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 Design
Creating sound effects from a musical angle adds a unique and fun energy to your design. Building effects, either momentary or sequential, can be made all the more engaging if their basis is a musical one, especially in animation. That being said, balance is key when approaching sound effect design from a musical perspective.
Creature vocal sound design and creature movement sound design is an essential part of creating believable and immersive worlds in film, television, and video games. It involves creating unique vocalizations for fictional creatures, ranging from terrifying beasts to friendly aliens, as well as translating where this creature comes from, what type of body it has and its size.
Often times, we’re faced with the task of designing sounds that track the movements of certain on screen visuals. These sounds need to be continuous, reactive, and dynamically pitched; imagine a car weaving in and out of traffic. It accelerates, then gradually slows down, eventually swerving out of the way of an oncoming semi-truck. Maybe you have a character wielding a magical sword; swinging it through the air at varying speeds and veracity while emitting a sparkly blue glow. These types of scenarios need a convincing sound that coincides with the every movement of the character or prop.
Weaponiser, a plugin from Krotos, was created to assist in the building of gunshot effects, but with a better understanding of how to use it, Weaponiser can be beneficial to all kinds of builds from customizing a one time effect to providing slight alterations to repeated sound events. Using Weaponiser you can even quickly build a multi character Foley Libraries!
Recently we published a blog that listed classic toon sound effects and the emotion they convey to the audience. Our hope was that it would be a helpful tool for anyone stuck in the editorial process. This is part 2! Continue reading to find out how our editors approach the following emotions with classic toon sound effects: Scared, Disgust, Love, and Bored.
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.
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!
Constructing a portfolio reel for the first time can be daunting, but it’s an effective method to show recruiters and potential employers your skill set in post-production audio editing. I noticed in my own job search that many employers encourage and even require them. While many audio-post production internships or college programs can offer helpful guidance for building portfolio reels, not everyone has these resources. So, here are four tips for making your portfolio reel.
With the changing of the seasons comes a whole new world of sound. So, let’s discuss some key summertime sounds to keep an ear out for and record to bulk up your SFX library this time of year!
One of the most challenging sequences a sound editor can face is a car chase. Vehicles are tough. Even the most experienced designer can hit a wall when trying to make them work. This is by no means a complete guide, however, this primer should prove helpful for those looking to dip their toes into the wild world of vehicle sound editorial.
Sound effects editor Brad Meyer is always designing amazing effects with unique builds and altering plugins. This week, well chat with him about a steady and pass by effect he created for a super fast running animal.
Dynamics processing is valuable for many kinds of audio work. Compressors, Limiters and Transient Shapers have become so ubiquitous that you would struggle to find a piece of recorded music, film or television show where one of these tools was not used. These processes have applications for the sound editor as well, allowing you to control dynamics in your own recorded sound effects or beef up a key element in a build for a big moment. In this basic overview, I’m going to talk about a specific plug-in for the three types of processing mentioned above, but the principles discussed here can apply to any manufacturer’s software, or even hardware tools.
The SiFi genre offers up so much creativity from a visual aspect but also opens up a lot of potential for cool sound design. This week, we will chat with sound editor Tess Fournier about a futuristic disintegration design she created.
An essential tool for editorial and sound design, in my opinion, is a graphic pitch and time shifting plugin. Waves SoundShifter Graphic audio suite plugin allows you to load the waveform of a clip you have selected and simultaneously manipulate pitch and time in whatever way you so choose by placing points along the linear graph. This can be very useful for a multitude of applications. I personally tend to use it most to accelerate and decelerate vehicle steadies, easily create variation in sounds that will be repeated without them sounding so repetitive, create movement and fluctuation, or even get wild sometimes and make something more abstract.
This month, I wanted to continue challenging our interns to improve their recording skills and get creative so I devised a recording assignment that would require them to think outside the studio! Each intern selected 2 sound effects from a list of easy to record materials(basic foley props, things around the office) and 2 from a list of harder to record sounds(nature ambience, elevator doors, quiet sounds, etc). Colin and Dilery both did an awesome job, so lets hear about their results!
Timeflux is a specialized sound design synthesizer that runs standalone. The program focuses on stretching, morphing and processing spectral effects for sound design. Similar to most specialized software, you really have to play and experiment with it to really understand to program; TimeFlux is no different. To better understand this program, I asked my colleagues for the favorite hard sound effect and see what I could create.
For this month's Inside Sound Design post I met with Brad Meyer again, to talk more about the exciting vehicle sound effects he creates.. Brad spends a lot of his time designing exciting, signature sound effects for his shows, especially vehicles, using both custom recordings and sound library material. This time we talked about a unique semi-truck vehicle, and it’s exciting transformation sequence.
Go behind the scenes of the Mutant Apocalypse arc of Nickelodeon’s CG Animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series with this story of how Boom Box Post created the sound of the post apocalyptic Shellraiser vehicle by custom recording Executive Producer Ciro Nieli’s vintage Mustang.
