The Boom Box Post blog provides insights into the creative sound design process of Boom Box Post's owners and employees.
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.
We recently finished construction on our brand new post sound facility in Burbank, CA. One of our top priorities was to have multiple mix stages under our roof, all of which ready for Dolby Atmos. The way we saw it, we might as well be on the forefront of this emerging format. Building a mix stage is challenging enough, but adding in the extra Atmos considerations meant we would be faced with lots of opportunities to learn. Lucky for us, we are all about continuing to learn here at Boom Box Post! It’s in that spirit that I want to share with you some of the details of our journey.
Natalia was given the challenge of creating the sound design for a character’s superpower transformation sequence. Natalia describes her process and the inspirations that led to her successful sound build. Read more to find out how she did it!
One of the most exciting parts about working in audio post production is getting to be a part of the final stages of a project. Here are a few recent releases that Boom Box Post had the pleasure of working on!
Katie was given the fun yet challenging task of creating a roller coaster only consisting of materials that could be found thousands of years ago. Find out how she tackled this project and what issues she faced.
Recently, Peter was tasked with creating the sound build for a time machine as it creates and travels through a time portal. Find out how he managed to achieve the desired effect while putting his own personal style into the sound.
We have a new Office Manager/Assistant Editor at Boom Box Post! It is our pleasure to introduce you to Jayson!
We have dozens of blog posts on how you can level up your sound editorial game. This post is intended to go beyond the basics - making sure you color code you work, cut for perspective, etc. This isn't about missing deadlines or forgetting to clean up markers in your session before turning in your work. These are mistakes that even seasoned sound editors make all the time. Avoiding these seemingly small mistakes could make a big difference in how you are perceived by your supervisors and those mixing your work.
Do you remember watching TV or listening to the radio and it drove you crazy that the audio levels were extremely different whenever something different came on or if you changed the channel? We no longer have this issue. Here is why!
Tim was recently challenged with designing ambiences for a series of shorts that had a lot of action. The clients very smartly requested these builds have a rhythmic quality to them, allowing them to play in the background without distracting too much from what was happening on-screen. Check out how this was accomplished!
One of the biggest challenges in sound design is creating unique and beautiful design work that will work with the musical score rather than against it. Because television schedules are tight, composers often need absolutely every moment they can get, and the music goes directly to the mix stage without the sound design team ever hearing it. In a dream world, we would be constantly collaborating with the composers and music departments. But unfortunately, we’re often on two secluded islands, trying to create something fantastic on our own, and just hoping that it will work when it’s all put together in the mix.
As I get more and more experience as the re-recording mixer, I’ve come to intuitively understand what will work and what will never work in a sound design build once the music is added, no matter how cool it sounds in the sound effects preview.
The key to designing sound that will work flawlessly with any musical score hinges greatly on the use of inharmonic elements rather than harmonic ones. But to understand what will work and when, we need to dive deep into the concept of harmonic versus inharmonic elements.
When I first started working at Boom Box Post, I had a hard time understanding what exactly took place during each step of the post-production process. With so many different steps in our workflow, it was very easy for me to get lost in the order of events. Oftentimes, I mixed up editor spots with client spots, editor previews with client previews, and don’t even get me started on editorial fixes and when those were supposed to happen…
Digital Foley is often a straight-forward and technical element of the sound design we create for a TV show, and it can become a simple skill for an editor’s toolbox that amplifies each episode. Though footsteps are a small detail in the entirety of a sound edit, it is sometimes tedious and overwhelming to transition similar Foley edits between episodes. Listed below are a few quick alternative solutions that I use when editing Foley.
In animation, large crowds serve to support the fullness and sonic versatility of a scene. However, it is easy to get lost in an audience’s hyperactivity and noise, which can potentially distract the listener instead of guiding them through the narrative of the show. Read below to see how sound effects editor Ben approaches a stadium crowd design.
It’s finally the day all of us at Boom Box Post have been waiting for–the relaunch of our internship program! Now an apprenticeship, we couldn’t be more excited to introduce our first apprentice post-pandemic, Kylina Aliotti!
As co-owner of Boom Box Post, I wear a lot of hats. I’m scheduled down to the 15 minute increment and often need to hyper concentrate on the task at hand. Still, I can’t control when a scheduling request or Slack message from my team will come through. Often times when I'm deep into a creative groove, I get hit with one of these important items that may not need to be handled at that exact moment, but I don’t want to forget. Distracted by the creative task at hand, I am actually quite prone to forget. I have employed various strategies to deal with it. Leaving messages unread, creating a reminder in Apple’s Reminder app or Slack, even Post-It notes. But I never had a perfect solutions. Until now.
Creating an exciting sound mix for television can be a HUGE challenge. Way back in 2020, I explained the basic structure of my mixing process, but there is a lot more to mixing than just following a list of steps. I also like to consider goals or objectives I want to achieve during the process. These vary from project to project, but here are three mixing objectives I often keep in mind while I work through each mix.
Not too long ago, I was given the creative opportunity to build a unique version of a camper van out of non-traditional motor sounds. The job was to make something that resembled a motor out of sounds that were not machinery or would sound like a realistic engine. This was a fun challenge and proof of concept that you can make a motor out of anything!
With such a wide variety of TV shows, our sound effects editors can end up designing some pretty out-of-this-world sound effects builds, like balloon nightmares, interdimensional time jumps, and even monster armies! For another imaginative look into some of the exciting sound effects we create at Boom Box Post, sound effects editor Natalia is sharing a deeper dive into how she approaches designing a magical tree transformation. Read more to learn how finding unique library sounds can contribute to a supernatural metamorphosis.
A new sound quiz has arrived! Let’s play!
