Don Paulin

Approaching every project "with an open mind and an open ear", Don Paulin has worked as a sound recordist and sound editor for more than four decades. His credits span numerous features and series, covering children’s fantasy, reality television, documentary, historical realism, and more.

Audiences generally "don’t give a lot of thought about how the sounds got there", Paulin explains. He argues that people hold "an image of a microphone on set that captures all the sounds they are hearing". This means the sound team has successfully crafted a natural, cohesive soundscape out of thousands of individual elements, “helping the audience feel immersed in the picture".

You may have the "actual sound of someone in gumboots walking on soft ground", but the addition of "the squish, a little splash and that unmistakable rubbery sound we associate with gumboots" will help sell the moment. By adding "the sound of a distant skylark” and a mooing cow, “because the cow over the fence may be thinking that it’s feeding time" – an entire scene can be built, expanding beyond the corners of the image.

Don Paulin’s entry into the film industry happened "by accident". After leaving school in 1975 without a clear direction, he began working as a maintenance technical trainee at South Pacific Television. Although it didn't feel like his calling, he did learn “some basic technical knowledge” and the ability to troubleshoot technical issues that arose on location. He also met some of the staff sound recordists, who brought their Nagra audio recorders to be checked over before they travelled “to Tahiti, or some other exotic location”. As a lover of travel, this was enough reason to apply for the next job opening in the film sound department.

This love of the great outdoors and travelling would be satisfied by Paulin’s work on Country Calendar. The show "rejuvenated my love for recording sound". Paulin had worked on occasional episodes in the past, and in the late 1990s he was invited to become a regular sound recordist for the show. The gig provides many "awesome challenges" when it comes to recording sound in varied environments. He notes that the show's producers use music sparingly, allowing “the real sounds of locations, machinery, animals, and people” to feature, greatly contributing to the authentic feel of the programme.

Paulin has mixed work for TVNZ with independent productions across much of his career. He was on staff with TVNZ until 2012, although for roughly five years of this period he was seconded to the Film Unit. En route he has worked on both movies and television, including shows for companies Plan 9 and The Gibson Group.

When he first moved into sound, Paulin was a sound recordist for news and current affairs shows. Despite being a large organisation, TVNZ then lacked a foley studio, so sound recordists on dramas needed to record a music and effects track. This entailed actors "walking through their scene without dialogue, while their feet and movements were captured by the microphone" — adding more time pressure to the location shot, and often more location noise to the soundtrack. In 1983, Paulin trained "as TVNZ’s first sound editor who was actually from the sound department" — previously sound editing had been done by film editors.

Learning the basics of sound editing and building a soundtrack from its many different elements proved to be "an eye-opener" for Paulin. It made him more closely consider what he was recording when in the field, and how to improve it. That decade he worked on TVNZ dramas Inside Straight, Roche, and The Marching Girls. Offering frank depictions of Wellington’s underworld, socioeconomic strife, and modern feminism respectively, the three shows brought a level of urban grit and political complexity to Kiwi TV screens.

Paulin also worked as sound designer on a number of kidult shows created by Raymond Thompson for his company Cloud 9, including The Enid Blyton Adventure Series, The Legend of William Tell, William Shatner’s A Twist in the Tale and cult series The Tribe (which ran for five seasons). Paulin would go on to act as sound designer on both seasons of beloved children’s fantasy-horror series The Killian Curse as well, for which he won the Sound Design in General Television category at the NZ Film and Television Awards. Paulin and colleagues won the same award for 2009 earthquake drama Aftershock.

Across much of his career, Paulin has lent his talents to numerous telemovies and theatrical films, beginning with TVNZ telefeature Mark II in 1986. He would go on to work on World War I dramatisation Chunuk Bair, high camp melodrama Desperate Remedies, the tragic Tangiwai – A Love Story, and interracial love story Broken English, for which he won his first award. He joined Gaylene Preston for epic social history Bread and Roses and feature documentary War Stories Our Mothers Never Told Us, which incorporated archival sound, and was sound editor for The Footstep Man­ . The later film told the story of an isolated foley artist toiling so long into the night, the characters on screen became real to him. "Working long hours alone is something that's familiar to many post-production sound artisans — even more so in the computer age".

Feature films have generally provided more direction than television dramas — the directors have lived with the film for such a long time, they already have an overall concept for the soundtrack, "with ideas of what they'd like to hear in each scene". This contrasts with television dramas, where "everyone has less time on the project" and the crew are expected to work more self-sufficiently. Yet "sound is a team sport", Paulin argues. "Your achievements rely heavily on the colleagues who precede you in the production line, and the people who come after you".

Don Paulin continues to work as a sound designer and recordist, and to travel with Country Calendar, his tenure on the show having extended for over 20 years. These days, he has "all the modern tools available — beautiful clear boom mics, reliable radio mics, and multitrack recorders". After he has finished recording each scene, Paulin makes sure to ask himself "What didn’t I hear?" Then he walks through the space, and records those elements too.

Profile written by Danny Bultitude; updated on 17 September 2023

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Don Paulin