The Boom Box Post blog provides insights into the creative sound design process of Boom Box Post's owners and employees.
In this Inside Sound Design I wanted to use our interns to explore an early part of the sound editing process: Field Recording. It’s always a blast to capture sounds in the wild, and we try to do so at every opportunity. I sent Ian Howard out with instructions to research and capture two unique and interesting ambiences.
We’ve reached out to our blog readership several times to ask for blog post suggestions. And surprisingly, this blog suggestions has come up every single time. It seems that there’s a lot of confusion about who should be processing what. So, I’m going to attempt to break it down for you. Keep in mind that these are my thoughts on the subject as someone with 12 years of experience as a sound effects editor and supervising sound editor. In writing this, I'm hoping to clarify the general though process behind making the distinction between who should process what. However, if you ever have a specific question on this topic, I would highly encourage you to reach out to your mixer.
Johnathan Lopez recently joined the Boom Box team as our new assistant editor and office manager. Johnathan was a stellar Boom Box intern, and we are thrilled to have him back to work with us again.
Here at Boom Box Post we have an extensive intern curriculum where our interns have to complete several different projects as part of their program. The projects include everything from sound editing basics, to pre-dubbing and from-scratch design work. In the project I teach, we come across many real-world sound editing scenarios, including a small clip in slow motion. Slo-Mo is a storytelling tool that sound editors come across quite often, and it is where I get the most questions regarding, “How do I cut this?”
Because slow motion is more conceptual than it is technical, there is no right way to approach it. However, there are some basics that you are going to want to cover, and I thought this would be a great opportunity to illustrate various sound concepts while editing scenes in slow motion. Every scene and scenario has it’s own set of challenges, but these tips are a great place to start.
In this month's Inside Sound Design, we have a brief chat with sound effects editor Kevin Hart. Kevin is a passionate member of the Boom Box Team who experiments with integrating other DAW's and softwares into his workflow. You can read about his method for creating dynamic fight backgrounds in Ableton Live here. In this post, Kevin shares his ideas and methods for creating the sound of high powered, electricity-based energy skates.
The entertainment industry can be tough. There are many cliche's, such as "It's all about who you know" or "It's all about right place right time." Neither of which are entirely untrue. However, I am a firm believer that anyone with some raw talent and a whole lot of drive can build themselves a career in post production sound - or any entertainment job for that matter.
If I'm making it sound easy, my apologies. It's absolutely a ton of work. Let me repeat that: getting a job in a highly specialized, creative industry where you are in competition with literally thousands of applicants will always be a ton of work. So why do it?
Some things never stop being funny, no matter how much time has passed. This is also true for sound effects. Some classic sound effects and jokes we use have been around for more than half a century! Kate gave an excellent run down of animation sound's origin in her THE HISTORY OF ANIMATION SOUND post, and many sounds devised by Carl Stalling, Treg Brown and Jimmy MacDonald(and the derivatives of their sounds) are still being used by sound editors today! This week, I asked a few of our editors to tell me about their favorite cartoon sound effects.
As Jeff mentioned in his blog post Top Ten Secret Pro Tools Shortcuts, learning Pro Tools shortcuts is a must for new sound editors if they want to be able to compete in our industry. Similarly, knowing the shortcuts to navigate through your OS quickly and efficiently is also really important. This is especially helpful to new editors trying to land their first sound job, as most of us come in at an assistant level, where a big part of the job is organizing files and multi-tasking among several projects. Learning basic navigational and organizational functions is a simple way to speed up your workflow and impress potential employers and clients.
When Plugin Alliance asked me to try out Unfiltered Audio's newest plugin, SpecOps, before it was released to the public, I was excited. I love having the opportunity to try out new sound design tools and maybe even give valuable feedback to the maker pre-release.
So, I began, as I always do, by reading the manual. You may prefer to watch a YouTube user video, or read a blog post (hopefully, like this one!), but I’ve always been a manual gal. I love to know every last detail about how to use a new piece of software before I try it out.
Well, this manual’s first sentence is “SpecOps is the ultimate spectral processor.”
Bold statement, right? I was a bit skeptical. I like my manuals to be fact-based, and this seemed like a pretty hyped up opinion. But, after digging into it, I can honestly say that it stands up to the hype. It is the ultimate!
Creative dialogue processing is a unique and fun challenge that varies from the sound design work we typically encounter on a daily basis. For this month’s Inside Sound Design post, I’m going to walk through one common and simple processing chain we might use for science-fiction themed computer or robot dialogue.
Last week we introduced the first of our fantastic new interns: Ian Howard. This week we check in with the other: Ruben Infante. Ruben attended Full Sail University, and recently worked as a Lead Stage Manager for NASA. We're thrilled to have him with us, and excited to hear about his unique perspective on sound and learning.
Here at Boom Box Post, we take pride in educating our interns and preparing them for the world of audio post-production. We are lucky to have a plethora of excellent candidates each and every time we interview. This week marks the beginning of a brand new class of interns: Ian Howard and Ruben Infante. In today's post I chatted with Ian about his background, expectations and desires for his internship education.
I’ve been very fortunate to have the unique opportunity to see both sides of the post production coin, if you will. Being this sort of sound effects editor/re-recording mixer hybrid has really propelled my understanding of the post production sound process and has expanded the depth at which I create that sound tenfold. I’ve come to find that the two roles compliment each other and I find myself using skills from one discipline in that of the other (and vice versa) on a daily basis. First and foremost, I will always have an affinity for sound effects editing. The single most mixer-related skill that has improved that affinity, and one that I cannot edit without, is panning automation. More specifically, panning automation in a 5.1 or surround space.
In this month's interview post we chat with Mak Kellerman, one of our talented sound effects editors here at Boom Box Post. Mak has worked with Boom Box Post on Future-Worm, Pickle and Peanut, Penn-Zero: Part Time Hero and many other exciting animated shows. Mak is expert at creating interesting sci-fi builds and today he was working on creating the sound of an evil haunted portal!
As sound people, sometimes we hear something so unique we just have to capture it. A lot of sound designers (myself included) carry around mini recorders for just such an occasion. But we can't always be prepared. There are moments when you need to capture a sound in an instant. Like if a bird with a crazy call lands on an open window. We don't always have professional recording gear at hand. Most of us however do have a cell phone nearby.
The Boom Box Post crew returned to San Diego this year for Comic-Con 2017!
Granular synthesis is one of the most versatile tools available to sound designers and an absolute favorite of mine. I love using simple sounds like whooshes or taking a steady sound like an electricity buzz and creating something completely new. From eerie drones to big sci-fi whooshes, granular synthesis can help you accomplish it all. For this demonstration I used the Soundmorph Dust plugin. We’re going to have a look at the plug-in's user interface and explore some of the methods I used to achieve some fun sounds. First let's take a look at what Granular Synthesis is.
Although the term “sound design” has been around for nearly four decades--and the practice has been pursued for much longer--its use has only recently become nearly ubiquitous. A day cannot go by that I do not see #sounddesign appended onto the end of a multitude of tweets from around the world. We now have the invaluable website DesigningSound.org which distributes information about our community’s adventures, musings, and technical inquiries. And our own Boom Box Post blog often touts titles such as Creature Speech Sound Design Challenge or Smoke and Mirrors: Unexpected Sound Design Sources.
Why this sudden renaissance of the term “sound design”? This week, I decided to take a closer look at the history of the term, the differences in how it is used across the film and television, interactive and immersive media, and theater industries, and its use and abuse.
For this month's interview post I sat down with Brad Meyer, a sound effects editor here at Boom Box Post. Brad spends a lot of his time designing exciting, signature sound effects for his shows, especially vehicle sound effects, using both custom recordings and sound library material. Brad sat down with me to talk about his process for creating the signature sound effects for a demonic race car that is possessed by monsters.
Here at Boom Box Post we do a lot of wild sound effects recording. In the last year we’ve recorded props as varied as children’s ball pits, seed pods from trees, laser swords, metal impacts, metal screeches with dry ice, christmas lights, human and non-human screams, zombie moans, body drags, two different Ford Mustangs and of course: farts. We’ve used a wide variety of different equipment to accomplish these recording goals. For our most recent vehicle recording(blog post coming soon) we rented a few additional microphones and took advantage of the new gear to set up a brief microphone shootout. The microphones we compared were the Sennheiser MKH 8050, a compact super-cardiod condenser, the Sennheiser MKH 8060, a short shotgun based on the same capsule as the 8050 and the Neumann KMR 82i, a highly directional short shotgun. All three are popular choices for sound effects and film production recording. We wanted to test the timbre and character of each microphone as well as how they interacted with the acoustics in our edit bays. To test the mics we recorded a variety of sample material similar to the type of recordings we make.
