We recently connected with Kevin Senzaki and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Kevin, great to have you with us today and excited to have you share your wisdom with our readers. Over the years, after speaking with countless do-ers, makers, builders, entrepreneurs, artists and more we’ve noticed that the ability to take risks is central to almost all stories of triumph and so we’re really interested in hearing about your journey with risk and how you developed your risk-taking ability.
There’s two main kinds of risk in sound design work: creative risks you take while working on a project, and, at least as a freelancer, the career risks in regards to what projects you take and who you allow to become your professional “family” of repeat collaborators.
When it comes to creative risk, taking too much time is often the enemy. Creative ideas are spontaneous, and it’s best to implement ideas as quickly as possible, while the inspiration is fresh and before overthinking sets in. While one idea may not be successful, it often leads to the next idea that wouldn’t have come up otherwise. Projects of course necessitate structure and scheduling, but staying creatively fluid within that framework is key to both making inspired decisions, and having fun.
I feel very fortunate to have started my career in sound design in the early 2010’s working for the YouTube channels FreddieW (later known as RocketJump) and Corridor Digital, creating short action films on weekly turnarounds, where the sound often had to be fully created in under three days. This helped me turn my spontaneous, “let’s just have fun and try crazy ideas” instincts into a relatively repeatable skill, the result of having to rapidly come up with ideas and commit to them as final.
As a freelancer, there’s also a lot of risk in the career side of things, chiefly where your next project is going to come from. While some major factors are outside of your direct control, like who you meet and who might call you back with another gig, I feel it’s absolutely crucial to learn about yourself and better understand your sensibilities and values, creative and otherwise, and having that guide your decision-making as much as possible. I think some of this understanding comes from spending time in your own head and figuring out your goals and what matters to you, while some of it’s informed by life and work experience. Learning what doesn’t click for you and what you don’t like is just as valuable as learning what you do like. The more you work with others, the easier it becomes to “feel out” if you’re a good collaborative match, as you figure out what kinds of work relationships are fulfilling to you.
If you find like-minded collaborators who challenge you in positive ways that grow your craft, and who also have enough common sense to not make too many poor career decisions themselves, it’s absolutely worth holding on to these relationships for the enjoyment and mutual success you might enjoy in the future. These are the kinds of people worth taking risks with – like passion projects or a crazy independent production – because you’re more likely to produce your best work and have a good time along the way if you enjoy the company around you. Not every risky project I’ve taken on with collaborators has been financially or commercially successful, but I’m proud of all of them, and feel that they were all more than worth my time and effort.
Who you collaborate with is the number one most important thing in the film industry. When you’re starting out you might not have the best choices, but it’s important to always be aware, to stand by your values, and value yourself, as best as you can. I find there’s two types of “bad collaborator” or “bad client,” the ones who mean well but simply don’t have their act together, and the ones who are actively harmful and looking to take advantage of you. While it can be tempting to take any job that comes by at first (and sometimes there may not be that much of a choice), it’s important to understand the inherent risk of each new client or collaboration, and to try to mitigate that risk as much as possible. A lot of that can be done at the beginning before you start work, things like setting a hard deadline, limiting the number of revisions you’ll do, or asking for part of the payment upfront. The last thing you want to have happen is for a project to peter out and vanish with nothing to show for it, in terms of credit or money.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
I’m a freelance sound designer for film, TV, web content, commercials, video games, podcasts, all kinds of things that need audio. What I enjoy most is that the audience literally can’t see what I’m doing – there’s almost endless opportunities to be creative, silly, ironic, and unexpected. If a sound paired with a picture feels “right,” people will accept it as authentic and true, as if that sound occured organically in the moment, even if the sound itself has absolutely nothing to do with what’s being portrayed. Oftentimes the literal sound of something isn’t the strongest creative choice, and it becomes a game of audio analogies and allusions, where you try to identify what specific tones, textures, and feelings you want to express, and then you source the parts that will combine to create that whole.
While a lot of people in sound design come from a music background, I was focused on visual art growing up. Creating sound that pairs with images still feels like tapping into my visual creativity as well, and I let my eye really guide my decisions on what to emphasize and what details and emotions to accentuate. I find it’s a really satisfying multi-sensory way to be creative, and I think having a visual art background personally helps me ground my focus in the overall story that’s being told, and what decisions are best for the whole, not just making the “coolest sounds” simply because I can.
As I’m freelance, I tend to bounce around a good deal project to project. Some of my recent work includes HBO’s documentary series “100 Foot Wave,” for which I was nominated for an Emmy, the indie sci-fi road trip film “We’re All Gonna Die” that will be premiering at SXSW, and the music documentary “Devo” which just debuted at Sundance. I’m currently working on a couple feature films, and have some exciting projects later this year that I unfortunately can’t discuss yet, because that’s how the industry is sometimes!
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
Play, obsessive enthusiasm for some of my favorite creative works (i.e. nerdiness), and life experiences outside of work have fundamentally shaped my growth and career.
By play, I mean exercising skills applicable to your work in a completely unserious, pressure-free environment. A lot of the skills I use now as a sound designer I started developing in middle school making weird movies, comics, and music with friends. The more you create, the more you learn about your own creative instincts and develop your personal sense of taste and style, which of course informs all of your creative decisions while working. Doing something “for fun” is also a great way to expand your skill set, without the pressure of having to do something perfectly for a client. While I don’t work in music professionally and don’t have any of the conventional “qualifications” to do so, I made an experimental electronic album last year just for fun (Meat Moth – “Intellectual Poverty,” for those who happen to be curious), and it was a great opportunity to use my “sound design brain” in a different context, and learn more about how different aspects of my DAW and plugins work, that I normally don’t get to dabble in. It also ended up being useful professionally, as I was later working on a film that needed a background dance beat, without much time or money left for the production to license a song – so I was able to rearrange something I’d made instead, and put it in the movie!
In regards to obsessive enthusiasm, I’m personally not someone who consumes a huge amount of media by volume; I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge about every noteworthy movie out there. Sometimes when directors make references, “oh it’s like this scene in this movie, but with this from that movie,” I’ll just make a note and look it up later to figure out what they were trying to say. However, if a movie really clicks for me, I enjoy learning all the ins and outs about a work as well as how it was made. “Star Wars” and “Jurassic Park” really got me excited about film when I was young, and I think even more than the movies themselves, I loved the behind the scenes documentaries and books, and to this day I can rattle off a huge amount of specific information about exactly how those films were made, and how specific results were achieved. There’s of course other works I’ve latched onto over the years as an adult, including albums, video games, and maybe even whiskies, if that counts. For me, obsessing over the small details and how specific decisions make a work into what it is is a way for me to stay excited about my own work, and that helps me stay conscious of small but important decisions I’m making on a daily basis. I personally don’t think you need to have seen a huge amount of movies to be successful working in film, but having some more in-depth knowledge into how a handful of really well-crafted films were made is absolutely a great asset for understanding your craft and unlocking your own creativity.
The companion “skill” to knowing your work medium well is having rich experiences totally outside of your craft. When my kids asked me what real aliens might look like, I explained that they’re usually shown to look like humans or bugs or sea creatures, because our imagination is limited by what we’ve experienced. So, similarly, pretty much any and all life experience outside of watching movies can be extremely valuable when making them, since you have more to draw upon. Sometimes this is pretty literal – knowing what a specific motorcycle engine sounds like, or what birds live in a certain part of the world can help make a scene more authentic. But oftentimes as a sound designer, it can be more abstract – when trying to create sound for a scene, a memory of something you experienced might give you an idea, or a random bit of knowledge from a hobby might give you a unique angle on how to create the perfect sound. Travel is always an amazing way to expose all your senses to something new, but even more mundane experiences can be rich with inspiration if you stay mindful. I’ve come up with some great sound design ideas while cleaning the house, cooking, or even just stepping outside to walk to the car. Life is constantly surprising in small ways if you can notice it!
We’ve all got limited resources, time, energy, focus etc – so if you had to choose between going all in on your strengths or working on areas where you aren’t as strong, what would you choose?
I think the ideal is a balance of both extremes – not a neutral middle ground, but embracing and really leaning into your strengths, while also trying to grow laterally and improve other areas of your craft as much as you can. Though it’s often not necessary or practical to have a fully-fledged generalist skill set, improving at skills adjacent to your primary focus is always a worthwhile pursuit, and will often strengthen your primary focus at the same time.
When I’m working on a small-scale project, I typically handle all the post production sound – dialogue editing, foley, sound effects, backgrounds, and mixing. However, when I’m part of a larger team on a bigger project, I specialize as a sound designer. This typically means handling the more stylized and subjective sound effects, and anything that may need to be created or non-literal, like fantasy and sci-fi sounds. Sound design is what I consider my main strength and the area I enjoy the most when I end up compartmentalized. As a result, I feel that I know less about the other areas of post sound, compared to people who specialize in them. At one point I was contacted about doing dialogue editing work for Apple, and I was really excited about the opportunity to push myself to better master dialogue editing skills, which while serviceable, I certainly was not something I was an “expert” at. Before I started, I was reminded that “this is a dialogue editing gig, not sound effects, are you okay with that?”, and I replied that I was interested in the job specifically because it wasn’t sound effects editing. I ended up learning a lot about dialogue cleanup and improving my iZotope RX workflow, and that’s now a permanent part of my skill set, even though I still consider myself a sound designer focused on sound effects first and foremost. I was able to combine my improved knowledge of dialogue editing with sound design for the video game “Immortality,” which is made up of about ten hours of live action footage that the player explores, most of which is supposed to have been shot between the 1960’s and 1990’s. I had to “age” the dialogue to feel authentic to period microphones and recording equipment, and while the “sound designer” part of my brain was well-prepared to create the effects that made the sound feel “old,” I was really fortunate to have had focused dialogue editing experience as well, which really brought things together in getting the best results possible out of the performances. Fortunately the game was well received, and I ended up winning an MPSE Golden Reel Award for achievement in video game dialogue, which I find somewhat funny because I still don’t think of myself as a “dialogue” expert.
Contact Info:
- Website: senzaki.com
- Instagram: @kevinsenzaki
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-senzaki-630b9716/
- Twitter: @KevinSenzaki
