The sound of Don’t Fear Death

On Saturday at 2pm, I’ll be joining Mark Ashworth, Paul Jones and Adele Cutting on stage at the Barbican to talk about the Importance of Sound In Animation and touch on the anomalies in attitudes towards approaching sound and music in film making.

We’ll be using clips from Don’t Fear Death with the sound and music separated from the picture to demonstrate the difference it makes.

You can book tickets for the Sound in Animation event HERE and here’s some more info on the event.

This is also a good time to big up Don’t Fear Death’s own fantastic sound and music team, Mark Ashworth and Rob Connor. People often say how sound is 50% of any film. That would be a conservative estimate with Don’t Fear Death as so many of the jokes, moments and tones we crammed in lived or died by the sound.

We were lucky enough to have an assembled a sound and music team that we hope to work with again and again in the future.

Mark Ashworth did the sound design and mixing on the film. I think Mark’s history in horror perfectly complements comedy in that horror spends a lot of time building around key moments and accentuating any physicality. His work on Robert Morgan’s BAFTA-nominated Bobby Yeah is how we met him and was also solid proof of well he can handle comedy gore. Having a relatable sense of humour is really important when working on comedy as it’s such a subjective art. It meant that Mark and I could chew over my pages of notes and refer to points of reference without going mental at each other. Here’s Mark’s showreel.

Rob Connor did the music for the film. Rob is another case having a shared sense of humour and being able to communicate with each other really well. In fact, I now share a studio with him and his Little Bad Wolf partner Craig Bush.

Rob’s an incredibly versatile artist who graduated from the Birmingham Conservatoire. As we threw points of reference at him for each scene he put together a run of ideas that were already nearly spot on. Not only did he create a great piece of music, but Mark and Rob worked around each other leaving spaces for each other and punctuating each other’s work. They were a great little team. Here’s Rob’s showreel and you can also hear his score for the film on Soundcloud here: