A Bit of Sound Design

Crystallizer is a unique echo/delay plugin and I find it to be an amazing tool. I've been getting more familiar with its wide range of presets and using it to manipulate sound.

It's a bit difficult to describe what it does but it all makes sense when you hear it. The versatility is almost endless. Whatever sound you splice up can be pitched, reversed, delayed and filtered before being sent to the output.

I'd like to tell you I have some unique creative process to how I went about this, but basically I started out with importing a tonal hum sound effect into my session and began experimenting. As I processed the sound more it became apparent that I was going in the whoosh direction and kept on tweaking. Feel free to take a listen:

Thoughts on Foley

Charles Maynes recently wrote an excellent Designing Sound article that I suggest reading.

Maynes discusses the importance of Foley in elevating the overall sound design despite its lower standing in the post sound hierarchy. I couldn't agree more with his perspective, and Douglas Murray has a great point in the comments section that Foley adds the "detail and weight that are helpful for believability and to glue the sound effects together."

As an editor, I have spent a lot of my time focusing on Foley. I find it important to communicate with a client the need for Foley and as others have pointed out in the comments, Foley can be a great medium for character development and emotional elements.

It got me reminiscing about when I had the opportunity as an intern to check out Gary Hecker's work during the post production of The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2. It was amazing how an experienced Foley artist and mixer can sync sounds for virtually anything. The dynamic between the Foley team and Foley Supervisor Chris Alba was very interesting to say the least. I could go on and on, but it'd be better to just check him out in action:

JFK: The Final Hours - The Soundscape

JFK: The Final Hours will be airing soon on National Geographic Channel (November 8th).

[Via press release from National Geographic Channel] "To help in bringing JFK's last day to life, the creative team behind JFK: The Final Hours restored an extraordinary color film, shot by a professional White House film crew that documented JFK's movements during his final day. By stripping off the original, now unusable audio, and converting the footage to high definition, this restored film is a haunting, immersive experience for viewers."

Before it airs I wanted to share a couple of my experiences on working with this restored footage and building the soundscape -

SFX & Research: Studying history at the University of Oregon finally paid off for me! In all seriousness though, it was important to maintain the accuracy as much as possible with the period of the documentary and that was true with the sound effects. As the Assistant Sound Editor, one of my tasks was to research what models Air Force One, the police officer's bikes and JFK's limousine were at the time so that we would work with appropriate material from our effects libraries.

Backgrounds: There were quite a lot of crowd BGs needed for this documentary. At many points JFK is being greeted by crowds at various airports or giving speeches to an audience. I was lucky that in my first week working on the project, the Portland Rose Festival was going on and I was able to go and record some great crowd ambiences to use.

Field recording at the Grand Floral Parade.

Foley: I was having a conversation with Sound Designer David Hughes about wanting to try a technique that I heard about Lon Bender's team using on The Hunger Games for making the outside Foley more organic. David was all for it and we put some quicktime clips onto an iPad to perform clapping and various other Foley elements in sync with the picture. It saved a ton of time by just having to nudge these recordings a bit instead of editing individual things in. In particular I liked the clapping, it really added some great material to play along with the wild clapping in the BGs.




That's it for now, but I'll see about updating the blog further after the documentary airs. Overall, it was an absolute pleasure to work with everyone involved on this project!

PT11 First Impressions

I've been on a bit of a hiatus from blogging the last couple months. I recently moved and I'm very stoked to be back in Oregon.

So the big recent news is that Avid has released Pro Tools 11:

The first thing I did was dive into the system requirements and make sure that everything was compatible.

There are definitely some cool new features in this version (Of course some of which have been available for quite some time in other DAWs).  I particularly like the new video engine. Hopefully no more transcoding videos!

One concern for me and a lot of others is making sure that all plug-ins, interfaces and peripherals would be supported. Having to wait for plug-in developers to port their plug-ins to the 64-bit AAX format is a big inconvenience at the moment. But I'm confident that this issue will be corrected in time.

Perhaps the biggest thing for me in holding off from upgrading right away is the ongoing documented issues with the iLok License Manager software. I know that at some point I'll upgrade to PT11, but being deep in the middle of a project is simply not a good time to be updating. My setup does everything that I need at the moment for my workflow. For the time being I'm good with that!

Lastly, Ceri Thomas has a great blog post about what PT11 does for post. Recommended reading.

Utah

I recently wrapped up work on Utah, a documentary short from director Kate Brown.

The aesthetic of the documentary involved all the audio being recorded on DAT tapes by Kate in Utah over multiple visits. We had many hours of recordings to master and creatively cut to the locked picture edit. Ultimately, we were able to comprise the entire soundtrack from the director's recordings. The documentary was mixed for both 16mm optical film and digital formats.

Utah was finaled at Danetracks

It was great to contribute on such an interesting project. Many thanks to Kate and the other collaborators, Felix Lau and John Creed for their hours of mastering/editing work and re-recording mixer Matt Kielkopf for making it sound great. I'll update the blog with more information about where the film will be screening at in the future.

"Sound is often subtle"

Just a few thoughts...

I've been reflecting upon my time in Los Angeles, and without a doubt it was a career affirming experience to have initially came out to intern at Danetracks.

I'm listening to The Matrix Reloaded playing on television as I write this post. I've always felt that the first Matrix film and Jurassic Park were influential on me wanting to get into audio post production and sound design.

Quick tangent -

I had the opportunity in 2011 to listen to Craig Berkey speak. Berkey used an example of horses from True Grit to discuss his take on editing. He explained that although sync is important, it’s sometimes equally as effective to concentrate on the “feeling” of the image rather than the cuts.

The concept of feeling being equally as important as sync is something that has really stuck with me.

I always enjoyed being the last person left at Danetracks at night talking with Dane about ideas such as feeling in sound design. Seeing Dane take a concept and hear what he created from things I got to assist in recording was inspirational.

I truly can't express my gratitude to Dane, Francine and the rest of the great people I met through Danetracks for sharing their perspectives on the industry and passing along honest advice.

Alright that's enough rambling from me for now. Here is an absolute must read interview in Mix Magazine with Dane, Eric and several others from Danetracks who worked on The Matrix trilogy.

Command|8

Recently I was able to score a Command 8 from a friend of mine. Secondhand audio gear can always be a little scary, but it sure helps to know who you're getting it from as opposed to someone off the internet.

I've previously worked with the MC Pro and Nuendo, and I was eager to finally have a control surface to add to my Pro Tools workflow at home.

Having an interface and control surface together like a 003 is not a huge necessity for me at my home workstation. I very rarely if ever record anything directly into my DAW. Most of what I record I do with my Zoom, and I have the option to dust off my Mbox if I need to input directly into PT.

While I'm fine working with a mouse and keyboard, the capabilities you get with a control surface have definitely increased the speed and efficiency of how I edit. I love being able to do more detailed volume automation, and I also really enjoy having my plug-in controls on a surface. The thing is, I'm truly not even using the the Command 8 to it's full capabilities. Sound on Sound has a cool article with some functions and features I won't even begin to detail.

It can sometimes be an issue for me deciding what do I really need vs want. When it comes to a microphone, or plug-in and so forth, there is a lot of research that goes into getting what will benefit your own individual workflow. Overall, I'm so stoked with the Command 8.

That is until I eventually own the Artist Series!

Mahna Mahna

So it appears that I haven't been doing a very good job of keeping the blog updated.

I've had a very busy start to 2013 as an Assistant Sound Editor at 740 Sound Design collaborating with some great clients. I was stoked to see some of the spots we've been working on at 740 air during the Super Bowl. Here are a few to check out -

• Taco Bell "Viva Young"
• Volkswagen "Get Happy"
• Hyundai "Stuck"

And here's a non-SB commercial I'd like to share, just because it makes me laugh every time I watch it -

Outside of work, the more I've been diving into iZotope Iris the more I've fallen in love. It's amazing the unique sounds you can create. I've been having a blast losing track of time with it. It's the most fun I can remember having since I first started using NI Kontakt. 4 out of 5 times when I import sounds into it thinking nothing more than 'this could be cool' I don't end up with anything much, but that 1 time when I do it's awesome! Perhaps the biggest challenge with Iris is coming up with descriptions and tags for the crazy sounds. I honestly don't think I'd turn to it if I was for example under a deadline for a revision, but I'm hopeful someday I'll be involved on a project where I'll get to use some sounds from my Iris folder. If you haven't yet, I absolutely recommend demoing it.