Game Audio Explosion

I've just been reading an article posted here which is primarily aimed at game audio, but sould also be useful to people working on sound for film.
Key points:
- It is important that your audio team all understand what their role within the project is and that they all know what is expected of them. This will allow them to focus their efforts more effectively and produce higher quality work. It is fine for poeple to help out with other roles/jobs but ultimately it must be one persons role to oversee each area.
- The planning stage is extremely important. In your planning, think about the characters and locations and the style/type of sounds that would be generated/created by each.
- You can use emotional responses to certain sounds to help people to "understand" the emotional content of a scene quicker and more easily.
- It is very important to consider the frequency response of the sounds that are being created and how these will work when large numbers of sounds are combined. You don't want sounds fighting for the same space within a mix.

The article also contains a few brief tips for creating effective explosion sounds.

Rob Nokes - Sound Seminar

Rob Nokes, a sound recordist and supervising sound editor gives a seminar on sound for film.
He answers the following questions:
What is the job of a sound editor?
In your job what audio is expected of you to deliver?
What happens if you steal sounds?
How do you prove copyright?
In your job what audio is expected of you to deliver?
What bit depth do you record at?
Detail the sound equipment you actually use.
How did you make monster sounds sound real?
What makes a good sound?
Why is it best to record clean?
Is it better to have actors do adr?
Is there another way to avoid adr?
What is 'smoothing' or EQ?
Do you process while you record?
Is it better to have actors do adr?
Is there another way to avoid adr?
What is 'smoothing' or EQ?
Do you process while you record?
What is a series?
How best to record gunshots?
How do you make a sound bigger?
How close to the sound or actor do you record?
Do you change your levels while recording?
How best do you cut background sounds in?
What mic technique would you use to record a room?
How can you control loud sounds?
What is your underwater technique?
How did you create your favourite sound?
Do you record everything?

Ben Burtt - Talks

collider has posted 4 videos of a presentation given by Ben Burtt on the making of the sound for Wall-E.
He demonstrates the sources of some of the sounds used within the film, including the system he used in conjunction with a graphics tablet to create the voice ofthe main character.

creating a background drone sound

audiotuts has a tutorial on designing an ambient/background drone sound suitable for use in a film's soundtrack - especially if you're working on a sci-fi or horror style film.
It involves taking a constant 'musical' sound such as a flute note and then combining this with modulation based effects, pitch shifting and some convolution reverb (the key here is the source sample of your convolution, the tutorial uses a growl sound).

Worth a quick look.

Markers in Logic

Here's a little video via audiotuts showing how to set up Markers within Logic.

Logic Pro: Markers from Elizabeth A. on Vimeo.

Tempo Tracks in Cubase 4

Audiotuts has a nice little tutorial on using hitpoints and marker tracks within Cubase 4 to create a changing tempo track. This is useful as it allows you to set up a tempo track that goes through multiple tempo changes over the course of a project. The use of hitpoints means you can 'sync up' these tempo changes to an existing piece of audio.
Could be useful for setting up a project for sound for film in which you would be likely to have varying tempos within your project.

Brief interview with Ben Burtt

pixar planet has a brief Q&A session with Ben Burtt, the sound designer on Wall-E.

In it he discusseshow he goes about creating voices for creatures and robots. He explains that voices are one of the hardest sounds to create as they have to be both intelligible and realistic for the creature/machine that's producing the sound. He finds that sounds that contain a human element and an electronic element work best.
He likens this to the creation of "ordinary" sounds for sci-fi films. He says that when you're trying to create the sound for a futuristic object that doesn't actually exist then it often pays to try and use a real-world sound as the basis as this will enable people to connect with the sound and make it more believable.

Film & Game Composers Forum

filmandgamecomposers forum is a new(ish) forum for people interested in composition for film, games, animation and TV. Contains posts of techniques, software, hardward, etc...

music for film - career?

via the music of sound

If you're thinking that you might fancy a career composing music for film and/or TV then you will probably want to check out the following articles which appeared in Sound on Sound in 2005.

Part One: Getting a break

Part Two: Creating your showreel

Part Three: Essential gear

Part Four: How to make a pitch

Part Five: You got the pitch - Now what?

Part Six: Completed orchestration

Part Seven: How to cope with revisions

Part Eight: Being creative under pressure

Part Nine: Roll credits

Interview with Matthew Wood

Matthew Wood is a supervising sound editor at Skywalker Sound.
HDFilmTools has a 3 part (currently only parts 1 & 2 are available) video interview with Matthew discussing a variety of things.

He talks about the role of supervising sound editor in realising the director's vision for the use of sound within a film and how he approaches the start of a film through spotting for effects, etc.
He also talks about how he started at Skywalker Sound when he was 17 and the roles he's had within the company since then and who he has worked with.

He briefly discusses the software that he uses on a daily basis - namely ProTools and the Waves plugins.

Part 2 ends with a discussion of his work on Wall-E and how the process of working on an animation is different to a "normal" film.

Creaky Wooden Floor

audio cookbook a site that aims to post one "interesting" sound file every day has posted a recording of a creaky wooden floor that has been pitched down 2 full octaves.

The results sound very cool; you can hear lots of the timbral and textural changes taking place within the sound and the whole thing sounds like some massive creaking construction as opposed to a small piece of flooring.

This technique of extreme pitch shifting to reveal the hidden intricacies of a sound can be very useful when designing original sound effects.

"To make this 4:15 minutes long recording I found a creaky spot on the wooden floors of my house, rocked back and forth in place and pointed a stereo mic at my feet. I remember doing this years ago, but thought I’d give it another go using a faster sampling rate and bit depth so the quality is not reduced as much when pitched down. Before making the recording I set the sampling rate and bit depth to 96kHz and 24 bit. I pitched it down two octaves and then normalized the results before rendering the final output.

I’ve suggested this technique on several occasions to students and sound designers to manufacture a realistic simulation of a creaking ship. It’s sounds as if I added reverb, but it’s just the natural sound of the room itself. I was not particularly careful about recording in a quiet environment. I heard a car go by outdoors at one point, but it’s not too noticeable after the down pitching."

creaky wooden floor sample

Behind the scenes of Dr Who's audio

Sonic State has an exclusive behind the scenes documentary from Bang, the post-production house in Wales responsible for the sound for the Dr Who series.
This first video is an introduction to the facility and their equipment/resources.
There is a short intro to the world of foley.



Following episdoes promise a more in depth look at sound design and foley - so should be good.

edit:
The second episode is now available. The majority of this post discusses their new Dolby licenced 5.1 studio. There are also a few comments from Russel T Davies (the main producer of ther series)

Interview with Ben Burtt

unidentified sound object posts a video interview with Ben Burtt discussing the Wall-E film.
This is a little different from the usual interviews in that they didn't focus entirely on the cute little robot sounds. Instead Burtt discusses the advantages of working on the project from the very start and how he was able to create little sound experiments of how he thought the character might sound. He would pass these recordings to the animators who would create short sequences to using his soundtracks. The cross-collaboration between the 2 departments really helped to develop and refine the character of Wall-E.

He touches on the amount of sound effects that needed to be produced on this film (over 2,600!) due to the fact that it is an animation and so everything in the film needed to have a sound created for it.
He goes onto explain how he finds himself recording "interesting" sounds from every day life as he walks around (he calls it "collecting"), even whilst he's on holiday. He recalls taking his daughter shopping so he could get away with recording the sound of shopping trolleys crashing into things.

He finishes up reminiscing about some of his favourite characters from the films he's worked on. Obviously he mentions R2-D2 and the difficulties he had in fabricating a personality for the little robot through the use of sound. He suggests that sound designers really enjoy working on some of the minor characters in films as it allows them "invent" personalities and show off a little bit with sound.

Sound of Gears of War

game trailers has a series of "developers diaries" focussing on Gears of War 2.
The vid that follows the above link concentrates on the sound design, effects and music of the game.

There is some good stuff for inspiration both for game sound and for film sound.

foley actors live

here's a video of a couple of foley actors performing live on TV in america.
The presenter is narrating the story of goldilocks and the 3 bears whilst the two foley artists create all of the sound effects.
Its an interesting look at how these guys produce the sound effects for films.

star wars: a new sound

just been reading this article on film sound.
It's pretty interesting.
its aimed primarily at the re-working of the original star wars soundtrack and Ben Burtt. It discusses a bit of Burtt's history and how he got started in the business and then moves onto discuss some of the processes and technical issues involved in the re-working of star wars.
The article then goes onto talk about some of the work that Burtt's contemporaries from that time have done since.

There are discussions of how certain sounds were produced and the roles of the various people involved in the creation of a soundtrack.

Exploiting Sound, Exploring Silence

Have just stumbled across this article from the New York Time in January.
It is a discusison of the use of sound and music (or lack of it) in the Coen Brothers' "No Country for Old Men". If you've not seen it, go watch it now!!

Some of the most intersting quotes from the article:

"By compelling audiences to listen more closely, this unnervingly quiet movie has had the effect of calling attention to an underappreciated aspect of filmmaking: the use of sound."

"Suspense thrillers in Hollywood are traditionally done almost entirely with music,” he said. “The idea here was to remove the safety net that lets the audience feel like they know what’s going to happen. I think it makes the movie much more suspenseful. You’re not guided by the score and so you lose that comfort zone.”"

"“The essence of sound design is you can’t record the sound,” Mr. Lievsay said. “You have to take a lot of sounds and put them together.""

creating a matrix-style transition effect

audiotuts has a tutorial which takes you through, step-by-step, how to create a sfx similar to that used in the matrix films when the characters transition between the two different worlds.

The tutorial makes use of various audio processes: EQ, chorus, filtering, reversing, pitch-shifting, reverb.

The end result is not quite as polished as those produced for the matrix films, but it is pretty good - the tutorial also gives a few tips and pointers on variations and refinements that could be made to the process depending on your needs.

audio cookbook

i've just stumbled across the audio cookbook which according to their site is:

a non-profit resource for music and sound enthusiasts made possible by contributions from Unearthed Music. The content has a slant toward the avant-garde or experimental side of audio production. Whether you have years of technical experience or you are just getting your feet wet doing sound design, you’ll find unique, interesting and useful information that might inspire you, give you an idea, or simply entertain.
Features

* One Sound Every Day is a new category where AudioCookbook.org founder John Keston creates and posts a new sound every day with a description of how it was produced.
* Posts under the Sound Design category describe techniques you can use to create unique sounds for your productions.
* The Foley category has posts that outline strange, unique, bizzarre, or just plain effective techniques to generate foley.
* Audio News contains stories from our contributors and links to articles outside of AudioCookbook.org that are of interest to sound designers and audio engineers.
* The Contributors page has brief bios of the audio professionals who are providing the content.
* Visit the Participate page if you are an audio professional interested in contributing to the content of our site.
* An integrated media plugin routes audio or video files directly into a player within posts so users can easily listen or view the examples while reading the articles.

worth checking out on a regular basis as they post lots of examples of interesting sounds and explain how they were created.

online sound design resources

create digital music has put together a round-up of 15 online resources geared towards sound design for both film and games.

Sound design is a fundamental aspect of nearly every form of digital media, from music production to games to commercial radio. Sometimes seen as a ‘dark art’, sound design can also be viewed as difficult and mysterious, often deterring would-be creators. Here are 15 sound design resources to help rookies and veterans alike.

The 15 sites are split into different categories:
Fundamentals: audiotuts, sound on sound, digital pro sound.
Sound for Film: filmsound, filmsounddaily, syncsoundcinema.
Sound for Games: gamasutra, GANG, music4games, IASIG, sound-music-interactive-games.
Communities & Lists: game audio forum, game audio pro, sound_design.
Other: USO.

If you're interested in either sound for film or sound for games, you should be looking at these websites (and others) on a regular basis as they all have some really useful and informative articles.
You can subscribe to an RSS feed from most of the above sites which can make keeping up to date really easy.