Colin Hart has published a very interesting and detailed article about the principles and techniques of boom operation. It's more focused on location sound, but it will be an amazing read for anyone who has to deal with booms, including sound designers and recordists. The Boom Operator: one of the most crucial parts of a sound team, if not the most crucial. Also, one of the … [Read more...]
Rob Nokes Special: Guide to Recording Dogs
Untrained dogs can be very hard to record. Unlike trained dogs, they don’t know commands and are usually scared or uneasy when put in a different environment. Also, their reactions are hard to predict and most likely they will not perform as you want them to when the time for recording comes. In order to minimize these problems there are some things you can try doing: First of … [Read more...]
Rob Nokes Special: Guide to Recording Cars
Back in the day when I first started recording cars, we were using small DAT machines, the Sony TCD7 and back in those days DAT machines were very expensive, so we had maybe 2 DAT machines. We had to record sounds for this movie called The Chase, and it was all a car chase movie. So Greg and I set out to figure out how we could make big hollywood sounding cars and between the 2 … [Read more...]
Bruce Tanis Special: Cutting Weird Things on "Fringe"
I started editing sound effects at Todd-AO back in 19.......... Something-or-other! I started working on a show called "Brooklyn Bridge" produced by Gary David Goldberg. I worked in television for a few years and then moved over to working on features. With a few brief side trips back to TV, I stayed in the feature world ever since until starting in on "Fringe" in August, … [Read more...]
Bruce Tanis Special: Cutting Crowd Effects
Hello again. Over the years I've worked on several films and TV shows that required editing crowds for different sorts of sports, both indoors and outdoors, concerts, and, my personal favorite, panic, battles, and riots. Umm, just kidding there. Mostly. Crowds are actually a bit more difficult to cut than they might seem on the surface. There are two obvious problems to be … [Read more...]
Bruce Tanis Special: Editing Hand to Hand Fight Sound Effects
Fight sequences are a common event in many action films and they are often fairly straight forward to edit. See a punch, hear a punch. Unlike fantasy or horror scenes where you're trying to create a mood that isn't necessarily supported by visuals, for fight scenes, the action you see on screen pretty much determines what you need to cut. As usual, though, I tend to go a … [Read more...]
Tutorial: Making Impact Sound Effects, by Jim Stout
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMgovfQjxUA The Jim Stout special was two months ago, right. But it doesn't stops the Jim's interest for sharing his knowledge and techniques with Designing Sound readers, so here is a new exclusive video tutorial, this time on making impact sound effects. … [Read more...]