The Boom Box Post blog provides insights into the creative sound design process of Boom Box Post's owners and employees.
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Recording
If you've spent a Fourth of July in Los Angeles, you know the city transforms into one giant fireworks show. For sound designers, it's also one of the best opportunities of the year to capture unique explosions, whistles, crackles, and distant booms for future projects. In this post we’ll take a listen to the ambience recordings I captured and how to process them to make them library-ready.
So you’ve just recorded the coolest sound out in the field, but it’s buried underneath environmental sounds like distant cars, planes, humans, birds, insects etc… How do we isolate these sounds and minimize that background noise? This is NOT another Izotope RX post. Instead we’re going to talk about a common yet sometimes forgotten audio processor that can help reduce your noise floor and make these recordings more usable.
You’d be surprised just how “quiet” raw gunshot recordings can sound without any processing. When played back dry, the recordings sound like weak little pops, lacking detail and punch. But with some basic processing, we can turn those thin pops into powerful, rich, cinema-ready gunshot sound effects.
As sound editors, we’re always looking for opportunities to fortify our sound effects library. A great sound editor can deliver excellent editorial with even the most limited toolbox. However, for a team that works on demanding series of varying styles with quick turnarounds—getting bogged down by a weak library isn’t an option.
We recently found ourselves working on a Roller Derby themed episode for one of our shows. As you can imagine, this episode called for an abundance of roller skating sounds to cover a wide variety of performances. With the guidance of Re-recording mixer Jacob Cook, Tess and Tim took it upon themselves to plan and execute a recording session to help build up our library and turnover some much needed roller skating sounds for the episode.
As a studio that works in a lot of children’s animation, we are always on the lookout for a good substitute for breaking glass. Recently, our supervising sound editor, Tess, took it upon herself to create our own library featuring the breakage of terracotta pots.
