Recently, we’ve been experiencing the joy of New York City’s expansion – yet another building. Which means tons of construction! Luckily, we’re 4 stories above them, so it’s not deathly destructive to our work.
After a few instances of severe vibration, I got the recording bug. If you can’t beat em, join em. So I pulled out my quick rig and started rolling. Ended up rolling for about 37 minutes! Seems long right? Well, it turns out that in the near future we will be doing a show that is going to have less than stellar dialogue tracks due to construction, and will have to be doing some major surgery to the tracks. Along with the surgery, I’ve found that to keep the environment real, and to also mask some of the “uglies” from extreme noise reduction, filling the track back out with additional environment sounds helps to really push the scene in a good direction (and also allows us much more control over the balance of voice to background noise). So no, 37 minutes is good for me.
Here’s a little recording clip of what we captured.
***Recorded at 96k/24-bit. Pair of SE Electronics SE-1a setup as X-Y into a Zoom H4.
In today’s world, we tend to live off of recommendations and suggestions. Someone sees a video on YouTube, and within 10 minutes, at least 20 of their friends either “Like” the video, or have shared it with their co-workers and family. Every now and then I’ll get a book recommendation or magazine article as well. But rarely do I get recos for blogs.
Everyone is obsessed with either sharing their own opinions or reading others’ thoughts. Period. No one can deny it anymore then they can spend an easy 20 minutes on Facebook just “checking in”. Blogs tend to be the most non-BS, true-hearted means out there. No one’s paying a lot of these people to share their 2 cents on why Hef and his new Bunny ain’t getting married! Theyre doing it because they care! Or don’t care…
So I offer you the challenge I gave myself – share at least one blog with five people in the next week. Then ask them to share one back with you. There are so many great ones out there! However, I would highly suggest that you limit yourself, otherwise you’ll be stuck in that “Twitter-esque” stage of your life where you have to micro-refresh every .5 seconds!
Here are a few of my favorites at the moment:
Lilith Blog ***A great blog started by the forever fascinating Sridhar Reddy, director of the film “Lilith”. Created at first to document the making of his film, it offers so much more. Brilliant and refreshingly new (and old) music, references and observations that always keep me occupied for hours.
Music of Sound ***The first blog i started to follow. Tim Prebble’s genius gathering of all sorts of interesting tidbits from around the world. From the quotes he tends to post up, all the way to his “Detrituses” (Detritusi?), the entire site is filled with all those vids and links that you always want to share with friends.
Designing Sound ***Sometimes I wonder if I should even classify this as a blog anymore because of it’s sheer popularity in the sound design world, but it absolutely is. From release announcements of the most up-and-coming sound libraries out there, to exclusive interviews, and even the “Sound Designer of the Month” segments – Miguel Isaza and his team have created a must-follow blog. Ya know that “bag of tricks” every sound designer says they have? This surely should be one of them.
These are just a few of the regular blogs that I visit for the moment. I’m ashamed not to mention more, but for the sake of length I’ll leave you with those to start.
Since the beginning of the year I’ve had the great pleasure to be working almost solely on Film mixing and sound designing. It’s a completely different game than advertising and television, but I think that’s why i love it so much.
We wrapped Zelmira Gainza‘s new film “La Pileta” (The Pool) at the end of February, and since Zelmira has picked up both the King and Wasserman Awards from NYU for the amazing tale of teenage Ana; awkward, shy and not interested in boys or growing up. That is, until she meets Diego, an old friend of her mother’s. A huge congratulations to her for all the attention the film has received!
Slightly overlapping with “La Pileta” was a feature film that was just completed for mix and sound design, called “The Normals“, written by Chris Ciancimino and directed by Kevin Connors. Produced by Woodshed Entertainment along with Gigantic Pictures.
Working on this movie reminded me so much of why I love film work – the collaboration and creative back-and-forth that can only be experienced with 6 weeks of constant interaction. It was a beast, but in the end everyone I think was very excited about the outcome.
A dark comedy focused around a great ensemble cast in a pharmaceutical drug testing environment. That’s all I’ll give you for now.
Next on the docket is a film called “Lilith“, directed by the genius Sridhar Reddy. He has such a taste and knowledge of cinema and i believe has created a very moving piece of horror based off the famous “Dante’s Inferno”. I look forward to the challenge and collaborating with him and his team to bring it to the next level.
For now a sneak peak at art made for Lilith (of which will end up having 13 posters, if not more by the release of the film):
Please make sure to visit Sridhar’s blog for Lilith to see all the other art that he’ll be using. And if you just so happen to get lost for hours reading it, don’t feel ashamed; it happens to me every time.
“Sound Effects don’t have a choice where they can go. They pretty much HAVE to be in sync with the picture. Music can choose to come before or after, but it isn’t necessary for music to hit action – or at least music does have a choice. If both music and effects hit the same moment on screen – neither one will have the intended impact. They’ll just take away from each other.”
So, I recently had a film that I mixed premiere at the IFC Center in New York City. I unfortunately wasn’t able to make it out there to hear how it went, however I did make it by this evening for a special screening of a new film, “Stone”. Firstly, fantastic character work by Edward Norton. Robert De Niro looked like Tony Bennett to me the entire time, and unfortunately I couldn’t get past that. Milla Jovovich was quite good, however, her childish approach could have been backed off in just a few very key moments, IMO.
Most importantly, was that the center speaker in the theater was completely a waste of space. The most important speaker in all systems, was completely devoid of any low end. Throughout “Stone” there is a barrage of radio interviews, phone conversations…all things that are futzed and filtered through EQs. However, as soon as actual dialogue starts, you can’t tell if it is still supposed to be part of the futzed work. Impressively annoying IFC. Fortunately for your theater, you have a slew of artsy peeps who think that it was a creative choice by the filmmakers. Bah!
To Skip Lievsay & the rest of the sound crew of “Stone”, my hats are off to you for what could have been a fantastic soundscape. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to hear it in all it’s glory as the theater I saw it at decided to not pay attention to what people are paying for. Last time I checked a movie contains both video AND sound.
Not to mention, it makes one worry that their own work will turn out just the same.
So I wandered into my studio this past Monday only to find one of the most interesting & random scribbles I’d ever seen on an audio post house’s notepad:
After inspecting it for a second, I thought I had a basic idea about what it might pertain to – stemmed obviously from my constant dreamlike state during high school physics class. So I asked around and found out that the day before, while recording a 13-year-old prodigy singer (quite good actually, I heard the tracks later that day), the father (a physicist) had gotten into a conversation about the concept of “excitement” with my boss. So, therein lies the secret “formula” of how excitement is born in the human brain.
And as I love so much what Tim Prebble does over at Music of Sound, I’ve posted up my idea of what “excitement” would sound like:
What does “excitement” sound like to you? (Seriously, I’d love to hear examples).
Finally sitting down on a Wednesday evening a few months back, I had the joy of watching this classic 1989 Best Oscar Foreign Film Winner (as well as the Special Jury Prize at Cannes that same year). What a captivating story. A film that feels like it was made in the 50s, blossoms into a completely different, yet related, modern film.
Beyond all of the praise that it well deserves, the ADR (Automated Dialogue Replacement) really stood out to me. How could a film that is practically 100% ADR (and not always in sync) still make such an impression on our culture?! Surely, a film released these days with just the slightest ADR sync issue in a few scenes would hardly stand a chance at an Oscar win. Let alone an entire film!
Questions have amassed and sleepless nights ensued. Here’s a little idea why:
Was this ADR planned? Did they really change that many lines? Did the fact that I had to read English subtitles happen to subdue the fact that this ADR didn’t match up at all?!?! Maybe, I haven’t seen an 80s flick in awhile and they’re all like this, but I just couldn’t believe it.
Whatever it is with this film, it has found a way to fit the tone and life that the film has created for itself. For anyone who hasn’t seen it yet, it’s worth the 2 hours. For anyone who has seen it, I recommend it again and again.
Ever feel like you’ve been stuck in that little bubble, called “your brain”? Yeah, that’s been me for more months than I’d care to count. And so, I’ve decided to finally let it all out and hopefully be fruitful with this blog. And so it begins…
For a little over a year now, I’ve been a dedicated client to the world-famous Altiverb. Through the general discovery of impulse responses, to the tweak crazy settings that one can change at the drop of a mouse – this has been a reverb that has definitely changed post-production for good. So, I was finally able to muster up the time and momentum to do a little IR recording of my own. My victims: mini djembes.
I purchased these fine finger tools years ago in a sudden outburst of “must-have” spending (you know, the kind that ends in, “you mean like the MacPro, PTHD System & $2000 mic I just bought?! WHAT?!”). These little suckers have been sitting either in, on or next to some form of a desk or other flat surface that has served as my work space, since the day of purchase. Occasionally, they have even made their way in front of a mic or two, but it has unfortunately been much rarer than I had planned on. Until now.
Today, these cheap $15 beauties got stuck right up the rear by a matched pair of Rode NT5s, while listening to the soothing sounds of Altiverb’s generated frequency sweep and all familiar (to other IR creators) flutter-ins and flutter-outs. Played on the most portable of rigs, my provider was none other than my trusty iPod Nano that has seen 0% usage since the purchase of my iPhone awhile back. So yeah, it’s no uncompressed WAV or perfect quality – but let’s be honest here: a 320kbps MP3 is a helluva damn good sounding compressed audio file. OH, and I didn’t have a car CD player, or any CD player for that matter, just sitting around, so I was forced into the MP3dom.
I played this signal through a Genelec 8040 speaker approx. 4 feet from the mics.
As these were mini-djembes, and I specifically wanted stereo IRs, it was pretty easy to figure out how to mic them up. Using a tight X-Y pattern with the NT5s, I gave each of the little djembes a surprise they weren’t expecting.
Here is the original sentence, unprocessed:
Here is the sentence run through a 100% wet IR of the Medium-sized, fatter djembe:
Here is the sentence run through a 100% wet IR of the Mini narrow djembe:
My biggest surprise was that the narrower djembe actually had the more enveloping impulse response. If you just sat down and played the two, you would notice that the medium-sized fat daddy djembe definitely has more ambient tones to it and a more full-bodied sound, due to the wider drum head and open body. Unfortunately, it’s IR really picked up a strong signal down in the 100-250Hz range, followed by a sharp drop off and slowly regaining power up around 1kHz. Examining the djembe closer, you will notice that the wide head gets squeezed down to a 1.5-2 inch hole through the base (which allows that lower tone to release – or not-so-low tone, as it’s a MINI-DJEMBE, ha).
I hope ya’ll enjoyed this post, the clips and the pics. As this is just the beginning, I always want to hear from everyone about these posts. Let me know what you think: more audio, less pictures, too long, get to the point, etcetera! All the best.
This is the blog of Chris Stangroom, sound designer, editor & mixer. In the near future, I will be posting up random things related to sound, video, technology, and DEFINITELY experiments. I am always looking to improve what I have created, so at any time please feel free to write me your opinions. Please click on any of the networking icons in the top corner, as they are how I stay connected.
And coming VERY soon: Impulse Response Recordings! Get ready.
