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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Sound Advice
Building out your studio desk and workspace can become very expensive. But not every upgrade has to break the bank. Sometimes it’s the small, thoughtful additions that end up having the biggest impact on your workflow, comfort, and overall studio vibe. Here are five wallet-friendly upgrades you can make to your home or professional studio that make an impact without hurting your wallet (too much).
As sound professionals, our most important tool isn’t a plugin or piece of gear, it’s our ability to hear. You’d never trust a mix on broken studio monitors or faulty headphones, so it makes no sense to overlook the health of your own ears! In this post I’d like to discuss our ears and how to care for them to ensure a long and prolific career in audio post.
The average American spends 8.5 hours a day working. That’s 42.5 hours a week, and a whopping 2,210 hours every year! If, like me your job ties you to a desk, that space is probably the only place other than your bed in which you’ll spend nearly that much time. But how many of us give any consideration to how the space is set up? Or how we position ourselves at that desk? Here’s a basic checklist for you to run down in order to optimize your workspace, and in turn, your overall wellbeing and health.
As a sound effects editor, you are likely part of a team of editors who eventually hand their work off to a re-recording mixer. It’s important to understand that the way that you organize your work is often just as important to your mixer and the final end product as is your creative quality.
This past week we chatted with one of our supervising sound editors, Tess Fournier! Tess has shared so much insider knowledge here over the years but we felt it was time to get an update on both a professional and personal level!
A re-recording mixer possesses many technical skills. Here at Boom Box Post, we’ve covered the subject in countless posts. But outside of the technical realm, what other skills are useful on the job? Here are my top 10.
For aspiring editors and audio students, I always come across one tip in—to start building up a personal SFX library. So I complied a list of 10 spring inspired sounds, that if you have access to, you should go out and record this refreshing time of year!
This past week we chatted with one of our supervising sound editors, Tess Fournier! Tess has shared so much insider knowledge here over the years but we felt it was time to get an update on both a professional and personal level!
I recently listened to an episode of the Ezra Klein Show podcast titled “Tired? Distracted? Burned-Out? Listen to This.” I don’t know about you, but as a parent of two small children, a business co-owner in a time of entertainment industry upheaval, and a creative professional who tries to eke out every last ounce of creative juice that I have on a daily basis, this title really spoke to me. I must say that I was riveted for the next hour as the host, Ezra Klein, and special guest, Gloria Mark, University of California Irvine professor and author of the book Attention Span, discussed how attention is not just a productivity tool, but part of our well-being and a precious resource that can be easily depleted, but also fairly easily restored if you know what to do.
Several years ago, we created multiple blogs with keywords to help you search your sound library and find the desired effects. This year, we have combined those blogs into one comprehensive sound effects glossary, adding more key terms to assist with your project. Hopefully, this will make it easier to find all the correct sound effects you need!
Earlier this year, I sat down with GirltalkHQ, the digital publication which describes itself as “an inclusive digital feminist magazine amplifying diverse voices + stories,” for an interview. But, I wanted to be sure that the article they released wasn’t just going to appeal to women or feminists. Instead, I hoped to give an interesting look inside a post-production sound studio that happens to be co-owned by a woman and which maintains a 50% female and gender-expansive staff (something unique in a world where Women’s Audio Mission is still citing that only 5% of those employed in audio are women) without giving gender any weight during hiring decisions.
Season’s greetings to all of you editors, mixers, engineers, recordists, professionals, prosumers, students, freelancers, and everyone in between. Whether you’re aiming to dazzle a certain individual in your life who is passionate about sound/post production, or if you’re a professional in the sound industry finding it difficult to put together your holiday wish list, worry not, we’ve got you sorted!
As many of you know, in 2017, we branched out from our post-production sound business, Boom Box Post, to start Boom Box Library. BBL (as we call it around here) is a sound effect library company which allows us to share our sound design work with other professionals, and also contribute to the creativity of our community members with custom-recorded libraries that we feel fill a void in basic materials. In short, our award-winning sound designers are creating sound libraries that we ourselves want to use.
For many of you who freelance or have unpredictable schedules, adding library creation to your business ventures could be just the thing you need. But, while recording or designing the sounds may be totally in your wheelhouse, there are a lot of other things that go into being able to sell your libraries. And that’s the end goal, right?
Happy Holidays to all of you editors, mixers, engineers, recordists, professionals, prosumers, students, freelancers, and everyone in between. Whether you want to impress a special sound/post production person in your life or you work in the sound world and are having trouble filling out your holiday wish list we have you covered!
I went back and forth about whether to write this post. I hope that I’m a good boss, but I’ll leave that to those who work with me here at Boom Box post. But, I can say with certainty that I’m always trying to become a better boss.
Job interviews are a challenge. As much as you know you deserve the job, those interviewing you do not (yet). A job interview is a sales pitch; the product you are selling is yourself. No worries, you know yourself really well! You just need to bring your story forward in the best way possible.
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.
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.
In this blog series we will be surveying our Boom Box Post team on different audio tools and equipment in hopes to help you decide if the chosen products are worth it or not! Up first, Pro Tools Ultimate!
Before audio post-production was even a possibility, composers would incorporate the emotion and the action of what they saw on the screen into their musical scores. They played the role of sound FX editor and composer, with a technique referred to as “Mickey-Mousing” where the composer would exaggerate a character’s movements with specific orchestration and musical motives. Now that sound FX editors have taken this role in post-production, Mickey-Mousing is less common, so it’s key for sound FX editors to make cuts that work with the music in the overall mix for a film or tv-show. Here are some considerations and tips that our team shared on their approach to editing with music in mind.
