The Boom Box Post blog provides insights into the creative sound design process of Boom Box Post's owners and employees.
Dialogue is king. To perfectly record dialogue, especially for film, has been the common goal amongst dialogue recordists and recording engineers since the birth of audio recording in the early 1900s. In working as a dialogue editor, it is a constant journey to adapt to the ever-changing market of audio recording gear. When considering building your own voice-over chain, there are many available options. Here, I’ve narrowed it down to just a few.
In the world of freelance sound design, it's likely you will be hired to do a job remotely. The internet allows us to share our talents on all kinds of projects without ever meeting face to face. The advantage here is a vast network of sound professionals that can very easily utilize your services. Here’s the downside; short of a few email exchanges, you are communicating skill and professionalism entirely through your completed work.
On the most basic level, a lot can be said by how your sessions are laid out. Experienced editors know that following a few basic steps to ensure compatibility and expediency down the line proves not only helpful, but a very succinct way of showing you know what you’re doing. Expanding on a previous post I wrote about "thinking downstream," (i.e. thinking beyond yourself to each subsequent step in the post audio workflow) here a few basics tenets of smart sound editorial layout which will scream THIS IS THE WORK OF A PROFESSIONAL and help set you apart from the pack.
People often ask us why we choose to work in such a niche market, sound for animation, and for us the answer is simple. Live action sound design has its own challenges and rewards, but more often than not, you're recreating the sounds of the real world. While working in the animated realm, week after week we get to work inside imagined worlds, create sounds for unknown creatures, and image futuristic technology conceived in the minds of the world's most fantastic artists. These new worlds give us the opportunity to use ever-evolving sound design techniques to breathe life into them.
We found such a technique when the software developers from Digital Brain Instruments approached us with the opportunity to create new presets for their stand-alone application, Voxpat, which is a newly release sound design tool for creating monster, creature, and robot vocals.
We were so excited to give a talk at this year's Creative Talent Network Animation Expo in Burbank. The talk started with a brief history of sound for animation (a lot of which you can find expertly boiled down here) followed by an overview of the post sound process from beginning to end. We finished up with some video demos of the different layers of sound in our work as well as some of the fun instruments and props we have recorded over the years.
We hoped the panel would prove interesting to content creators looking for information on how to approach the sound process for their own work. To our pleasant surprise (this was our first time doing this after all) the turnout was incredible! The room was filled to capacity and we were bombarded with fantastic questions from a very energetic crowd.
Without question, location recording is the most difficult part of the process of making sound effects. Selecting the right location is just as important as what you will record there. Environments shape your sound. Be sure to select a location with your ears and not with your eyes.
Here are a few things to consider when planning your next field recording:
The entertainment industry is hard. There are precious few jobs and far too many applicants to be a viable career option. Yet the crowds keep arriving. Hopeful applicants with a dream of making a life for themselves in the entertainment industry. I was one of them. I moved from Detroit to Los Angeles in a fifteen foot truck (which my wife and I accidentally set on fire in the hills of Colorado, but that’s another story). Waiting for me was an unpaid internship at a music video and commercial production company. Nothing even close to what I was looking for career-wise, but who cared? I was on my way! Wrong. Like anything in life, a successful career path takes forethought, careful planning and execution. Here are my five tips for putting yourself on the right path.
In the 1920’s and 1930’s, recording equipment was extremely large and heavy, rendering it impossible to take outside of the studio. Unable to record sound effects in the real world, the studios were forced to invent new approaches to creating sound for their animated content. Thus, two different approaches to sound effects were quickly developed.
For my money, the second I get my hands on a new synthesizer app or program, the first thing I gravitate towards is designing laser blasts and steadys. Some of the most diverse and memorable synthesized elements in TV and film are laser sounds. With that in mind, this week I challenged the team to create a distinct and original laser sound effect.
With the recently released Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer smashing existing viewing records, and crashing sites like Fandango due to a rush for pre-sale tickets, it is no secret that the hype is strong with this one. On December 18th of this year, hoards of people will be heading to the theaters to witness the newest addition to the Star Wars universe.
Diehard fans know there is a lot to look forward to, but there is a new addition to the Star Wars universe that is easily overlooked: Dolby Atmos. Most theaters still show films in 5.1, but with Atmos becoming increasingly popular as part of a premium film experience, it is worth noting how far technology has come since the first Star Wars film in 1977. Therefore, I would like to focus this week’s blog post on the evolution of mixing formats and how they impact the audience experience.
Ageism is prevalent in Hollywood. Everywhere you look, the emphasis is on the next big thing; younger, faster newer. In our industry, I'm talking about gear. The equipment we use is constantly being overhauled and upgraded. And rightfully so. The demands of our job continue to increase (although this may be a chicken and the egg style scenario because the faster equipment certainly creates higher expectations). Regardless, as a creative professional you have to make choices. You need the gear to learn and practice the trade. Starting out with the top of the line equipment however will simply break most editors financially.
A month back, I wrote and article for the A Sound Effect blog that argued for a powerful Pro Tools setup on a budget. This wasn't intended to be a bible on how to set up the average pro tools rig or even a recommendation for everyone. I aimed the advice at freelance individuals or small studios that want the power to be creative on as little money as possible.
When I was a child, my brother and I would happily forego the majority of our trick-or-treat time in order to put on a free haunted house in our basement for the neighborhood kids. We planned it for weeks and had everything from the quintessential haunted "bowl of brains" (cold spaghetti noodles) to a gauntlet where hidden ghouls grabbed at your ankles.
The key element of this yearly extravaganza was always the cheesy haunted house soundtrack cassette tape that we played on a portable boom box.
So, in the spirit of Halloween, I brought together the whole crew at Boom Box Post, and we recorded some very cheesy and spooky vocals. Then, I recreated that classic spooky cassette tape!
For a team challenge this week, I thought it would be fun to give everyone an onomatopoeia sound as a jumping off point for creative sound design. No rules. Just create a sound inspired by the following phrase:
Wheeeeeeeeee-Sha-BLAWNG
I asked that everyone 'show their work' and type up a few words about how they went about inventing these new sounds. Here are each designer's take and the final sound effects.
As sound designers, we're often drawn to talking and writing about our latest endeavors in creating new and interesting sounds from scratch. We blog about just such occasions all the time here at Boom Box Post, like when we recorded our own alien vocals or I created the sound of a submarine moving through blood vessels with a contact microphone in my bathtub.
But, it's important to remember that sometimes the most successful sound design isn't born of invention, but instead of perfectly matching just the right sound from the real world.
A while back, I was asked to “stretch my creativity” a bit and record some original sounds for a new series here at Boom Box Post. My objective: create a fresh take on the classic “rubber stretch.” We wanted something new and different that still inspired the same feelings of tension and impending release that the classic balloon rubbing/cable twisting has. I ended up working with a recording of my finger running along the sticky side of a strip of packing tape.
Film is a collaborative medium. We all know this. However, when it comes down to the day to day grind of sound editorial it's very easy to get caught up in the time crunch or creative rabbit holes, ignoring where the work is heading; the mix stage. This is a major mistake. As a sound supervisor, I value collaboration just as much as I do the creative output of my team. And there's a lot that can be done every step of the way to support collaboration in the post sound world. That's why I preach one simple philosophy; think like a mixer.
Take this quiz to see if you can guess the original sound used to create these newly designed ones! How do you think we made this dragon snarl: a human fart or a mustard squirt? Can you decipher the origin of each sound? Submit your best guesses to see the real answers.
This week, we brought the entire team together to record alien walla (otherwise known as group vocals) for an upcoming season premiere episode. Jeff is the real performer in the group, but after seeing how much fun he had at the mic, the rest of us were game to jump into the spotlight, too. Check out this fun video montage of our raw performances!
Backgrounds. Ambiences, the rarely heard but most definitely felt, unsung heroes of the post-production sound world. Without ambiences, scenes and designs feel empty. I could have went with a discussion about the design of some next level insectoid-servo-monster-hybrid-machine, but I feel like in order to get to that level of creativity you need a solid foundation. Not only in your skills as a sound editor or designer but in the overall build of your production. And that foundation, my sound design brethren, are backgrounds or BGs for short.
Vocal processing is one of my favorite challenges. It's always a delicate balancing act to add enough treatment to shine through onscreen without covering up the nuances of the performance. Inventing new ways to treat dialogue is a blast but I also take great pleasure in trying to ape a classic vocal effect.
In an effort to recreate the treatment applied to C-3PO (from Star Wars you guys) my first thoughts were to apply a vocoding effect paired with a reverb based on a small space impulse response. I assumed it was a vocoder making the voice robotic and a reverb placing the voice inside the robot itself. In listening closely and experimenting, it turns out I was half right.
When asked by Plugin Alliance to test their newest noise reduction/reverb removal plug-in, accusonus ERA-D, my first thought was that de-noise/de-reverb is possibly the least sexy category of plug-in on the market.
However, I have to say that after putting accusonus ERA-D through its paces, it is, in fact, quite sexy.
