Tom Joyce is a multi-award-winning sound designer and the founder of Sound Canvas – a sound design studio in Bristol, UK. With over 20 years’ experience in post production, working alongside top directors and creatives, he has worked on numerous films as well as commercials for some of the world’s best known brands including Tesla, Nike, Gucci, Apple Music, British Airways, to name just a few.
Initially pursuing a background in art during his university years at Bath, Tom’s interest in video and sound grew, using the latter as a way of inspiring the visual and creating, in his words, “a lot of quite pretentious sound art”. Eventually, Tom realised his passion lay in sound and after university he entered the television production sector where he worked his way up from a runner to an in-house dubbing mixer, gaining diverse experience across reality TV, documentaries, and promos.
So how did he move from dubbing mixer to sound designer? We sat down with Tom to talk more about his work.
How did you get into sound design?
Working on long form projects as a dubbing mixer was a good education, but I felt they weren’t creatively stimulating because it was quite a lot of just transition sounds to the next scene. I wanted to go to short form, so did a lot of promos and then went freelance. I was doing a bit of everything – long form, short form, and a bit of advertising which led me to Factory Studios in Soho where they predominantly did advertising. I was doing a lot of bespoke sound design for them and I became staff there. It was more concentrated on the creative side and I felt that’s where I wanted to go.
Do you see there’s benefits of working in the commercial sector?
It’s a double-edged sword because I was finding that the creative was getting lost because there’s so many middlemen in the process. You’ve got the creatives who are wanting to do creative stuff, as I am, as is the director, and then you have the producer and the account handlers, and so on. By the time it gets to the actual client, a lot of the creative has been sucked out because everyone wants to play it safe. Brands like Honda, for example, were an exception to the rule as the agency was very good at keeping the creative at high levels and talking them through the process to the client. They were more open to creative work, but that is not the norm. That was one of the reasons I found it frustrating; it was more to do with getting the right voiceover and way of selling the product rather than the creative side of it.
Did you ever over-play your hand on purpose hoping that by the time it was all pulled back, it was still part of your vision?
I think I would always push the creative knowing it was going to get pulled back, but sometimes it was pulled back to a very basic music and video track and that kind of stuff I found quite frustrating. That’s partly why my studio now is very eclectic. It is still working in advertising, but it’s also in film and motion graphics, the work goes across the board really to keep it interesting and to fulfil the creative side that is inherent in me.
Does that mean you’re spinning a lot of plates all the time in terms of creativity because you’ve got three or four projects going at the same time?
Yeah exactly. So quite often we’ll have a long form project, say like a feature film or something, that we just attack over time, and then we’ll have something little, like at the moment I’m working on a short for Burberry, and then there’s a couple of other motion graphics projects that are very short. I also have a small team now, I’ve got a composer on board so we’re doing music as well as sound design. It’s just trying to get good creative output.
Do you find there’s a symbiotic relationship between each kind of project in the sense that those more Avantgarde projects are able to inform some of the sound design you do in movies and commercials, or is it pretty ring-fenced and you have to stick to the rules?
That is what I’m trying to do. You can see all the modular hardware synths which I’m trying to get that into ads and other projects, trying to make things a bit more interesting. I guess that’s our USP from a studio point of view.
“We don’t do just day to day sound design, it’s a little bit different.”
That’s the same with film because we’ve done a few feature films recently and we would start with some of their stuff and do some crazy sounds, and then on top of that we’ll do the usual foley and the audio post production side of it, so it’s a hybrid workflow.
Talking about Foley, how do you use sound libraries? Are they a starting point? Are they augmentation? How are they helping you in your work?
I would love to go out and record and do bespoke stuff but obviously with the turnarounds, especially at the moment, it’s just not viable. So, I’ve got a mic right here and I do Foley in the studio. I can do it bespoke to picture so that’s good especially for those quick turnaround 30 second things where you can just do stuff on the fly. We use libraries a lot, we use Soundminer and BOOM Library stuff, we’ve got BOOM ONE which is great. It fills in a lot of the gaps in all our libraries but we also use a lot of the Cinematic Hits library as well. The quality is great and even if you don’t truly hear it, it just gives a little bit more to the sound.
How are you using them as construction kits? Are you using as is or a bit of both?
Yeah, a bit of both. I do use those Cinematic Hits and those trailer-type ones, I might EQ and filter it in a certain way, just to feel like it’s a little bit our own, but I do use a lot mainly because of their bass content; they’ve got a real rich low end where a lot of the libraries, especially from the 90s, don’t have that kind of deep richness in the bass frequencies. There’s one I use regularly called Dead Knocker, it’s a really lovely cinematic hit, it’s really tasteful and cinematic but not over the top, it’s just really nice.
Is it one of those that you put in and you don’t notice it, but if you took it away, you would?
Exactly. Yeah. And because we do a lot of short form I quite often put it right at the start and you don’t even know that it’s there, but it just engages the audience straight away.
It sounds like it’s a craft for you, you can’t just buy a sound library and start throwing it over everything, can you?
No, and editors quite often put sounds on there edits. There’s a lot of cheap libraries that editors can just chuck on say, a trailer, on every boom, and it’s overkill, but I guess that’s our job – to craft it, like you say, and find those moments that really need it. There are also the times where it just needs to breathe and let the audience go into the film.
“The crafting is part of the job, knowing what works and when to use certain things and when to leave them out!”
You mentioned cheap libraries, there’s a lot of free sound effects libraries these days, do you think you can notice the difference between that kind of stuff that’s all over the internet and paying for a professional library?
I think it’s choice, isn’t it? In terms of, say BOOM Library, the people there are curating the sounds whereas the cheap or free libraries are just thrown together to have the most impact, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the right sound. With curated libraries, there’s something more to it, there’s depth and thought.
We often look at A Sound Effect and try and update our libraries now and again and I know BOOM Library is on that as well. It’s great, because, for instance, I’m working on a feature film with another studio with Benedict Cumberbatch and there was one sound that neither of us had in our libraries. It was just a shopping trolley, but obviously you can’t go to a supermarket with your recording equipment because the security guards will come and get you. We both didn’t have any good high-quality sounds of shopping trollies in a supermarket so we looked at A Sound Effect and there was this one library of trolley sounds and it basically saved the day. It’s really useful for those kinds of situations.
What advice would you give to somebody who really wants to get into sound design?
I would say find a studio that you highly regard and start from the bottom there. My sound designer has been quick lucky in that he came straight out of university to here and he’s getting right on the kit and doing stuff straight away. Whereas a lot of people, like myself, do the runner thing first then work our way up, I think there are good elements to that – understanding the industry, knowing how to work with people and all that stuff.
