The SiFi genre offers up so much creativity from a visual aspect but also opens up a lot of potential for cool sound design. This week, we will chat with sound editor Tess Fournier about a futuristic disintegration design she created.
All great editors start out as good editors. The hope is that you evolve as time passes, into an exceptional talent. I have seen it time and again here at Boom Box, often in very short order. An editor with lots of skill and professionalism decides to push for more. These great editors form our core team; the kind of editors you want to keep around. So what’s the secret? Well I’m happy to tell you that going from good sound editor to great sound editor is not that complicated.
It’s easy to fall into the habit of working so often that you forget to practice and develop your skills on your own time. For anyone in the audio field, this might be ear training. For this Lunch and Learn, we’re going to explore some of the features of the online ear training program SoundGym.
We are proud to announce the release of our newest Boom Box Library Collection: The Editor Toolbox, and we are celebrating with a site-wide 40% off sale!
The Editor Toolbox Collection is geared toward professional picture editors or sound effects editors who wish to bolster their sound effects libraries with a streamlined collection of common live action sound effects.
During the first week of November, my alma mater, the DePaul University School of Music, held an 11-day music festival with numerous masterclasses, panel discussions, and concerts to commemorate the unveiling of its new Holtschneider Performance Center. I was asked to take part in the panel discussion sponsored by the Sound Recording Technology department titled Women in Audio Engineering. The panel sought to bring to light the fact that although women are a minority in music production and audio engineering (according to Women’s Audio Mission, women make up five percent of all audio professions), there are many notable women contributing in these fields.
Former intern Katie Maynard recently joined the Boom Box Post team here as a sound effects editor. We are all very excited to have her join us and to work on a lot of fun and creative projects with her.
Every round of interns that join us here at Boom Box Post are put up to the challenge to get out of the studio and go out to do filed recording. We give them specific sounds we are looking for and also task them to use their creativity to find and record something they think could be cool to capture. This week, we will hear what our intern Peter was able to record.
What is Soundly? Soundly is a freemium audio library management software that lets you organize, tag, and audition your sound effect and add them into your projects in a concise and incredibly simple way. For this blogpost I decided to put myself in the shoes of someone just starting off in the sound editor world. When you’re just starting off in the industry your budget is going to be your biggest limiter. You don’t have the freedom to drop a ton of money on multiple professional grade libraries and a reliable audio library management software to get started on your work. Sometimes the free option is really the only option. This is where Soundly comes in.
Earlier this year, the team from The Loud House approached us with a brand new short designed as a 360° video for YouTube. Never having worked in this format, I did some searching and was surprised at how little information had been published on sound for spatialized video. After working it out for myself, I thought I’d share the details with our readers as a jumping off point should a project like this come across your desk.
A few months ago, Tess Fournier had a lunch and learn blog post about a free web-based audio synth called Chip Tone. We decided to have a contest amongst the Boom Box crew of who could design and create the best retro video game sounds utilizing Chip Tone. And the winner is……. Brad Meyer! This week we will take a look at what Brad created and hear from him about his inspiration and creative process.
A few weeks ago we introduced our first new Fall intern Peter. This week, our other intern Jen Hawkins will sit down and talk about some of her interests and how she is enjoying her Boom Box internship so far.
Izotope audio repair plugins are helpful tools for many applications to clean up your audio. From dialogue editing to cleaning up live recordings, there is bound to be an Izotope plugin for what you need. For this demonstration, we will go into a bit of detail specifically in the Izotope RX Connect application which is included in the RX Standard and Advanced bundles.
Sound editor Mak Kellerman has been working on some cool new projects here at Boom Box Post lately. For this weeks blog post, Mak will give us an inside look at something he designed for sounds for a video game.
You may recall that I’ve written about creating signature sounds in the past. So, why write another post on the same topic? First of all, creating signature sounds is a skill that is absolutely essential to to setting yourself up as a high-quality professional sound designer. Second, that post covered a practical approach to designing signature sounds such as working on one sound at a time and designing in context. Here, I’d like to walk you through my actual creative process on a particular project.
This week, we welcome a new class of Boom Box interns to join us through the rest of the 2018 calendar year. For this blog post, we will sit down with Peter Kay and learn more about him and what he is excited for starting the internship.
When starting out as a freelance sound designer, you often have to work on a budget. Many effects are usually compromised; a large one being foley. Not everyone has access to a foley stage or has the budget to rent one out and hire a walker. A good alternative to filling in the footsteps of foley is to do it digitally. The most well-known plug-in that is used in digital foley is Kontact, a sampler from Native Instruments. Although the plug-in is great in its own rights, it has a hefty price tag for new sound designers. With inspiration from my colleagues, I searched for an affordable sampler that can also be used for digital foley and came across one that is often overlooked: Structure Free.
Our sound effects editor Jessey Drake has been working on a lot of fun and creative things for us lately so for this months Focus on the Creative post, Jessey is going to break down how she created a unique sound for mind control.
A while ago we did a blog post about favorite audio tools our Boom Box editors enjoy and are using lately. New plug-ins, techniques and libraries are coming about all the time so I thought I'd check in with some of them now to see if there are any new tools they could share with us.
We’ve all been there. There's an action or object on screen that isn’t in a sound effects library at your disposal. This can be a tricky or fun and creative situation to be in. Working on ever changing animation, this situation comes up all the time. Here are a few tips and tricks to help re create realistic on screen sound effects.