunity to create a completely immersive sonically. But it shouldn’t distract us from the ‘point’ of what we’re doing. If an audience member ever takes their eyes off the screen in a theatre to look behind them, then I believe we have failed.”

Nielsen is no stranger to designing sound for games too but there are some differences when designing for film and games. “On a practical level, games have more rigid requirements for specific sounds, because of the programming layer that exists to implement the sounds into the game. Unless we’re talking about cinematics, in which case there is very little difference. In the world of games, you may make a series of ‘options’ for the game to trigger. Ultimately though both are about storytelling with sound, and so the same ideals apply.”

Games are now expected to have a cinematic soundscape too. “I think there has been a need for quite some time. And the reason is simple, a good video game is still a story, it has movement and evolution, conflict and resolution. But as the technology of the visuals becomes better and better, with the advent of Virtual Reality, this idea of immersion has become even more important. But I think great games have been using cinematic approaches for years. I remember an early job on a video game was designing backgrounds for a James Bond game called Goldeneye. We created a series of quad loops that had quite a bit of depth to them. They really helped put you in the place of the gameplay.”

Time, budgets, the late delivery of visual effects on a modern movie are all challenges associated with creating sound design for film. “Creating something ‘believable’ that the audience has never heard before, finding that sound that sticks, and works. But lately also the challenge is that I fear a lot of filmmakers don’t really understand how to USE sound to their advantage. They don’t craft films to take advantage of it. And then there may be this expectation that sound can do something that maybe it cannot. I wish we had better education about sound in film schools and for emerging filmmakers. Music and how omnipresent it has become in many movies also provides a unique challenge I find.”

Nielsen agrees that the same things apply to games. “Often games have some extra technical limitations, amount of memory on a console dedicated for sound used to be more of a limitation than it currently is. But the biggest challenge is when sound is thought of as an afterthought, and not included early on in the design of the film or game.”

With games and film now readily available on many different platforms you would think it important to consider the delivery format at an early stage. “While we are working, our job is to make it sound as good as we can. Later we’ll deal with making a home theatre mix, etc. But I’ve never believed much in creating content for the lowest common denominator. I want to create the best sounding product I can, and after that I have little control over how people watch.”

As for kit, Nielsen uses a pair of Sanken CO-100k microphones for a lot of his recording with. “They have the ability to record up to 100k frequency, and allow for amazing pitch shifting work.”

We asked Nielsen what lessons he had learnt that would help an upcoming sound designer. “Failure is not only possible, it is inevitable. And it’s beneficial, probably necessary. Most of what I do is to fail, over and over and until I don’t. We try something, ultimately realize it’s not quite right, and we try again. This forces us to experiment, to ‘play’, to try new things, and to swing wide. So don’t be afraid of failure, it’s a powerful tool.”

www.skysound.com/people/tim-nielsen