We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Aniket Solanki a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Aniket, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s start big picture – what are some of biggest trends you are seeing in your industry?
I think the biggest trend that everybody is talking in filmmaking is the rise of Artificial Intelligence in the process of making movies. A.I is very divisive right now in the industry as recently it was a key issue for the SAG and WGA strike. While the strike is over right now, the industry still hasn’t picked up at its full potential. Meanwhile, the growth of A.I has being exponential from A.I made photos and now videos. I personally believe A.I is an opportunity to improve our workflow so that we can focus on being more creative. A.I has being used in sound designing for quite some time as a noise reduction tool and plug ins which can modulate voices and it is now being used in every major motion picture and TV show. This has given post production sound professionals the necessary tools to use a line of dialogue or maybe make the sound of a spaceship flying by from a tea kettle going on.
A.I has allowed us to be more creative and more faster in the way we do things and I don’t think it can write movies for us and act in movies but rather should be used as a tool in our workflows.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
My journey into the film industry in LA has being nothing short of a fairytale. I am originally from India and I came to the US to pursue a Master’s degree in film and TV production. That led to my love for sound design in movies which has now led to a career doing sound in films. When we think about films we always think about cameras and beautiful imagery but we do not realize that all that imagery is incomplete without an aural perception that goes with it. Visual and aural perception are the two most important senses that humans have and film has the unique ability to tingle both those senses. So by that logic, sound in movies is as important as the visuals as it allows the audiences to be fully immersed in what they are watching. And that is where I come in. I feel the most exciting part about doing what I do is to gamble with the unknown as human vocabulary is not quite proficient in describing sounds. SO most of the time I am in the dark trying to decipher what sounds work best to convey the emotional feeling of a scene or a movie. And that process is thoroughly exasperating but also highly rewarding.
I feel it was never easy to reach where I have because I never thought a career in films was remotely possible. So it all still feels like a dream. I am just waiting for somebody to wake me up and go to a ‘real’ job.
Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?
I tell this to all the young people who are starting out in the film industry to collaborate with their peers as much as possible. I think filmmaking is a people’s business and the biggest resource you can have are the people around you. The person is worth more than the idea because that person can give you multiple ideas. I think I have now reached a stage where I am very comfortable taking ideas from other people rather than dismissing them because when I was young I had the youthful arrogance that I was the smartest person in the room. I have now realised that it is not important to be the smartest person in the room but rather identifying which are the most talented people whom you trust and then surrounding yourself with these people.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
For me it’s the challenge and the excitement that everyday at work is going to be different. One day I am sitting at my home and doing sound design for a feature film and the next I am in Hawaii doing production sound for a film which recently had its premiere at Cannes. There is also the added effect that I get to deal with emotions and feeling rather than numbers while getting to tell stories with sound.
