Sound effects editor Makenzie Kellerman is our newest addition to the Boom Box Post team. She received her Bachelor of Science n Audio Production from Middle Tennessee State University, and soon after moved to Los Angeles to pursue her dreams of working in post-production sound. After an internship and working as a sound effects editor and foley mixer on feature films, she found our way to us, and we couldn't be happier. She brings a sunny disposition and her dog Bowie with her each day to work. Here, she shares some of her thoughts with us.
For this month's collaborative post, I really wanted to challenge the team. I was inspired by the cooking show Chopped, wherein participants compete to create the best dish for a panel of judges, but are hindered by "mystery ingredients" that you would not normally want to cook with, like gummy worms or instant mashed-potatoes.
For this edition of Mystery Sound, I asked the team to create a magic spell sound effect. The catch is they had to incorporate this recording of a California Sea Lion in a prominent way, and explain how they did it!
At Boom Box Post we host monthly meetings that are followed by an educational lesson we call a “Lunch & Learn.” Topics include a wide variety of sound related skills from noise reduction to synthesis. One of our upcoming TV series features a number of unique race cars and hot rods, so we decided to step out of our comfort zone and into the fascinating world of multi-track vehicle recording. I partnered up with BBP sound effects editor Brad Meyer to take on this monumental task.
As sound editors and designers, it’s always fun to talk about the techniques and tools we use to create out-of-this-world effects. At Boom Box, we’re often teaching each other new plug-ins to broaden our “sonic toolbox” and take our work to new heights. All of these tools and tricks-of-the-trade are necessary for us to do our job, but it’s important to remember that our job is that of a storyteller. Everything we create (however we choose to create it) must support, and perhaps elevate the storyline. In my personal experience, I have found that the quality of my work shines when I allow the story to guide my decisions specifically when editing “toony” effects, backgrounds, and design.
We have been meeting with a lot of candidates lately, both for our internship program as well as to bulk up our freelance roster. In addition to sitting down for a chat or looking over resumes, Kate and I are reviewing a lot of work. Whether editors are aware of it or not, the work in these sessions speaks a lot to their experience level. I've written previously about how to properly present your work with the mixing endgame in mind. However, I haven't yet touched on a topic that time and again seems to need further discussion; how to properly cut backgrounds. Not so much on a technical level (when it comes to how we like to see backgrounds cut, Jessey Drake has already created a great practical guide right here on this blog). It's more an issue of what constitutes a background, an ambience or simply another sound effect. It seems like such a simple thing, but being able to distinguish these from one another and thus properly laying out these sounds seems to be the dividing line between experience and novice. Here are some tips on how to be sure your backgrounds are an asset rather than a liability.
We have just begun work on several new projects here at Boom Box Post, and it has jump-started a lot of conversations about how best to go about designing signature sounds. It’s one thing to chug along on a previously established television series (and not always an easy thing!), but it’s a different beast completely to be in charge of creating an entire new world from scratch. How do you manage your time? How do you commit to your choices? How do you know which sounds should be signature, and which should be filled in with your best stand-by library sounds? Here are my top five tips to help answer those dilemmas.
We had a great time returning to Comic Con again this year! We kicked off with the empowering Cartoon Creatives: Women Power in Animation panel, a discussion showcasing talented women and their experiences in animation. On Friday we were excited to see our work showcased at The TMNT Return to New York Panel and the Disney XD Penn Zero: Part Time Hero and The 7D panel. The creators of Future Worm and Pickle and Peanut kept us laughing all day long on Saturday with their antics, and we wrapped up the show with the first ever Boom Box Post Comic Con TweetUp. Thanks to everyone who came out to all of the exciting events this year! Enjoy some of these fun photos we took, and we look forward to seeing you all at Comic Con 2017!
Elastic audio. The myth, the hidden tool and treasure.
Looking at the various jobs in the business of Post Production sound, re-recording mixing seems to carry an air of mystique. It’s an intimidating task, even for an experienced sound editor, to make the jump to the console. There seems to be so much that can go wrong. So many small factors that need to be accounted for simply to make the gear work. It’s true, there are hundreds of details to be aware of, but with some basic tips we can pull back the curtain on some of the more daunting technical aspects, allowing you to put aside trepidation and make the gear work for you.
Unfiltered Audio’s newest plugin, Fault, has just been released, and it comes with high expectations. Plugin Alliance’s website (where you can download a full functional 14-day trial version or purchase the plugin outright) boasts Fault as a “new kind of effect,” a “pitch/mod tool [that] soothes the savage sound,” and the creator of “spectral modulation mayhem.” But what do those catchy phrases really mean? I dug into the new plugin to find out.
This week we challenged the team to create Sonic Branding Stings. These short clips are designed to create a fun and interesting sonic brand to help identify and showcase the company.
When it comes to vocal processing either for music or post production, engineers and producers have always needed an accessible way of augmenting their vocal tracks. iZotope’s VocalSynth ($199) is the new plugin that combines all the classic vocal sounds of the 80s and 90s. Whether you are trying to have your vocalist sound like Daft Punk, Michael Jackson, Imogen Heap, or T-Pain, or if you want to sound like an alien robot from Planet X, now you can. VocalSynth gives you the tools to do just that.
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!
