Hervé Girardin

Hello, my name is Hervé, I am a sound designer and I am based in Edinburgh in Scotland.

When I work for Screen Academy Scotland I look after the sound studios for films. I help out students with their projects and look after the place.

And when I'm working with other clients, can be filmmakers, animators or film production companies, then I create the soundtrack for them. So that means I create the sound effects, create the foley, sometimes the score, the final mix and everything so that their sound is really, really good on their films.

It varies greatly. Sometimes I record foley, so footsteps or some grass or some sounds with microphones. Then I cut them, I edit them in a computer. Sometimes I create score with instruments, like virtual instruments in computer or recording some real instruments.

Sometimes, most of the time, I also fix computers, I fix microphones, I make sure that the studios are up and running and I also try to always learn some new techniques, new softwares and some new ways to do things.

When I work at Screen Academy, I work with other technicians, colleagues, lecturers, university lecturers. I also work with students to help them with the film.

And when I work for my own company, I work with filmmakers, with animators, with marketing companies, just people who make media, who try to tell stories and I help them make a soundtrack for that.

The thing I like the most is when I manage to get lost into doing what I'm doing, so like for a couple of hours just working on one particular sound, on one particular scene in a little animation film for instance.

And I would create the backgrounds and I would create the ambiances and the sound effects and I would just get lost in doing what I'm doing and the whole evening would pass and I would not realise how much time I would have spent doing it but it's really, really fun doing that. Like a kid in a candy shop.

I can't believe this is my job. This is amazing.

Sometimes there's lots of work all coming at the same time and sometimes there's no work at all for sometimes weeks or months.

And knowing how to navigate this, not be too stressed when there's too much work or not be too anxious when there's none is probably maybe the most difficult one.

I really didn't take a direct route. I started listening, I started studying music.

I was really into music during when I was a kid, then growing up in my twenties I learned how to be a sound engineer, I worked in music clubs and theatres.

And since then I wanted to make a composer for films and for some reason ended up being a sound designer and now I work at Screen Academy Scotland as a freelancer but I took slightly different routes but always still within the realms of music and sound.

It gave me some good theoretical knowledge but mostly it allowed me to meet people and to collaborate with them in a risk-free environment.

That means that I could do things and it would not be great and I would be okay. I could fail, I could do something that doesn't work, I could make something that people don't like and everything is fine.

And you learn a lot by doing little mistakes like that and knowing that this is not the right approach to do things, this is not the right way to do things, I didn't really like how this panned out.

And that's where studying, like going to school for this can be a good idea.

A very important moment for me was the first time that a film that I worked on, it was an animation film, played in a cinema.

And it was played alongside other films and I was like wow this is crazy I had spent like so much time working on this and just by myself and to see the reaction of other people seeing them being moved by that story that I participated in.

It was like really really nice for once I was out of my little cave, my little studio and out in the world. That was really, really top-notch.

I think it would be to learn to talk to people a bit better and to not be intimidated by other people.

I know it's really sometimes hard when you are younger to approach people, to talk about your interests and to learn to connect a little bit with other people.

I think that's something that I had to learn a little bit later in life and I wish that when I was a teenager I would have been shown and taught a little bit more to take more risks in talking to other people.