Meet Jonathan Scott

 

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jonathan Scott. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jonathan below.

Alright, so we’re so thrilled to have Jonathan with us today – welcome and maybe we can jump right into it with a question about one of your qualities that we most admire. How did you develop your work ethic? Where do you think you get it from?

I have always been a hard worker since I was a kid. I first had a job at the age of 12 and continued to work from that age to this day, and only took one year off when I was focused on my education. When I was 15 I was enrolled at a regional occupational program in high school, when I signed up for audio technology and learned how to record and mix bands and musicians. That is what got me into recording programs in college that led to becoming a recording engineer, practicing sound design, and mixing sound for films, and then now I practice as a field sound mixer and recordist. Now I constantly have my cell phone or email inbox filled with customers hitting me up to work sound on their projects or films.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

The career I fell into is a freelance sound mixer for film, documentary, media, and electronic news gathering. Originally I had gone to college to learn the audio engineer position for recording musicians and bands for their art, but later I fell into sound design for films and that’s what attracted me to switch from music to the film industry. While I was still in college earning my degree in digital media arts in audio, I was interning at post-production sound studios and working on what projects I could get my hands on. One day while I was working on a movie I saw that we had to automate dialogue replacement the audio in the movie because the audio was not pretty and recorded incorrectly. That’s when I made a statement that I should just go buy the recordist equipment and just do it myself. Once I was done working with some clients as a sound mixer, they were passing my number around because they didn’t have to replace the audio and were able to have great sounding set audio. And that’s what I intended because bad audio on film was just bugging me and watching ADR in movies is very difficult to watch. Since being in the industry for 10 years I have non-stop worked and even found ways to still work as a freelance sound mixer during the Hollywood strike.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

The best qualities you can have on set are a loveable attitude towards crew and producers and networking with people so you know key coworkers, and coworkers who know you for your art. To have skills in the industry is not to have a know-it-all-all attitude and treat every job as an upcoming learning curve so that you can always be willing to learn and improve your art reveal your strengths and improve possible weaknesses. Even being a likable person on set will help the crew assist you if there is a learning curve because it’s a noisy environment, the lighting does not agree with your booming shadows or you need time to get the sound right. When you become friends and family with the crew and cast, they will try their best to get this project done right for everyone. Advice I can give people who want to enter this profession, link up with others who have done it for a while and made a stake in the industry. Also, feel free to ask if pros can take you in to be a boom operator or utility assistant to learn the basics and prepare you for the pros jobs when the time has come. Even today I had old professors reaching out to me to help educate and inspire the new generations of film and audio world.

All the wisdom you’ve shared today is sincerely appreciated. Before we go, can you tell us about the main challenge you are currently facing?

The number one obstacle I am feeling right now is trying to survive right after the Hollywood strike and where will my career be in the future. Well, one thing for sure is that audio is a hard job that many people don’t understand or overlook sound to the camera, wardrobe, art, or lighting department. But one thing is for sure artificial intelligence is not holding a boom pole, pushing a sound cart, or putting lavalier mics on actors. So looks like my job still has some stability I will not be out of work anytime soon.

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Image Credits

Daniel Button

Ricky Hilton

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