Kate Hopkins

Kate Hopkins is one of the most accomplished sound editors in the country. She has worked on many documentaries about nature, notably “Blue Planet II” and “Frozen Planet”. So in this Q&A session, the main concern was how to use sound to make a documentary as It’s pretty much universally agreed that wildlife documentaries such as blue planet can be as exciting as a feature film.

The project files that Kate presented in the class gave me a lot of insight into how sound editing for documentaries can be created. In fact, it was clear from Kate’s previous work that the sound effects she uses are very rich and engineered.

In my understanding, a documentary is a film that documents the real world, which means that the sound design for it is based on the picture and the reality of the situation. It is possible to create sound for a feature film that goes beyond the picture to enhance the film, but this cannot be done for a documentary. With her work, Kate has shown me that it is possible to make a documentary as excellent as a feature film by designing sound within its limitations.