In film sound editorial one of the most important people we deal with, aside from the director & producer, is the picture editor and their assistant/s… they are our conduit into the project & I have been lucky to work with some very talented picture editors over the years. With the ever changing workflow involved with recording sound on Hard Disk recorders, metadata & the various ages of the NLE workstations it is also very challenging territory for assistant editors. The skills they must possess are a critical mix of technical & creative – this video goes a little way to illustrate the fundamentals, heh heh
ADR (with Orson Welles)
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!?’
taking a choir for a drive
but you know, i like the sound design of this one more….
a word to the wise
“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)
sync test
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?’
2021 Update: back when I posted this in 2007, sync was off by approx 10-15 frames, variable every time..
Thanks evolution for sorting that out!
piano + electronics
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:
crashing cars for a living
What to do with an old car that still goes, but the idea of it actually passing a warrant of fitness is less likely than discovering a perpetual motion engine in a junk store in Westport? I believe one of the best options is to donate it to a bunch of maniacal sound editors & let it become one with its particles as we smash the living daylights out of it. I’ve learnt from this article source that except the licence, documents like insurances and pollution check should be maintained by the new owner of the car. So, I briefed myself on stuff like this before showing it to anyone.
here is the ‘before’ photo, a donated Ford Telstar parked outside my old studio in Jessie Street – the front windscreen was already smashed but other than that it actually was quite driveable… Late the previous evening, when the city was quiet, i put a couple of mics inside the car & stomped around on the roof & got some great sounds until one of the neighbours woke up & asked me what the hell I was doing?!?
The first time we did this we had six sound recordists and a serious array of crow bars, hammers & axes. This time there were just four of us – we got access to the local landfill/rubbish dump after hours & spent the next three hours wreaking every kind of sonic havoc that we could muster. First up was reversing it into other car bodies & a huge pile of fridges and we got some massive metal impacts! Then we drove slowly into the other car bodys & recorded some fantastic metal scrapes – the kind that when heard in real life you just know the next phone call is to your insurance agent from whatever the best auto insurance companies you have in your area. Here is a video clip of reversing into fridges (hint, if you ever do this – reversing is better for recording car crash impacts for a start as it doesnt damage the engine)
And a few ‘car meets mountain of fridges’ sounds:
After we had tired of driving moves we decided to try & blow the motor up. A brick was found & placed on the accelerator & we stood back as the motor screamed its lungs out. After about ten minutes the entire exhaust & muffler were glowing red hot & the motor began to self oscillate in revs until it finally seized.
By this point the motor was VERY hot & we recorded some fantastic hot metal ‘tinks’ as it cooled
Next up we recorded puncturing the tyres with a sharp knife:
Followed by an array of axe & hammer impacts on the doors, bonnet & roof
Everyone went home physically exhausted.. and the following day we compiled all the various perspective recordings into a fantastic library that has been used in more than a few films since. Highly reccomended for the sound effects library (& for any residual violence/stress relief) and SO MUCH BETTER than the generic sound FX that you can buy in commercial librarys. They are also easier to find/remember when hunting through the many thousands of sound files in my library, simply because I was there and recorded it myself – every sound effect from that session is permanently imprinted in my brain, unlike generic library sound effect….
And here are a few of the ‘after’ photos”
RIP = REST IN PIECES
sashimi as a metaphor
I am seriously hanging out to see David Lynch’s new film Inland Empire and for now have to make do with some youtube teasers
The official trailer:
The italian trailer:
The second official trailer:
And a short clip about Angelo Badalamenti – I never realised he acted in Mulholland Drive! I’m a big fan of his film scores & this clip is worth watching just to see him play a bit of the score to Mulholland Drive on the piano…
FWIW I also recently bought a book Mr Lynch has just released, which I can highly reccomend if you are interested in the creative process – his and your own. Its called ‘Catching The Big Fish – Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity’ and it is one of those books that you could easily skim read in a few hours, but the impact of a single paragraph may well take weeks to process.