Mike Collins's sound and picture credits
 

MP3 files to download

My introduction to film work came in 1984, working for Dolby Labs as a Film Sound Consultant. I assisted at dubbing sessions for several major Hollywood films - sometimes in London, frequently in Paris and Berlin, and occasionally in Munich. My role included troubleshooting any technical p roblems which arose with the recording equipment and advising the dubbing engineers about placement of audio elements within the stereo mix. Films I worked on during this period included: "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom", "Purple Rain", "Splash", "The Right Stuff", "Superwoman", "Greystoke" , "Karate Kid/Buckaroo Banzai", "The Culture Club Movie", "The Falcon and the Snowman", "The Killing Fields", "Break Dance" and "Company of Wolves".
 

In 1986 and 1987 I worked for Yamaha R & D as Senior Recording Engineer and Music Technology Specialist, based at Yamaha's state-of-the-art 24-track recording studio in Conduit Street, London - which I helped to design and commission. At the studio I worked as a recording engineer, MIDI programmer and DX synthesizer programmer on a wide variety of music recording and music-to-picture projects with clients including George Martin, Hans Zimmer, Keith Emerson, Courtney Pine, Gus Dudgeon and George Benjamin.

I have been working regularly on audio-for-video post-production since 1990, and one of my first jobs was a series of Thomas The Tank Engine videos. For this series, I digitized all the typical effects sounds from reel-to-reel tape, sourced others from DAT and CD, and created so me original effects needed for the new series. Using Q-Sheet software and a Sound Designer II system - the forerunner of Pro Tools - all synced to picture, I spotted the sound effects and music to the video, leaving placeholders for the dialogue (which was recorded elsewhere).

Not long after this, I got a call from Ryuichi Sakamoto to work on the orchestral recording sessions for two feature films - a remake of Paramount Pictures' "Wuthering Heights", starring Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes, and Bertolucci's "The Little Buddha" starring Keanu Reeves. My role here was to set up Ryuichi's massive rig of equipment, assist with the MIDI programming, handle the clicks and MIDI cues on the orchestral sessions, and offer consultancy for the Mac computer system. Another call from David Arnold found me working on David's first major film, "The Young Americans", in a similar role. David also asked me to produce a selection of musical sound samples so he would have a useful palette to choose from - designed to his personal specifications. A selection of these were used prominently in the score. "One of the outstanding moment".

Around this time, multimedia CD-ROM projects became popular and one of my first commissions was to co-write and produce 50 short music 'clips' for use as backgrounds for multimedia CD-ROMs. Released in 1992 by REMedia in the USA on a CD-ROM entitled "Loops", these were produced as MIDI files, 44.1 kHz/16-bit CD-Audio files, and as 22 kHz/8-bit multimedia audio files to give the users a choice of popular formats.
 

A couple of major audio editing projects followed which involved editing many hours of audio and music for two audio-only CD-ROM-based 'Gallery Guides' - for the Seattle Art Gallery and for Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum. Here the audio had to be edited and processed before supplying on CD-ROM in a suitably-compressed format. Visitors to these art galleries can hire a walkman-like device to play these CD-ROMs through headphones, with the correct selection triggered automatically as they pass each exhibit.

Projects producing sound effects and music for several commercial interactive projects followed - notable a games title, "The Virtual Nightclub", a 'kiosk' for Apple Computers, a CD-ROM magazine for VNU publications, a showcase for Canon Cameras, and training titles for Mercury Telecommunications and Marshall Cavendish.

Desktop video editing projects came along in the mid-90's, including a series of edited QuickTime video clips for a Mercury One-2-One showcase CD-ROM, and a series of Quicktime versions of popular TV ads for soft drinks such as Coca Cola and Lilt - produced using Media 100 for a Creative Review CD-ROM.

An interestingly film project in 1998 involved playing and recording acoustic guitar improvisations on 'Concierto de Aranjuez' for a new British film - "Greenwich Mean Time". This led to being hired as a guitar 'coach' for the lead actress who had to mime as closely as possible to the guitar improvisations - and to some equally tricky bass improvisations by Mick Karn! Following this, a commission to write and produce music for a short TV documentary, "Martin's Story", provided an opportunity to work with sequencers, drum machines, synthesizers and sa mplers on some more contemporary-sounding material.