Music & Sound Design: Jim Griffin

Sometimes the sound of chips being thrown at a windscreen is best expressed as... silence – but it takes an expert in sound design to know that. Jim Griffin, senior sound designer at Jungle Studios, reveals to Joe Lancaster how the best sound often goes unheard, and describes the OCD delights of becoming a snuffling pig and making sushi noises with fish fillets

Making tea and emptying bins are the kinds of crap jobs that work experience kids usually get. But when Jim Griffin started at the bottom at Jungle Studios in the 90s, he had to go a little further to impress the boss. Sent to the butcher to retrieve two pig legs, he was tasked with Foleying (creating a sound effect to replace an ambient noise) scuttling trotters. “I was on the floor, being a pig basically.”

Growing up playing drums for bands in High Wycombe, England, Griffin was always enamoured of music and knew he’d end up working with sound. After a brief stint producing audio for theatre, he got a shot at Jungle and clearly did a good job with those trotters because he’s still there now, having worked his way up the ranks to establish himself as one of the best sound designers in the commercials industry.

Echoes of The Dark Knight’s drums

What is a sound designer? The affable Griffin would forgive you for not really knowing what he does, or spotting when he’s worked his magic. “Often what we do has to be unobtrusive and so good that you don’t notice it… so realistic that people just believe [the sound is real]. If you start breaking someone out of what they’re watching, then you’re failing as a sound designer.”

His daily tasks are too many to list here but they include cleaning up the audio recorded on shoots, creating Foley, looping (re-recording actors’ lines), dubbing and a lot more. He’s effectively responsible for everything you hear other than the music. This certainly isn’t just adding a few ‘boings’ and ‘booms’ – for example a sound designer can spend around nine hours on a 30-second ad.

Like all aspects of filmmaking, sound design goes through trends and recently Griffin has noticed a lot of work in the vein of top Hollywood composer Hans Zimmer, whose sound for The Dark Knight trilogy, for example, sees big drum hits coinciding with action – particularly punches – on screen. “It’s entered into the lexicon of sound design. It’s not like you’re ripping it off, it’s an homage [when you replicate a sound]. It’s not like music where you’re copying it directly – it doesn’t work that way.” However, these trends can quickly get tired, as Griffin points out. “The problem we’ve got now is that the big drums thing is being overused. It’s becoming lazy.”

And the rest is silence

But Zimmer is a composer rather than a sound designer, so the two must overlap a little? “Most good sound designers will tune their sound design so it at least interacts with the music,” explains Griffin. “Sound designers each have different styles. I’m obsessed with music (he’s also a working club and radio DJ) and my strength as a sound designer is in the more musical stuff.”

What else makes a good sound designer? “For me there’s a touch of OCD to it, where I have to go out and watch movies to know what other people are doing, and I have to learn from that and apply it to what I’m doing. Don’t bother [trying to be a sound designer] if you’re not obsessive about sound.” Also, he believes that good sound designers don’t only know which sounds to use and where to put them in a film, but also when to leave them out.

“You can use a gap of silence to accent the sound design either side of it even more,” he explains, pointing to an example in a commercial he worked on for Transport For London, through M&C Saatchi and director Yann Demange. At a critical scene, some chips are thrown onto the windscreen of a car, but there is no sound effect at impact – just silence. “It’s the best shot in the whole piece and I argued against putting sound on it – which is a weird thing for a sound designer to do, but I thought it would rob [the film] of its energy.”

Other notable work on Griffin’s reel includes spots for Virgin, Nike and his proudest piece – a trailer for a Discovery Channel documentary. He also worked on a charming short film called Mohammed, for hot young director Mustapha Kseibati, which starred Kayvan Novak and was selected for the London Film Festival last year. 

A public lack of understanding about how much work – and skill – goes into sound design is an occupational hazard. You’ll often hear people praising the cinematography or score in a film, even if they don’t know who was responsible for it. But do you ever hear people gush about sound design? “We’re not a very well known bunch,” admits Griffin.

Two of his idols are relatively well known however – Ben Burtt (every Stars Wars film) and Randy Thom (Despicable Me) – and Griffin acknowledges that doing a big feature film is the way to gain recognition. Fame doesn’t appear to be something he craves, but the fun of creating sounds for movies definitely is – his eyes light up when he talks about Star Wars, The Revenant and Kung Fu Panda. “It’s incredibly competitive, so to get to the level in the features industry where I currently am in commercials would be a big leap. But it’s not impossible.”

Recreating porcine pandemonium

Spend an afternoon chatting with a sound designer and you might never watch films the same way again. Every time a pig trots into shot you may now picture a young intern tapping amputated hooves on a recording studio floor.

You’d think that successful sound designers might not need to get their hands dirty anymore, but that’s what makes Griffin tick and he thinks it makes the difference between good and great results.

For an M&S spot he recently spent a “happy half-hour” cutting up raw fish fillets and slapping them together to get the perfect sound for sushi landing on a plate. “My wife’s sprayed me with a garden hose, prison-style, to get a sound before,” he shrugs. “I’ll go the distance. I don’t know if I’m a sound fetishist – I just get really excited about sound.” Give Jim Griffin a microphone and some real-life props to play with and he’s happier than a pig in shit.