MUSIC+SOUND AWARDS 2021

BEST SOUND DESIGN IN A TV PROGRAMME

BEST SOUND DESIGN IN A TELEVISION PROGRAMME

Truth Seekers

Entrant: Molinare TV & Film, London

Sound Team: Tony Gibson, Lewis Todd, Filipa Principe, Claire Ellis, Stefano Marchetti, Ciaran Smith, Stuart Bagshaw, Adam Douglas Jones, Ruth Sullivan, Claire Mahoney, James Gregory + Stuart Piggott

Director: Jim Field Smith

Production Companies: Amazon Studios + Stolen Picture

An eight-part horror comedy, directed by Jim Field Smith, Truth Seekers revolves around the lives of ‘Gus’ and ‘Elton’, played by Nick Frost and Samson Kayo, Broadband Engineers by day and paranormal fanatics in their spare time. In each episode Gus and Elton encounter different strange and paranormal occurrences whenever they are sent on a new install job by their boss Dave, played by Simon Pegg.

We hear from the Sound Team…

“Upon reading the scripts, and having worked with Jim in the past, we knew we were in for a challenge from a sound point of view. He's incredibly creative, loves audio, and can produce spectacular shows on a tight budget. The sound post allocation was five days dialogue edit including ADR, two days foley, and seven days sound effects edit per episode. It was tracklayed and mixed in 5.1, given the content of the show I am still not sure how we managed it!

Receiving the scripts quite early on was so beneficial to our sound design process. we were able to visit Jim while he was still shooting, speak to our location recordist, Stuart Piggot, about wildtracks for the van, and get hands-on with some of the props including the all-important Electrospec (Gus’ ghost detector).

The brief Jim gave us for the sound design was that everything should have an analogue feel, Gus is very much an amateur paranormal investigator, and the instruments used in the series had to sonically reflect this. We had a long recording session with some old machinery in our sound facility basement, these were perfect for the buzzes, clicks, hums and bleeps that we incorporated into the sound design. This allowed me to temp up some of the more frequently occurring devices and creatures, like the ‘wraith ghosts’ and Electospec, ahead of us ‘officially’ starting on the job. It was very important for me to keep away from library sounds as much as possible to give it a unique feel.

Overall on the series Jim’s attention to detail and how bold he can be with audio has made this a joy to work on. Truth Seekers has a very full effects tracklay on each episode as Jim would use his mix time to let every little detail of audio have its place on screen, whether that be the soul of a soldier trapped in an air raid warning system, brainwashing cinema screens, inter-dimensional ghosts, the spirit of a dog being transferred into a 80 year old woman or just the simple sound of a router bleep.”

Visit Molinare’s site HERE