The London Film School is hosting a 2 day weekend workshop with Gustavo Costantini on January 28th and 29th. Gustavo Costantini earned his PhD working under Michel Chion, is a Professor of Sound and Editing at the University of Buenos Aires, University of Cinema, and at the National University Institute for the Arts (IUNA). He is also a board member of the School of Sound and part of the editorial team of The New Soundtrack. The London Film School is also offering a 20% discount to Designing Sound readers. So if you’re in the area, you might not want to miss out on the opportunity.
You can register for the course here, and make sure to use the discount code designingsound20% during checkout.
Here is a brief description of the workshop (full description is available here):
SOUND & MUSIC TECHNIQUES FOR NARRATIVE FILMMAKING with Gustavo Costantini Saturday 28th & Sunday 29th January 2012 10.30am-5.30pm – £200 – This essential 2-day workshop aims to equip filmmakers with a better understanding of how sound and images are used in filmmaking. Rather than the blank coverage approach now demanded of many sound editors, designers and re-recording mixers, tutor Gustavo Costantini advocates soundtracks to be full of ideas rather than effects. Participants will learn key elements of sound/image strategies and be introduced to all the possible uses of sound and music in film. Extensive use of film clips ranging from THE BIRDS to SAVING PRIVATE RYAN will demonstrate how difficult it is to think in terms of sound and music and how neglected these fields still are. Exclusive material provided by Academy Award-winning Sound Editor Walter Murch will be used to reveal his working methods on the assembly of sound design and film editing. This unique footage will also show the collaboration between Murch and Anthony Minghella on the opening sequence of THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY, from first assembly to the final version.
The Motion Picture Sound Editors announced the nominees for their annual Golden Reel awards. I’d jot them down below but Awards Daily did a great job making the extensive list readable already, so CLICK HERE. If you’d like to see the actual editors nominated for each category CLICK HERE.
The society of sound editors also presents two non-competition awards each year, Filmmaker and Career Achievement. For 2012 a producer of countless blockbusters Gale Anne Hurd will be accepting the Filmmaker Award and for Career Achievement Supervising Sound Editor George Watters II is bestowed with the honor.
The Awards will be held on February 19th, one day after the CAS awards and one week before the Oscars. Congrats to all the nominees.
The Cinema Audio Society announced nominees for their 48th annual awards show celebrating outstanding achievements in Film and TV mixing. In addition, every year the CAS presents a “Career Achievement Award” to a deserving mixer, bestowing Re-recording mixer Scott Milan with the honor in 2012. Milan is currently finaling “Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters”, which will be the first film mixed at Technicolor’s new Paramount on-lot facility.
That said, the big news for this year’s CAS awards is that scoring mixers are to be nominated along with their fellow production and re-recording mixers. Below are the CAS nominees for sound mixing, motion picture. Head over to the CAS website for the rest of the nods.
HANNA - Roland Winke, Christopher Scarabosio, Craig Berkey, CAS, and Andrew Dudman.
HUGO – John Midgley, Tom Fleischman, CAS, and Simon Rhodes.
MONEYBALL – Ed Novick, Deb Adair, CAS Ron Bochar, CAS, David Giammarco, and Brad Haenel.
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: ON STRANGER TIDES – Lee Orloff, CAS Paul Massey, CAS Chris Boyes, and Alan Meyerson.
SUPER 8 – Mark Ulano, CAS, Andy Nelson, Anna Behlmer, and Dan Wallin.
Andy Farnell – a familiar name in computer audio – is a computer scientist, sound designer, author and a pioneer in the field of procedural audio. He is a visiting professor at several European Universities and a consultant to game and audio technology companies. His book, ‘Designing Sound‘, is a bible for procedural sound and should be on your bookshelf, if it isn’t already!
He was very kind to find time in his busy schedule when I visited London, and we talked about what procedural audio is, where it stands now and what it can be in the future. This article is a transcription of our conversation, which he was again very kind to edit along with me. It was no easy task because there was so much good content!
Thank you Andy!
DS: Where does Procedural Audio stand now? Would you say it is comparable to where CGI was in the 70s/80s, when computers weren’t powerful enough?
Andy: That is a central mythology – that the computers aren’t powerful enough to do it. This is often brought out as a straw man argument against Procedural Audio by skeptics. One of the things I did with my 2005 demo was to make all of the sounds (they weren’t very high in quality) that you would need for a first person shooter game – fire, water, wind, rain, some animals, some footsteps, some guns, some vehicles. This was 2005 and I had them all running on a 533 MHz processor generating a realistic-ish sort of soundscape to prove that if you had 1GHz processor and if you used half of it for the graphics then it would be quite possible to synthesise all the sounds using the remainder. Six years after doing that people would still come to me with this straw man argument, they would say, “You know Andy, we love this Procedural Audio stuff but there’s just not enough CPU available”. But we now have two to the five times more CPU than when I did my 2005 proof-of-concept demo. So, what’s behind that? Why are they saying that? It’s not true. What happens is the internal politics of resources. The requirements always expand to fit the resources available. The game worlds get bigger and bigger and the graphics get more and more demanding. The audio team will always have the least amount of CPU allocated to them as an afterthought, because in the current structural model of production sound is “post production”, and no body wants to commit to giving audio that much CPU bandwidth. I feel that is the real reason behind the argument. You often get these straw man arguments that enter in to a culture and just get recycled. People know that there is an argument and it comes to their tongue very quickly and they say “Yes we could do it but there is not enough CPU”. With the left over CPU on a modern games console I could provide you great procedural sound. On an eight core architecture, we would need one or two CPU cores to give procedural sound. Even more interestingly is what happens when we run models in GPU, and many Procedural Audio models are inherently parallelisable. So, yes, Procedural Audio is somewhere in that era before the Tron movie, or before the Pixar CGI revolution, its possible, but not yet seen as viable, perhaps the shift is too painful for big companies to make.
The Recordist has released Ultimate Rockslide 2 HD Pro sound library, containing 750 24bit 96kHz rock and dirt sound effects on 115 Broadcast WAV files with detailed Metadata embedded.
This sequel to Ultimate Rockslide contains brand new rock based sound effects and multi-microphone files with tons of dirt and sand debris sounds recorded close up and distant to give the sound designer ample options. The multi-perspective files are also time aligned and grouped for easy access and auditioning. Most tracks contain many variations and performances for sound design flexibility.
Included in this collection are:
Large, medium and small rocks with tons of dirt debris – Gritty rocks off a cliff – Moist and dry dirt falling – Sand based debris sprays – Gravel dumped on wood boxes and platforms – Extended foley actions such as scraping, dropping, hitting, movement and much more.
Recorded with a set of extended frequency response microphones, the heavy weight and the subtle details of the rocks stand up to heavy layering and pitch manipulation This is the next generation of rockslides.
[This is a first of a series of interviews/articles on procedural/generative sound]
‘Pugs Luv Beats‘ is a hilarious music composition game for iOS devices developed by Edinburgh based studio Lucky Frame. It’s about guiding pugs (in costumes) around a galaxy of worlds, whilst creating an endless variety of music. It sounds fantastic and runs on a generative sound/music engine developed in Pure Data.
Lucky Frame is Yann Seznec (artist, musician and sound designer), Jonathan Brodsky (artist, designer, musician, coder) and Sean McIlroy (illustrator and print maker). Jon and Yann were kind enough to make some time right after the release of the game to talk about the sounds and technology behind Pugs Luv Beats.
DS: How did Pugs Luv Beats come together?
Yann: Jon and I made an app called Mujik a couple of years ago. A lot of people downloaded it and there were a lot of good reviews. It was basically a different approach to music on a mobile interface. After playing around with that for a while we started thinking about how much further we could take the idea and Jon started getting into the idea of making games. So, we started thinking about how we could really bridge that gap between music and games. What if you could use a game interface to create music rather than to play music that is already there? That was the starting point. Jon made a demo which we dubbed ‘Space Hero’. The idea was that you were controlling a little ship that was shooting enemies. As the enemies came on screen they made a sound and as you destroyed them they made a sound, with the twist being you could edit how the enemies came after you so it was like a piano roll hybrid drum sequencer. It was more of a proof-of-concept than anything else. We took that to Channel 4 and to make a very long story short they ended up eventually telling us that they liked the idea and that they wanted to invest in it. Interestingly they told us, ‘We want to invest in the concept but don’t make that game’ [laughs]. So we started making various different prototypes for what became Pugs Luv Beats.
First: a BIG thank you to all the contributors, this wouldn’t have been possible without the sounds!
How did this work?
The Max/MSP patch works by playing random files in a random sequence and from random points within the files. If left by itself it can play these files back in this random order to create a never-ending soundscape. Although, there are a few controls to help design the way it sounds:
Play length of each file (Eg.: If it’s set at 4000ms, it would play back a sound for 4000ms and then crossfade into the next sound)
Fade length – crossfade length (from 0ms to 1ms less than the play length)
Speed/pitch: Vari-speed playback control
Reverse
Random type: Urn (random without repeats), Drunk (Randomised but ‘drunken’), Random (random with unpredictable repeats), Counter (sequential playback)
The outputs were connected to a channel strip type interface, from which the signal was sent (parallel) to a reverb and delay plugin.
What you hear below are sounds that were contributed (thank you again!) and then generated and ‘performed’ using the above mentioned controls with a MIDI controller. I recorded a few takes and this was the one I preferred the most. I’ve also included a screengrab of the patch at work, for the curious.
Miguel Isaza
Jake Riehle
Varun Nair
Damian Kastbauer
Shaun Farley
Jamie Hardt
Abigail Sie
Peter Albrechtsen
Tim Nielsen