On Sunday, Michael Hopkins died in a rafting accident in New Zealand. Mike's best known work was with Peter Jackson. He and I worked on the Jackson film "The Frighteners." He won Oscars for his work on "Lord Of The Rings" and "King Kong." Mike Hopkins was as kind, generous, and humble a man as you might hope to meet, and a world class sound editor/designer. Everybody who spent … [Read more...]
2013 Kicks Off with Plug-in Month
Happy New Year from all of us here at Designing Sound! This month is going to be devoted to a lighter, slightly braoder topic of discussion...Plug-ins. This won't be an open-ended, catch-all, "any and every" discussion, though. We'll be focusing on the novel, weird and wacky side of these tools we all use in sound design. Plug-ins that create strange, esoteric and exotic … [Read more...]
Thanks to our December Contributors
It's been a great month here on Designing Sound! We took a gamble in November with the new monthly features format, and it's been paying off in spectacular fashion. This site would not be so special without the support and contributions of the community it serves. A hearty round of thanks goes out to this month's guests: Ian Palmer, for his examination of just a few of the … [Read more...]
Analog Worldization
Guest contribution by Cormac Donnelly I am, at heart, a techno-nostalgiast and I’ve worked with tape machines of one kind or other for most of my career. When I sold my 2” multi-track, in 2010, I resolved almost immediately to get myself another tape machine (albeit something a little smaller than the 250kg Otari I had just parted with). A few weeks later, I found myself … [Read more...]
Creating the Spaces of Ambience
Guest contribution by Michael Theiler (Kpow Audio) Situating an Ambience When creating ambiences for games (this applies equally to film), I am striving to make them blend into the background and not mask any important in game sounds. For most ambiences, these are the most important qualities that I am attempting to resolve. In order to achieve this, I need to firstly focus on … [Read more...]
Panning Reverb Returns
Guest contribution by By Douglas Murray OK, here is the ugly truth for film post, or really any surround sound work… Most reverb plug-ins do not sound natural for applications using greater than 1 or 2 speakers. What you don’t want: a reverb that jumps to completely different speakers from the source. What you do want: a reverb that spreads out from the sound and helps localize … [Read more...]
Rewind…Audio Implementation Greats #3: Crackdown – Realtime Worlds
In the run-up to this month's reverb theme, former contributor Damian Kastbauer suggested we re-run this article he put together discussing the game Crackdown for XBOX. The article may be two years old, but the content remains undeniably relevant. Never one to ignore good suggestions, here we are... One area that has been gaining ground since the early days of EAX on the PC … [Read more...]