When the team from Nickelodeon's Albert walked through our doors, they presented us with a great sound design challenge - bring a rich world of talking, walking plants to life with sound. Nickelodeon’s first original animated TV movie tells the story of a tiny fir tree named Albert and his plant friends overcoming all kinds of obstacles (like a Christmas hating cactus) as they journey to the big city. The rich animation of these plants - bouncing around in their pots, foliage and needles flying, trunks bending - is extremely detailed and impressive. Now it was our job to provide the proper sonic support. With the use of digital foley, we had just the tool for the job.
In our BBP blog, we spend a lot of time talking about how to make cool sounds and when to cut those sounds. But, there's one key element to artful sound design that we don't often talk about: when not to cut any sound. I'm not talking about utter silence. I'm talking about choosing which moments you highlight with sound and which you allow the picture alone to carry. And how do you decide? This question is often one of the biggest issues that new and seasoned editors alike have and one that gets surprisingly little attention.
We've been doing a lot of recording around the studio recently and I have been inspired at the wide array of sounds the Boom Box editors are capable of creating from their own bodies! To showcase a few of these(and have some fun recording) I asked each editor to perform some kind of sound effect they could create from their person. They vary from disgusting bodily functions to to fascinating foley material and I hope you all enjoy them as much as I have!
Water is a fascinating recording subject because it can create a huge variety of possible sounds! Splashing, gurgling, crashing, bubbling, trickling, dripping and draining are all useful as sound effects and design elements, but they can be challenging to capture if not prepared. I've assembled 4 tips for capturing evocative water sound effects, with examples to demonstrate. We've also bundled together a selection of these water recordings, which can be downloaded for free! See the link at the bottom of the post for details.
Here at Boom Box Post, we are lucky enough to work on an exceptionally large variety of animated shows. Each show has it’s own unique style and sound; some of our shows are more on the toony side, while others are incredibly realistic. Because of this, a large number of our shows take place in real places. In one of our newest shows, Mickey and the Roadster Racers, the characters take an adventure to a new place or city in almost every episode, which is what inspired me to write this blog post. Whether it is traveling to a new city in each episode in Mickey and the Roadster Racers, The Lion Guard in the African Savannah, or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in New York City, we often have the challenge of making a specific, genuine place sound accurate.
The first piece of advice I give any new sound editor is to get Pro Tools and learn the keyboard shortcuts. Forget proficiency in typing, that's child's play. In order to compete in the real world of post production sound, you need to be FAST. Knowing your way around the keyboard doesn't just shorten your workday, it tells the clients - who expect requests to be carried out quickly - that you are on top of your game.
Basic keyboard shortcuts - switching the tools, changing the view - need to be second nature. But with literally hundreds to learn, there's bound to be a few that have slipped through the cracks. Here are some of the best 'lesser-known' Pro Tools keyboard shortcuts to help speed up your workflow.
We've all been there, right? You're setting up a home studio, and notice that although you finally have all the right gear, your room is sounding less than optimal. Clap once, and you hear a ping-pong of reverberations that make your ears recoil and your heart sick. So, you look up acoustic panels only to find that they're priced for princes. In this post, I'll share with you how to make inexpensive yet high quality acoustic panels on your own.
To celebrate Halloween in gruesome style we came up with a unique challenge for our editors: Death by Sound Effect! To kick off the creativity, we asked the team to come up with bone-chilling, funny bone-tickling and gut-wrenching ways to die, and threw all of their ideas into a hat. Each participating editor was randomly assigned a form of savage expiration, and encouraged to be creative in their approach to a sound effect representative of that event.
The great thing about recording and designing sound effects is that source material is near infinite. Fortunately and unfortunately, having such an incredible variety of sound sources makes each new recording session a technical and creative challenge, requiring forethought and experience. One of the decisions we must make is the format in which we will capture the sound; mono, stereo, quad-surround, 5.1 surround and ambisonic are all valid options depending on the source at hand. Sound effects are most commonly captured in mono or stereo, and today we will compare several common stereo microphone techniques for field recording.
It's no surprise that parodies/homages of the games of my youth (those popular throughout the 80's) are starting to pop up in the shows I work on. In fact, they've been cropping into modern cartoons for pretty much my entire career. There are a few reasons for this. First (and most obvious) everything that is old is new again. Retro is always going to be hip, and we have been in a love affair with 'The Decade of Excess' for quite a while now. It's also true that a lot of the talent at the Executive Producer, Director and Head Writer level these days (those producing the content) land right square in that age group where these are the things they love from their youth as well. Lastly, however, you need to consider the style that comes with writing a video game sequence into your animated program. Most modern games both look and sound entirely realistic. So if, for example, you wanted the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to take a break and geek out over a video game together, what fun would it be to have them play something that looks and sounds like a feature film? The fun comes with the retro, both visually and sonically.
Over the past year, Jeff has written two excellent posts on sound effects editorial layout: Downstream: Valuable Sound Designers Think Like Mixers and Speak Volumes Through Well Organized Work. He's laid out the golden rules of sound editorial layout in an easy-to-follow manner, and I highly recommend reading both posts before this one.
But, even the clearest rules can be misinterpreted and scenarios that seems like exceptions can often arise. Even the most seasoned editor will encounter situations where he or she will wonder, "How do I know if this is the best layout?" Here, I want to address some common pitfalls that I've seen and help you to solve them.
This month's collaborative post dives into the everyday lives of the talented editors here at Boom Box Post. For this challenge I asked the editors to open their ears and listen to the sounds they take for granted everyday, and attempt to capture a unique window into their lives with sound. I sent each editor home with a small handheld recorder(unless they had their own) and encouraged them to capture a fresh take on a sound they hear in their daily lives. The results were exciting and surprising, let's take a listen!
Here at Boom Box I often find myself cutting chew effects for aliens, monsters, humans, animals, etc. I’m always looking for new crunches and lip smacks. For this week’s post I thought it would be fun to record my dog eating different foods and see what we could come up with!
Our first Glossary of Sound Effects post was so popular we decided it would be fun to expand on it. This time around we not only included more specific search terms, but also a handful of modifiers.
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.
![Death by [Sound Effect]: A Halloween Sound Design Challenge](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54813413e4b0034aade3a0bc/1477583620478-NXJOE06KIWZN6610ZHBX/skulls-623532.jpg)
