To help with our continually growing and evolving business, we have had the pleasure of bringing on a new team member: Assistant Editor & Office Manager, Jacob Cook. Jacob's smiling face will now be the first thing that you see when you enter our doors, and we are exciting to add someone with such joyful enthusiasm for sound to our crew.
As a recent graduate of Cal Poly Pomona's Bachelor of Arts in Music with an emphasis in music industry studies, he comes to us with a great base knowledge of recording techniques and a true passion for post-production sound. He shares this passion on a bi-weekly basis through his own personal sound blog, which you can follow here.
When my business partner, Jeff Shiffman, and I first conceived of Boom Box Post, we had one main goal: to integrate creativity into our overall business approach. We’ve seen other “creative” workspaces that have ping pong tables, communal lounge areas, and even designated nap rooms. But none of those things help with the question of being creative under time constraints. If anything, spending your time playing ping pong to “loosen up ideas” has the opposite effect. You may come up with something new, but then you also may be too behind on your workload to actually implement it.
Here are the five steps we took to create an environment conducive to allowing our editors to be creative in a time crunch:
This past weekend I traveled to a fascinating location I’d been reading about for several months, the Salton Sea, CA. The area is ripe with images of urban decay, isolation and surprisingly, tranquility. My goal was to capture some of these characteristics with sound.
As you might have read in our previous blog post How Do Ears Work?, our brains use our ears to derive sounds from detected frequencies. These frequencies are natural occurring vibrations that enter our ears where they are then processed into what we perceive as sounds. But what exactly are these frequencies? And how do they work?
We recently discovered the wonders of SLACK here at Boom Box Post. On the surface, Slack seems like a basic messaging platform, not much to dig into. However, once we did dig in, we realized the potential power of such a streamlined platform. Slack's tagline is "Be Less Busy." And that's the real draw here. Finding ways to communicate better and faster can be such a time saver. Here's how we at Boom Box Post utilize Slack to its fullest in our Post Production workflow.
One of the major hurdles of becoming a sound effects editor is learning your library. This means knowing what keywords to search in a given situation as well as building up a mental catalogue of "go-to" sounds.
While it is always a good idea to start by looking at the picture and then thinking of descriptive words to search, it helps if you know which words will yield the best results. This is where onomatopoeia enters the scene. Onomatopoeia is defined as the formation of a word from a sound associated with what is named (e.g. cuckoo, sizzle). Following is a beginner's guide to onomatopoeic sound effects search words. Some of these terms can be found in any dictionary, and some are unique to sound effect library naming conventions.
With three nominations, we were very excited to attend the Daytime Emmy Awards this past Friday evening. The event was massive and the team had such a great time celebrating together. Adding to the fun, we brought home the gold with our first Emmy win for Outstanding Sound Mixing - Animation for Nickelodeon's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
A huge congratulations to DJ Lynch and Jeff Shiffman from Boom Box Post as well as our fellow honorees, the fantastic dialogue mixing team of Justin Brinsfield, Matt Corey and Manny Grijalva from Nickelodeon. We are so thrilled to play our part in this amazing series and couldn't be happier than to grab a win for TMNT!
This week I challenged the team to create their own audio "Rube Goldberg" machines. If you aren't familiar with the concept, a Rube Goldberg machine is
"...a contraption, invention, device or apparatus that is deliberately over-engineered to perform a simple task in a complicated fashion, generally including a chain reaction. The expression is named after American Cartoonist and inventor Rube Goldberg"
Thanks Wikipedia! In addition to imagining and executing their sequence of events with sound, I also asked that everyone give me a visual representation to include in this post. Granted, we are all audio people for a reason. That said, I'm really impressed with all the work here BOTH audio and visual. I hope you enjoy these fantastic Boom Box Post Rube Goldberg machines!
There’s nothing worse than having your show fail quality control due to a tiny tick in the dialog. What a silly thing to reject an entire episode for! But sadly, it happens. And once the QC operator finds one tick, suddenly they are hearing ticks and clicks everywhere in your mix. Fortunately we now have tools to easily pre-empt such rejections before they even have a chance. Just combine iZotope RX and some AudioSuite handles and you’re good to go!
Working in post audio has been an excuse to purchase all kinds of audio toys. As one of my good friends once observed, I seem to suffer from G.A.S. (Gear Acquisition Syndrome). I've spent years building up an arsenal of tools to add to my creative routine, pining over the latest and greatest software, synthesizer or control interface. That said, as I grow older and more patient, I have narrowed my focus.
Which brings me to the Avid Artist Control. It had been a while since I invested in something new and frankly, I was feeling some gear-based FOMO. So I researched like crazy (a big part of the fun for me) and decided to go for it. As it turns out, this little piece of gear packs a huge punch in my day to day workflow. Here's how I've customized this beauty to utilize it's very deep skill set.
We've all been there: all year long, we pine for a vacation and some time to ourselves. But then when an unsolicited break from work arrives, we spend the entire time stressing about all the work we're not doing, or about whether or not a new project will come along, and we forget to enjoy it. Furthermore, when we start back again, it's as if we have forgotten how to do our jobs.
After eleven years in the business of seasonal sound work, I've developed some skills as to how to take a break from work and come back fresh (instead of reeling to catch up). I'd love to share them with you:
We get questions all the time about breaking into the industry. Some of the best tips come from our editors themselves and their interesting stories. With a background in film, sound and music, sound editor Brad Meyer joined the team back in October of 2015. His work for Boom Box Post has since garnered nominations for both a MPSE Golden Reel and Daytime Emmy. Here's a chance to get to know Brad and how his particular background lead to our doorstep.
We are thrilled to be a part of this year's Daytime Emmy celebration with three nominations for Boom Box Post!
We received a nod for our work on Nickelodeon's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the category of Outstanding Sound Mixing - Animation, as well as a nomination each for TMNT and Half Shell Heroes in the category of Outstanding Sound Editing - Animation.
A few weeks ago, we wrote a blog post about how the human ear works, and that inspired me to dive deeper into the section about the brain; specifically, psychoacoustics. The study of psychoacoustics, as defined by Merriam-Webster, is “a branch of science dealing with the perception of sound, and the sensations produced by sounds.” Essentially, psychoacoustics is how your brain perceives sound, and if used correctly, it can be an incredibly powerful tool in a sound designer’s arsenal.
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.
