The Boom Box Post blog provides insights into the creative sound design process of Boom Box Post's owners and employees.
Tonebenders, a podcast featuring a collective of sound design professionals sharing their thoughts, ideas, and stories, recently released a podcast featuring an interview with our two owners, Jeff Shiffman and Kate Finan. Tonebenders chatted with Jeff and Kate about their experience of transforming a former auto body shop into a brand new multi-room audio post facility.
No Film School recently released an article featuring an interview with our two owners, Jeff Shiffman and Kate Finan. No Film School chatted with Kate and Jeff about the goals within Boom Box Post. This includes hiring men, women, and non-binary at a 50/50 level, education within the studio, and their paid apprenticeship program which contains weekly lessons and real-world feedback from members of the staff. Jeff and Kate also chat about their experience building their own sound studio from a former auto shop.
Animation World Network recently wrote an article and interviewed Kate Finan, re-recording mixer, supervising sound editor, and co-founder with Jeff Shiffman of Boom Box Post, a boutique animation-specific sound studio located in Burbank, CA. They chat about sexism within the industry and their way on how to create an enviorment that strives for 50 percent women and gender non-conforming as well as 50 percent male. This was a founding goal of Boom Box that Finan and Shiffman reached within the first couple years.
Last year, we published two blogs that listed classic cartoon sound effects and the emotion they convey to the audience. In those posts, we outlined the toony sounds we associate with happiness, anger, sadness, humor, scared, disgust, love, and boredom. Toon sound effects have been provoking emotion for decades. With so many classic toon sounds to choose from, how does one know which to use? Our hope is these blog posts help those stuck in their sound editorial from having to sift through their entire sound library looking for the perfect sound. You can read part one HERE and part two HERE!
Dialogue editing is an essential part of the post-production process for animated TV shows, and one we take very seriously at Boom Box Post! Clear, crisp, organized, and coherent dialogue is the bedrock of any TV show. Meticulously shaping, enhancing, and cleaning up the voice performances does wonders to breathe life into the characters as well as streamline the mixing process.
Creating sound effects from a musical angle adds a unique and fun energy to your design. Building effects, either momentary or sequential, can be made all the more engaging if their basis is a musical one, especially in animation. That being said, balance is key when approaching sound effect design from a musical perspective.
Knowing your SFX library is essential to becoming an efficient SFX editor. However, it can be quite daunting at first as there are so many different types of sound for the same object. Knowing how to read and use your SFX library to its fullest potential will greatly increase the creativity and ways to use those sounds. Our SFX Editor, Katie Jackson, sat down to teach the tips and tricks to making the most out of your SFX library.
Creature vocal sound design and creature movement sound design is an essential part of creating believable and immersive worlds in film, television, and video games. It involves creating unique vocalizations for fictional creatures, ranging from terrifying beasts to friendly aliens, as well as translating where this creature comes from, what type of body it has and its size.
We have a new Assistant Editor at Boom Box Post! It is our pleasure to introduce you to Mia!
I’ve had it on my list to test out some software synths that I had purchased a while back. My week was light so I fired up The Riser by AIR. One of the presets had a really interesting oscillating sound and the functionality of The Riser made it easy for me to play around with pitch and speed. I found myself creating crazy spaceship engine sounds (very likely influenced by having just watched the movie) and thought, “this would be a great blog post!'‘
Creating futuristic anything is fun, but where to start? Here was my process for creating a full compliment of entirely original (and useful!) futuristic spacecraft engine sounds.
On past projects I have received critiques that my wood creaks for various items (doors, wooden chairs, footsteps, etc) sounded pretty weak and ill-fitting for the scene. The sound libraries I had access to at the time really didn’t offer many quality options, so I decided to do some research on how I could capture better creak sounds. I stumbled upon a couple videos online of Foley artists using what is called a creak box. This Foley instrument allows the user to more precisely create and perform creaking sounds quite easily. Below I’ll be going over how I put together a couple different creak boxes of my own and what I learned in the process.
We recently brought on a new Boom Box apprentice. It is our pleasure to introduce AzMarie Livingston! We had a chance to ask her a few questions to better get to know her. Continue reading to get to know her better.
By the beginning of this year, Boom Box Post had fully moved into our new facility with three Atmos mix stages, three 5.1 mix suites, eight sound design/editorial suites, and full client amenities. So, when Women’s Audio Mission reached out to revisit the idea of having an in-person workshop focused on sound for television and film that would meet the needs of their Los Angeles membership base, we had the perfect space to accommodate it.
For the last six months Isabel has worked as the Boom Box Post studio apprentice. She has done an absolutely stellar job, adapting to any task assigned to her. Isabel was kind enough to share some of her experiences and insights on the process for future Boom Box Post apprentices or anyone entering the sound industry for the first time.
We are extremely proud to announce the release of our latest Boom Box Library: Women and Men! You can now also purchase this new library by itself or bundled with Babies & Kids as the Human Vocalizations Bundle!
The Women & Men SFX Library contains a variety of custom-recorded adult female and male vocalizations.
Starting your first 360 audio project can be a bit overwhelming. I decided to focus my Lunch and Learn on some essential concepts to help you get started. This post is specifically about designing for 360 video or VR experiences that are intended to be heard through headphones.
I am currently knee-deep into recording an extremely comprehensive auxiliary percussion library for Boomboxlibrary.com. The idea is to produce pristine recordings which we (and other sound editors) can use as source material for new creative sound design.
As the recordings pile up (and I procrastinate having to edit them all) I have been playing around with some of them, just to see if my hunch was correct; that these would help me create great cartoon sound effects that are high quality and new but harken back to the classic Hanna Barbera sounds we all know so well.
If you are just starting your career in post production sound you might have seen the position of Supervising Sound Editor or Sound Supervisor pop up here and there on job sites or in the end credits of TV shows or movies. For many new or aspiring sound editors there is a bit of a misunderstanding over what the roles and responsibilties of the Supervising Sound Editor position consist of. Sound supervisors are more than just people who check the editors work, they wear many hats that they need to switch between at a moments notice. We had a chance this week to chat with Tess and Brad, two of our supervisors, about what their jobs entail and advice they would give editors looking to become sound supervisors.
Often times, we’re faced with the task of designing sounds that track the movements of certain on screen visuals. These sounds need to be continuous, reactive, and dynamically pitched; imagine a car weaving in and out of traffic. It accelerates, then gradually slows down, eventually swerving out of the way of an oncoming semi-truck. Maybe you have a character wielding a magical sword; swinging it through the air at varying speeds and veracity while emitting a sparkly blue glow. These types of scenarios need a convincing sound that coincides with the every movement of the character or prop.
Congratulations to the Boom Box Post team for winning the Golden Reel for Outstanding Achievement in Sound Editing — Non-Theatrical Animation for their work on Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie! We are so honored to have won this award, especially in such a competitive year.
