Craft
Emma Butt The audio post expert discusses her career and elevating the role of women in the industry with ROB SPEIGHT
T
o work in post-production audio in film and television you need a specific set of skills. However, one of those ‘skills’ is still predominately being a white male. The number of women working in post audio roles, be it dubbing, re-recording, dialogue or SFX editing across major broadcasters in the UK can pretty much be counted on two hands. It’s not hard to see then, that in order to work in this environment and be a woman takes an extra amount of effort and determination. One example of this, is dubbing/re-recording mixer, dialogue and SFX editor and ADR recordist, Emma Butt. Extremely skilled and well credited (having worked on shows including ADR for Games of Thrones and Dr Who, as well as mixing and sound editing on Eastenders and White Riot to name a few) she has managed to survive the hard-to-navigate audio post-production world, as well as gain recognition for her work in highlighting the lack of diversity in this area of film and television. “Okay. So the, condensed version,” she tells me, 28 / March/April 2022
“is I studied music in school and I actually wanted to get into live sound. I didn’t want to do film at all. But did the usual thing of being a student three months to the end of my course being like, oh, I need to get a job. So, I just emailed all the post hosts in Dublin and the music studios and ended up getting a job as a runner at Screen Scene production. And I loved it and I realised I really loved post production.”
Making moves
It was at Screen Scene where Emma started
recording voice for animation and eventually working on entire productions from quotes and script prep through records, sound design, mixing and deliverables. “So literally every stage of the process was me. And it was just me. There was no one else involved, or very rarely, and I loved it. I absolutely loved doing it. So I stayed there for nine years and worked my way up through the ranks and got to a point where my career was going really well. I had a really good client base, but I wanted to do re-recording mixing for drama,” said Butt. With other engineers with seniority at Screen Scene, Butt decided it was time to make a change and decided to leave Ireland and head to the U.K. to see if she could continue to develop her career in a bigger market. “So I came over and did six interviews over three days with different companies and very quickly learned that the English industry didn’t want to pay attention to my credits, didn’t want to
[I] very quickly learned that the English industry didn’t want to pay attention to my credits, didn’t want to pay attention to my experience