Set primarily in one location with only two characters on screen, on the surface 'Leo...' seemed a pretty straight forward drama shoot. However upon the first read of Katie Brands fantastic script, it quickly became apparent to me that this was not going to be walk in the park for production sound and that I was going to have to get creative with my work flow. For those who haven't seen it; the film is broken down in to 4 scenes; based up on the encounters of retired RE teacher Nancy Stokes (Emma Thompson) and sex worker Leo (Darryl McCormack) and features a lot of dialogue, a lot of dialogue which means ADR would be pretty tricky to pull off, so it was important we got the production audio just right on set.

Fortunately director Sophie Hyde and her partner / DOP / editor Bryan Mason were a joy to work with and involved me and my team from the early days of production - they both understood sound and its importance to the story. We were able to contribute to the set design (having the hotel room set carpeted was a must have), have conversations with other departments (one highlight was asking art dept if we could have the bedsheets washed with a fabric softener to make them less noisy, which was a real help when we had intimate dialogue in the bed) and get a really strong plan for our workings in advance. As the DOP was also going to be the editor he knew how important it was to get the dialogue and performances captured at source. I was also able to speak to Supervising Sound Editor Steve Fannagan, who was able to discuss with me exactly what post audio would want from the set. I was also able to flag any potential issues that would come up and he would be able to tell me if this was something that post could fix or not.

The production was a dream to work on and I was overjoyed to sit in the cinema listening the production sound sounding fantastic, also being credited in the opening credits as well was a pleasant surprise!