Basking in the acoustics
Annie’s colourful and vibrant career spans television, film and stage, whilst she has also dabbled in yoga, teaching and mentoring. A love of film and history brought Annie to the NFSA a little over 16 months ago, but her passion and creativity started almost at birth.
Growing up in the idyllic northern Sydney suburbs, Annie knew at an early age what she wanted to be. Her early memories are filled with sound; her father, a music lover, took Annie and her siblings on journeys to acoustic spaces, recording the sounds of architectural marvels such as 'basking in the acoustics’ of St Mary’s Cathedral as it hosted Greek Orthodox masses.
A ‘child of a sound-aware father’, her father’s passion was the catalyst in her career choice or, as Annie says jokingly, ‘It’s all his fault! That’s where it all started!’
However, it was not until she left high school and began her career as a trainee in the ABC editing department in Sydney that her passion for the collaboration of film and sound was able to thrive. Working on a scene from Run from the Morning (1978), Annie was sent to the sound effects library with the vague instruction to find ‘office working sounds’. When matching the end of the scene to the sound of a filing cabinet drawer closing, Annie had her light bulb moment: she says, 'Who would have thought a filing cabinet could mean so much!’
