Reviews

“Working with Neil Hillman was more beneficial and enlightening than I could have imagined.

Having worked as a musician for years and a bit in music production, the transition into sound design and editing was perhaps easier than it would have been if I’d had zero experience, but it was still quite a steep learning curve. Neil was very attentive and able to meet me where I was on each aspect of the process.

The project I came to him with was an indie feature film, for which all of the audio was captured on rather low-budget equipment and much of which had a lot of wind noise and serious mic disturbance issues. Neil taught me how to overcome these challenges using Davinci Fairlight without having to purchase expensive plugins or additional tools.

While his consultation on these important technical issues was incredibly helpful and valuable, what I most cherished about the experience of working with Neil was his creative input, which was clearly fueled by a deep love of film and film sound and an honest appreciation for independent film, in particular. He watched our film with great attention and gave me thoughtful notes on how to approach building a strong, emotion-driven soundscape for the world and characters.

I felt respected and supported all the way through, as Neil was always easy to communicate with and quick to respond in his consultation.

That film is set to win an award at its first festival this year and I know its overall production value increased exponentially from my working with and learning from Neil. I can’t recommend his sound design consultation enough! It can absolutely take your project to the next level and beyond.”

Books
Hillman, N. (2013), Journeyman, Birmingham: Merlin Initiatives

‘Journeyman is an authoritative, accessible and at times irreverent, retrospective view of the most significant decade of digital development in the professional audio-for-picture sector; written with humour and passion from first-hand, operational experience.’
Foreword by Andy Farnell, author of Designing Sound.

Academic Books
Hillman, N. (2024), The Routledge Handbook of Sound Design – Emotional intent in sound design (chapter.), London: Routledge
‘The Routledge Handbook of Sound Design offers a comprehensive overview of the diverse contexts of creativity and research that characterize contemporary sound design practice. Readers will find expansive coverage of sound design in relation to games, VR, globalization, performance, soundscape and feminism, amongst other fields.’

Hillman, N. (2021), Sound for Moving Pictures – The Four Sound Areas, London: Routledge
‘This book is at its heart a love-letter to cinema, and in particular cinema sound, thinly disguised as an investigation into the relationship between the creative process of designing and mixing moving picture soundtracks; and an exploration of the emotions elicited in listening-viewers by doing just that.’
Foreword by Walter Murch, multiple Oscar-winning Sound Designer.

Hillman, N. (2019), Foundations in Sound Design – Post-Production II. The Mix Stems: Voice, Effects, Music, Buses. (Chapter.) London: Routledge
‘This volume provides a comprehensive introduction to foundational topics in sound design for linear media, such as listening and recording; audio postproduction; key musical concepts and forms such as harmony, conceptual sound design, electronica, soundscape, and electroacoustic composition; the audio commons; and sound’s ontology and phenomenology.’

Academic Papers
Hillman, N. & Pauletto, S. (2016), Audio Imagineering: Utilising the Four Sound Areas Framework for Emotive Sound Design within Contemporary Audio Post-production, The New Soundtrack, Volume 6.1, pp. 77–107.
Hillman, N. & Pauletto, S. (2015), The Craftsman: The use of sound design to elicit emotions, The Soundtrack, Volume 7.1, pp. 5–23.

Hillman, N. (2014), Organic and free-range Sound Design, The New Soundtrack, Volume 4.2, pp. 123-138.

Academic Citations

Vargas-Aguilar, R.D.C., Banda, I.C.R., Pajuelo, M.L.T., Cotito-Mujica, A., (2024), Data Analysis on Cinematic Language in Video Games

Butterworth, A. (2022), Beyond sonic realism: a cinematic sound approach in documentary 360° film

Cunningham, S., Ridley, H., Weinel, J., Picking, R. (2021), Supervised machine learning for audio emotion recognition

Hans-Martin Lutz, O., Kröger, J.L., Schneiderbauer, M., Kopankiewicz, J.M., Hauswirth, M., Hermann, T. (2020), That password doesn’t sound right: interactive password strength sonification

Carter, L. (2019), Affective Communities: Music, Emotion, and Subjectivity in the Popular Cinema of the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, 1933-1949

Cunningham, S., Ridley, H., Weinel, J., Picking, R. (2019), Audio emotion recognition using machine learning to support sound design

Heath, T. (2018), Making TV sound: a history of television sound operation from 1970-2010

Marshall, K. (2018), The Gulf War Aesthetic? Certain Tendencies in Image, Sound and the Construction of Space in Green Zone and The Hurt Locker

Chacón, A. M. A. (2018), El sonido en el diseño de marca. Construcción de identidad institucional a través de la radiodifusión universitaria

Donaldson, L.F. (2017), Feeling and Filmmaking: The Design and Affect of Film Sound

Heath, T. (2017), Mumble-gate: Negotiating Theory and Practice in Television’s Production Hierarchy

Delmotte, I. (2017), Losing sight of atmospheric sounds in televised nature documentary