To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom. - Bertrand Russell It seems only fitting that as we wrap up Halloween that we delve into the season’s most prominent emotion: fear. While horror sound design and making just the right mixture of viscous liquid for appropriate gore sounds is part of what we do, so too, is the sound design of psychological fear. Crafting dread, … [Read more...]
Nathan Smith – One Prop at a Time
Nathan Smith is Sound Design Supervisor at Dallas,Texas based Gearbox Software. He has worked in TV, films including "The King of Kong" and video games such as the Borderlands franchise. What brought him to my attention was a series of videos he produced demonstrating various boxes and gadgets he constructed to capture sound assets for his various projects. I asked him some … [Read more...]
Finding Fun Outside of Work
It seems like a perfect counterpoint to last month’s topic of burnout that we switch to the opposite: fun. How many times have you taken a step back to think about how much you love your job? How often do find yourself grinning uncontrollably at the absurdity of your daily work life? Hopefully it’s a frequent occurrence to be in the midst of your job and think with glee, “I … [Read more...]
Preventing Burnout
We are in highly creative, highly competitive, deadline-driven fields, and as such, over-exertion and long hours are often the norm. I'm been through the delirium of long crunches dozens of times and have unfortunately seen amazingly talented people fall victim to the stresses and exhaustion, ending their careers and leaving the creative field far too young. There is plenty of … [Read more...]
Employing Minimalism as a Design Aesthetic
There are some great articles this month about people who utilize minimalism as a core to their design aesthetic, but what about the rest of us? Not every project demands or needs a minimalist approach, but there are aspects of minimalism we can learn from and use in our design that will hopefully result in cleaner, arguably better sound design choices. To be clear I’m not … [Read more...]
Andrew Roth: Telling Stories in a Space
Andrew Roth is a sound designer specializing in installation work-- both sound design and engineering. He got his start at Earwax Productions in San Francisco in the late 1990s as an audio editor and expanded into radio, television, film and video games. Nowadays he still dabbles in film, commercial and video game sound, but his passion lies in sound installations. Some of his … [Read more...]
Joanna Orland – The Rosetta Stone of Audio
Joanna Orland is supervising sound designer at Sony Interactive Entertainment's London Studio. During her time at Sony she's worked on various projects including PlayStation VR Worlds, Wonderbook: Book of Spells, Diggs Nightcrawler, God of War 3, Eyepet and more. Before Sony, she was at EA / Criterion where she worked on the Burnout franchise and the fps game BLACK. … [Read more...]