Firstly, thank you for taking the time to speak with us. Could you tell our readers a bit about yourself and how you first got into the world of sound?
Hi! So I suppose I could describe myself as a freelance sound generalist, for want of a better description! I work across commercial music production, both as a recording and mix engineer, and sound for picture, both on set as a production sound mixer and in post production as a sound designer and mixer.
I guess my love of sound started at a young age — I started learning the piano and violin from a young age (and it's probably fair to say that nobody loved the sounds I was making for many years!) and after school studied music at university where I was introduced to recording in the second year, following which I did a year at the SAE Institute. As I approached the end of the course I started writing letters to studios for entry level opportunities and I lucked out with a short placement at Sphere Studios in Battersea, after which I joined Livingston Studios as an intern, before climbing the ladder and graduating to making tea :)
Over the course of my years at Livingston, I assisted on and engineered a vast variety of sessions and eventually started working on a freelance basis with clients who would want me to engineer for them on projects elsewhere. One of these freelance gigs included a run of work on entertainment shows such as Britain's Got Talent and The X Factor. Working with the orchestrator and producer, I was tasked with recording the backing tracks with visiting and remote musicians, and then editing and mixing to short order for broadcast on the show. It was a very different change of pace from working on records and in a way a very formative experience in some of the realities of the industry!
A few years later an opportunity came up at The Crypt Studio in Crouch End, owned by sound recordist Ricky Barber, which would lead to a long running collaborative relationship — I hold Ricky personally responsible for dragging me out of the studio into the world of location sound!
I guess my love of sound started at a young age — I started learning the piano and violin from a young age (and it's probably fair to say that nobody loved the sounds I was making for many years!) and after school studied music at university where I was introduced to recording in the second year, following which I did a year at the SAE Institute. As I approached the end of the course I started writing letters to studios for entry level opportunities and I lucked out with a short placement at Sphere Studios in Battersea, after which I joined Livingston Studios as an intern, before climbing the ladder and graduating to making tea :)
Over the course of my years at Livingston, I assisted on and engineered a vast variety of sessions and eventually started working on a freelance basis with clients who would want me to engineer for them on projects elsewhere. One of these freelance gigs included a run of work on entertainment shows such as Britain's Got Talent and The X Factor. Working with the orchestrator and producer, I was tasked with recording the backing tracks with visiting and remote musicians, and then editing and mixing to short order for broadcast on the show. It was a very different change of pace from working on records and in a way a very formative experience in some of the realities of the industry!
A few years later an opportunity came up at The Crypt Studio in Crouch End, owned by sound recordist Ricky Barber, which would lead to a long running collaborative relationship — I hold Ricky personally responsible for dragging me out of the studio into the world of location sound!
You've worked across location sound, studio engineering and playback operation. How did that multi-discipline path develop, and how do those areas influence one another in your work today?
I definitely feel like something of a magpie when it comes to the different skills I have picked up across my career, and have definitely gone the long way round with a lot of things. The music skills I developed in my education wouldn't come into play for a decade, until the point when I started producing records, and the skills I developed in the recording studio wouldn't become relevant for a good few years until I started working with hybrid DAW-usage situations.
I was lucky to join Livingston at a time when we still regularly used tape machines, and with that came a daily studio discipline of calibrating and lining up the tape machine and Pro Tools I/O, as well as learning all of the different LTC driven automation systems used on the different consoles. It was great to see some of the old school tricks of getting an off-tape timecode track to lock — one trick was to insert an EQ to alter the phase of a problematic LTC track. Of course these days there are lots of different solutions and boxes, but having some of that knowledge in the tank has been so useful for helping solve problems encountered on set.
I recently ran a remote ADR session in London, with a studio remote listening in Paris but we were having a problem with the Audiomovers software — after much head scratching, we worked around the problem by repatching to drive their video session with an LTC stream sent over one channel of the Audiomovers stereo link. It was definitely squeaky bum time, but we got it done! It definitely feels like a jigsaw-puzzle life win when I get to use some knowledge from deep storage!
You've contributed to major productions such as Indiana Jones and The Batman. What does working on projects of that scale teach you about preparation and problem-solving in location sound?
Working on The Batman was my first introduction to the scale of modern blockbuster features. I was only involved for a short stint at the end of the shoot, but it was a huge eye opener for me to see the amount of specialism that went into every department in a production of that scale, and on a departmental level, the different and specific roles each member of the sound team had in service of the production sound.
In a sense, it showed me what a no-compromise sound department looked like — everyone is always communicating, anticipating the next thing needed, whether it be rigging plant mics to cover unboomable positions, or putting down carpets to dampen footfall on metal steps — but at the same time showed me that shows on that scale are often full of compromises for sound in service of picture, for example stunt sequences where SFX wind machines and mechanical effects rendered all captured audio as guide only.
It was also funny to see that even on the biggest productions the same problems affect us all equally — during a dialogue scene we heard someone on the other side of the stage try to angle grind something quietly!
How does the workflow and pressure of a large-scale feature film compare with other types of productions you've worked on?
I actually think there is an inverse relationship with pressure when comparing long and short form work. In a sense, it seems the bigger the project, the more time there is allocated for preparation — it stands to reason — from a production perspective there is more on the line, so it is in their interest that the team are properly prepped. With team being the operative word — in the larger departments of features and HETV, the pressure of performing all the necessary tasks gets spread across the team.
In the short form world, certainly in the sound department there is so seldom any prep time allocated in the budget. Depending on the nature of the shoot, this is often times fine when situations are more predictable, but for some of the more out of the ordinary shoots I have been asked to do, it has been fun to get out the thinking cap to achieve what is needed within the limitations of the production — let's call them creative constraints!
Monitoring plays a critical role in location sound. How do you approach monitoring in challenging environments, particularly on high-end productions?
Monitoring is indeed crucial on location — in particular in challenging exterior locations, it's so important to know what you're hearing — whether it is the sound that you are recording or the immediate environment. I typically use Sennheiser HD25s, but am wary that you can get an acoustic effect of wind hitting the sides of the ear cups. In those instances, I've both resorted to the low tech option of wearing a hat over the earcups, or to defer to a set of IEMs underneath some industrial ear defenders!
Let's talk about the Confidence Man music video shoot. When you first received the brief involving helicopter sequences over London, what were your initial thoughts?
This was definitely a fun brief to be presented with, with the challenges being presented one by one… all of my usual methods got toppled over like dominoes!
What made this playback challenge different from a typical music video shoot?
When I was told about the shoot, there were two main parts — the easy bit would be standard playback for lip-sync on a helipad. The other part was lip-sync playback in a helicopter — but I wouldn't be able to be in the helicopter, so playback would have to be operated by the director. Also there would be off-speed shots. Also the artists would be naked!
With aviation and Ofcom regulations preventing the use of your standard wireless setup, how did you rethink your approach to playback?
As you mentioned, with regulations and health and safety to consider, I couldn't set up for a “normal playback to earpiece” scenario, nor was I allowed to blast anything out of a speaker (I argued that they were allowed to in Apocalypse Now, but they wouldn't go for it!).
With the requirement that the director could operate the playback, I ended up walking back the setup to the most critical element, which for lip-sync, is timing for the artist, and then started building up the rest of the setup around this core function.
Can you walk us through the signal chain you designed for the helicopter shoot and explain why simplicity became so important?
So the key function of the playback system would be for the director to cue the music loud enough for the artist to hear so they could lip-sync to the track. To this end, I had video slates made up of the track at the different speeds required, with ample pre-roll and post-roll timecode, for front or end boarding. This was played back on my trusty iPad Mini — the last to feature a minijack output!
At the most basic level, this would have been sufficient to run the shoot, but from here I started tackling some “nice to have” functions. Firstly, I wanted the director to be able to talk to the artist, so I introduced a Sound Devices 302 mixer which mixed the iPad output and a switched dynamic mic. The output of this then fed a Sound Devices HX-3 headphone mixer, which gave individual headphone level control to the artist, director and DOP, as well as plenty of volume if needed.
All of this was bungeed together in a case which the grips strapped to the floor of the helicopter. It wasn't much to look at, but meant that everything could be set (and secured with gaffer tape!) and then put away to minimise accidental changes in the air.
There were only a few days between the initial brief and the shoot. How important was it to rely on trusted, readily available equipment in that situation?
Given the tight timeframe of the planning and the necessity of it being reliable when unmanned, I stripped the setup back to what I had, knew and trusted. In this situation, I wanted to be able to hardwire as much as possible, and chose kit for their reliability over anything else.
For the artists in the helicopter, what were you looking for in an in-ear monitoring solution?
When considering the needs of the shots in the air, my first thought was that the in-ear monitoring would need to be invisible and loud!
Why did you choose The Sidekick 3 (Stereo) for this particular shoot?
The Sidekicks fit the bill perfectly, and were my first port of call — given that I own five sets!
In such a high-noise environment, how did The Sidekick 3 perform in terms of clarity, level handling and reliability?
I tested the Sidekicks on the ground with the rotors going and was really impressed with their performance. Much like getting a microphone in the right place in reverse, it made spades of difference that the drivers were placed right where they needed to be, and I was actually surprised that I didn't need to crank up the headphone amp once they were fully in my ears.
Discretion was clearly important, particularly given the minimal wardrobe and aerial cinematography. How did the low-profile design and cable of The Sidekick 3 support that requirement?
I've been so impressed by the design of the cable for the Sidekick — in particular the shape and clear colour means that they are really difficult to spot unless you are looking for them.
In a more recent live performance I recorded with South London artist Sasha Keable, production wanted an invisible earpiece look, which meant we couldn't use her usual custom stage IEMs. For live music performance I also wanted something full range and latency free, which ruled out discreet wireless earpieces. I immediately turned to the Sidekicks, which Sasha was really happy with the sound of. On watching the finished piece, I still can't spot them in the opening close up! Watch it here
You also worked on Foals' Rip Up The Road documentary, recording the shows at Alexandra Palace. How does capturing live performances at that scale compare to other professional audio work?
Capturing live performances, much like running live sound, always result in funny shaped days — you're busy at the start getting set for line checks, then sound check, and then there is a big break in the afternoon until showtime and then a mad rush at the end to get out! It definitely gets the adrenaline going!
For the Foals shows, I really wanted to capture the volume of the space, so on top of the stage side mics firing into the crowd, there was also an ORTF array and a first-order ambisonic mic at the FOH tower in the middle of the venue.
What are the biggest monitoring challenges in a live concert environment?
Probably isolation from the bass to hear what is being recorded. In lots of instances, where I'm not able to be in a separate space and end up being at monitor world, you're sometimes having to rely on visual references to see what is coming in. It can be helpful to have ear defenders or IEMs, but more often than not, the bass is all coming through your body! However, between IEM usage and amp sims like Kempers and Helixes on stage these days, it can sometimes be unusually quiet on stage!
How does your experience across studio engineering, location sound and playback operation inform the way you approach live music recording?
I guess a lot of skills from these different disciplines have all fed into one another, and having them all in the arsenal has empowered me to approach live music recording from a slightly left-field angle, and say yes to some barmy requests! I think there is a lot of shared DNA in the philosophy of music production and narrative film production — there is a common goal to capture the artistic intention and authenticity of a performance. In practical terms, I see all of these accumulated skills as a means to ensure that the method never gets in the way of the artistic intention.
As a recording engineer, I have always taken the approach of working quickly to maintain the rhythm and pace of a session to keep artists in the moment to get the performance — there is nothing more important — and I definitely think this is something that is relevant on a live music set.
During the pandemic I recorded a session for Holly Humberstone for Jimmy Kimmel Live, which was a very creatively fulfilling coming together of a lot of what I had done over the years, from monitor mixing to recording, to guitar tech-ing, to playing piano — it was a fun exercise of saying “yes, I can” in order to keep the show on the road! Watch it here
You move between different disciplines within audio. Do you feel that versatility is becoming increasingly important in today's sound industry?
I'm not sure that versatility is necessary, but I definitely do feel like with the democratisation of content creation, it is important for sound professionals to know what is out there in terms of technology — in particular the aspects of the industry that are being encroached on by the advent of affordable kit and AI.
When selecting gear, what determines whether something becomes a permanent part of your workflow?
I think there is a combination of reliability, compatibility and ubiquity. I'm always slightly worried about the slightly more exotic bits in my kit — that they can be difficult to replace at short notice!
In your view, what makes a monitoring solution truly production-ready?
I think to consider something production-ready, it really has to be hard-wearing and be able to withstand a fair bit of abuse, even if it comes from well-meaning helpers!
Looking back at the helicopter shoot, was there a particular moment where you realised the plan had come together successfully?
We tested the kit on the ground quickly before takeoff — I was quietly confident, but still kept my fingers crossed!
What advice would you give to sound professionals facing unusual or technically demanding environments?
I would say not to be shy with asking for advice! I am so grateful and thankful for the sound community who have been so supportive and generous with their knowledge!
Finally, what kinds of projects are you most excited to take on next? Is there anything exciting in your calendar?
I'm really excited to be starting a new live music performance series in the next month with a long time collaborator, but otherwise looking forward to what challenges the year will throw my way!
From blockbuster film sets to a helicopter over London, Anthony Leung's career is a masterclass in creative problem-solving and the power of versatility. When regulations stripped away every conventional playback method for the Confidence Man shoot, it was the combination of trusted fundamentals and The Sidekick 3's invisible, reliable design that kept the music playing at altitude. Whether he's engineering studio sessions, mixing sound for major features, or rigging playback systems in the sky, Anthony's philosophy rings true: strip it back to what works, trust your gear, and never let the method get in the way of the performance.
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