The Boom Box Post blog provides insights into the creative sound design process of Boom Box Post's owners and employees.
Daylight savings time is upon us. Not the fun 'bonus hour of sleep' daylight savings, but the 'where did that hour go?' daylight savings. After the promise of resolutions and new beginnings that come with the first few months of the year, here we are in March and it's easy to find ourselves running into creative blocks and falling into old patterns. Here are some small changes that I've found made a big difference in my creative output.
Sound is an essential part of all of our lives. It allows us to communicate with others via speech, it helps us to sense imminent danger, and it affords us the enjoyment and entertainment of music. But, how does sound make its way from vibrations in the air to our own auditory perception which we can easily identify and translate? Our bodies are miracles of science, and the answer to that question is fascinating.
This past Saturday was the Motion Picture Sound Editors 63rd annual Golden Reel awards. Nominated for three series, we decided to make a night of it and took the whole crew! To our delight and surprised, it turned out this was our year to bring home the trophy, winning Best Sound Editing: Sound Effects, Foley, Dialogue and ADR Animation in Television for Nickelodeon's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. We are very humbled to be honored amongst so many wonderful nominee and proud to be celebrating our company's first industry award. Here are some photos of our fantastic evening at the Golden Reel awards.
Traditionally, Foley--or footsteps, cloth movements, and the handling of small props--is performed and recorded live to picture and later cleaned and edited to be sent to the mix. In recent years, with the development of new technologies, Digital Foley is now available as an alternative to traditional Foley, and it is how the Boom Box Post team covers the footsteps for many of our current projects.
Cut Notes, by Digital Rebellion is an iPad note taking app that works seamlessly with digital audio workstations like Pro Tools as well as many non linear editors. I've mentioned the app in previous blog posts; discussing its time-saving application in my day to day workflow as well as naming it one of Boom Box Post's Top 5 iPad apps for sound designers.
I utilize Cut Notes by syncing the app over WiFi with Pro Tools. As my timeline moves, so goes the timecode on the app, printing precise locations on each note in real time. I find this especially useful for client spotting sessions. Once complete, my workflow involves me copying the text from Cut Notes and pasting it into a google doc for the specific episode or project. These docs are shared with the appropriate editors on my team, giving them pristine location-based notes to follow as they work (it also saves them from having to interpret my chicken scratch hand writing).
Being such a fan, I decided to reach out to the app's developer, Jon Chapell with a few questions about the app, and plans for its future.
At Boom Box Post, we are always doing our best to meet new content creators who are just beginning their professional journey. Not only are their projects incredibly fun and inventive, but we often get to walk them through the process of post-production sound for the first time. For even the most seasoned artists, writers, or producers, this can be daunting territory the first time around.
The following is a primer designed to introduce new content creators to post-production sound. It's an incredibly fun process and the final step in creative story storytelling before your content reaches viewers.
I've been a fan of Native Instruments plugins for years. For sound design and music, I find their software hard to beat. In particular, I was a huge fan of KORE, their "sound machine" that had the a very useful FX processing mode, allowing the user to run any source sound through it's many amazing effects chains. Some of these chains, sold in bundles of 'effects packs' were extremely powerful and very intricately constructed. Many posts on my old Sounds Like Jeff blog refer to my use of KORE for original sound design. So naturally I was bummed when NI discontinued the product, I suspect to make way for MASCHINE, it's flagship product for the future.
Last night, nominations for the 2016 Motion Picture Sound Editor's Golden Reel Awards were announced. Alongside a comprehensive list of top industry talent, Boom Box Post was acknowledged for their work on three separate titles within the Best Sound Editing: Sound Effects, Foley, Dialogue and ADR (Television Animation) category.
We are beyond excited to accept the nominations for Supervising Sound Editor Jeff Shiffman and his crews on Half Shell Heroes and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as well as Kate Finan and Jessey Drake for their work as dialogue and sound effects editors on Penn Zero: Part-Time Hero.
The study of the interaction between how our ears and brain respond to sound is called psychoacoustics or sound perception. As audience members, we can perceive a sound as being a pleasing experience or not and anywhere in between. But, this perception isn't formed merely by using our ears. The connections between our ears, brain, and nervous system let us feel the effects of sound with our entire body. This concept of physically hearing and psychologically perceiving sound helps to connect us to the television show, movie, or video game we might be enjoying.
A few months back, an episode of Nickelodeon's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles presented us with a stone cold challenge. In The Moons of Thalos 3, the gang encounters a bunch of Ice Dragons. We decided to get some custom ice recordings in order to give these creatures lots of original character.
Few people would truly describe themselves as a level-headed business person and innovative creative mind. It’s difficult to wear both hats well. As sound designers, we pride ourselves in approaching design challenges from new and exciting angles and using our creativity to elevate projects from ordinary to spectacular. We don’t generally relish wearing the business hat. Yet, most of us would still like to get paid.
That’s the crux--how do you set a price for something you love to do? The answer is: quite simply. Follow these seven steps, and you’ll find out how.
Have you ever attempted to record a prop, only to find that a small tweak creates an entirely different sound than you were going for? Sure a creaky door sounds like a creaky door, but what else can it sound like? How about hearing something while out and about that triggers your creativity? With the right tweaks, that bird would be a super cool laser blast!
As sound professionals, our ears are always open. Creatively, these discoveries can be the most exhilarating part of the job. I challenged the team here at Boom Box Post to come up with some of their favorite 'smoke and mirror' sound design moments; creating sounds from unexpected sources.
We've had an incredible year at Boom Box Post and want to say a giant thank you to all of our clients, friends, and blog readers! Day after day, we find ourselves feeling thankful for the opportunity to add our zany sounds to such amazing content. We wish you all peace, love, and joy in the new year!
Dialogue is king. To perfectly record dialogue, especially for film, has been the common goal amongst dialogue recordists and recording engineers since the birth of audio recording in the early 1900s. In working as a dialogue editor, it is a constant journey to adapt to the ever-changing market of audio recording gear. When considering building your own voice-over chain, there are many available options. Here, I’ve narrowed it down to just a few.
In the world of freelance sound design, it's likely you will be hired to do a job remotely. The internet allows us to share our talents on all kinds of projects without ever meeting face to face. The advantage here is a vast network of sound professionals that can very easily utilize your services. Here’s the downside; short of a few email exchanges, you are communicating skill and professionalism entirely through your completed work.
On the most basic level, a lot can be said by how your sessions are laid out. Experienced editors know that following a few basic steps to ensure compatibility and expediency down the line proves not only helpful, but a very succinct way of showing you know what you’re doing. Expanding on a previous post I wrote about "thinking downstream," (i.e. thinking beyond yourself to each subsequent step in the post audio workflow) here a few basics tenets of smart sound editorial layout which will scream THIS IS THE WORK OF A PROFESSIONAL and help set you apart from the pack.
People often ask us why we choose to work in such a niche market, sound for animation, and for us the answer is simple. Live action sound design has its own challenges and rewards, but more often than not, you're recreating the sounds of the real world. While working in the animated realm, week after week we get to work inside imagined worlds, create sounds for unknown creatures, and image futuristic technology conceived in the minds of the world's most fantastic artists. These new worlds give us the opportunity to use ever-evolving sound design techniques to breathe life into them.
We found such a technique when the software developers from Digital Brain Instruments approached us with the opportunity to create new presets for their stand-alone application, Voxpat, which is a newly release sound design tool for creating monster, creature, and robot vocals.
We were so excited to give a talk at this year's Creative Talent Network Animation Expo in Burbank. The talk started with a brief history of sound for animation (a lot of which you can find expertly boiled down here) followed by an overview of the post sound process from beginning to end. We finished up with some video demos of the different layers of sound in our work as well as some of the fun instruments and props we have recorded over the years.
We hoped the panel would prove interesting to content creators looking for information on how to approach the sound process for their own work. To our pleasant surprise (this was our first time doing this after all) the turnout was incredible! The room was filled to capacity and we were bombarded with fantastic questions from a very energetic crowd.
Without question, location recording is the most difficult part of the process of making sound effects. Selecting the right location is just as important as what you will record there. Environments shape your sound. Be sure to select a location with your ears and not with your eyes.
Here are a few things to consider when planning your next field recording:
The entertainment industry is hard. There are precious few jobs and far too many applicants to be a viable career option. Yet the crowds keep arriving. Hopeful applicants with a dream of making a life for themselves in the entertainment industry. I was one of them. I moved from Detroit to Los Angeles in a fifteen foot truck (which my wife and I accidentally set on fire in the hills of Colorado, but that’s another story). Waiting for me was an unpaid internship at a music video and commercial production company. Nothing even close to what I was looking for career-wise, but who cared? I was on my way! Wrong. Like anything in life, a successful career path takes forethought, careful planning and execution. Here are my five tips for putting yourself on the right path.
In the 1920’s and 1930’s, recording equipment was extremely large and heavy, rendering it impossible to take outside of the studio. Unable to record sound effects in the real world, the studios were forced to invent new approaches to creating sound for their animated content. Thus, two different approaches to sound effects were quickly developed.
