With over 50 years experience as a location sound recordist in documentary and features, Ray Beckett is best known for his work with Ken Loach, Kathryn Bigelow and Merchant Ivory.

His aim in this session is to stress the importance to communicate the need for sound to be included in production planning from the earliest stages as an important part of the final viewer experience and not just as an ‘addendum’ to the image. 

Having achieved a ‘sound friendly’ set, I’ll then focus on how the technology can help with giving ‘a sense of place’ to a scene. I include in this the way that ‘simultaneous atmos tracks’ can contribute to mood. I am no longer current on the latest radio mic systems and on-set noise reduction systems but what I would like to stress is that, whatever equipment is used, it is done within a department that is respected as providing a great part of the final experience of a film.

2 hours including time for an extensive Q&A.
Each ticket includes free access to a recording of the event for 6 months.

Ray Beckett
I joined the film industry in 1969 as a trainee maintenance and sound transfer engineer. After a three year apprenticeship that included doing sound transfer on Lindsay Anderson’s Oh Lucky Man and Mike Hodges’s Get Carter among others I went freelance as a sound assistant on documentary films. I began my life as a sound recordist in 1977 and worked on many documentaries around the world.
        In 1981 I was asked to work with Merchant Ivory Productions as location sound recordist on Heat and Dust in India. Two more Merchant Ivory films followed. In 1983, on The Bostonians, I began recording location sound digitally using the Sony PCM F1 system. I continued with this system on A Room With A View in 1986.
        In 1992 I began working with Ken Loach on Raining Stones and have worked on about 17 films with him since. In 2007 I worked with Kathryn Bigelow on The Hurt Locker. I received an Academy Award, a BAFTA and a Cinema Audio Society Award for my work on that film. I subsequently worked on two more Kathryn Bigelow films: Zero Dark Thirty and Detroit.