"The ultimate metaphoric sound is silence. If you can get the film to a place with no sound where there should be sound, the audience will crowd that silence with sounds and feelings of their own making, and they will, individually, answer the question of, "Why is it quiet?" If the slope to silence is at the right angle, you will get the audience to a strange and wonderful … [Read more...]
Francis Ford Coppola Talks About the Evolution of Movie Sound
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-fNpE9vQJw[/youtube] As early as the Apocalypse Now movie in 1979 when Francis Ford Coppola and sound designer Walter Murch pioneered a quadraphonic sound system for the film tour, Coppola has made sound and audio technology an important part of filmmaking, including building a dedicated mixing facility, American Zoetrope. In 2010, under … [Read more...]
Blastwave FX Sound Design Competition – Results & Webinar
Ric Viers will be announcing the winner of the Blastwave FX Halloween Sound Design Competition on Wednesday, November 30, 2011 during a free one hour webinar. The webinar will include a special lecture by Ric Viers on "How To Win A Sound Design Competition". An open question and answer session will follow the lecture. Register Here … [Read more...]
HISS and a ROAR Releases BEACHES
HISS and a ROAR has released BEACHES, an ambience library recorded by sound designer Tim Prebble. If you’ve ever had to sync waves to picture then you will appreciate the need for a collection of cleanly recorded waves of various scales; from gentle idyllic waterlaps to more turbulent surf. Each location in this new library was recorded to six tracks, capturing a narrow … [Read more...]
SFX News: Ambiences, Animal Bells, Drones, Swishes
Two new ambience libraries are on the way. HISSandaROAR Beaches: [vimeo]http://vimeo.com/32247477[/vimeo] and TONSTURM Mountain Air: http://vimeo.com/32139444 Rabbit Ears Audio has an Animal Bells Library on the way, "for sheep, goats, cows, elephants, or sound designers". [vimeo]http://vimeo.com/32374039[/vimeo] Chuck Russom FX has released Drones sound library, … [Read more...]
The Sound of “The Muppets”
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/32188511[/vimeo] On vacation in Los Angeles, Walter, the world’s biggest Muppet fan, and his friends Gary (Segel) and Mary (Amy Adams) from Smalltown, USA, discover the nefarious plan of oilman Tex Richman (Chris Cooper) to raze the Muppet Theater and drill for the oil recently discovered beneath the Muppets’ former stomping grounds. To stage The … [Read more...]
Harry Cohen Special: Sound Design Moments Re-visited
[Written by Harry Cohen] I wanted to write a different kind of article, one that indulges my more geeky-tech side. While the main source for material remains great recordings, there are lots of times when we find solutions to problems in processing; these days that mainly means plug-ins, but that was not always so. Sometimes, looking back, I see creative sound design moments … [Read more...]