Guest Contribution by Abigail Sie The Great Gatsby was an unusually long sound post-production process. How long did the sound mix take? Just under three months, it was quite a long haul. A lot of that really was logistics in the way of rethinking, re-conforming the pre-dubs and integrating new material with the edit as the picture changed and was updated throughout the … [Read more...]
In Memory of Charles Campbell
A message from Randy Thom... Charles (Chuck) Campbell, whose Supervising Sound Editor credits included the Back To The Future series, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, ET, and Schindler's List, died in his sleep a few days ago. Chuck was a gentleman statesman in film sound, in addition to being a heck of a sound editor, and he was a mentor to many, many people in our business. From … [Read more...]
Finding Your Way With High Dynamic Range Audio In Wwise
Guest Contribution by: Louis-Xavier Buffoni – Software engineer at Audiokinetic HDR in a Nutshell HDR (“High Dynamic Range”) audio is a technique which draws its inspiration from the local adaptation method used in HDR imaging, which “attempts to maintain local contrast, while decreasing global contrast.” [1] In audio, this local/global dichotomy applies to time, and contrast … [Read more...]
The Dynamics of Mark of the Ninja
Guest Contribution by Matthew Marteinsson At first listen you can tell Mark of the Ninja is a game with a wide dynamic range. The game is all about being hidden and safe or out in the open with the danger of being seen. A very binary visual contrast between being hidden and visible informs the player clearly which state they are in. When hidden, the player has got time to … [Read more...]
Time
Guest Contribution by Randy Thom I'm on a plane from San Francisco to New York, May 3, and I see that the Designing Sound theme for May is time. Two notions relating to time and sound design come to mind. One is that fiddling with time in storytelling is always a playground for sound. Jumps to the past or the future in a movie swing the door wide open to using sound in … [Read more...]
Generating Complexity in Max
Guest Contribution by Mark Durham With this post I want to look at some strategies for generating control data in Max, or more specifically generating complex envelopes for controlling parameters. Now I expect that designing envelopes is nothing new for most Designing Sound readers; it's been a staple technique for manipulating parameters on a timeline in most DAW's, … [Read more...]
A Quick Introduction to SuperCollider
Guest Contribution by Graham Gatheral Let's be honest: code can be daunting. All those words and numbers and operators and punctuation errors... For a start, there's no GUI. How are you supposed to make anything without a GUI?! Well, as we'll see later we can make a GUI-based synth in SuperCollider with just a few dozen lines of code! But let's put GUIs to one side for now, … [Read more...]