The Boom Box Post blog provides insights into the creative sound design process of Boom Box Post's owners and employees.
For a team challenge this week, I thought it would be fun to give everyone an onomatopoeia sound as a jumping off point for creative sound design. No rules. Just create a sound inspired by the following phrase:
Wheeeeeeeeee-Sha-BLAWNG
I asked that everyone 'show their work' and type up a few words about how they went about inventing these new sounds. Here are each designer's take and the final sound effects.
As sound designers, we're often drawn to talking and writing about our latest endeavors in creating new and interesting sounds from scratch. We blog about just such occasions all the time here at Boom Box Post, like when we recorded our own alien vocals or I created the sound of a submarine moving through blood vessels with a contact microphone in my bathtub.
But, it's important to remember that sometimes the most successful sound design isn't born of invention, but instead of perfectly matching just the right sound from the real world.
A while back, I was asked to “stretch my creativity” a bit and record some original sounds for a new series here at Boom Box Post. My objective: create a fresh take on the classic “rubber stretch.” We wanted something new and different that still inspired the same feelings of tension and impending release that the classic balloon rubbing/cable twisting has. I ended up working with a recording of my finger running along the sticky side of a strip of packing tape.
Film is a collaborative medium. We all know this. However, when it comes down to the day to day grind of sound editorial it's very easy to get caught up in the time crunch or creative rabbit holes, ignoring where the work is heading; the mix stage. This is a major mistake. As a sound supervisor, I value collaboration just as much as I do the creative output of my team. And there's a lot that can be done every step of the way to support collaboration in the post sound world. That's why I preach one simple philosophy; think like a mixer.
Take this quiz to see if you can guess the original sound used to create these newly designed ones! How do you think we made this dragon snarl: a human fart or a mustard squirt? Can you decipher the origin of each sound? Submit your best guesses to see the real answers.
This week, we brought the entire team together to record alien walla (otherwise known as group vocals) for an upcoming season premiere episode. Jeff is the real performer in the group, but after seeing how much fun he had at the mic, the rest of us were game to jump into the spotlight, too. Check out this fun video montage of our raw performances!
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.
Vocal processing is one of my favorite challenges. It's always a delicate balancing act to add enough treatment to shine through onscreen without covering up the nuances of the performance. Inventing new ways to treat dialogue is a blast but I also take great pleasure in trying to ape a classic vocal effect.
In an effort to recreate the treatment applied to C-3PO (from Star Wars you guys) my first thoughts were to apply a vocoding effect paired with a reverb based on a small space impulse response. I assumed it was a vocoder making the voice robotic and a reverb placing the voice inside the robot itself. In listening closely and experimenting, it turns out I was half right.
When asked by Plugin Alliance to test their newest noise reduction/reverb removal plug-in, accusonus ERA-D, my first thought was that de-noise/de-reverb is possibly the least sexy category of plug-in on the market.
However, I have to say that after putting accusonus ERA-D through its paces, it is, in fact, quite sexy.
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.
With the new demands of our expanding business, we have had the pleasure of bringing another talented editor on as part of our team, Jessey Drake. She comes to us with both a master's degree in sound design from The State University of New York at Fredonia, but also years of experience in animation sound editorial. To get to know her a little better, we asked her a few fun questions.
One challenge any modern business owner will inevitably face is data sharing and storage. It's not sexy. In fact, it's super unsexy. However big data is a fact of life and in post-production we collect A LOT of data. So I'm going to throw caution to the wind and dive right in. At Boom Box Post we've gone through a few iterations. Here's how (through trial and error) we solved our big data issues.
This was Boom Box Post's first time attending Comic-Con International: San Diego, and it was spectacular! Jeff and I reveled in the cosplay (and crossplay) photo ops, met amazing visual artists on the floor, attended panels for Disney's Penn Zero: Part-Time Hero and Star vs the Forces of Evil and Nickelodeon's TMNT, saw Nickelodeon's The Loud House screened for an audience of insanely enthusiastic children, and schmoozed with all of our favorite clients and friends from the past ten years. It was an incredibly overwhelming, fantastically fast-paced, whirlwind of a weekend. Check out some photo highlights below, and don't forget to read the captions to get the full experience. We'll see you all again next year!
Unlike in the past, degrees in audio engineering are now quite common, and many universities have added bachelor's as well as master’s degree programs for the specific professional niche of sound design. However, while these programs may teach the latest software and philosophize masterfully about the effects of sound on the human subconscious, surprisingly few degree tracks include the necessary knowledge of how to acquire actual work upon graduation.
In order to best understand the business of getting a job in sound design, you must first understand the types of employment available to you. Although these opportunities may be divided into two categories for tax purposes (independent contractor vs employee), I would like to further divide them into three in order to make important distinctions in business responsibilities in addition to the financial ones.
I've been proselytizing about the wonders of working with an iPad in my sound design career for years. More than just an excuse to get a new Apple product every few years (which admittedly it is), my creativite output and productivity have increased 10 fold with this device. As a tool in the studio, an iPad isn't necessarily cheap, but thes apps all clock in under $30. Compared to stand alone soft synths and plugins, all of these are a steal. Here are my favorite apps and some ways I like to utilize them.
In today's digital age, what better place to look for professional resources than the internet? Not only is the internet probably the most abundant collection of useful information, it is also the most accessible given the fact that we already spend nearly all day tethered to a computer, smartphone, or tablet. Why not take a quick break from your work and learn something of use rather than perusing the latest cat vids (although I am by no means against wonderfully indulgent cat videos)? Below are my absolute favorite online resources for sound designers. They span the breadth of online content from sound effects library downloads, technical support forums, mixing videos, and even mini documentaries to keep you current on the latest movie sound design trends. Enjoy, and internet away!
I often find myself creating custom effects as well as discovering hidden gems deep within my library. Sometimes I will go to look for a specific sound and stumble upon an awesome sound which is so randomly labeled, I know I will never be able to find it again. Now maybe you have a photographic memory or an astounding talent for remembering trivial file names. If so, this post probably isn’t for you. But if you’re like me, and memory just isn’t what it used to be, here’s a bit of advice on how I handle labeling my library.
With the new demands of our expanding business, we have had the pleasure of bringing another talented editor onto our team. Her name is Tess Fournier, and she comes to us with a great amount of technical knowledge from her previous employment and a passion for animation sound. To get to know her a little better, we asked her a few fun questions.
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.
