For some context, Kit Rollings is a legend and pioneer of film sound in New Zealand. I never got to work with him on a project, but know him well & have spent many hours chatting with him, trading stories and experiences.
With digital it is so easy to take for granted the tools that we have, but a couple of anecdotes from Kits work:

Back in the day, sound editors worked using “sep mag” which is basically 35mm film coated with magnetic emulsion. So to edit a gunshot, a sound editor would request some gun shots from their sound library be transferred to sep mag so they could edit it in sync with a work print, assembling a reel of sound identical in duration to the (visual) work print.

Kit came up with a couple of clever solutions for shaping sounds on sep mag. First was scraping the emulsion off the sep mag, to create a fade in or fade out. Second was using a head demagnetiser and performing erasure! – I so love this idea!

Kit has also done a LOT of recording over the years, and in the very early days before Nagras he told me about his experiences recording sync sound on a shoot direct to optical film! Imagine not knowing if you had clean sound until the lab processed your recordings!?! He also told me stories of recording at a beach and burying his microphones for a unique perspective, with the periodic roar of the sea filtered through millions of grains of sand (it would almost be like a contact mic!)

Lastly one funny story he told me involved some recording with our mutual dear friend Hoppy (Mike Hopkins RIP). Kit & Hoppy were working on a film together at the NFU (National Film Unit) in Lower Hutt, which had a very large car park. Kit needed some tyre squeals and if you knew Hoppy you’d know he was more than happy to help. So after work & msot of the normies had gone home he got in his car & was doing 360s in the carpark, having a ball while Kit recorded…. until the manager of the NFU sound dept came running out to demand to know WTF they were doing…
I can just picture the grin on Hoppy’s face, as he pretended to not notice & carried on 🙂

Here is an interview with Kit that the NZ Archives just released:

One early project Kit worked on as sound designer was THIS IS NEW ZEALAND, an innovative split screen film which was created for the World Expo in Osaka 1970. Imagine cutting sound for this on sep mag!?!

View full screen, like you’re in Osaka 1970 at the Expo: