Thanos Bikakis

My name is Thanos and I am in London now and I'm a sound engineer.

So depending if I am doing live sound on a location for film, TV or commercials or if I work in live or within education I do different stuff and that means you have different paths you can take in this industry within this job title.

But most of the time I play around with sound so it sounds good.

So most of the time you have to set up some equipment, so you start with that and when the equipment is ready sometimes you have to talk with the talent and use microphones around them or work with people that do work in venues and they want to do their conferences or their events, their festivals and you work with them on how the sound should be.

Or if you are within education you work setting up classrooms for the students that will come later so you can do the classes.

You have to work very close with people and be very clear and communicate how you're going to make what they want to do work and make sure that everything sounds great.

If it is sound engineering or even post-production, how we call it, it's sound designing and sound editing, film, TV, commercial, short video, social media, all that content, you work closely with on-set directors, directors of photography and actors, obviously, and the rest of crew, crew members.

And in order to communicate how and when to do the work and if it's post-production, again, directors mainly and the client or producers on how they want it to sound and how you can work on towards their vision but also put your signature in if it's a film for example.

I think the best thing about the job is that I like it and it is very important to do what you like and go for it.

When I have film work, it's very creative. So I get to create all these very fancy worlds. Sometimes science fiction, they don't even exist. Or sometimes they recreate. And that's a very fun job.

But also when you are on the job and you have to troubleshoot the audio to be what the people want, what the client want, that's also very satisfying.

And within education is also great to have all these students around and try to make it as good as it can be for their learning process.

I think sometimes it's troubleshooting. Things happen, it's normal. And that's, it's very fun, but it's also the hardest thing to have in your mind. How am I gonna solve that?

That's a great question. There's many, many different ways to do that job and to start.

I was very keen on studying. So I studied audiovisual arts and then I also did sound design for film and TV. So I did the whole bachelor's, master's, seminars with people, everything.

But I know many, many people that just had some gear and they started doing the job and learning through the job.

I think my bachelor degree gave me a broader spectrum of how to deal with issues, how to deal with problems, problem solve. It opened my mind, I would say, to different things.

And it also, when I started, I was thinking I could be doing live sound for live events. And they gave me so much more of what that job could be that I ended up loving different things like film and TV sound design for example, it wasn't something I was thinking I would be doing.

And my master's was more focused on that and it gave me the tools. And it was more research focused on how to use my creativity and to produce the final result and obviously how to connect with different people in the industry and work with them, with different editors, directors and how we work together. It gave me the how-to.

It's a great question because if you do mostly film sets and commercials it's very long days most of the time so it's harder. For me it's very important to balance work and life.

Education helps me a lot because I work within higher education and I balance sometimes more work within higher education, less work of film set or sometimes the opposite. You can work within different programs, different organisations.

It's not always easy to balance sound engineering, that's what I'm trying to say, but you have options on where to work and how much of work you want to do. So it's really not that difficult to create your life the way you want it to be.

I think the first time they hired me on a freelance basis to sound design a film, it's the best moment because it's when I thought, wow, they will be paying me to design sound for films now, which is not something you hear every day.

I got so many advices through the years and I was very lucky because when I was at the age of 14 and I was thinking I like sound, what could I do?

I had in my school at the time people that guided me and I figured out that this is something I like and it's possible to do it in the future.

I can work on that, so that's very important. So I guess the best advice I wish I had was ask people, go out there and ask people what they think, what do they do, how they made it, how do they do it. That's the only way to figure it out.