For only the second time in history (the first was 1996's Toy Story), the Academy is granting a special Oscar, this time to Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu for the virtual reality experience, Carne y Arena (Virtually Present, Physically Invisible). The experience was hosted at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year and remains on exhibition in Los Angeles, … [Read more...]
Monthly Theme: DIY
If you want something done right, you should probably hire a professional at or above market rate. But if you want to learn, try doing it yourself! Consider it a companion month to our time spent on Tutorials: this month's theme is DIY. It's about taking lessons from a Tutorial (or brazenly ignoring them) and diving headlong into the trenches, puzzling it out, eventually … [Read more...]
The Fun of Foley
This is a guest contribution by Jim Griffin, Senior Sound Designer at award-winning Soho-based audio post production facility Jungle Studios. Foley is probably the most fun and creative element of sound design – here, Jim looks at some of the lengths he has gone to creating great sound and offers his tips on Foley. Just a few days into my first job as a runner at what is now … [Read more...]
Monthly Theme: Fun
[perfectpullquote align="full" cite="Steve Smith" link="" color="" class="" size=""]We're not curing cancer. We're barely curing boredom.[/perfectpullquote] Art is hard. Creativity is hard. Ditto clients, technical challenges, deadlines, impostor syndrome, repetitive strain injury, and burnout. The realist's manual on the hazards of professional sound design runs many miles … [Read more...]
Sunday Sound Thought #82 — To Continue
As has come before; many of these posts will be philosophical in nature. Some will be in contradiction to previous postings. These are not intended as truths or assertions, they’re merely thoughts…ideas. Think of this as stream of consciousness over a wide span…Please bare with us as we traverse the abstract canals of audio musings. A few heavy reads recently had left me … [Read more...]
Sunday Sound Thought #73 — A Voice
I finished Haruki Murakami's "Wind / Pinball" a while ago, and this month's Language / Lingo theme got part of it resonating in my memory. The novels are forewarded with Murakami's own narrative on how he came to realize he should be a writer. It dawned on him in a moment: the crack of a double in a Jingu baseball stadium, then, "In that instant, for no reason and on no … [Read more...]
Sunday Sound Thought #68 – Our Intelligent Future
A really compelling narrative running underneath all the other news of the world right now is the ways in which machine learning and neural networks are transforming data interpretation. And really, transforming everything. The core concept of machine learning, termed over fifty years ago now, is a process which "gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly … [Read more...]