Backgrounds. Ambiences, the rarely heard but most definitely felt, unsung heroes of the post-production sound world. Without ambiences, scenes and designs feel empty. I could have went with a discussion about the design of some next level insectoid-servo-monster-hybrid-machine, but I feel like in order to get to that level of creativity you need a solid foundation. Not only in your skills as a sound editor or designer but in the overall build of your production. And that foundation, my sound design brethren, are backgrounds or BGs for short.
What do you get when you add five sound designers, a handful of audio plugins and one amazingly unique sounding ape? This week we decided to get the entire crew involved with a fun sound design challenge. On a recent visit to the Los Angeles Zoo, my wife got a fantastic recording of Gibbons on her iPhone. If you're not familiar with the gibbon (I wasn't until we heard them from clear across the zoo), they are a species of Ape with a large throat sack that makes incredibly unusual (and loud) sounds. This recording captured a bunch of different tones and seemed like the perfect jumping off point for creative sound design. Each member of the crew was tasked with creating an original sound effect from this recording.
You may have heard the exciting news that Boom Box Post owner Jeff Shiffman and his wife, Corey, have welcomed a new baby boy into their family. Theodore "Teddy" Shiffman was born on May 29th, and Jeff has spent the last few days getting him settled in at home and starting to enjoy his new family of four.
So, in the spirit of new babies, below is a re-post of one of Jeff's personal sound blogs from just after his first child, Eloise, was born. You can find the original on Sounds Like Jeff or continue reading for a full re-post. Here's to growing families and sleep-filled nights! Enjoy!
Last week, I was tasked with designing the sound of a new character for a show. She is a fast-moving wild cat, and the spotting session called for her to sound incredibly speedy, but also fairly natural. She needed to be able to race past the other characters with astonishing velocity, leaving them in a trail of her dust.
My inspiration: jet bys! I wanted to create something from scratch that had the same effect of super speed as a jet by but was made from different sonic elements. I played around with different ideas of what sound her quickly cycling legs would make as they rushed past, thinking that focusing on this aspect would give an added level of interest to the sound. I considered using multi-swishes, speeding up her footfalls, etc. But, in the end, I settled on using a helicopter blade wop to express this idea. It had the perfect amount of high-frequency overtones to really cut through a mix, and also had the repetitive whooshing nature that I was looking for.
At Boom Box Post, we try to take the time to meet with nearly everyone who asks: be it for an interview or a to give career advice to a young editor. Among the most inspiring parts of interacting with those who are new to the profession are the questions they pose that cause us to look again at our job with fresh eyes (and ears!). One of these questions which was posed to me by a recent audio school graduate was, "What should I do to prepare myself to be an editor?" My answer, "Start listening."
Unlike visuals of which we take constant notice, sound is often an unnoticed undercurrent in our lives. Ask yourself: when you tell a story to a friend, do you describe what you saw or what you heard? Most likely, you focus on the visuals. Now think about how hearing a sound from your childhood can suddenly thrust you back to the emotions from that time in your life. Sound can be an incredibly powerful storytelling device.
Yesterday I came across a sound design challenge I've faced a handful of times. I needed electrical crackling/humming sounds (think Tesla coil). The sequence required both a steady sound as well as some fast whooshing of these sounds by the camera. I have needed these sounds enough times that I decided it was time to try and create them from scratch instead of using some old standbys.
To start, I needed a really great warm humming sound. My first thought was to get up and see what kind of sounds my light bulbs were making. Trying to find this in my lamps proved fruitless because as it turns out, we have gone through a handful of lightbulbs (requiring a number of trips to Home Depot by our Boom Box Post interns) to avoid just such a noise in our editorial rooms. As I headed to our storage room to try and dig up some of the noisier light bulbs we had rejected, I heard a loud noise coming from the kitchen. As luck would have it the compressor for our water cooler was freaking out and making quite a racket. I grabbed my Sony PCM-M10 portable recorder and ran to the kitchen.
A recent challenge had me wanting to create some new writhing/wriggling/squishing sounds. I dug up some very old recordings I had done of my mouth when it was really dry. They were decent recordings, but by themselves they really only work for exactly what they are, a character opening and closing a very dry mouth. I knew there was a lot of good texture and variance in there, but the performance was all spread out. I could spend my time chopping it up and trying to make something of it in editorial, but I decided to break out a new tool in my arsenal.
Samplr is an app for the iPad that I recently discovered. It's a multi-mode sampler that you can record directly into (useful for on the fly recordings) or import directly into from a variety of sources (I'm using dropbox). As an iPad app, Samplr is inherently touch based, which is what makes it so powerful.
Jeff and I recently had the pleasure of working on a fantastic animated project that featured an incredibly vibrant city park filled with pets. There were dogs, horses, cats, sheep--you name it. When Jeff met with the creator, she expressed that she loved the idea of having human vocalizations covering the main pets on screen. Jeff and I completely agreed since it really spoke to the hand-made, warm, and contemporary feeling of the animation.
In fact, we loved the idea so much that we decided to create our own custom sound effects for all of the animals using just our own voices and a microphone. Thus began what I now like to think of as The Day Our Neighbors Realized We Were Completely Crazy.
