My Biggest Lesson: Dean Jones

Dean Jones a multi-award-winning sound engineer. Owner of Scimitar Sound, Dublin's newest post production sound studio, Dean has a broad and extensive customer base covering the advertising, broadcast, film, TV drama and animation sectors.

He has built up relationships from the creative teams and agency producers in all of Ireland’s top advertising agencies working on campaigns for brands like Bank Of Ireland, Tesco, Three Mobile, National Lottery, RTE and HSE, to broadcast production teams on Ireland’s most successful TV formats such as Dancing with the Stars, The Voice of Ireland, Last Singer Standing, and Say Yes to the Dress to name but a few.

Dean has also been part of the sound teams on TV drama series such as RTE’s Love Hate, Vexed for the BBC, Thirteen Steps Down for ITV and has many credits for feature films such as Lady Bird with Saoirse Ronan and You’re Ugly Too starring Aiden Gillen. Dean was very proud in 2016 to receive an IFTA for his work on the documentary Deoch an Dorais for MagaMedia. With these creative skills comes a broad knowledge of the recording process and protocols, developing practices that allow him to work quickly and efficiently.

This all stems from years of good management and organisational skills that help continue to keep standards high and clients happy. There is a fundamental awareness of the importance of quality in all of Dean’s work.

If I can take you back to my first post production sound engineering position. It’s Belfast, it’s 2003, and I’m working in a brilliant little studio called Jingle Jangles. The two lads that hired me are so good to work with and immediately show a lot of trust in me. I’m making TV and radio commercials very quickly in my new career but I’m still at the stage where I’m more worried about the buttons than reading the room, still a learner driver you could say.

This particular radio commercial I recorded was for a big national newspaper. One that runs ads in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. The only difference in this ad was that the supplement that week was a Champions League version for the north of Ireland and a GGA version for the south. We can perhaps already see where this is going. Somehow I sent the wrong versions in the wrong order and unfortunately the ads went on air like that!

When it was noticed, I took a call quite quickly from a very senior person at the newspaper. Now this person had a reputation. A reputation for shouting and screaming and arguing about anything. The call was loud and panicked and aggressive. Very aggressive.

As a younger man I would normally have given back as good I was getting, defensively protecting myself and lashing back. But on this occasion I realised I had really messed up. I tried to work out how I had managed this error. I simply said…”I’m terribly sorry, I think I’ve made a mistake. Let me fix it for you as quickly as I can”. There was a tense silence on the phone call and then a receiver going down.

I did fix the error. I resupplied in minutes and I think the ads were back on air correctly within the hour. But boy did I feel like shit! I was convinced I was about to lose my job, I had let everyone down and I was getting ready to clear my desk and get on the boat back to Scotland.

And then the phone rang for me again. It was the newspaper lady. She was strangely calm, she was polite. She asked me if it was okay to just report to people above her that there had been a “Human Error”. She thanked me for my honesty, she thanked me for the quick turnaround in fixing the problem and I continued to work on the account for the next couple of years. The studio was agog! She NEVER spoke like that to anyone... NEVER backed down... and certainly never thanked anyone!

So what’s the lesson I learned? Well as naff and cheesy as it sounds, I learned that day to be honest in my failures. Mistakes are always going to happen, I took from that situation that day in Belfast that I'd always own up to any mistakes and that I would be honest in any of my errors. No one wants or has the time for egos in those moments. A problem just needs to be fixed and it’ll always get fixed quicker if there is transparency and clarity.

Something else happens when that approach is within you. You lose the fear of being judged for your mistakes. It allows you to remove that apprehension and I have found it lets me focus on being creative, it frees up the brain to listen to what’s happening around you in the studio or the room. Having that mentality also gives you an understating when others make mistakes that affect you. You are more compassionate as to why the other person has simply just had a moment and that they are just like... you.

I have had this mentality since that day and it has served me very well throughout my career. It's something I applied as I set up my own studio and practice as often as possible with my staff and my peers...

… Except video editors... man I hate when they make mistakes!