WRITTEN BY KATE FINAN, CO-OWNER OF BOOM BOX POST
At the very beginning of 2020, Women’s Audio Mission reached out to ask if Boom Box Post would be interested in contributing to their upcoming Los Angeles popup by giving a workshop on sound design for television and film. We decided to put together a small event in May for 15-30 people which would introduce the audience to sound design and include some hands-on interactive components.
And then… COVID hit and it seemed that this plan to collaborate would need to be put off indefinitely due to travel, health, and safety concerns.
But, WAM being the incredible resource that it is for so many people in our industry (but especially for their core membership of women-identifying, non-binary, and non-gender conforming individuals), they quickly pivoted and created WAM Everywhere Live Classes, a series of free virtual workshops “to keep our community connected, supported, and learning during this time of social distancing and beyond.”
We set a date of August 19th, 2020, and reconfigured our game plan to fit a virtual audience. I made it a priority to format the interactive portion to show how to practice sound design with limited financial resources by pulling still images from the internet and working creatively with them to practice cutting hard effects and backgrounds. I rounded up free resources that our team has covered in past blog posts (which Tim later published as this blog post) and I also gave out a .pdf of ProTools keyboard shortcuts that I especially love to use for sound design.
There are certainly downsides to giving a virtual workshop: in order to route both my microphone and ProTools audio out to the audience, both needed to go through my webcam microphone, which is not the best. The class would then be broadcast over Zoom, which clearly has a built-in gate which helps to make your work meetings void of feedback and background noise, but does really weird things when you attempt to both speak and alternately play sound effects.
But, there were so many more upsides! What had originally been conceived as a small workshop for a dozen or so participants was now open to a global audience, and ended up having 126 attendees! We were able to make full use of the Zoom chat window to allow easy audience interaction during the editing demo. People from around the world were able to greet each other, suggest sound ideas, and become re-invigorated as part of a booming online community during this time of social distancing and isolation.
So, I would like to sincerely thank WAM for the opportunity to help with this event. It gave me so much joy and also re-excited the love of sharing knowledge that was such a foundational pillar for Jeff and I when we started Boom Box Post.
Without further ado, here is the workshop for you to enjoy! Please also check out WAM’s other virtual classes for so many more opportunities to learn and grow within the audio industry.