Although the term “sound design” has been around for nearly four decades--and the practice has been pursued for much longer--its use has only recently become nearly ubiquitous. A day cannot go by that I do not see #sounddesign appended onto the end of a multitude of tweets from around the world. We now have the invaluable website DesigningSound.org which distributes information about our community’s adventures, musings, and technical inquiries. And our own Boom Box Post blog often touts titles such as Creature Speech Sound Design Challenge or Smoke and Mirrors: Unexpected Sound Design Sources.
Why this sudden renaissance of the term “sound design”? This week, I decided to take a closer look at the history of the term, the differences in how it is used across the film and television, interactive and immersive media, and theater industries, and its use and abuse.
For this month's interview post I sat down with Brad Meyer, a sound effects editor here at Boom Box Post. Brad spends a lot of his time designing exciting, signature sound effects for his shows, especially vehicle sound effects, using both custom recordings and sound library material. Brad sat down with me to talk about his process for creating the signature sound effects for a demonic race car that is possessed by monsters.
Here at Boom Box Post we do a lot of wild sound effects recording. In the last year we’ve recorded props as varied as children’s ball pits, seed pods from trees, laser swords, metal impacts, metal screeches with dry ice, christmas lights, human and non-human screams, zombie moans, body drags, two different Ford Mustangs and of course: farts. We’ve used a wide variety of different equipment to accomplish these recording goals. For our most recent vehicle recording(blog post coming soon) we rented a few additional microphones and took advantage of the new gear to set up a brief microphone shootout. The microphones we compared were the Sennheiser MKH 8050, a compact super-cardiod condenser, the Sennheiser MKH 8060, a short shotgun based on the same capsule as the 8050 and the Neumann KMR 82i, a highly directional short shotgun. All three are popular choices for sound effects and film production recording. We wanted to test the timbre and character of each microphone as well as how they interacted with the acoustics in our edit bays. To test the mics we recorded a variety of sample material similar to the type of recordings we make.
The Morphoder is Waves' version of a vocoder. A vocoder combines two audio signals in a specific way to get a unique effect. Most commonly the vocoder is used to create robotic, alien, or other unusual sounding vocal or speech effects, but it can also be used as a sound design or musical tool as well ('musical', referring to other-than-speech or vocal uses). In this post, we're going to give a quick run-through of the plugin's GUI and parameters, then give a few examples of how it may be used. Hopefully after this intro, you'll be armed with some basic knowledge to start making your own vocoded creations!
Welcome back to our new series of monthly blog posts called Focus on the Creative! These posts will be formatted like a short and casual interview focusing on the topic of creativity and design in our daily work. This month I talked with award-winning sound effects and foley editor Tess Fournier to chat about her design for a retro-inspired sci-fi machine.
If you’re a creative working professional, it’s likely you don’t have time for your work-life to be a mess. Co-owning a sound design company, Boom Box Post, I quickly realized that simply skating by with a handful of half baked systems was not going to cut it. I needed help to be sure important threads both creatively and professionally did not get lost. Phone calls to return, projects to review, notes to give, even remembering to stand up (of course there’s an app for that). There's a lot to keep track of and a lot that can get lost.
A quick search in the Mac App Store for ‘productivity’ currently shows 158 results. There are a TON of tools out there to help you try and organize your life. Here are a few tools for Mac, iPhone and iPad with my thoughts on how I’ve used them to make my work life run smoother; leaving more time to focus on the creative.
Here at Boom Box Post we have an exciting internship program that runs throughout the year. During the program each of our 2 interns will shadow editors, record foley props and participate in a series of lessons encompassing the different sound services Boom Box provides. This includes dialogue editing, sound effects editing, mixing and more. For more information on our internship program click here. We collect applications year round and would love to hear from you!
Our newest class of interns began about a month ago and have done a great job learning about sound editing and recording as well as showing their passion for sound. We hope you enjoy this brief look into our program and our stellar interns: Liz Roman and Amanda Niles.
One of the most commonly misunderstood characteristics of digital audio is Sample Rate. Many argue about the relative merits or lack thereof when recording audio at 44.1khz, 48khz, 96khz and so forth, and the truth can be quite complicated. When it comes to recording sound effects however, it is quite clear that recording at a high sample rate can be provide serious benefits.
While Boom Box didn’t bring home a statue from the Daytime Emmys this year, we were humbled to have been honored with two nominations for our work on Ask the Storybots: Outstanding Sound Editing - Preschool Animated Program and Outstanding Sound Mixing - Preschool Animated Program. We were so proud to see our fellow Ask the Storybots nominees at JibJab, Gregg and Evan Spiridellis, bring in a win for Outstanding Interactive - Enhancement to a Daytime Program or Series! Congratulations to all Nominees and Winners, we hope to see you all again next year!
This week we’re kicking off a brand new series of monthly blog posts called Focus on the Creative. These posts will be formatted like a short and casual interview focusing on the topic of creativity and design in our daily work. To kick off the series I sat down with award winning sound effects editor Jessey Drake to talk about her design for a gigantic other-worldly laser weapon.
After buying our first home last year, my husband and I have been working hard at building our own home studio. In the past, every time we moved to a new apartment, we would always customize a home studio with our own DIY sound panels (see my blog post about that here). But since we plan to stay here forever, we have gone all out to make this studio space our own. And part of this customization has been soldering our own cables.
Today's blog post is a spotlight on audio tools. I'm using the word "tool" in a broad sense, to mean anything used in conjunction with a set of skills to accomplish work or goals. I've asked several Boom Box Post editors to tell me about their favorite tools used when working with audio. This could be a plug-in, a collection of sound effects, a microphone or even a technique they have learned or developed.
For my Lunch & Learn lesson I wanted to talk about something simple that everyone has most likely experienced in his or her daily life and during sound editing/designing. We’ve all heard it anytime we’ve walked down the street and heard an ambulance or police car passing by or maybe even an airplane. The point in time when you first hear the siren and the time when it has sped off into the distance sound different in pitch. I personnally get woken up everyday by hearing the Doppler effect of an airplane landing or taking off since I live 10 minutes away from an airport.
I've been in the industry long enough to notice some trends among successful sound editors. Those that stick around and do well for themselves, ensuring the longer term show placements, share a handful of characteristics. Here are some traits I've found have served all of us well here at Boom Box Post.
Sound effects editor Sunni Walker is a new addition to the Boom Box Post team. Sunni grew up in the bay area, graduated from LA Recording School, and funnels his passion for action and superhero films into his work on our shows.
One of the pillars of our creative learning environment here at Boom Box Post is our internship program. During the program our interns shadow editors, record foley props and participate in a series of lessons encompassing the different sound services Boom Box provides, such as dialogue editing, sound effects editing and mixing. For more information on our internship program click here. We collect applications year round and would love to hear from you.
As our current class of interns nears the end of their time here at Boom Box, we wanted to showcase their unique personalities and backgrounds. We hope you enjoy this brief look into our program and our fantastic interns: Madeline Kushner and James Singleton.
Here at Boom Box Post, we conduct monthly Lunch and Learn meetings where a rotating member of the team teaches a lesson to the rest of the studio. Whenever it is my turn to teach a Lunch and Learn lesson, I always try to rack my brain for a topic that I either don’t use on an everyday basis, or would personally like to learn more about. This month I chose Impulse Responses and Convolution Reverb.
I find this particular topic very interesting for a few reasons. First, it requires getting up out of that office chair! I’m always down for active and interactive audio experiences. Second, I love customizable audio options. It isn’t often that you find EXACTLY what you’re looking for, so the ability to create custom reverbs is always very useful. And lastly, it is a topic that I always knew about but have never personally done, so I figured diving right in was the best way to get a proper hands-on Convolution Reverb and Impulse Response experience.
We've been lucky enough here at Boom Box Post to be working on a lot of new series lately. And with new series, come main title sequences. The goal of any great main title is to stick in your head, typically achieved by a catchy, music-driven sequence. So where does that leave us sound designers? Sound effects can be infectious too! Here are some tips to help you succeed in getting sound effects into the next great main title sequence.
At Boom Box Post, we specialize in sound for animation. Although sonic sensibilities are moving toward a more realistic take, we still do a fair amount of work that harkens back to the classic cartoon sonic styles of shows like Tom and Jerry or Looney Tunes. Frequently, this style is one of the most difficult skills to teach new editors. It requires a good working knowledge of keywords to search in the library--since almost all cartoon sound effects are named with onomatopoeic names rather than real words like “boing”, “bork”, and “bewip”--an impeccable sense of timing, and a slight taste for the absurd.
I used to think that you were either funny or not. Either you inherently understood how to cut a sonic joke, or you just couldn’t do it. Period. But, recently, I began deconstructing my own process of sonic joke-telling, and teaching my formula to a few of our editors. I was absolutely floored by the results. It turns out, you can learn to be funny! It’s just a matter of understanding how to properly construct a joke.
The shocking conclusion of our 2 part vocal sound design challenge is here! In Part 1 we asked several BBP editors to perform a non-english vocalization, and tell us about the imagined creature that created it. For this post, we asked a few other BBP editors to process, twist and have fun with one of the clips in order to enhance the original vision. Not surprisingly, they favored the clips with a lot of low-end information, and especially enjoyed pitch-related processing. Check out the before and afters, plus each editors methods below!
