The Boom Box Post blog provides insights into the creative sound design process of Boom Box Post's owners and employees.
Viewing entries tagged
sound effects
As sound editors, we’re always looking for opportunities to fortify our sound effects library. A great sound editor can deliver excellent editorial with even the most limited toolbox. However, for a team that works on demanding series of varying styles with quick turnarounds—getting bogged down by a weak library isn’t an option.
Awards season is here and we are SO honored to have been nominated for three Children’s and Family Emmy Awards for our sound work. We spoke with our talented team to get an inside look at the sound work for our nominees.
Growing up in the Midwest, it seemed like everyone had a basement (not a thing here in LA). A basement is a bonus space the size of your entire floor plan. For adults, this means lots of storage (functional but boring); for kids, a giant playroom! When I was young, my dad bought two used pinball machines from a friend and plunked them down in our basement. These were mid-70’s era classics with all the (literal) bells and whistles. At any time of day you could hear these very specific sounds emanating from our basement, working their way into the consciousness of one young sound designer in the making (me).
Needless to say, these two pinball machines became family treasures. So when it came time for my parents to downsize their house (no room for pinball), I just couldn’t resist keeping one for myself and my family.
In the past, we have published multiple blogs that list classic cartoon sound effects and the emotion they convey to the audience. Our hope is that these lists will help those stuck in their sound editorial from having to sift through their entire sound library looking for the perfect sound.
We recently found ourselves working on a Roller Derby themed episode for one of our shows. As you can imagine, this episode called for an abundance of roller skating sounds to cover a wide variety of performances. With the guidance of Re-recording mixer Jacob Cook, Tess and Tim took it upon themselves to plan and execute a recording session to help build up our library and turnover some much needed roller skating sounds for the episode.
We love to put our editors to the test to see what kind of SFX builds they can come up with! For Halloween this year, we thought it would be fun to see how well they can design a realistic, classic Halloween creature. From werewolves, vampire, and zombies, to banshees, let’s see what they came up with!
As a studio that works in a lot of children’s animation, we are always on the lookout for a good substitute for breaking glass. Recently, our supervising sound editor, Tess, took it upon herself to create our own library featuring the breakage of terracotta pots.
In the past, we have published multiple blogs that list classic cartoon sound effects and the emotion they convey to the audience. Our hope is that these lists will help those stuck in their sound editorial from having to sift through their entire sound library looking for the perfect sound.
Several years ago, we created multiple blogs with keywords to help you search your sound library and find the desired effects. This year, we have combined those blogs into one comprehensive sound effects glossary, adding more key terms to assist with your project. Hopefully, this will make it easier to find all the correct sound effects you need!
We are so proud of our clients who have been nominated for a GLAAD Award! The GLAAD Media Awards is the most visible annual LGBTQ awards show in the world, sending powerful messages of acceptance to audiences globally.
Last summer I found myself with a little extra time on my hands and a big idea. Coming on the heels of an original Boom Box Library offering, “Magic Chimes,” which I recorded back in 2021, I wanted to expand on the idea of an all encompassing percussion library. I received classical training as a percussionist at the Indiana University School of Music (now the Jacobs School). We would spend hours in master classes focused on one instrument, perfecting for example, the ideal triangle performance. Hours. On the triangle. Needless to say, I felt qualified for the task. Here’s my chance to revisit those roots and put together something really special.
We are honored to have been nominated for one Golden Reel Awards for 2023!
Transformers: Earthspark: “Security Protocols”"
OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN SOUND EDITING – BROADCAST ANIMATIONWe are honored to have been nominated for three Children’s and Family Emmy Awards for 2023!
“Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie”
Sound Mixing and Sound Editing For An Animated Program
“Santiago of the Seas”
Sound Mixing and Sound Editing For A Preschool Animated Program
“Waffles + Mochi’s Restaurant”
Sound Mixing and Sound Editing For A Live Action Program
To celebrate Halloween in a gruesome style, we decided to do part two of: Death by Sound Effect. We came up with a cause of death and put our editors to the task to create a gross, gruesome sound build. Let’s see what they came up with!
Last year, we published two blogs that listed classic cartoon sound effects and the emotion they convey to the audience. In those posts, we outlined the toony sounds we associate with happiness, anger, sadness, humor, scared, disgust, love, and boredom. Toon sound effects have been provoking emotion for decades. With so many classic toon sounds to choose from, how does one know which to use? Our hope is these blog posts help those stuck in their sound editorial from having to sift through their entire sound library looking for the perfect sound. You can read part one HERE and part two HERE!
I am currently knee-deep into recording an extremely comprehensive auxiliary percussion library for Boomboxlibrary.com. The idea is to produce pristine recordings which we (and other sound editors) can use as source material for new creative sound design.
As the recordings pile up (and I procrastinate having to edit them all) I have been playing around with some of them, just to see if my hunch was correct; that these would help me create great cartoon sound effects that are high quality and new but harken back to the classic Hanna Barbera sounds we all know so well.
As many of you know, in 2017, we branched out from our post-production sound business, Boom Box Post, to start Boom Box Library. BBL (as we call it around here) is a sound effect library company which allows us to share our sound design work with other professionals, and also contribute to the creativity of our community members with custom-recorded libraries that we feel fill a void in basic materials. In short, our award-winning sound designers are creating sound libraries that we ourselves want to use.
For many of you who freelance or have unpredictable schedules, adding library creation to your business ventures could be just the thing you need. But, while recording or designing the sounds may be totally in your wheelhouse, there are a lot of other things that go into being able to sell your libraries. And that’s the end goal, right?
We are honored to have been nominated for two Motion Picture Sound Editors 2023 Golden Reel awards!
“Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie”
Outstanding Achievement in Sound Editing – Non-theatrical Animation
“Transformers Earthspark” -
Outstanding Achievement in Sound Editing – Broadcast Animation
We thought this would be a great opportunity to share some stories behind the sound editorial on these two fantastic projects via interviews with Supervising Sound Editors Jeff Shiffman and Brad Meyer.
At Boom Box Post, since we focus in sound for animation, I thought it would be helpful to create a list of classic toon sound effects and the emotion typically associated with them. In this post, we will be focusing on the following: happiness, anger, sadness, and humor.
![Death by [Sound Effect]: A Halloween Sound Design Challenge Part 2](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54813413e4b0034aade3a0bc/1696292819748-VS7VWLU2IR3EBJ71HYAB/image-asset.jpeg)
