I worked on a project recently that had a giant wooden monster transformation. Here's how I designed it!
A few weeks ago, I sent out our intern Katie Maynard on a field recording mission to find record backgrounds and other cool sounds she came across. This week, our other intern Sam Busekrus was sent out on the same challenge but came back with much different sounds. Lets see what she came across!
I often times need to pitch dialogue on the mix stage. For this week’s blog post, I wanted to pit a few built in Pro Tools pitching plugins as well as some affordable alternatives against one another. Is there a one size fits all option for pitching? Do some plugins work better in certain situations than others? I’m not ashamed to say I had never taken the time to do a comprehensive head to head test until now. The results were very surprising.
A few weeks ago we talked with our intern Katie Maynard about her interest in film, audio, and what she is most excited about for her internship here at Boom Box Post. This week, we'll chat with our other intern Sam Busekrus to learn more about her and what she has enjoyed from the internship so far.
As described in a blog post a few weeks ago, our amazing Supervising Sound Editor and Co-owner Kate Finan has recently welcomed a beautiful new baby into the world! While she is enjoying her much-deserved time off, I have the privilege of filling in for her, and while I do sound work almost every day, I’ve gained a new perspective and appreciation for the sound process along the way. From editing sound effects and foley to overseeing the entire post-production sound process, here are some useful takeaways and tips from my time as a Lead Sound Editor.
Field recording in an always moving urban environment can be tough. As a way to push our interns skills, we sent them out to find different locations to record ambient backgrounds and cool sounds they come across. This week, lets listen to what sounds intern Katie Maynard was able to capture!
My husband and I are proud to announce that we have just had a lovely baby boy! I can't tell you his name, or really anything about him, since I'm writing this ahead of time in an attempt to spend as much of my maternity leave at home with my family as possible. But I think it's safe to say that I'm surely enjoying my time off!
While I'm reveling in the present, I thought this would be a wonderful time to take a look back at all of the great times we've had on this blog over the last few years. Jeff and I started this company almost four years ago, and beginning to blog was one of the very first things that we committed ourselves to. You'd think that beginning a successful post-production audio studio would be enough of a challenge, but creating a space on the internet where we could share our knowledge, trials, and discoveries was such a huge part of the ethos we wanted to create for our new company, that we didn't hesitate for one single week.
Jeff wrote a blog post about designing retro game audio using BFXR a while back, and since then I’ve frequently used that tool when I need to create interesting and nostalgic 8-bit game audio. Recently, however, I heard about an alternative tool called ChipTone, so I decided to check it to expand my toolbox a little.
Summer is here, and that means new interns have joined the team here at Boom Box Post! They've already started to learn from editors, record sound effects and have a lot more ahead of them. This week, we'll sit down with intern Katie Maynard to learn more about her and her interest in sound.
Here at Boom Box Post, we strive to design and create things that are unique. In this month’s Inside Sound Design, we talk with sound editor Tess Fournier about some cool creative vocal design she has been working on.
Creativity and talent are a huge part of being a professional sound editor. But our talents can only take us so far. I get questions all the time about finding work and have written another post specifically on how best to make this happen. Today however, I want to talk a bit about not just getting work as a sound editor but building a career. Because the way we approach our every day challenges can be just as important as the way we pour our creativity into them.
Earlier this week we orchestrated a mini monster-fest, recording an insane amount of monster vocalizations for a new series. We recorded almost everyone in the office performing a variety of sounds , giving direction as to the type of creature each person would be voicing and instructions on the types of sounds we needed. Not only was this a total blast, but it reminded me how powerful our own voices are as a tool for sound design. As a result, these are my top tips for creating and designing great monster vocal material!
An essential tool for editorial and sound design, in my opinion, is a graphic pitch and time shifting plugin. Waves SoundShifter Graphic audio suite plugin allows you to load the waveform of a clip you have selected and simultaneously manipulate pitch and time in whatever way you so choose by placing points along the linear graph. This can be very useful for a multitude of applications. I personally tend to use it most to accelerate and decelerate vehicle steadies, easily create variation in sounds that will be repeated without them sounding so repetitive, create movement and fluctuation, or even get wild sometimes and make something more abstract.
Plugin Alliance recently approached me to ask if I would like to try out one of Krotos’s newest plugins, the Reformer Pro. As a big fan of Dehumanizer by Krotos, which we previously blogged about using to create alien vocals, I quickly agreed.
Not able to wait until I had time to install the plugin and really dive in, I took a few minutes between clients at work and checked out the Krotos website to see what Reformer had to offer. What I found was this description:
Though I am fiercely passionate about all things animation audio (I wouldn’t be interning at Boom Box if I wasn’t), I share that zeal with another area of professional sound: Game Audio. On March 17th I boarded a Megabus and traveled up to San Francisco to attend the The Game Developers Conference, one of the the largest professional game industry events in the world. All aspects of the industry come to exhibit, network, and learn; from AAA to indie to student, all walks of life with varying experience and disciplines attend. In this talk I want to shine a light specifically on the tight-knit Game Audio community and a few of the many events that occurred.
Here a few ways in which the Game Audio community came together during GDC to educate and celebrate its communities.
In past blog posts we’ve discussed tips to effectively capture sound effects, methods for recording water and even how to create iPhone recordings on the fly. Today I wanted to offer some quick tips related to recording planning and recording effectively in the field. These habits can help elevate your recordings to the next level, creatively and organizationally.
This is not the sexiest blog post you will read this month. In fact, it’s probably the least sexy topic we’ll write about all year here at Boom Box Post. That said, it’s such an important one for anyone considering themselves a professional sound editor. A cluttered file structure is the equivalent of a messy home. Sure you can make do sorting through a mess, finding what you need after some intense searching. but why put yourself through it? Go to the container store, buy a pack of labels and some bins and get your stuff off the floor (I’m still on the messy house metaphor). So with that in mind, let me be your personal Peter Walsh (he is a professional organizer - I had to google it) as I help you to get your digital life in order.
This month, I wanted to continue challenging our interns to improve their recording skills and get creative so I devised a recording assignment that would require them to think outside the studio! Each intern selected 2 sound effects from a list of easy to record materials(basic foley props, things around the office) and 2 from a list of harder to record sounds(nature ambience, elevator doors, quiet sounds, etc). Colin and Dilery both did an awesome job, so lets hear about their results!
Timeflux is a specialized sound design synthesizer that runs standalone. The program focuses on stretching, morphing and processing spectral effects for sound design. Similar to most specialized software, you really have to play and experiment with it to really understand to program; TimeFlux is no different. To better understand this program, I asked my colleagues for the favorite hard sound effect and see what I could create.
For this month's Inside Sound Design post I met with Brad Meyer again, to talk more about the exciting vehicle sound effects he creates.. Brad spends a lot of his time designing exciting, signature sound effects for his shows, especially vehicles, using both custom recordings and sound library material. This time we talked about a unique semi-truck vehicle, and it’s exciting transformation sequence.