Recording ADR can be tiring at the best of times, but this recording of Orson Welles voicing a commercial is hilarious. Never have I heard such succinct putdowns as he struggles to read a script obviously written to be read & not spoken aloud….
‘crispy crumb coating!?’
but you know, i like the sound design of this one more….
“My feeling is that if somebody has got the imagination, they’ll figure a way to do something no matter what the limitations are. As I was saying before, when David (Lynch) and I worked on The Grandmother, we had nothing like we have now, and we still got what we needed, sometimes just out of junk lying around. For Eraserhead, we floated a big five gallon bottle in a bathtub with a microphone inside. We recorded the innards of an old Bell & Howell movie camera as it chugged away. David blew into an old metal heater and put a microphone in the bottom of it and got some kind of weird sounds, and then we altered them and slowed them down. You can do all this, and you don’t need a big budget or thousands of dollars worth of equipment. Sometimes that stuff just gets in the way. You just need to use your imagination.”
This quote is taken from an interview with Alan Splet, an eternally inspiring sound designer, published in a Americ@n Cinematograph3r magazine, December 1984. Sadly he skipped off this mortal coil back in 1995 but his creative spirit & unique sound library continue, thanks to his partner & sound recordist Anne Kroeber, who runs Sound Mountain. When I was working on the film The World’s Fastest Indian we needed to recreate the sounds of classic land speed racer cars & Anne provided us with some fantastic sounds that were both unique & perfectly suited.
The rest of the article about Alan Splet & his work on Dune is available here (apologies for the scan quality) and below is a list of films worthy of careful listening, thanks to imdb
Alan Splet Filmography
Rising Sun (1993) (music editor) (sound designer)
Wind (1992) (supervising sound editor)
Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead (1991) (sound editor)
By the Sword (1991) (sound designer)
Henry & June (1990) (sound designer)
Mountains of the Moon (1990) (supervising sound editor)
Weekend at Bernie’s (1989) (supervising sound editor)
Dead Poets Society (1989) (supervising sound editor)
Winter People (1989) (sound editor)
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988) (supervising sound editor)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988) (sound designer)
The Mosquito Coast (1986) (supervising sound editor)
Blue Velvet (1986) (sound designer)
Warning Sign (1985) (supervising sound effects editor)
Dune (1984) (sound designer)
Never Cry Wolf (1983) (sound)
The Elephant Man (1980) (sound designer) (special sound effects)
The Black Stallion (1979) (supervising sound editor)
J-Men Forever (1979) (sound effects)
Days of Heaven (1978) (special audio assistant)
Eraserhead (1977) (location sound and re-recording, sound editor, sound effects)
The Grandmother (1970) (sound editor) (sound effects) (sound mixer)
why is this video out of sync?
the 2 pip feels 10 or 15 frames late!?!
W T F ?
its a standard 24fps SMPTE leader with a 1 frame beep on the 2 flash
or it was before i uploaded it….
‘hello, youtube?’
I have been a big fan of the ongoing collaboration between Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto (Carsten Niccolai) since their first album, Vrioon was released a year or two ago on the raster noton label. Heres a short excerpt from a track ‘Trioon I’ off the album;
And a piece of the track ‘Berlin’ off their second album – Insen
The third release was an EP called revep, which features a beautiful version of a piece of the score to the film Merry Christmas Mr Lawerence
Over the last few years the pair have also completed three major tours, performing Insen live with piano, electronics and some exquiste synaesthesic visuals created by Karl Kliem – I SO want to go see/hear this concert but in the meantime I ordered and just received a DVD of the live concert released by raster noton & available here
The DVD has a 5.1 soundtrack and multiple viwing angles as well as short making of documentary, although one has to wonder why Karl Kliem was not interviewed – his visual interpretations are most definitely the third member of this live trio, check this bit of audience wobbly cam to see what I mean:
