The Boom Box Post blog provides insights into the creative sound design process of Boom Box Post's owners and employees.
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Editor Post
Collaborating is a big part of our industry. Even in sound editorial, where we are usually by ourselves in a room when we work, we collaborate in projects with mixers, supervisors, Foley artists, and also share editorial with other sound designers/editors.
My main reason in writing this post is to give some insight to college students/new graduates on what being an assistant editor looks like because I was in that spot not too long ago. If you don’t fall into this category, well, I hope you still want to know what my job is like! After interning at Boom Box in the summer of 2018, I knew that I wanted to work here. I was so excited to take over the roll of the person who was supervising me as an intern! I’ve now been in this position for over a year and feel like I can give you all there is to know about my job.
With the protests that have erupted after the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and the countless other African Americans that have experienced police brutality, a conversation about general inequality and lack of representation in the entertainment industry has bubbled to the surface once more. It is a sore subject for many and there is no easy solution to tackle the issue, but it is a necessary conversation.
In 2016, we did two very popular Glossary of Sound Effects posts. Learning keywords to use for your library can save you a ton of time. I thought it would be helpful to do a third post with a ton of new terms!
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.
I worked on a project recently that had a giant wooden monster transformation. Here's how I designed it!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Galactic Assistant is a standalone specialized synth that can be used to create high tech interface sounds and / or musical samples and accents.
Few things can positively impact a sound editors workflow like effective and thorough sound effects metadata. Having good metadata in your library will lessen the time needed to find the sounds you are looking for and speed up the process of finding new favorites in a packed library. If you are selling your sound effects, having rock-solid metadata is essential to creating a marketable product.
In this Inside Sound Design I wanted to use our interns to explore an early part of the sound editing process: Field Recording. It’s always a blast to capture sounds in the wild, and we try to do so at every opportunity. I sent Ian Howard out with instructions to research and capture two unique and interesting ambiences.
Here at Boom Box Post we have an extensive intern curriculum where our interns have to complete several different projects as part of their program. The projects include everything from sound editing basics, to pre-dubbing and from-scratch design work. In the project I teach, we come across many real-world sound editing scenarios, including a small clip in slow motion. Slo-Mo is a storytelling tool that sound editors come across quite often, and it is where I get the most questions regarding, “How do I cut this?”
Because slow motion is more conceptual than it is technical, there is no right way to approach it. However, there are some basics that you are going to want to cover, and I thought this would be a great opportunity to illustrate various sound concepts while editing scenes in slow motion. Every scene and scenario has it’s own set of challenges, but these tips are a great place to start.
Some things never stop being funny, no matter how much time has passed. This is also true for sound effects. Some classic sound effects and jokes we use have been around for more than half a century! Kate gave an excellent run down of animation sound's origin in her THE HISTORY OF ANIMATION SOUND post, and many sounds devised by Carl Stalling, Treg Brown and Jimmy MacDonald(and the derivatives of their sounds) are still being used by sound editors today! This week, I asked a few of our editors to tell me about their favorite cartoon sound effects.
As Jeff mentioned in his blog post Top Ten Secret Pro Tools Shortcuts, learning Pro Tools shortcuts is a must for new sound editors if they want to be able to compete in our industry. Similarly, knowing the shortcuts to navigate through your OS quickly and efficiently is also really important. This is especially helpful to new editors trying to land their first sound job, as most of us come in at an assistant level, where a big part of the job is organizing files and multi-tasking among several projects. Learning basic navigational and organizational functions is a simple way to speed up your workflow and impress potential employers and clients.
Creative dialogue processing is a unique and fun challenge that varies from the sound design work we typically encounter on a daily basis. For this month’s Inside Sound Design post, I’m going to walk through one common and simple processing chain we might use for science-fiction themed computer or robot dialogue.
