First re THE DOORS I’m sending out an email today with August 31st as the final upload deadline for the library. I want to get this library finished and out to all the contributors. So on September 1st I’ll share a private google docs spreadsheet with all the contributors and you can each tag it with your preferred delivery medium i.e. download or physical media. Currently we have 638 doors contributed totaling 88.3GB. If you want to have a look, there is a public google docs spreadsheet with all the current doors contributions here – bear in mind it is just a list of the folders, sorted alphabetically & is not the final order, layout or anything else…. You can see I have a bit of work to do with renaming… I’ll make a list of the door types that we could do with more of (for variety) below – please add comments if you have a look at the google docs spreadsheet. If you have time & access to any please feel free to contribute an extra couple – I’m aiming to do the same. If you’ve already uploaded your ten doors then just upload a folder with “NAME Additional” and for anyone who has uploaded less than ten doors please DO record & add the enough to get to ten, these first few are accessible to anyone!
- Cupboards & Drawers in Kitchen & Bathroom (easy)
- Oven, Fridge & Freezer Doors (easy)
- Office Doors
- Electric Doors eg airport or office building
- Shed Doors
- Gates eg Farm wood or metal gates
re THE DOGS it is great to see all the enthusiasm for this project. Some valuable homework to do before we start is read this article at Designing Sound by Rob Nokes about his experiences recording dogs, download and read the PDF of this article by Malcolm Gladwell on dog behaviour and have a look at this infographic: 7 Facts about Canine Communication. Also check out a few of the kinda funny dog vox videos below. Funnily enough I was trying to record some doors at my studio the other night and a dog staretd barking & I felt like shouting out: WAIT YOUR TURN!!! One library at a time!! I’ll get to you in a few weeks time!!
Lastly re the future as I mentioned in a previous comment I am in the final stages of setting up a forum for the contributors to these projects; a forum is a more efficient means of ongoing discussion between a lot of people. It should be live in the next few days and I’ll send an invite out to you via email, so I figure we use it to discuss THE DOGS project, but I’d also like to propose four more crowdsource libraries some of which will have far longer time frames.
AMBIENCES – URBAN
AMBIENCES – RURAL
AMBIENCES – ROOM TONES
AMBIENCES – CROWDS
We’ll need to discuss each of these seperately in detail (hence the forum) and for example I imagine the rural ambience library requiring a time frame of 12 months minimum, so as to capture all four seasons. If you are registered as a potential contributor you’ll receive an invite to the new forum in the next couple of days. If you aren’t and would like an invite please add a comment below…
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Tim Prebble, Gustavo Carvalho. Gustavo Carvalho said: Crowd Source Libraries Update: First re THE DOORS I’m sending out an email today with August 31st as the final upl… http://bit.ly/cNWyte [...]
Hey Tim,
Kudos to you for continuing to go the crowdsource route. Its a unique way to compile these types of libraries, and it adds value to them in a way that a single person recording stuff can not. I’m also sure its a huge pain, but the effort is greatly appreciated and the opportunity to participate is something I value.
thanks again!
-Rene
Thanks! I think these longer term projects are good; they require perserverance, it is a continual learning curve & there isn’t the instant gratification but I think the eventual resource/s will be incredibly valuable in terms of doing good work with them!
I fully agree, this is a very interesting new way to created libraries! About the ambiences I do have some worries, see my comment below. cheers, max
I missed the boat on the doors library, I don’t really have access to any dogs, but I would love to join in for the ambiences collections. A lot of of SFX work is done in isolation so it is great to get a community going so we can all feel like we are part of something bigger.
Tim, there’s someting on my mind about the ambiences: ‘Ambience’ is a very vague term, it’s just saying something about the function of the sound in a mix, like ‘hard FX’. Their content and meaning could be anything. So yes, making it ‘rural’ or ‘urban’ is making it clearer what we’re about to record. We probably all agree that ambiences are more ground than figure (Gestalt-psychology), and that they convey the feeling of being in a certain space/ surrounding. But still it is a huge field. Maybe it would be good to create even more specific ambience libraries, like urban traffic, urban humans, maybe even urban railway traffic, urban road traffic etc. For doors or dogs it doesn’t really matter where you record them, but ambiences often have soundmarks in them (I mean geographically typical sounds, landmarks), so that adds to the possible variety even more. When recroding ambiences including walla, within Europe there are are dozens of languages, cars are different in the US than in Europe or Asia. I’m afraid when we ask people to record urban ambiences we’ll get lots of stuff but still it will not be covering 10% of what you might need. What I like about the doors and dogs is that it results in a pretty ‘complete’ library where you have a great number of choices, because the subject is so narrowed down to a certain sound source. Somehow we should narrow down the ambiences too, I think.
I agree, and it is really why we need a forum so a subject like this can be debated until it is distilled down to its constituent parts. When i think of the term ambiences I think in terms of what I might need to create ambiences for a film with scenes shot on location in places I cannot get to myself to record. And I totally agree: even the sound of traffic in eg Barcelona is very very different to the sound of traffic here in Wellington. But really it is not that hard for someone local to go out & record a number of good traffic ambiences in their local city….
But lets continue this discussion on the forum – I am setting it up so that each library is almost itself a self contained forum, so for example discussing AMBIENCES URBAN anyone can start a topic/thread in the section for AMBIENCES URBAN. And then we can discuss all aspects of the process….
The best thing to come from THE DOORS is that the best result occur if I act as a conduit for the ‘best practice’ to arise through many people engaging with it… No ONE person has all the answers, but between us we can evolve amazing clarity!
Yeah, I think to have the forums is a very good idea, looking forward to that. As a group of people with their deal of knowledge to share we might come up with some new ideas!
Hi there,
I also missed the boat on The Doors, don’t have direct access to any dogs, yet would love to contribute to the other libraries that are being planned.
Therefore, please do sign me up!
Daan
Hi Tim.
I’m not recording that frequently, but a long time ambiance project does sound a lot more interesting and realistic for me to be able to contribute something. So if there is still room in the forum, put me up there, please.
And more important than that I’d like to congratulate you to your THREE (out of 3 *wow*) Nominations for the Qantas Film and TV Awards 2010 for Best Sound. You’ve had a good year there, didn’t you?
I only saw “Boy” which sounded great and which I really liked.
Anyway, congratulations for the nominations and it seems it’ll be a night of celebration after the awards for you.
Best
Lars
hah thanks Lars!
tim,
just came across this project. i love it. i’d like to be included in any future calls for sounds. i’m also curious about what has been decided with the selling and price of each series. i have no idea how you can blog, work, record, and administrate all at the same time. do you even have a private life? you’re a beast.
cheers,
P.
hah! I have the best and worst boss (i’m self employed)
But being freelance means I have gaps in work eg the last six weeks
I start a new film next Monday so freetime will become a little more precious for the next 3 months…
Is it too late to contribute? I know the deadline is august 31st but I didn’t understand if it’s still possible to join in on the fun.
Can you record full coverage of ten doors, edit them, add metadata and upload them via ftp before the Aug 31st?
I do mean for THE DOORS library
Thanks for the fast response Tim. I should be able to do so.