You’re in for a great read this month with another sound story from the location department, this time from one of our Australian Screen Sound Guild Lifetime members. Please sit back and enjoy getting to know Gary Wilkins.

What drew me to work in sound? It seems a strange thing but it all sort of fell into place.
When I was a teenager in the 1960’s I found some parts of a gramophone my father had built. The valve amplifier, a 12-inch Rola speaker and the 78 RPM turntable were all intact and after a few electric shocks, I got it all working. Then I began playing his collection of jazz and popular 1940’s and 50’s music discs which I also found in the garage.
I used to love playing those old 78’s and knew most of them off by heart so began to be able to pick out and follow a particular instrument in the big swing bands such as the brass, guitar or drums and bass. I used to imagine I was playing a particular instrument and learnt the cues; I realize now that I was actually training myself to listen analytically to sound. I had no idea of a career, it was just great to do. Maybe I could have become a musician but chance sent me in a different direction.
A small private production company called Academy Films located in Ringwood was producing a film for the Victorian Education Department and my high school class was the test audience. The print we were shown was, I now know, a work print. It had the cue lines for the narration drawn across it in yellow Chinagraph pencil and all the dissolves and fades marked. I was fascinated by the lines and technical things I was seeing on screen.

 became restless at high school – I loved the outdoors and thought more and more of getting into some kind of work in Television. I knew nothing about it of course but I wrote to the only two TV stations seeking work and was rejected. At 17 I left school and got a job with a travel agent in the city. I learnt many valuable lessons there about travel and operating businesses in general but I hated the filing I had to do. This lack of application finally led to my demise in the travel industry. At the same time I was doing a night course in Diploma of photography at RMIT in Melbourne.
I needed a job. One of my uncles suggested I go and see this company Crawford Productions in Collins Street Melbourne. They had just produced a TV crime show called Homicide. It was rough and clunky compared to the slick Hollywood productions on TV but it was Australian and it featured our city and our voices. The audiences liked it and Crawfords had just renewed the contract for a further series of the show with HSV7.

Here’s the part where it gets weird. On my lunch break on my last day at the travel agency I walked into the offices of Crawford Productions. It was on the 4th floor at 476 Collins Street. The Olderfleet building was a large gothic structure with a corridor running the depth of half a city block from Collins to Flinders Lane, quite long. The hallway was decorated with a golden arch and chandelier above a reception desk. No one was in attendance at the desk so I walked a little further on and waited. There was absolutely no sign of life in the building until about half way along the hallway a door opened and a young man about my age stormed out and slamming the door walked away towards another very large door at the end of the passageway.

I headed towards the door he had exited from and saw the sign Hector Crawford on it. . So I knocked and a voice said gruffly “Come in.” So I stuck my head around the door and saw an impressive silver haired man at a large desk.
He said “What do you want?”
So I replied “Are there any jobs? “
To my surprise he said “Do you know anything about tape recorders?”

Now while I was at school my mother was friendly with the wife of our GP Doctor Matthews. He was doing some kind of research and had started a film appreciation group. He wanted someone to assist him and part of that meant learning to thread up and operate his 16mm projector and run his National Stereo tape recorder which he used to record the audience reactions. I thought that tape recorder was beautiful and really liked using it.

So I was able to answer Hector Crawford’s question reasonably truthfully.
Then he said “ Good! You start in the sound department tomorrow morning.at 7.00 am – What is your name?”

Now it turns out that that the other young man was the junior in the Sound Department and had been offered another job at the ABC. He had just asked for a pay rise or else he would leave and Hector apparently had a policy of never giving in to a threat like that and had just fired him. So when I stuck my head around the door 30 seconds later we were both surprised at the result.

So I became employee number 35 in an organisation which grew in size to 450 staff  with three studios and five film crews working full time. I was fortunate to grow with and help the company expand in skills and technology over a ten year period that I was with them. It was the best education in film that anyone could ever ask for. I worked on everything from live symphony concerts, orchestral recordings, films, television, radio commercials , documentaries, special projects like the talking chairs for the Australian Expo pavilion at Montreal. I spent time in editing, sound post, foley, sound effects, post sync dialogue, track laying, mixing and radio transcription, even negative matching. So many areas of experience that cannot be acquired these days. Crawfords and the ABC were the main places for training as there were no courses available in media of any description especially technical areas.
Crawfords came from a successful radio drama production background and I learned many useful techniques from that as all their sound recording, editing and mixing was done in house. After more than ten years their star began to fade and they switched over to video tape production just as the feature film industry began to blossom. Their film crews were becoming redundant I decided to take the plunge and become freelance as I really wanted to do the movies which were just beginning to start up.

But every one of more than 80 Features and other miniseries I worked on is like one of your kids, each is different, each has their own problems, failures and successes but you still love them all equally. Some of the least known or commercially successful films were some of the sound tracks that I am most proud of contributing to.
I also taught a lot of people how to record and was guest lecturer in sound at the VCA Melbourne for eight years which I loved doing.

If I hadn’t been in this industry God knows how I would have ended up? I reasoned that I would be unemployable at any other job so I had better make this one work. I once went down the list of possible jobs out of film and got as far as bus driver. I was able to survive for fifty years doing what I loved and I still couldn’t believe they paid me to do it.

Two soundtracks that I would have loved to have worked and which both inspired me to move from TV to Film were Lawrence of Arabia for its sheer scale and emotional impact and Zulu. Zulu uses sound in very interesting ways which builds the dramatic thrust of the story.

That scene when the two men in the outpost hear a sound which they think is a train in the distance but turns out to be thousands of chanting Zulu warriors approaching and the other sequence of the dancing at the start of the movie are things I would have loved to have worked on. Such powerful sound.

Recording music live on set is always a challenge and much of the music in Breaker Morant was shot and recorded live on location.

But just being told that encouraged me to really want to learn everything I could about sound recording. I haunted the technical bookshops of Melbourne and read anything remotely connected to sound and film even translated Russian textbooks, books on psychology and perception, the ear and hearing. I even attended lectures on British naval artillery, firearms, explosives, studio design, projectionists licence and enrolled in an electronics course. At every opportunity I spoke with every technician and sales person who would give me the time.  I collected pamphlets about sound equipment and learned what all the terms used meant.
I picked up valuable tips from the old radio panel operators and the young television techs as well. It’s a habit that I still practice in retirement. I left school early but I have never stopped learning. I like finding stuff out.
At home I used to record movie soundtracks off the TV and replay them through headphones for hours on end listening to them. I began to get a feel for the things that should and shouldn’t be in a soundtrack.