Music composer/producer, sound designer  and mixing engineer for film, tv, advertising Home  Works Bio  Contact            Andrea Ponzano - history A BRIEF HISTORY At 14 years old I start to study guitar , harmony, and composition at Free Sound, in Milan. I get an audio engineer diploma at the SAE Technologie College of London in 1998. In London I also move my first significant steps in high-end recording studios as an intern at the Westside Studio, learning from the work of artists and producers such as Ben Young (producer of Massive Attack), Pet Shop Boys, Rod Stewart, Mark King, and of course Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley, the owners of the studio and historical producers of Madness. In 1999 I moved to Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, where I work for seven years as a sound engineer and sound designer, employed at Estudios Mega, one of the most important recording studios for the phonographic market, and audio/video postproduction facilities in Latin America, with the most advanced audio department for 5.1 film mixing in Brazil. Here I work in many motion picture and recording projects (see details on my c.v.).  In Rio de Janeiro, in the meantime, I deepen the study of guitar and harmony, applied to Brazilian popular music (samba,bossa nova), at the Cigam (Iam Guest school of music). In 2006, I leave Estudios Mega to start my self-career. Moved to Italy , near Milan, I found Taboo Studio, and collaborate on several projects (see works or  download c.v)  with renewed video production companies and advertising agencies from Italy and abroad (UK, Brazil, Lebanon) as a music composer/producer, sound designer, and mixing engineer. SPECIALTIES: - Jingles and soundtrack composition - Sound design - Audio post production - Sound field recording - 5.1 surround mix - Adr and oversound - Sound edit - Music Production   WHAT SOUND MEANS TO ME I consider sound as the raw material of my work (either in musical composition, or sound design and mixing), to be shaped and molded on size to any production, exploring in depth all its evocative and narrative aspects. Too often sound is undervalued in audiovisual productions. But in order to understand how important it is, would be enough to reflect on the fact that a bad sound can completely ruin the best video scene, with the best photography and the best acting. On the contrary, often a good sound could save a failed video scene; sound is at least 50 percent of a film, Coppola and Lynch, among others, sustaine that. Many mistakenly believe that this is true only for films with a large presence of special effects, or striking experimental sound research, where sound effects and music are blatantly protagonists; some still think that 5.1 surround mixing, instead of an effective narrative tool (beside by now an indispensable standard even for advertising), is a technological devilry, superfluos if not in movies full of helicopters flying everywhere...  Not so: much more often the strength of the sound (and music) is manifested in a subtle, discreet, but equally powerful way. It 's a concept that applies to any project whether it be a film, an advertisement, a game, or a corporate video, and has much more to do with the ability of helping telling a story through a "dramaturgical design" of sounds and music (wich doesn' t mean at all to be didactic as some may think), rather than suprising the audience with shocking sound effects. This is why the sound should be discussed and planned, in its creative and technical aspects, from the earliest stages of pre-production of an audiovisual product, so that it' ll really be an integral part of it, in order to exploit all natural potential of the project, as a whole.