Five Questions from Quarantine: Raja Sehgal
Raja Sehgal, sound designer, mixer and Founding Partner of GCRS, feels lucky in his self-isolation studio, thinks POTUS could bring some fun to a dinner party, and tries to stay a glass-half-full kind of guy.
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What's your self-isolation set-up at the moment?
My self-Isolation has left me in my studio away from the studio. I built it a couple of years ago to experiment with immersive audio, so it's fully equipped with a lot of speakers and it's been constantly updated, so I am pretty lucky. This means I have been able to sound design and mix radio, TV and even cinema at home.
My wife is fairly understanding considering it's in the front reception room, and part of the through lounge, but it is acoustically treated so not to annoy the neighbours too much!
I can link up and remote into my colleagues and we enjoy a morning catch up on Zoom. But being able to keep working has kept me sane, and having breaks in the garden as well is all together new, and not spending two-and-a-half hours a day driving has meant, overall, my day at home is pretty productive.
It's lockdown; aside from your family, which four people, past or present, would you most like to be quarantined with?
Well, not sure about being quarantined with them, but would have loved to have Elvis, Mirza Ghalib, an Indian poet from the 19th Century, my niece Harlene, and bring in Trump for some laughs… would be quite a dinner party for me.
We need entertainment, what's your favourite short film?
I don’t watch too many short films, but the strangest one I have worked on was The Attendant, directed by Isaac Juien.
You've completed Netflix. And Amazon Prime. And Disney+. It's on the hard stuff; board games. What do you pick and why?
Mmmm... as a kid I always got bored of board games and ended up throwing them in the air in frustration, especially when many people were playing and it took too much time for your turn to come around. If I had to choose one, like many others, I'm sure Monopoly would be the one that I could last a couple of rounds of, but I would rather go build a shed or, as a kid, building a radio was much more fun!
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On a serious note, how do you think this situation will impact you individually, and the industry as a whole?
I have been trying to look at my glass as being half full; looking ahead, keeping in touch with clients, but instead of talking about projects we are now asking about each other's health and our families health. It's great to see so many people you think of as clients in the studio being friends outside of the work environment. I have some Italian clients from an advertising agency in Milan which emails every couple of days just to see how my family and I are. This is all new and I would like to think that once we come out of this, we will have learned a lot about caring for each other, keeping in touch as friends.
My work tends to be weighted towards International TV and cinema spots and cinema trailers. With the shutdown affecting cinemas worldwide, many film releases were shelved or straight to Netflix/Amazon Prime/Disney+. Now, with China starting to re-open, we can look forward to cinemas starting to open in the Far East. I expect I will be mixing a film trailer called Pandemic in the not too distant future!
We need to look further ahead on TV spots. Once lockdown and travel restrictions are lifted, I would hope to see spots that were shelved revived. Everyone in the industry will want to get back to work, together, face-to-face. Brands will want their name to be remembered in every household though all mediums. So, with that last thought, I will stay positive and look forward to when this is all over, learning from this experience and not forgetting the lives lost.
