I started editing sound effects at Todd-AO back in 19………. Something-or-other! I started working on a show called “Brooklyn Bridge” produced by Gary David Goldberg. I worked in television for a few years and then moved over to working on features. With a few brief side trips back to TV, I stayed in the feature world ever since until starting in on “Fringe” in August, 2009. The feature landscape was looking pretty empty at that point so twenty-two weeks of work on an episodic TV show looked pretty good. Turns out, it was a LOT of work but, ultimately, a rewarding journey. “Fringe” is a lot like “X-Files” was. It has a core mythology based on conspiracies and alternate Universes and, while we didn’t have “CancerMan” we did have a lot of monsters-of-the-week just like “X-Files” did. It was these M.o.t.W’s that made up the bulk of the design work on the show although the gadgets and atmospheric effects were challenging as well.

In the episode “Night of Desirable Objects”, the team runs across a cave-dwelling Mole-Man who ends up killing anyone who wanders too close to his cave underneath his Father’s house. This episode had two key elements in terms of design: Mole-Man obviously enough, and Olivia’s bionic hearing. Early on we decided that Mole-Man would be voiced in ADR because his range of actions and emotions was simply too broad for a library monster vocal set to cover. What I ended up doing for him, though, was cutting creepy moans and breaths out of the library for when we’re in the cave with him but don’t see him directly. I also added a layer of vicious attack growls and wounded screams when, in the end, the cave roof collapses and a car crushes him.

An interesting trick that was used in the ADR session was that the actor who was vocalizing Mole-Man actually put pieces of an orange in his mouth which gave him a slobbery, sputtering voice. Probably made the ADR stage a little sticky too . . . At certain points during the episode, Olivia has moments of her bionic hearing ability. The first time we see this, Olivia is sitting in the Sheriff’s office and she begins to hear things that aren’t quite in the room with her. I played phones, typewriters, and file cabinets and treated them to make them sound a little beefier than normal and kept them a bit more up in the mix than they usually would be. We can see the whole room that she’s in so we know these things aren’t in the room with her.

I also had voices from down the hall and cars from outside so we don’t really know how far away she’s hearing these things from. They could come from the next room but she could also be hearing things from down the block. Or, they may only be playing inside her own head. The scene had to play both ways which is why I included things that we never saw. It left an ambiguity in the scene that wouldn’t have been there if I had simply used sounds that we see in the room with her. A later scene revisits Olivia’s “talent”. This time, she’s relaxing in a bubble bath and, again, her bionic hearing kicks in without warning. This ended up being another obscure mix of things she might actually hear, although, played in a surreal manner, and things that were never seen on camera. The bubbles in her bath become huge and reverberant and a fly walking up a wall is magnified many times over. Adding to the odd feel of the scene I put in a person walking across a creaky floor overhead although we couldn’t tell if it was from the next floor up or several floors away. Again, we don’t know the boundaries of Olivia’s hearing so the events could come from her paranoia, anywhere in the building, or somewhere far away.

In the “Fringe” world, there are often devices and gadgets that create or affect various events. In “Fracture”, the villain has created a serum which several characters inject because of a type of post-hypnotic suggestion. He has invented a frequency generator which causes these people to crystallize and then explode. In one of the best scenes all season, Walter and Astrid are in the lab and, using a watermelon for their experiments, are able to determine the exact frequency that the villain’s generator operates on. It was something like 68.7 megacycles ( I don’t recall exactly), so I used the signal generator plugin and created some tones that started out as 68.7 megacycles. They were simply low-frequency tones on their own so I processed them so that they warbled and chorused and were a bit more mysterious than the straight tone. It ended up being pretty subtle for television, but when Walter identifies the tone as a certain frequency, that’s what’s actually playing.

One of the key characters in the “Fringe” world is William Bell, Walter’s former partner and founder of Massive Dynamics, a private research institute that figures prominently in several episodes. In “Momentum Deferred”, Olivia is brought to the Alternate Universe by Dr. Bell in order to give her information that she will need in the future. The direction I received for this sequence was that as his name is Bell, bells should be a recurring motif in the scene. I couldn’t simply put bells in everywhere though so I took some dry ice recordings and pitched them down considerably and reverbed them to become ringing tones that I played underneath the whole scene. There were also some reversed ship’s bells and crystal glass rubs so that Dr. Bell’s office was made up of multiple layers of glass and bell sounds. It became a little ominous but stayed away from being too cliche’.

“Earthling” was a really good episode for strange sounds. It starts out with the appearance of a smoke monster that kills its victims by enveloping them and leaving behind an exact life-like looking corpse only the body is made of ash which crumbles horribly when touched. The smoke creature moved rapidly as opposed to gently drifting so I had some movement to play off of in creating a sound for him. I came up with some stuttering, fluttery whooshes that kind of vibrated which made him more dangerous than if he sounded like a puff of steam moving along the hall. The smoke monster requires a host body to live in when he’s not vibrating around killing people. The only way to recall the smoke monster to the host body, or to keep him there in the first place, is by severe electrical shock.

The bad guy has collected a whole bunch of car batteries in his hotel room and they buzz and zap and really get going when he throws the switch to zap the host and hold the smoke monster inside him. It ended up sounding a little like a 1920′s electric chair but had lots of screams and growls as the smoke monster got to vocalize a little bit as he was zapped into submission. This episode had lots of little electrical things scattered around and I tried to make it sound a little like the Exploratorium in San Francisco, California, with all of its electricity-based exhibits.

Time travel is always a good topic for a science fiction program and “Fringe” is no exception. In “White Tulip”, Peter Weller from “Robocop” and “Buckaroo Banzai” is an inventor who develops a time travel system by wiring his body so that he can go back in time and save his wife from her death in a car accident. He ends up looking like some sort of battery coil with all the wires crisscrossing his chest and arms. I used vocals from the dialog to create high-pitched jittery tones that played against the visual of his time-jumping. He would start to flicker faster and faster as he ramped up to the moment of leaping so I wanted to play up the fragmented sense of time we had visually and create the idea that he was somehow jumping over other people to land at a different point in time. It also had electrical humming and zapping to support the electrical nature of the device.

Computers are a large part of the “Fringe” world and in many episodes they would be whirring and buzzing away. One of my favorite effects just because of the goofy nature of the request is one computer which is processing information in the lab and, as it assembles more and more data, was supposed to sound busier and busier! Actually, computers don’t speed up and get excited the way people do but that’s what the clients wanted so I came up with a computer that increasingly gets more frantic as it “learns” more and more about the data that has been fed into it.

It ended up being a challenging and rewarding season cutting all kinds of creatures, machines, and ambiences that helped make the Universe of “Fringe” come to life. Or I should say, both of them . . . .

Written by Bruce Tanis for Designing Sound.

Hello again. Over the years I’ve worked on several films and TV shows that required editing crowds for different sorts of sports, both indoors and outdoors, concerts, and, my personal favorite, panic, battles, and riots. Umm, just kidding there. Mostly. Crowds are actually a bit more difficult to cut than they might seem on the surface. There are two obvious problems to be aware of in cutting crowds for just about any event and these are: getting the right flavor of material and keeping them from summing into an insurmountable wall of noise.

There are basically three possible places that crowd recordings usually come from. The first, and really the best, is if the production mixer can get good, clean, stereo production or wild track recordings on the set. Unfortunately, these are often either short takes, recorded in mono, or have some sort of set-based intrusive sound in them such as wind machines, production vehicles, or Assistant Director vocals. In the event they do exist and don’t fall into one of the traps I just mentioned, you are starting off from a great position. Tracks recorded on the set have the obvious advantages of correct size of crowd ( two people to two million ), correct makeup ( men or women, domestic or foreign speaking, etc. ), and correct character ( excited, concern, anger, panic ).

The second source of crowd material is the Group ADR stage. These can work well if your group Supervisor is really good and paying attention to the specific requirements of the project. The concern here is that most ADR groups consist of eight to twelve people so getting material that represents larger gatherings can be a little problematic. It’s best not to rely on Group ADR for the weight of masses but it is particularly useful in creating a close-up layer of specific voices that will play in the mix over and above the cheering or screaming millions that will come from crowds cut in sound effects. Library sound effects is, of course, the third source for preparing crowd material.

For effects editors, the gates are pretty much wide open to come up with any type crowd, in any size, and in any static or changing character that the scene requires. It’s not all drudgery, though. We also get to do fun stuff like crowds heard through the ears of an outer space visitor or maybe by a Earthling who is drunk. Also, scenes are often presented in slow motion for one reason or another and that’s a whole area unto itself in designing crowds.

While all crowds are basically a see-it, hear-it type of sound, there are some differences in cutting them that would be useful to discuss. I’ll start with concert or pageant crowds. In “Miss Congeniality” (2000), there are various sequences which require layers of laughter, applause, and reactions. Pageants, concerts, and other similar audience type events are mostly reactionary to whatever happens on stage. In addition to the basic elements of steadies and reactions, I’ll add cheers and whoops to bring up the energy level in reaction to a specific event or song.

In “Hannah Montana: The Movie” (2009), directed by Peter Chelsom, there are several concerts which have endless armies of screaming young girls. I had to cut elements for the crowds that were paying attention to what Hannah was singing on stage but I also had to cut tracks of shrill, squeaking, screaming girls! They didn’t seem to react to anything in particular, they just screamed and screamed and screamed . . . . Easy enough to cut once I thought to turn my monitors down by about 15db! I’d like to mention that, while in no professional regard whatsoever, working back-to-back on “Hannah Montana: The Movie” with Miley Cyrus and “17 Again” with Zac Efron, did get me some significant credibility with my teenage nieces and nephews!

I usually find myself creating a structure of three general levels of crowds for almost any type of scene actually and they are: base crowds or steadies, also known as idles, specific but still large-group-based reactions, cheers, etc., and, finally, a close-up layer of single voice specifics such as shouts or laughs. The base crowds play throughout the entire sequence as needed and form a support level for all the other elements to sit on. I like to cut these as five-channel ( L-C-R-Ls-Rs ), tracks in order to fill out the theater or room the event takes place in. Cutting a specific center mono track can also help the dialog mixer cover angle or mic changes in the production dialog. These tracks don’t have any specific movement or recognizable vocals to them which might be problematic in terms or preparing the M&E version for delivery. They are intended to deliver size and weight of the crowd but nothing necessarily close-up or sync relevant.

The second layer that I edit is a crowd-level reaction pass. These do have pan and sync characteristics and by their nature, often have vocal specifics to be aware of, again, for the M&E. Finally, the third layer is played for on-camera, close-up shots of the audience and these are the single-person shouts or laughs that play right up against whatever the speaking actors are doing in that particular shot. I find this type of layering works for just about any type of crowd scene from small recitals to huge planetary doom scenes.

Sports films are a great opportunity for crowd scenes and one that I worked on was “Rollerball” (2002). This film had a good combination of raging sports crowds for the Arena matches and also a few interesting street riot scenes. The games had the usual mix of base crowds and reactions to players getting pulverized on the track, but it included another great element: chanting and footstomps. We start one of the early contests below the arena in an access corridor. From above, we can hear the crowd is already getting into the event and I cut both chanting crowds and bleacher foot stomps in sync with each other which built in both pace and loudness as we approached the end of the tunnel and crescendoed as we move out on the track with the players to start their warmup laps. Here, I did get to cheat in some inappropriate chants as we didn’t have wild tracks from the set but it worked ok because they were non-identifiable vocally and pretty much got covered up by the other elements in the scene. They ended up being felt more than heard but along with the footstomps, made an intriguing pulse-like element in the soundtrack.

As I mentioned above, I also worked on “17 again” (2009), and the film had several high school basketball games. There was one game in particular in which Zac’s character starts to go into a bit of a trance as he finds out a critical bit of personal information and the whole room slows down and begins to time-warp. I took the crowds of yelling spectators and pitched them in sync with the slowing camera pov while simultaneously changing their character from happy high school kids to slowed-down panic screams and wails to play up the surreal tone. In the regular backgrounds, I also cut in some underwater tones designed to supplement the pitch-slowed crowds and play up the claustrophobic, near-drowning, feel of the scene.

For some reason, war movies and riot scenes always seem to skip the nice gentle ramping up of the crowd’s energy and just go straight to the screaming and panicking. For “Windtalkers” (2002), John Woo’s film about Navajo code talkers in World War 2, I edited some of the Japanese attack sequences and was lucky enough to have a few of those rare wild tracks I mentioned in the beginning of this article. We had great attack yells of large groups of soldiers and, crucially for the sequence, big group “Banzai’s” and other attack screams. This one is a good example of crowds having very specific natures that have to be addressed in order to be believable by the audience. There was only a small layer of ongoing attack vocals that I could use because most of the Japanese soldiers were seen running and shooting, not yelling as they ran forward. Further, I couldn’t use any other language crowd because they wouldn’t be yelling anything in any other language but Japanese. Unlike the “Rollerball” chants, I couldn’t cheat in attack yells of African Tribesman or Roman Legionaires! “Forward, Claudius! Put them to the sword!” simply would not have worked here at all . . . . For the American soldiers, I had a little more leeway though. I actually had access to some really terrific death yells and run-by screams in the library that had been recorded for “Glory” (1989). Mid-19th century yells from the Civil War somehow seemed right at home in the mid-Twentieth. The nature of these battle scenes relied much less on beds of yelling soldiers and more on single person grunts and screams but it was still a layering of sounds much like the concert material.

I seem to work on lots of films with big crowd panic scenes. “Snakes on a Plane” (2006), “Poseidon” (2006), and “The Final Destination” (2009), all feature big crowd death and destruction scenes. They are all pretty much just what you’d expect: big in-your-face screaming crowds. I wanted to be a little different in each case though so I started coming up with other types of crowds that I could mix in with the up-front screams. In order to ramp up the energy, I started to add in things like angry men from simple arguments on up to boxing crowd shouts and yells. I found a recording of rodeo cowboys yelling back and forth. Not what you might expect at a Nascar race but there they were. One track was of a group of girls laughing that I pitched down for “Snakes on a Plane” to give the moment a more demonic feel. They weren’t distinguishable in the mix, but it added just a bit of a creepy note. In the end, I scoured the library at Soundelux in Hollywood, where I worked on these three films, to come up with any sort of angry, shouting, spikey vocals that I could layer over the top of the more constant scream-based tracks. Thankfully, the library there is extensive to say the least and I found all sorts of odd little bits that livened up the crowds as they met their horrible, inevitable ends!

One crowd that I specifically want to mention occurs in “The Great Buck Howard” (2008). This is actually sort of an “anti-crowd” event. As the grand finale’ at each performance, Buck Howard, a personification of the real-life mentalist, Kreskin, played here by John Malkovich, is required to locate his paycheck for that show by reading the audience’s collective mind to determine its hidden location. We see the trick performed successfully a couple of times in the film and are left uncertain of whether or not this is a well organized charade or if he is truly locating his check by thought waves.

The moment I want to point out comes one evening at a performance in front of a huge Las Vegas showroom audience. Buck, who has become progressively more anxious and unstable, is not able to determine the check’s location and the crowd, which had been laughing and murmuring along with him up to that point, finally falls silent as they slowly tumble to the fact that Buck has lost any ability he may actually have had in terms of his mental gifts. As Buck lurches from table to table, desperately trying to “read” anyone in the audience, the crowd in this huge room just sits there, silently. The absence of any sound from the audience at this point just becomes heartbreaking as Buck continues to flounder hopelessly and helplessly, alone in a room full of people.

Written by Bruce Tanis for Designing Sound.

Fight sequences are a common event in many action films and they are often fairly straight forward to edit. See a punch, hear a punch. Unlike fantasy or horror scenes where you’re trying to create a mood that isn’t necessarily supported by visuals, for fight scenes, the action you see on screen pretty much determines what you need to cut. As usual, though, I tend to go a little more overboard than most other folks. I think most people tend to edit sequences from the top down and by that I mean, they start with the large, in-your-face sorts of things like the punches and impacts.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with that and I think that’s the way most editors like to work. I simply prefer to build my tracks from the bottom up starting with a foundation of fight cloth movement that is cut to each character’s actions throughout the fight. The reason I cut that way is that I know the punches, glass breaks, and body falls are going to end up taking care of themselves. They’re all big, bold sounds and they are going to work into the mix just fine. They mostly have on-camera sync or, at least, temp effects cut into the OMF’s that you can use as a guide for positioning them.

So I typically set them aside for the moment and build out a good fight cloth movement track which will form a base for the punches, impacts, and whooshes to swoop in and out of later on. Simply put, fight cloth is a sound effect, found in most libraries but probably having been created on a foley stage, of someone waving and snapping a jacket or small blanket back and forth, in such a manner as to mimic a character’s clothing movements during a fight sequence. The action ranges from gentle, longer moves to shorter, violent ones in a random pattern just as a fight is made up of random movements between the participants. I’ve found that, by building a full movement track myself, as opposed to recording it as part of the regular foley process for that project, I can be a little more detailed and a little more tailored to the action than a general movement pass. Most TV projects don’t allow much time for more than the basic movement pass as required for delivering an M&E version of the final tracks so I find it useful to create my own.

Once the fight cloth pass is complete for each character, I’ll start layering the various punches, kicks, and slaps wherever they belong. Since I don’t really ever know how a particular client is going to respond to the sound of a punch or a kick, or what range the music is going to occupy at any given moment during the fight, I break these impacts out into a high, middle, and low element. Not all of these are required for every impact but in having the different elements available makes it much easier to mix the sequence to the client’s approval. Some clients prefer very realistic, smaller, punches and kicks while others like big, over-the-top impacts. By providing each of these elements, the mixer can pick which one of them to favor at any given moment. Obviously, for body punches I don’t usually cut a high-end element and for face slaps I don’t often cut a low-end one because they aren’t really needed. There is a bit of a sub-category at this point which is gore and bone cracks. If a sequence needs to be made more vicious or violent in nature, I will include a pass of bone breaks or gore squishes (usually chickens or jello!) which top the punches or kicks as needed.

Next up, I’ll cut a pass of shoves, blocks, and body falls. They are typically similar sounding events unless the body falls are of a particular character such as wood or metal, etc. but, even so, they play in approximately the same range in the mix so I group them together here. They get cut individually on different sets of tracks: the shoves and blocks together and the body falls on adjacent tracks.

By now the sequence should be coming along fairly well and there’s not too much more to do. At this point I’ll cut simple whooshes for each arm or leg movement, topping each punch or kick. I like to place these just a bit above the fight cloth pass I started with in terms of level so they nestle down in the mix and you feel them more than hear them. They’re great for contributing a sense of movement and, if they are a little sharp sounding, they can add a good bit of danger to the fight as well. If they are played too loudly, though, they call attention to themselves too easily and the sequence can become “cartoony” more quickly than with any other element I’ve cut.

Finally, after all that is finished, I’ll cut the wood breaks and glass crashes and whatever else gets destroyed during the fight. It’s really easy to make these impacts and crashes as big as you need them to be so I save them for last after assembling the more intricate pieces of the puzzle. As with some of the punches and kicks, I’ll add a low frequency element to wall hits and wood breaks and things like that in order to beef them up a little.
There’s a whole category I haven’t mentioned yet which is hand weapons. Swords, knives, kendo poles, whatever the weapon may be, they typically have specific, and usually loud impacts and whooshes of their own. Again, as with the crashes, I’ll do these last because I like having the support of the other layers to help lift them up and create a realistic base for them to move in and out of.

By cutting all these other layers first, I have more control over making the sounds of the fight swoop and fall as the fight progresses as opposed to a somewhat more sterile sounding track of just impacts by themselves. It sounds kind of silly put into words, but basically what I’m trying to do is create wave swells from the movement and whooshes that rise and fall, supporting each impact at nearly the same height in the mix and then dropping away again, sonically trying to play up the idea that a fight is very graceful and dance-like in terms of energy and motion.

Written by Bruce Tanis for Designing Sound.

Tim Prebble has been publishing on his blog a series of posts talking about metadata. Some days ago he emailed various developers of sound library apps and asked some questions about metadata support in their applications.

Applications featured:

• AudioFinder
• Basehead
• Library Monkey Pro
• Snapper
• Soundminer
• Twisted Wave

Questions:

• Could you provide basic info for me as to how your application handles metadata?
• Does it read iXML?
• Does it write iXML?
• Does it read BEXT?
• Does it write BEXT?
• Do you use your own custom metadata?
• Can your custom metadata be read by other programs?
• Can your custom metadata be exported for use in other programs?
• What fields of metadata do you support?
• Can I import metadata from a spreadsheet? what formats are supported?

Read the answers…

Creating sounds for gadgets, machinery, and weapons beyond any mundane character they may have as ordinary objects is a core task of sound effects design. To be sure, there are many of these core tasks, or categories, that most of our work as designers falls into. Creatures and Monsters, Alien Planets, Future Tech, and Comic Book Violence effects are examples of some others. Today, I’d like to discuss editing mechanical effects in terms of scale and perspective.

I’ll start with the scale of an effect. What I mean by this is simply that, if the scene includes a hand-held device of some sort, the sound I try to create for that device needs to fit the size of the object as we see it. It doesn’t work well, in my experience, to have some little gizmo that has a really large sound effect associated with it or, conversely, some huge planetary-level machine that has little cogs and gears as its operative sounds. Gadgets are a staple of most Science Fiction and Caper movies and I’ll try to start with sounds that are appropriate in size to the object on screen. If someone is holding a palm-sized communicator, I’ll look for material to start editing with by searching through cameras or printers and other smallish machines and then process them as needed. I’ll also go through larger things like turbines, wind tunnels, and aircraft inertia starters ( I love those!), when I need to make an interesting power up sound but I know I will need to time-compress them or pitch them up in order to make it seem like they could actually be coming from the little box that we see on camera.

In “The Island” (2005), two of the characters are working in the vitamin lab, injecting nutrients into the food stream tubes of other “Islanders”. I started with a metal tripod to create the sound of the “gun” mechanism and added in a small air chuff along with a wind-down burst from a small electric drill. It ended up working because the sounds felt like they could actually be made by something that size. Half the battle in “selling” an effect is making it believable in terms of what we as viewers would expect the thing to sound like, regardless of how fictional it truly is. The tricorders and communicators in “Star Trek” don’t exist in reality, but since they make an appropriately sized sound when we see them, we’re much more likely to accept them as a “real” part of the scene. The key here is that presentation, or packaging, goes a long way toward gaining client or audience acceptance of what may be an otherwise very subjective sound. Strangely, it’s not just that the sound that needs to feel right, but sometimes it has to look right too. It turns out, either one can cause a client to start second-guessing things on the dub stage and that’s not good. Long ago, I worked on a fairly modest car sequence. The client wanted the car in the scene to be both authentic and “Hollywood” big. Being somewhat two different, mutually exclusive things, I went with the big. I cut in a hot Camaro engine for a Corvette because the Camaro had the maneuvers I needed and it was a better recording of a beefier engine.

We had recordings of a Corvette but the Camaro was the more dramatically appropriate choice to use and the client loved it. On the cue sheet, though, which the client could see, it listed the effect as a being a Camaro and he was very upset. “But that’s a Corvette up there on screen! We paid extra for that car!” Umm. Ok. We moved on and eventually came back around to the same car and the client glanced at the sheets again and turned to us, very pleased that he’d gotten what he wanted, and said, “See, THAT’s the right car!” Well, we hadn’t recut the car. What we had done is reprinted the cue sheets. They now read: “Corvette such-and-such Maneuver”. Now, I’m absolutely NOT suggesting lying to clients by any means but the way you present your material is important just like the actual sound is important. As Jay Wilkinson likes to say, “Start with right effect . . . .and stop there”. I would like to amend that just a little to say: start with the right-sized effect also. Or start wherever you’d like, just make it the right size.

Perspective is another aspect of creating a sound that we accept as correct because it fulfills expectations that we as viewers bring to the film. We listen to the world all day everyday and get to know various aspects of it in terms of basic survival mechanisms. If something is really loud, it’s probably very close to us and may be dangerous therefore requiring attention until we can dismiss the event as being safe to ignore. Conversely, something very quiet suggests being distant and is probably not an immediate threat. Obviously, these are blatant generalities that may be highly inaccurate given the true nature of the event, but, nonetheless, serve to illustrate that we make determinations based on what we’ve heard in the past. A big, loud screech of tires means you probably don’t want to walk out in the street just at that moment. You don’t need to see the car because you’ve heard the sound before and have determined that each time you hear that sound, you need to pay attention for possible danger. It’s a developed shorthand to navigate your environment safely and it’s the same with film language. If something doesn’t fit what we expect to hear, it seems false or incorrect and can pull you right out of a film.

Thankfully, the range isn’t exactly that narrow or every film would sound exactly like every other one and what would be the fun in that? I like to use Randy Thom as an example from time to time because he is great at just getting it right. In this instance, I’m referring to his Machine in “Contact” (1997). The machine is wonderfully powerful and complex ( and the right scale!), when were right up next to it. I completely buy that those revolving rings make that exact sound but what helps is how he’s built the sounds that you hear when we’re miles away and still looking at it. He’s taken that machine and simplified the elements in such a way that it sounds just like we’d expect it to from a long distance. It still has the character of the rings, meaning, it sounds like the same exact machine we heard in the close-up, but now it feels like we’re a long ways off. It’s really nicely done. More recently, in an episode of “Fringe”, nearly the entire episode was set in a small town in which people’s grotesque appearances were masked by a mysterious generator located in the basement of one of the local houses.

The producers specifically wanted the hum to be everywhere within the city limits but a “Fringe” episode is about 43 minutes long without the commercials in place. There’s simply no way anyone would want to listen to a relentless 43 minutes of generator hum! My solution was to build the generator geographically so that where ever we were in town it would have more or less complexity in character. Out by the city limits, the sound was a gentle swelling simple hum with just a couple of layers to it. As we move through town, I added layers to build up the energy and proximity of the generator.

Finally, when we go into the basement where the generator is working, it appears in its most complex state with additional elements like valves clicking and chuffing that we haven’t heard anywhere else. It’s kind of interesting to note that, in the end, the machine had more noticeable movement in the track when played as distant, and, because of its additive nature, less movement but more energy when played as close up. The final example of perspective in cutting comes from several years ago. A film that was supervised by Scott Hecker was being dubbed at Todd-AO by Richard Portman. They’re both very talented professionals and I’m thrilled to have had the opportunity to have worked with them! At one point, Richard took issue with a distant train that had been cut in. His explanation, as Scott graciously passed on to me, is a lesson I’ve never forgotten. He said, pointing to a photo perched in front of him on the mixing console, “that’s a close-up picture. You can take it clear across the room and it’ll still be a close-up”. He meant that our train effect was a close-up sound that we were playing as very distant. It didn’t work for him and he was absolutely right.

Written by Bruce Tanis for Designing Sound

Colin Hart has talked with re-recording mixer Gary Rizzo about his favorite moments of “Inception”. This is what he said:

He replied (in my words…). There are a couple of great moments in the movie. The first one is this sequence that happens in Paris. You are down on the street in Paris, and all of a sudden things start exploding around you. But not a fiery explosion. It’s just all air, as if there was some kind of pressure making everything explode. It starts small and then everything around you is exploding, but there is never any fire. Some of the shots start for half a second in real time, then switch to slow motion. There was this news stand that starts to explode. I had a lot of low rumbling, and some air pressure sounds, and then some paper sounds and everything. There are also some cool animal sounds mixed in there. There are no incendiary or concussion explosions in there at all. It’s really cool.

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It seems like this film will be definitely an amazing experience in every aspect of filmmaking. We’ll keep you aware of the lastest news regarding the sound work there.

Here’s an example of a common scene from a suspense film or TV show: A woman walks alone to her car late at night down a long, dark alley. Shooting a scene to play as late at night or in a deserted location is common film language for creating suspense or tension. Sometimes, though, the opposite approach can be very successful as well. Creepy scenes don’t always have to be set at night in a cemetery. Sometimes, they occur in bright, sunny, happy places like forests or meadows. These can work really well precisely because you don’t expect them to be so suspenseful or tension filled. Cute little bunnies run around here – how nasty could this be? The answer is, plenty nasty!

Many, many years ago, I worked on a film called “Flesh and Bone” (1993). In one scene Meg Ryan’s character has returned, now as an adult, to her long-derelict childhood home and she walks alone out in the high grass behind the house. All you can see in any direction is long, flowing, green grass warmed by the sun and gently waving in the wind. The scene is definitely darker under the surface though. As she struggles to remember the night her parents were murdered in that house, I included cicada beds that rose and fell and a particularly nasty sounding locust ratchet. As she looks off into the distance, I cut a couple of very distant frightened horse whinnies that played up her nervousness. Of course there were also the usual suspects: crows and insects whining and scratching away. Poor crows! They never seem to get much respect. Need to cut something ugly? Throw in a crow!

They actually make a really cool clicking sound as well as their more familiar cawing, something very much like the language the alien warriors speak in “Predator”. Toward the climax of the scene, I had a low, heavy, throbbing diesel train approach in the distance but never really quite go by. The chugging drone helped the ominous tone I wanted in order to transition into the next sequence. An interesting side note to “Flesh and Bone” is that it was shot in the summer in West Texas and the insects were intense to the point of being crippling to the production. Apparently, they had to fire off a shotgun on the set in order to scare the nearby cicadas into an extremely brief moment of silence so they could record a couple of lines of dialog and then the drone would start up again! I don’t know if that was factually true, but I love the story!

In “Skeleton Key” (2005), the film takes place in the back bayou country outside of New Orleans, Louisiana. Again, evil lurks in what otherwise looks like a fairly pleasant rural location. As Kate Hudson’s character is being shown around the plantation grounds as part of her job interview, I cut in a squirrel chitter which played off against some squawking bluejays. Harry Cohen at Soundelux in Hollywood created all the design stingers and tones and did an amazing job, as always.

Flickers and cactus wrens are good, squawky birds that have a spooky sound to them and I put in a couple here and there. Vocals are one contribution birds and animals can make to a scene but their movement can also add to the suspense. It can get a bit cliche’, but having a bird fly away does still work. A dog running by on leaves and twigs can be really scary if you don’t know what it is and this thing you don’t see goes running right by you sonically. Claw scrabble on tree bark or rock is a great sound to place in at certain moments to catch a character’s attention.

I worked on “The Reaping” (2007), and in one scene, Hilary Swank’s character goes out to the proverbial lonely shack in the deep woods. The scene started off as just a walk through the woods but as she gets closer and closer to the shack, the tension gets stronger so I began with nice, pleasant birds and happy crickets chirping and, as it gets darker in tone, I transitioned to harsher insect beds and shrill chitters. There’s one moment in which she begins to notice something is wrong but without any actual visual cue and I cut in a wapiti scream which is similar to a loon cry. It’s a very mournful, haunting sound and it worked great as a turning point as the scene continued its downward spiral.

The middle of the woods in bright daylight isn’t normally a place you might expect to hear whale clicks but this forest has them! Whales and dolphins make some incredible sounds that you can’t readily identify but add a strong ominous element.I tend to try and use natural vocals and movements to develop suspense as opposed to doing a lot of processing but that can be another way to go. Pitching vocals way down can make them pretty unnerving. Or just weird. But sometimes weird is just the right note to hit.

Written by Bruce Tanis for Designing Sound

I gave up a quasi-staff position nearly a decade ago in order to pursue a career as a freelance sound effects editor. Certainly, there are positives and negatives to both of these paths but, at the time, I was being offered a one-film job at a different facility from the company where I’d been working for a few years. I had pretty much reached the highest plateau available to me where I was so I decided to head out and explore the freelance world for awhile. The film was John McTiernan’s “Rollerball” (2002), and I’ll be discussing that in a little more detail in another article dedicated to editing crowds for sports, concerts, and riots. Scott Hecker was supervising the sound crew at Soundelux in Hollywood and I was given a more or less permanently set up edit bay to work in for the duration of the project. One of the things Soundelux does really well is that they set up their edit bays in a highly professional manner. The effects rooms are typically 5.1 monitoring systems with up-to-date Mac computers containing all the appropriate software bells and whistles, and server access that is, literally, worldwide.

To be fair, I’ve worked at several facilities which offer first class edit rooms but that is not always the case and that’s the point I wish to make with this article. As a freelance editor, I never know from job to job what the system I’m assigned to will offer in terms of gear, monitoring, Pro Tools software version, plugins, etc. There’s not much I can do if the room is set up for monitoring left/right only, or even less, set up only for headphone monitoring. I could bring in my own speakers and rewire the room, I guess, but most people don’t take kindly to having their facilities remodeled by a short-term editor! Since there are no particular constants between rooms, I’ve developed a bit of a survival strategy at least as far as plugins are concerned.

There are probably hundreds of different plugins available ( maybe more!), but every system out there has a specific set of them that comes with the Pro Tools software. I won’t be dealing with quite all of them here but I’ll go through a few of them in terms of what they might offer if you need to come up with some design elements in a hurry and don’t have access to all the really Super-Cool Turbo Nuclear Firestorm Plugins that are available in the market today.

EQ

I’ll start with the basic “EQ” plugin. There are one-band, four-band, and seven-band EQ’s available and they all operate pretty much the same. The seven-band EQ simply offers more detailed control over the whole frequency range than the four-band and the four-band offers more detailed control than the one-band. I use this primarily to reduce hiss or to boost the low frequency of a sound effect. I always find that cars, guns, and other things as they occur in the library can always use a little low end boost to help make them pop. In the example, the first sound is a sliding steel door just as it was imported from the effects library. The second sound file is the same steel door but with the low frequency range boosted. As you can see in the plugin window, it was done by simply drawing the curve up in the lower frequency end of the range. It only takes seconds but you can make any sound beefier this way. In contrast, you can instead boost just the high end frequencies to make something shrill and add tension in a different way.
( FROM THE LIBRARY ) Door,Steel,Close,Muted by designingsound
( LFE BOOST w 7-BAND EQ ) Door,Steel,Close,Muted by designingsound

Delay

“Delay” is one of my favorites. Although it’s very simplistic, you can make some really fun things with this. Obviously, any plugin is only as good as the time you have to experiment with it by trying out different parameters in combination and seeing what effect they generate. This one allows you to quickly take a single sound like a door close or gunshot and echo decay the tail out. Example one is the basic sound from the library of a door closing. Example two is the same sound with an echo decay. You can alter the speed of the echoes or their amplitude just by altering the parameters or by clicking on a higher or lower musical note icon near the bottom of the window. Example three is the delayed effect reversed into itself and sped up just a little. In this way, you can make some interesting transition stingers or suspense whooshes.
( FROM THE LIBRARY ) Door,Steel,Close,Reverb,1 by designingsound
( REVERSED INTO ITSELF ) Door,Steel,Close,Reverb,1 by designingsound
( USING DECAY FOR ECHOES ) Door,Steel,Close,Reverb,1 by designingsound

D-Verb

“D-Verb” is a fairly simple little reverb plugin that basically operates off of seven different room types and you simply pick the one that’s closest in character to what you’re looking for. You can alter the amount of reverb in the processed result by changing the mix percentage. The length of time something reverbs out is accomplished by choosing the small, medium, or large buttons, in effect allowing you to choose a small church or a large room. Or a small hall. It is definitely more limited than Altiverb or TL Space or even Renaissance Reverb but still useful in a pinch. Example one is someone walking down a tiled hallway. Example two is the same effect cross-faded into itself after processing so you get the effect of the person moving away down a long tiled hallway or away from us into a large reverberant space.
( FROM THE LIBRARY ) FOOT BootsWalk 6017-DUPL 01 by designingsound
( FROM THE LIBRARY ) FOOT BootsWalk 6017 by designingsound
BNC SingleBallBou 6031-AMTp 01 by designingsound

Signal Generator

In every project I work on, there is always a scene in which tonal backgrounds can be included. You may be able to get everything you need just by going through the library but sometimes it’s nice to come up with something new that’s tailored for the scene in question. The “Signal Generator” plugin is actually kind of cool and can make all sorts of strange tones. I’ve included a few examples here to illustrate the range of different sounds you can make. The other reason I use the signal generator plugin is to create sync pops. Create a couple of seconds of -18db 1000 Hz sine wave tone, cut off the head and tail of the clip leaving only one frame and you have your sync pops.
-18 db Sine Wave TONE by designingsound
10K Triangle Wave TONE 1 by designingsound
80Hz Square Wave TONE by designingsound

Multi-Tap & Ping-Pong Delay

Multi-Tap and Ping Pong delays are really good for coming up with bizarre sounds in a hurry. These both definitely benefit from experimentation in order to get an effect that works for what you need. The first sound is a ping pong ball bounce for reference. Example two is the same ball bounce but pretty odd now as a result of processing in Multi-Tap. The Ping Pong delay took our single ball bounce and created something you might use for a computer going into overload or something like that. There was a scene in an episode of “Fringe” that I edited in which the team was watching a computer model of the anticipated growth rate of a virus were it to escape from the office building where it was trapped. As we watch the model virus spread extremely quickly over a map of the United States, this sound would be a good choice to illustrate the oncoming wave of disease! Yechh!
( FROM THE LIBRARY ) PING PONG BALL BOUNCE-DUPL 01 by designingsound
( FROM THE LIBRARY ) PING PONG BALL BOUNCE by designingsound

Flanger

There is a plugin named “Flanger” which does some interesting things. What I’ve done here is to take a stream babble imported straight from the library. Again, example one is untreated for reference, example two is the treated sound which has become much more electronic and could be used for computer data processing or maybe for the sound of someone tapping the phone line during a conversation we’re listening in on. The secret of this particular sound effect is that I processed the sound five or six times, changing some of the parameters at various points along the way. A key thought to remember when using any plugin is that if you’re looking for something way out there, maybe processing the sound multiple times within the same plugin will get you there. After a while we all start to get in the habit of going one time through a plugin and then running it through something else entirely but you can create some pretty different sounds by hitting “process” more than once. It’s a good idea, if you’re going to do this, to save a copy of the sound from time to time in case you get to a point where you decide you have, in fact, seriously over-processed the sound. That way you can return to a more appropriate version and start again.
( FLANGER ) STREAM BABBLE 1 by designingsound
( FROM THE LIBRARY ) STREAM BABBLE by designingsound

Waves Q10

There is one Waves plugin that I want to mention. If you have access to it, there’s a good filter called Q10. There is a whole series of them from Q1 right on up but the one I like is Q10. This plugin comes in both mono and stereo versions ( as most of these plugins do although some are stereo only) and has a neat little secret weapon buried down in the preset menu. If you click on the “load” button a list of presets will pop up and near the bottom you’ll find ones for “AM Radio” and one for “Telephone”. These are great for quick and dirty processing to create phone conversations or playing music or dialog as though it were coming out of a radio speaker. I used these to create some answering machine voice effects in another episode of “Fringe”.
( Q10 FUTZ FILTER ) YOGI R1v2.4 0611 DIA GT by designingsound
YOGI R1v2.4 0611 DIA GT by designingsound

Thanks for checking out my review of basic audio suite plugins. I’ve only just touched on what they can do and there are a few I didn’t even get to but this should serve as a good starting point if you need to get a bit of mileage out of some of the basic plugins that are available to any Pro Tools system. Altogether, these samples took less than an hour to create so you can see you can get quite a bit done pretty quickly, depending on what you need to achieve.

Written by Bruce Tanis for Designing Sound

The guys at Raven Software published another great post on the Dev Diary of Singularity. This time the turn is for audio lead Mark Kilborn, who talks about the mix approach and the dynamic range on the game. Check:

When you play Singularity for the first time, you may notice that parts of the game are much quieter than others. You’re hearing this because we’re working with what audio engineers call Dynamic Range, which is the difference between the loudest and quietest sound in an audio recording. We believe it is the key to delivering a powerful and memorable mix, especially for a game that depends so heavily on sound to deliver its atmosphere and mood.

Volume is not an endless thing. With color, the brightest you can get is pure white. With volume there is a limit as well, and when you hit that limit you hear what is called distortion. This isn’t the cool distortion you hear from a guitar pedal, it’s a really nasty sound that can potentially damage your speakers. Some consumer audio receivers (like the one you may have in your living room) are designed to shut down if the DVD or game being played generates too much distortion. This is a safety precaution to prevent damage to your sound system.

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Also, we’re working on a exclusive article/interview with Singularity’s sound team. Expect it around here very soon!

The July’s Issue of AudioMedia is also available for  viewing online (or download) now, including a very cool Game Sound Special featuring:

• The Sound of “Uncharted 2: Among Thieves”
• 20 Years and Beyond - Dan Bardino glances at where games audio has come from, and peeks at the future
• Games – A Serious Business - Richard Wilson talks about TIGA
• All in the Mix - Garry Taylor on his Develop Conference presentation
• Music, Dialogue, Effects… - Talk with Richard Aitken of Nimrod Productions
• Big League Games - Alexandre Carlotti talks creativity, standardisation and trust
• What you Put In - Interview with Matt Howe
• Special Compositions - Interview with Ian Livingstone
• Videogame Dialogue – “The Final Frontier? – Barney Pratt on the current state of speech in games

AudioMedia – July 2010