Enos Desjardins is a Finnish/Canadian sound designer and supervising sound editor based in London whose career to date is no surprise given his early experimentation with field recordings at the tender age of seven.
The gift of a Fostex four-track recorder from his father when he was around 11 years old, proved to be a pivotal moment, further fuelling his experiments with sound recording and production, leading him to sequence MIDI and record his own bands in southern Spain where he grew up. His journey then took him to Manchester where he studied audio engineering, however, an unexpected module on film sound during his studies opened his eyes to the potential of sound design in cinema.
Shortly afterwards he became a virtual intern for Tim Prebble, a New Zealand-based sound designer who encouraged Enos to buy the best gear he could afford and just start recording. Enos soon realised that most film work was in London and after relocating there in 2012, he began knocking on doors and building his reputation in the industry, transitioning from low-paying gigs to specialising in sound effects editing.
Enos now has over 116 IMDb credits to his name with projects ranging from smaller arthouse indie films all the way through to higher budget features, TV series and commercials. In this interview, we explore Enos’ craft of sound editing for film and television and using BOOM Library sound FX and plug-ins…
What is it about sound effects that appealed to you?
I realized very quickly that what I loved most about music was not so much being a performer or only recording and mixing bands but being involved at a production level. What I really enjoyed was coming up with some vocal arrangements or a guitar part and taking a song that was someone else’s work and embellishing it, basically doing arrangements, and, essentially, that’s what sound effects editing is – you’re taking someone’s film and you’re adding all these different elements that are supporting it. That is what I fell in love with and what led me to working in film.
You utilize BOOM ONE in some of your work which includes over 166,000 sound effects, how do you begin to approach working with such a massive library of sounds?
The thing as a sound effects editor is that in many ways you’re only as good as your ingredients. My mentor in the early days told me how important it is to just start recording stuff and so sound effects recording has always been something I love doing, but the reality when you’re working on some projects is that time constraints often mean that you just can’t record all elements in a project from scratch. So having access to these kinds of libraries is invaluable. When I first started working in film, we had all these older general libraries that had been around forever, which were great to start with, but you could quickly tell that they were dated sounds that had been used to death.
I remember buying some of the early BOOM stuff, the first guns library, horses, etc, probably over a decade ago, and even then they were setting the trend with good quality, new generation, high fidelity recordings and this idea of designed elements that you can grab and put on a timeline, but also the option to dig into the construction kit elements and design your own sounds. Then, when BOOM ONE came out, I thought if it’s anything like the other libraries, it’s probably worth getting. It’s been nice receiving a monthly injection of new stuff into the library – whether you use them straight away or not, it’s been really cool. For me, getting new sound effects is a bit like Christmas come early and it’s the element of surprise as you don’t know what it’s going to be each month – it may not even be something that I need right now.
If I need something for a project, I’ll go and buy it or record it, but with BOOM ONE, I’ll see what’s new each month by going through and listening to all of it, then I know that’s a new set of fresh ingredients that I’ve got for when the time comes, and it always does come.
One thing people have said that they love about BOOM is that they seem to curate stuff well, but how do you curate sounds? Do you have a quick listen and then log it in your mind? Or do you put stars next to them on the hard drive or color code them?
That’s a good question. One thing you come to realize these days with such a proliferation of different sound libraries, good metadata has become monumentally important. Quite often you’ll ingest a new library into Soundminer or whatever software you use, and you have a listen through. But no one’s brain is good enough to remember those sounds just from listening and making a memory archive per se, so if you don’t have good metadata you’re never going to find some of these sounds.
I’ve gone through different approaches in the past and quite often I’ll add something to the user field, like, ‘this could be a cool robot’ or ‘cool for potential sci fi material’; notes which I know could be useful for something that I wouldn’t find if I didn’t specify that it might be good for that.
One thing I do a lot in Soundminer is create little spotting folders. As I start on new projects or sequences, I’ll asses what elements I need to put together to tackle the various sequences. So, before I start editing, I’ll go through the library and search through a bunch of sounds and drag and tag different ones creating my own custom subsets of folders, which would potentially include different sources of different libraries, but with material that is relevant to the current job. So essentially curating a little bespoke library for the sequence from the wider collection of sounds I possess.
Let’s take, for example, Mission Impossible, which is one of the highlights of your career, did you want to get a sense of what the aesthetic had been in the past, or did you come to it fresh?
In regards to Mission Impossible, I grew up watching the movies and was a big fan of the franchise long before I was given the opportunity to work on one of them so I knew the films. I did go back and watch them actually once I found out I was going to be working on Dead Reckoning, but I realized, unlike franchises like Star Wars for example, Mission Impossible doesn’t have signature sound elements per se. Yes each film may have some similar elements such as car chases and stuff like that, but they’re all different vehicles, different settings and different stories and so require a different and fresh sonic approach each time.
So it’s not like a Bond movie where he’s driving the DB9 every time?
Yeah, you don’t really have that. There’s been a long running relationship with BMW in the past I believe but it’s different BMWs each time and not limited to those vehicles either so they’re all very different sounding. When I started working on that project I assumed, because it was a big American Hollywood movie, I should go massive and bombastic and way over the top, so when I did my first passes, I went really big and “Hollywood”. But I was soon told that what makes Mission Impossible different to say, Fast and Furious, is that it’s a lot more grounded in reality and we’re trying to highlight the fact that Tom Cruise is really doing these stunts for real so you want to place the audience in Ethan’s shoes and therefore one should almost think of it more as a really heightened doc than a Fast and Furious Hollywood movie, in the sense that it has to sound realistic and gritty and grounded. We want to feel the energy and the peril. It’s not full of booms and trailer hits and that kind of sweetener stuff.
Are you often presented with a theoretical blank sheet of paper that you have to come up with an aesthetic for or do you get guidance before starting?
Each film, each project and each director have their own style and their own ways of wanting sound to support their stories. Usually what happens is we get the first sense of what direction we want to be taking when we attend the spotting session. Sometimes I might be attending as an effects editor or if I am supervising, other times when I am fx editing on these bigger films the sound supervisor might be the only one attending and then they’ll relay notes and information to us. I might ask things like, ‘What’s the aesthetic we are after for this movie?’ ‘Are we more realism or more hyper realism based?’ ‘Any preferences that you might want me to know of?’ ‘Are we trying to be realistic and gritty or are we trying to be slick and modern?’. With these kinds of terms you try and get a sense of roughly what the sound aesthetic wants to be. After that, we usually just have a first go at it. We’ll take a specific sequence and focus on that and try and nail the vibe of it, and then we’ll have a few early reviews and then hone it from there, but the spotting session and early temp mixes are usually a good place to try and pick the director’s brain.
I’m guessing that different directors have different vocabulary for expressing what they’re trying to get out of you. For example, some will be very visceral and very demonstrative, and others will be more pragmatic and very composed about what they want, so I suppose you have to be adaptable each time you come to a project.
You have to try and read between the lines and some directors are better than others when it comes to describing sound. Sound is hard to describe, it’s not a visual medium. Certain terms can mean different things for different people in sound so you have to try to read between the lines, get a sense of it. Some directors know what they want and they’ll give you fairly specific feedback and others will be more reactionary so they’ll prefer you doing something and then say, ‘okay, that’s good’, or ‘that’s not good’, or ‘I see what you’re doing here, let’s go in that direction’. I find so many directors say, ‘give me what you’ve got, show me what you’ve got, do your version of it based around these parameters, and then we can start honing in’.
It sounds like to stay in the game you need to have flexibility and the ability to not hold on too tightly to what you originally thought was a good idea.
Absolutely.
I think being too precious about your work is only going to cause you heartbreak down the road. Ultimately, we’re providing a service. I’m not a songwriter who is releasing an album of my music. I’m servicing someone’s film.
I can take ownership of the sound design and sound effects, but it’s not my movie. There’ll be times where the director agrees with my version of something and that’s cool. Other times they’ll be like, ‘I see what you’re doing there, that’s really cool, but it’s not what the scene needs’. Even if you don’t agree, you just have to be flexible, let it go and not be too precious about it.
How much do libraries help you when you’ve got your brief and you know the direction you’re going? What’s your workflow at that point?
I think usually as soon as I know the project I’m working on and have had a read of the script, which is usually where I start most projects, I’ll know roughly what the story is about, what the genre is, and hopefully, if I’ve had a spotting session, then I have a sense of the aesthetic.
Usually, I’ll just spend a day or two going through the library and seeing what things I’ve got covered and what areas might need new sounds. Then, once I’ve decided what things I don’t have enough of, I can consider whether it is worth going out and recording the stuff I need or whether I look at other libraries out there that have covered these things. Sometimes, for example with vehicles, I need to find out whether anyone has recorded this exact vehicle already or if I must go out and try and source it. I start to put a shopping list together and check different libraries and see who’s done what and source stuff I might not have if I think it’s going to be useful for the project.
Are you a perfectionist? For example, if it’s a 1975 BMW 3 Series are you determined to find a 1975 BMW 3 Series?
It entirely depends on the film. Usually, as a starting point, I’ll ask for the list of cars that are in the movie so I know the models, and we’ll often ask the armourer about the guns they’ve been using. I’ll typically try to start by cutting in the real thing if possible and then we’ll see if that works or if we need to choose a sound that serves the story better. Quite often its what serves the story best that ends up being the favoured option whether or not that is the real sound of the element on screen. In Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning the filmmakers and supervisor may want certain vehicles to be more beefy and hero like and others to feature more humorous elements or fit the character that is driving it better so we will tailor the sound of each element based on its role in the story.
I guess it sometimes simply comes down to the budget?
Yeah. For most projects, like for TV things, I’ve rarely done car recordings, I’ve always usually used library stuff. Mission Impossible and projects of that caliber are projects that often warrant or allow for recording of the vehicles and bespoke sounds we needed.
In terms of recording sounds, sometimes a lot of natural things don’t sound that impressive, they don’t sound how the audience wants them to sound. A good example is a real gun. I spent a year doing National Service in Finland and we spent many days shooting guns, and the real sound of a gun is very underwhelming. They don’t have that big tail, that’s all designed through compression and using the acoustics for space and stuff. But that’s what we want to hear when we’re watching the movie, we don’t want to hear that actual pop, so you’re always going to tailor that. But going back to the vehicle stuff in Dead Reckoning, we did record all the specific vehicles that were used in the film, and then we cut them to picture and in some cases realized, actually, it sounds like the car that it is meant to be, but maybe it doesn’t sound like Ethan’s hero car or bike, doesn’t sound cool enough or appropriate for the scene or moment in the movie. Like the real bike that was being used might have had an engine that was more high pitched, but we wanted a more ‘hero-sounding’ bike, something which sounded more gravelly and muscly. So, then we’d look to replace that with something that is close enough to be believable, but tailoring it to feel right for the film, the scene, and the character.
Do you use construction parts of sound effects to go under things to give them more weight rather than just replace it?
Yeah, sure. If you’ve already done a track lay with a certain vehicle and it’s not right, we’ll see what we can do to the already edited sounds to make those work before we start completely throwing it all out and starting again. So maybe we’ll pitch it down or use EQ or even subharmonic synthesizers.
I’ve become a big fan of BOOM Library’s UBERLOUD; just taking raw, specific sounds and being able to really make them chunky. Once I started using it, I used it on a lot of stuff.
I have it on my Soundminer output chain sometimes. Not for every movie of course, but for something that needs things to cut through and be chunky I’ll have it on the master output of Soundminer or whatever I’m spotting into. Pro Tools will already come with it on sometimes so I’m monitoring through it on some occasions because a lot of the time the sounds that have been recorded need a lot of work to be made chunky and big or to give them the right tonality to cut through what can be quite busy mixes. You want to hear roughly what they’re going to sound like as you’re previewing them so that’s a good example of a BOOM software plugin that I’ve been a big fan of.
What piece of advice would you give to somebody who wants to get into sound design that you think has carried you throughout your career?
There’s not one solution that fits all. I think from all the colleagues I’ve worked with, I always find that everyone’s story has been radically different in the way they’ve come in. These days, the important thing is if you know there’s something you love doing, then you have to stick with it. It’s taken me ten years from coming to London, not knowing anyone and not doing anything to doing a project like Mission Impossible, so it’s taken a decade to reach the level of working on big budget movies and it takes a lot of determination and persistence to do that, and there’s been a hundred or so projects along the way.
The other thing I would say is that there are some amazing tools out there, but you’re never going to have all those tools when you’re starting out, you’re not going to be able to afford all those and have that breadth of libraries from day one.
The good thing about BOOM ONE is that you can sign up with a subscription that’s affordable and have quite a rich base to start off with.
Not having everything you want when you start out shouldn’t be a reason not to be doing great work, you can do great work with very little stuff, just start ‘doing’.
