Monday, February 28, 2011

Oscars

Inception picked up both Sound Editing and Sound Mixing awards at the Oscars!  I read a fascinating interview with the team behind the sound on it at the New York Times website - now seems like an appropriate time to link it.

Of the other contenders, Tron I thought had a good shot at Sound Editing, and True Grit wouldn't have been a poor choice either - I thought it was particularly interesting how they accurately pulled off the echo delay for gunshots in the distance without jarring the audience, who are long used to physics being ignored in movie soundtracks.  Surprisingly strong field this year!

Though I have often had a hard time taking the Academy Awards seriously since 2008, when The Dark Knight beat out WALL-E for sound editing.  Not to say The Dark Knight wasn't deserving of the accolade, but it was nowhere near the feat of a movie where sound design carried more of the script than actual speech.  But perhaps that's just being jaded. :)

Friday, February 11, 2011

But Will It Blend?


Looking at the prospect of moving house again soon, and came to the realisation that sound designers have the potential to be the very worst hoarders.

It's not just keeping cables of every sort - because you never know when you might need another midi to midi cable, or a midi to usb, or an XLR to stereo plug.  Or those old speakers, either - you need a backup, and they're an extra set of reference speakers, after all.  Or synths, or mixing desks, or microphones... yeah, there's a lot of gear involved in sound design.

But it's not really the gear I'm talking about.  People understand not wanting to throw out or resell some of that - it was expensive to begin with, and can still be useful.  The real danger is all the random bits of bric-and-brac you discover.

This random bit of plastic tubing.  Those old vacuum hoses. That burnt out lightbulb.  That tub of styrofoam.  That broken slinky.  Those glass marbles that used to sit in the fishtank.  That blunt, gaudy, fake sword with the loose handle.  That child's boomerang.  A random piece of leftover balsa wood.  Thirteen different rulers you never use.  Silly putty.  Empty jewellery boxes.

I'm either going to have to have a marathon session one day to record every possible use of these things so they can finally be thrown out, or accept that moving house is going to remain a nightmare forever.

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Sticking Up Acoustic Foam

Received four big rolls of second hand acoustic foam for the office!  \o/  It's kind of like Christmas! However my office is unfortunately both my recording and mixing environment, so I likely won't need all of it, but it should take a bit of the bite out of the current echo.  I have a feeling the rest of the team think the foam is soundproofing, not sound deadening - although it is probably soundproofing to some degree... for them, that is.

After finally getting some room treatment materials (aside from the ever-faithful mattress), the challenge now is mounting the foam on the wall - without either terribly damaging the foam or the wall.

Spray adhesive is typically the best for this sort of thing, but without that option I've had to get a bit creative with double-sided mounting tape:


These are works in progress.  After a bit of trial-and-error, this seems to be the method that's finally held up using the available materials on hand. It's not beautiful or tidy, but it gets the job done.  That's packing tape, glued directly to the foam (since packing tape won't stick to foam), and then double-sided mounting tape stuck to the back of that (since mounting tape won't stick to foam either.)  Turns out once you rule out spray adhesive, getting anything to stick to foam is a real challenge! 

I should have used glitter.