Singaporean sound designer, re-recording mixer and foley artist Ting Li LIM put Singapore on the map in the sound and music editing industry recently when she won the Verna Fields Award in Sound Editing at the MPSE Golden Reel Awards in Los Angeles held on February 16, 2014. She was nominated for her work in the student film Robomax. At the same awards, Wong Kar Wai’s The Grandmaster also won Best Sound Editing: Sound Effects, Foley, Dialogue & ADR in a Foreign Feature Film.

A graduate from the MA Sound Design course at the National Film & Television School in the U.K., and based now in London, Lim’s foray into sound started in 2004. She has worked on several award-winning films including Boo Junfeng’s Sandcastle, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival’s International Critics’ Week in 2010. Her works have also been presented at film festivals such as Berlin, Rotterdam, Clemont Ferrand and Pusan.

Ting Li LIM

What are the circumstances by which you came to be connected to the awards?

I graduated from the National Film & Television School (NFTS) in the U.K. in early 2013 and the school submitted one of my graduation films, Robomax, into the competition. The nominees were announced in January 2014 while I was on holiday in Singapore. NFTS very generously subsidised my trip to LA and the rest, as they say, is history!

What were your feelings on receiving this award?

Most of the time, post-production people are the silent heroes working in their little dark rooms, so it was a real honour to have my work recognised at such a prestigious event. And it was fantastic to be in the same room with amazing talent such as Walter Murch, Randy Thom and Erik Aadahl. I had the chance to meet them in person and had to restrain myself from looking too starstruck. I also hope this win will pave my way to working on bigger films.

What were the challenges faced in production?

One of the biggest challenges of the film was to strike the right balance between sound design and music. The director, Moayad Fahmi, wanted the film to sound big, but we didn’t want it to be a wall of sound charging through, so the composer Sarah Warne and I worked very closely together from script stage to pinpoint exactly when sound or music was going to take the lead or a backseat. It was a really fun process picking out the sounds for Robomax that would personify him. I snuck puppy whines in midst of emotive metal creaks to give him more character. Another huge challenge was cutting in baby sounds from different and very limited sound libraries and making them sound like they were all coming from the same baby. It was also the first time I was mixing for a 62 piece orchestra, so that posed a huge challenge in itself. I was also about 39 weeks pregnant during the final mix of the film so it was kind of hard to reach the high knobs on the Euphonix MC 5 desk we were mixing on.