David John Darlington

Born: 2nd January 1971, Bellshill, Scotland

Age: 37

davidATdeejsaintDOTcoDOTuk

http://www.deejsaint.co.uk/

PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES AND EXPERIENCE

May 2001 -

Freelance sound editor and designer | Music composer, arranger and performer | Recording and CD mastering engineer

A primary client has been Big Finish Productions, who have employed me to oversee a diverse range of full-cast audio drama releases. This entails being involved at all stages of production from recording  through editing and mixing of the raw audio essence, addition of sound effects, ambiences, reverberation and specially composed music, to the final production of a CD master. A full list of Big Finish and other professional credits is available in the sound section of this site. Other absorbing projects have included some interviewing and post-production work for BBC Audiobooks, and I will shortly be recording a chamber orchestra for a Christmas CD project. Within Big Finish, I have pro-actively become involved in CD mastering, recording of interview and voiceover material, editing and mastering for radio broadcast, scripting and compilation of documentary features, compilation of trailers for forthcoming and archival releases, mentoring of newer freelance contractors, the setup and maintenance of an online archive for much of the 'communal' audio material used by various different contractors, and diverse other 'non-core' activities which have streamlined working practices for various people as well as making my own working time more productive and interesting.

In addition to my extensive work for Big Finish, I have worked on a wide range of audio-visual products for diverse clients, more detail of which can be found elsewhere at this site. I am currently working in diverse capacities (sound recordist, sound editor, sound designer and/or soundtrack composer) on a number of short independent movies (including Speechless, Break-In, Sunday and My Fifteen Minutes), more detail of which will be added to my site and documentation once the projects are complete. I recently worked on mixing the sound for the promotional video and accompanying documentary for the Keane single The Night Sky in aid of the charity War Child.

July 1997 -

Freelance writer and researcher

I contribute regular columns to Panini UK's Doctor Who Magazine, less frequent columns to Visual Imagination's TV Zone and formerly to the latter's Shivers. I have also contributed several feature articles to these publications. A full list of professional writing work is available in the words section of this site.

November 2000 - August 2001

Research Assistant

Department of Electrical Engineering, King's College London.

August 2001 - December 2002

Research Assistant (continuation of King's College contract)

Department of Electrical Engineering, Queen Mary, University of London.

I was engaged on an EPSRC ROPA (Realising Our Potential Award) contract, investigating the possibility of effecting linear processing on digital signals in the wavelet domain. The potential applications of a system which can filter or mix signals without having to extract them from the compressed format used for storage and transmission are widespread. Additionally, I took on the responsibility for ensuring video footage of internal seminars was made available online. The project moved from King's College to Queen Mary along with the Professor in charge of the grant, and the project concluded successfully in December 2002 with four conference publications and a full EPSRC report (rated as 'tending to outstanding') produced from the material therein.

January 1998 - October 2000

Research Associate

Department of Computing and Electrical Engineering, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland.

I worked on an EPRSC project on the simulation of sonar images, developing extensions to a sonar image synthesis technique created as part of an earlier PhD project. This used graphical ray tracing techniques to model the propagation of sound pulses through water. I also had diverse tutorial and supervisory duties.

November 1996 - December 1997

Teaching Company Associate

Department of Electrical Engineering and Physics, University of Paisley, Paisley, Scotland.

As a Research and Development engineer working within Diagnostic Sonar Ltd. - manufacturer of ultrasonic equipment for medical and non-destructive testing - I contributed to development of new products while helping to facilitate information transfer between company and university. As the Associate I was project manager, keeping track of progress against scheduled deliverables and milestones, and maintaining the programme within budget. I regularly reported progress and expenditure to a monitoring committee and liaised with the EC (via project monitoring officers) on FUSE, the European-funded First Users Action scheme which funded some of the work. Performing all these tasks required careful balancing of the demands on my time from both company and university, and the 10 month FUSE project was seen to successful completion.

A full list of my academic research papers is included in the words section of this site.

PROFESSIONAL SKILLS AND INTERESTS

Sound Engineering

Having been involved for many years with the creation of professional quality audio releases at all stages of post-production, I am intimately familiar with diverse audio software packages and plug-ins (most commonly used are Adobe Audition 2.0, Cakewalk Sonar 7.0 Producer Edition and SoundForge but I also have available too many others to list, and have conducted recording and mixing sessions using ProTools). Full details of individual projects are available elsewhere at this site.

Writing

I have written both professionally and to disseminate information on my academic work. For many years I have contributed monthly columns to Marvel UK's Doctor Who Magazine and to Visual Imagination's TV Zone and Shivers - professional publications devoted to cult television - previewing and assessing books, television shows and audio fiction releases, interviewing contributors to same, and contributing a wide range of feature articles. Prior to entering full-time employment I wrote for, and edited, a number of fanzines (non-professional magazines) on similar topics - including the noted pseudo-academic reference work In-Vision, and my own co-production November Spawned a Monster. One article from 1994 (Love Needs No Disguise) was reproduced in Licence Denied, a professional fanzine compilation published by Virgin Books in 1997. A link between my research and writing work exists in that I contributed a brief article to SD'99, the Heriot-Watt University training and staff development programme for the summer of 1999, and a small research profile to RACE, a newsletter describing research in the Computing and Electrical Engineering department at the same University. I have also contributed extensively to the non-fiction books Doctor Who: The New Audio Adventures - The Inside Story by Benjamin Cook (Big Finish, 2003) and Bernice Summerfield - The Inside Story by Simon Guerrier (Big Finish, 2007).

Computing

Prior to going freelance I was accustomed to working in Windows, UNIX and DOS environments, with experience of programming in Pascal, BASIC, FORTRAN, UNIX shell scripts and most extensively in C, with some experience of Microsoft Visual C++ for both DOS and Windows-based applications. I completed introductory courses on Javascript and HTML, investigated Java and converted some sections of my Heriot-Watt EPSRC project - those involving pattern matching and file I/O - to Perl. During the latter stages of my academic endeavours I became familiar with the use of Matlab tools for programming of DSP algorithms.

Time Management

I have completed more than one course in time management, and have put these to use. My PhD thesis was completed on personal time while working full-time in industry on an unrelated project. The thesis was submitted within six months of the funding completion date, and amended within six months of the oral assessment, despite the strictures of full-time employment. The deadlines on my audio work are even more pressing - in August 2001 I completed a full professional audio production (Doctor Who: The Eye of the Scorpion), part-time, in less than four weeks in order to meet a particularly pressing deadline, and to a standard which has received much acclaim. The quality and speed of my work impressed to the point where I was immediately given further important and high-profile commissions, many of which have similar turnaround times.

Design and Document Production

I have gained experience of diverse word processing and desktop publishing packages (Microsoft Word, Adobe Pagemaker), and image capture, storage and manipulation software such as Adobe Photoshop. I also have some basic experience of HTML and web page design, have completed an introductory course on JavaScript, and am continuously working to improve my multimedia skills.

Teaching

I have carried out supervisory and tutorial work with undergraduate and postgraduate students at Paisley, Heriot-Watt and Queen Mary universities.

Dissemination and Teamwork

As a member of Paisley University's postgraduate activities committee, I was involved in the arrangement of two poster display events. Over the course of my academic career I attended formal training courses - and less formal staff development seminars - in teamwork, project management, work planning and presentation skills.  As a freelance worker, such skills are perhaps more vital than ever.

Membership of professional institutions

I am a member of the Audio Engineering Society and of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (formerly the Institution of Electrical Engineers), and have been elected to graduate membership of the Institute of Physics and the Institute of Measurement and Control.

Other areas of interest

Mobile phone ringtones; HTML and web design; graphic design; the play ethic; online music distribution; video editing and effects; DVD authoring; poetry and lyrics; voice tapes; drama and comedy production; talking books. There will never be enough hours in the day.

MISCELLANEOUS AND RECREATIONAL INTERESTS

Music and Sound

Until I was employed in the field, I enjoyed pursuing such activities as a hobby, cleaning up noisy, hissy or poorly recorded music tracks from, for instance, cheap cassettes or scratchy vinyl using spectral subtraction, gating and equalisation procedures. Such facilities are now, of course, standard equipment in most CD burning software, but this was certainly not the case when my interest in the subject was first piqued. My interest in sound and music borders on obsession; the only downside of being employed in the production of audio releases is that I can't listen to music while I'm doing it.

Literature

In addition to reading - with favourite fiction authors including Carl Hiaasen, Nick Hornby and Christopher Brookmyre - I enjoy collecting diverse editions of books from several difference children's fiction ranges.

Television

As a pro-active member of TV societies in Glasgow and Edinburgh through the 1990s, I was heavily involved in the organisation of several celebrity-based events, as well as a number of auctions of memorabilia in aid of the Cot Death society - the favoured charity of actor Colin Baker - at which our societies raised over £2,000. At these events I conducted interviews, in front of an audience, with actors Gareth Thomas and Michael Keating and experienced television writer and novelist Chris Boucher. More recently I have interviewed diverse actors from Doctor Who and Blakes 7 at conventions in London and Stockton-on-Tees. Television and film criticism, analysis and appreciation also form the bulk of my writing work. I was asked by Richard Herring and Stewart Lee to contribute research material on Doctor Who to a show they compiled for BBC2's Monster Night (Reasonably Scary Monsters) in 1998, and to the last edition of the second series of This Morning With Richard Not Judy in 1999. For a time, from 1998 until my move to London in 2000, I ran a semi-official website - directly linked to the Lee and Herring site - for an associate/employee of theirs, actor and comedian Trevor Lock. This site has now been re-uploaded to my current site as an 'archive' of vaguely historical interest, to me if no-one else.

Swimming, football and cricket

Both for exercise purposes, and as interested spectator. When I played for Drumpellier Cricket Club, in Coatbridge, I was part of the Scottish Western Union under-16 cricket league runners-up in 1986. Not the most impressive of sporting accomplishments but we take what we can get.

Amnesty International

I am a member of the UK Section of Amnesty International, the international human rights organisation campaigning for the release of prisoners of conscience, fair trials for political prisoners and an end to torture and executions. In Edinburgh I participated in door-to-door collection for their 1999 children's rights campaign. I regularly sell raffle tickets to raise money for the cause and use the organisation as a source for Christmas cards and similar items.

EDUCATION

October 1993 - October 1996: University of Paisley

PhD: The Enhancement of Noise-Corrupted Speech by Sub-Band Adaptive Processing, thesis passed March 1998, graduation July 1998.

Supervisors: Professor D. R. Campbell, Dr. T. J. Moir.

The work comprised an investigation into the enhancement of speech signals corrupted by reverberant acoustic noise, and involved study of adaptive filtering techniques and the effect on speech and ambient noise signals of room reflections. This led to the award of Doctor of Philosophy.

September 1991 - June 1993: Glasgow Caledonian University

Bachelor of Science (Honours, First Class) in Instrumentation with Applied Physics.

Areas of study included Control, Digital Signal Processing, Instrumentation Systems, Applied Instrumentation and Measurement, Computational Physics, Physical Electronics, Environmental Measurement.

September 1988 - April 1991: Bell College, Hamilton

Scottish Vocational Education Council Higher National Diploma in Applied Physics with Electronics.

Areas of study included Semiconductor Technology, Control, Physical Electronics, Digital Techniques, Microprocessors and Data Transmission.

August 1982 - April 1988: St. Margaret's High School, Airdrie

School Proxime Accessit (Runner-Up Dux) and subject prizes for English and Physics, 1987.

1 Certificate of Sixth Year Studies, 1988

English (C)

5 SCE Higher Grades, 1987

English (A), Physics (A), Chemistry (A), Mathematics (B), Art and Design (B)

8 SCE Ordinary Grades, 1986

English (1), Arithmetic (1), Physics (1), Chemistry (1), French (1), Mathematics (1), Modern Studies (2), Art and Design (3)

REFEREES