Hello. This is my blog. It used to be just about sampling but now I write about sound design and film audio as well. If you’d like even more content then what you find here, I suggest you visit and ‘like’ my Facebook page. Also, I have the beginnings of an online store hidden away behind that ‘Downloads‘ link to the right. There you’ll find sampled instruments and original sound effects for sale.
As a movie, I felt Hanna didn’t live up to it’s potential and was ultimately an exercise in style over substance. But man, what style! If you haven’t scene it, it’s definitely worth watching. For the fantastic sound design at least. 32 people worked on the sound for this film! Including sound designers/re-recording mixers, Craig Berkey and Christopher Scarabosio.
One of the many great sound scenes in the movie is the “subway fight” scene. It’s a single shot scene that tracks Eric Banna, playing ex-CIA operative and father of the protagonist Erik Heller, as he’s being followed down into the subway. The clip starts off with a very organic sounding rhythm that seems to blend with the complex sonic environment. The unconventional soundtrack by “The Chemical Brothers” frequently blurs the line between music and sound design and it’s not always clear which sounds were put there by the sound team and which sounds are part of the score.
As Erik (played by Eric) exits the bus station through a pair of sliding doors, the stereo field widens dramatically. Immediately there is as flurry of movement. A skateboarder skates past, a plane flies overhead with an exaggerated woosh, a car zooms by in the left speaker. All this as the camera pans 180 degrees. Now Erik is walking, we see graffiti eyes painted on the bus station walls and an advertisement for glasses, all symbolizing that Erik is being watched. Sure enough, the camera pans past an agent behind the piller and we hear a wonderfully non-literal representation of the agents in-ear radio. Another passby, wooshing sound as Erik turns to look behind him and the agent pretends to look at his watch.
If the theme up to this point has been movement, the theme now is danger. We hear a police siren in the distance. Followed by something that sounds like a siren or a machine of some sort turning on. Then someone yelling, a crow calls out, another angry shout, a car drives by and honks loudly. All sounds signifying danger in rapid succession as Erik steps onto the escalators down into the subway.
The escalators have a wonderfully rhythmic pulse to them which sets the tempo of the music. Erik unbuttons his jacket, preparing for a fight, and a solid drum beat kicks in. A high sound design flourish blends with the echoing roar of a skateboarder down in the nearly empty subway station. His footsteps echo, drawing our attention to the emptiness of the space as the agents close in. We hear a snippet of radio chatter before we pan around to see the lead agent saying “we got him” into his walkie talkie. Then they fight.
I could, and will, write an entire post on punches. I’m always interested to see how filmmakers handle punch sounds. These punches are certainly exaggerated but not as over the top as they could be. Around 2:02 there’s a moment where one of the agents is blocking our view of Erik’s hand so there’s a little reversed metallic ”shing” sound that helps communicate to us what is happening. As the last agent falls, the beat stops dramatically and all that is left is a high screeching sound which sounded like part of the music but now seems like it could be part of the environment.
And finally, listen to the funny little crackle the walkie talkie makes as Erik tosses it on the ground. It’s completely unnecessary and kind of cartoony and silly if you listen to it over and over again, but it fits within the borderline dream state, almost hallucinogenic sonic palette of the film.
100 points if you can guess the origins of this sound. Hint – it’s made by a living creature.
Click here for the answer.
I’m currently working on the DVD length cut of “JourneyQuest – Season 2″, a web-series I worked on last summer, and I was reminded of a very small moment in the series that I thought was interesting. I’ve posted a link to 3 back to back versions of the same scene. First the full mix, then just dialog, then sound effects only. The main thing I want to point out is the bells that sound at the end. These were not in the script or in the story boards. They were thought up and added in during post. So, originally, the characters turned around simply because their conversation was ending. Now they turn around because the school bells are signaling them to. That’s all. It seems extra insignificant now that I put it in writing, but I think it’s a small example of how sound can suggest a much larger and more detailed world then what can be shown on screen. There’s nothing wrong with these characters turning around without a specific reason to do so, but having the bells there suggests that these people have a reality beyond their screen time. They have duties to return to, a routine that they have and that the school has. Maybe these bells have been signaling class breaks for decades, for centuries even. Some of the other details in the backgrounds suggest a larger life for the setting as well. There are students talking in the distance somewhere. Maybe there are dormitories and the students are sent here from all over the land. You can faintly hear teachers giving lectures, and a student practicing violin in an extremely repetitive fashion. The dialog only version is perfectly functional and with perhaps just some wind noise it would have moved the plot along just fine. But with the extra details it feels less like a movie set and more like a lived in world.
If you haven’t scene JourneyQuest, you should! It’s fantastically clever and fun and has surprising depth as the story develops. In short, it’s everything a web-series should be so check it out! www.journey-quest.com
What would the world sound like if we could climb inside the head of another animal? I went to the Olympic National Park some time ago with my wife and got some great recordings of humming bird vocalizations. The B&B we stayed at had feeders frequented by more humming birds than I’ve ever seen in one place. I never realized what feisty little creatures they are. I placed my handy Zoom H4n in the bushes just above the feeder and recorded while the little buggers fought and squabbled over the feeders and nearby flowers.
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To us, their chirps all sound more or less the same, but, when slowed down, you can hear that these short high pitched bursts contain a lot more information than we perceive. Here’s a section of the same recording pithed down three octaves.
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There’s a lot of interesting information out there on bird song, including this great podcast from Living on Earth.
Several months ago I was hired to do some recording down at Pike’s Place market in Seattle. We recorded lots of things, including a good sampling of the fantastic street musicians that play there on a regular basis. One of my favorites was a very talented woman playing the harp. Unfortunately, I don’t remember her name, but she was kind enough to let me record her playing for a little while.
And for this weeks “Sound of the Week”, here’s that same recording stretched out to about 5 times it’s original length. I love how the environmental sounds become musical as well and interact with the harp melody.
I want one of these! Such a cool sound! (the best bit is at the end btw)
I think this scene from Mullholland Drive is a fantastic metaphor for just how powerful the illusion of storytelling is. Watch it first and then I’ll explain myself.
This scene all leads up to the moment with the trumpet player. We’ve been told over and over again that it’s all an illusion, and yet, when the trumpet player stops playing, and the sound continues, we’re surprised. A certain part of our brain is unaffected by our knowledge. Even as the trick is being explained to us, we still fall for the illusion.
Movies, theater and media are all so powerful, that even in our current media saturated, celebrity obsessed world, where we’re constantly bombarded with gossip, on set footage, reviews and behind the scenes analysis, we still get swept away as soon as the lights go down and the story begins.
It’s an audacious form of magic that shouts, just like the MC from this scene, “this is a trick, this is a trick, this is a trick” while simultaneously fooling us over and over again. For me, this is why working on films is so thrilling. Even though I am fully aware of every artifice that went into the audio track for a particular scene I still believe it upon playback. I get to be both the magician and the audience at the same time! The trickster and the tricked, the con artist and the victim. I don’t know which is more thrilling, the illusion itself or just how impervious the illusion is to scrutiny.
In this clip the stage magicians Pen and Teller shove it in our face as well. Even as they explain the trick, it still delights us. (skip ahead to 1:32 if you’re in a hurry).
Of course there’s a darker side to all this. We all think of ourselves as rational thoughtful individuals, able to see through the stories told by marketers, salesmen and savy politicians. And maybe we can, but it does it really matter? When it comes down to it, what part of us is making decisions? The part that knows there is no band, or that part that was surprised when the trumpet kept playing?
I just discovered this series that the NY times online does called “anatomy of a scene”. Here’s one on a scene from “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”. So many behind-the-scenes featurettes are just a bunch of self congratulatory drivel but in this one the director David Yates goes into some detail on the design of the scene and how each element from camera angle to set design to sound design all come together to communicate emotion and tone. Say what you want about the Harry Potter movies but they had fantastic sound and this stark visceral scene is no exception. Here are links to the scene with and without commentary.
I’m very proud to announce the release of my newest sample library “Fractured”. You can see screenshots and listen to a collection of really wonderful demos from a group of very talented composers on the Big Fish site. It’s a wonderful sense of satisfaction that I feel when I hear awesome music being made from my library.
There are over 100 instruments in “Fractured” representing a wide variety of sounds. Some instruments were made from acoustic preparations such as pinching off strings with clothes pins or threading strings with bobby pins, business cards, wire and other items. Other instruments were made by playing the guitar in non-traditional ways like tapping strings with chopsticks, silverware, plastic forks, snapping strings with rubber bands, rubbing wires across strings, rubber balls pulled across the back, drumming on the guitar with hands, mallets, dish brushes, scissors etc. Then there were other instruments which I altered digitally sometimes subtly sometimes to extremes. Then of course there’s all manner of combination of the above three categories of instruments . One of the cooler features of this library is that every instrument comes with an icon that can be clicked on to see a picture and read a description of how exactly I created each instrument.
I’ll post more on the library soon including a video!