Michael F. Bates is a freelance sound editor and re-recording mixer working across drama and documentary film and television.
Over the last ten years he has worked on films that have been nominated for BIFA and BAFTA awards, shown at cinemas worldwide and been distributed by Amazon and Netflix.
He has also worked on factual and documentary television for Discovery, National Geographic, Channel 5, UKTV and the BBC.
Michael is a BAFTA Connect member and a full member of the Association of Motion Picture Sound, the craft guild for film, television and game sound.
An interview about my work on James Webber’s debut feature Sorority
https://sororityfilm.com/interview-with-sound-designer-michael-f-bates/
Behind the scenes video from Spitfire Audio about the final mix of The Haunted
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBGEmR7dngs
How I work, creatively speaking
My experience in the industry covers working on micro budget projects where I’ve had to edit and mix an entire film, but also supervising in a more traditional sense; budgeting and scheduling the post sound process whilst supervising and working alongside other freelancers and post production facilities to bring together the final soundtrack.
I understand that the process of bringing a film to life is a long one, so my goal is to create an inspiring, collaborative environment during sound post.
The reason I am passionate about sound in film is that it holds so much potential for subliminal yet powerful work that can enhance the mood and tone of the images and performances it is combined with.
The exciting part of the process is collaborating to discover what type of approach will work to bring the director’s ideas to life.
I always try to record and create a collection of custom sound effects for every project to provide each film with a unique palette of sounds, but I also have an extensive and ever growing sound library that enables me to work quickly and efficiently on any type of project.
I prefer to be brought on board as early as possible, as this allows me to become familiar with the script, meet the other crew members and plan the sound post workflow to make the most of the resources available during production and post, in order to save money and time later on in the process.
I believe that better communication and understanding between production and post departments helps to ensure that budget and resources are spent on making your film sound as fantastic as possible. Many of the issues that are encountered during sound post can be solved by better communication between the production and post production crews, but this requires us to collaborate early on.
How I work, technically speaking
As I work in Pro Tools Ultimate on a calibrated 7.1 monitoring system I can easily integrate into workflows at bigger facilities.
This means that it is possible to work on a project in the less time and budget pressured environment of my studio before taking it to a large dub stage to do the final mix.
It also means that I can provide sound effects and dialogue editing to other sound supervisors.
