ONN Today Now: How To Put The Spark Back Into Your Relationship With Your Cat
How To Put The Spark Back Into Your Relationship With Your Cat
There’s not a lot say about this one from a sound design perspective; it was pretty straightforward.
Like most people in Brooklyn, we don’t have a front yard…
…so we had to use the roof.
Newark Museum – Constructive Spirit: Abstract Art in South and North America, 1920s-50s
Here’s the most recent podcast I edited for The Newark Museum via Pimzlo. Watch it in HD!
ONN – Final Season Of ‘Lost’ Promises To Make Fans More Annoying Than Ever
Final Season Of ‘Lost’ Promises To Make Fans More Annoying Than Ever
When my sister, Caitlin, was in town in early January, we went to the New York Transit Museum with her boyfriend, Nolan. (The museum itself is pretty interesting, but if you go too close to closing be careful not to get suckered into wasting all your time on the Triborough Bridge exhibit. It is surprisingly thorough…and just not worth it.) On our way out, I recorded the sound of a few old turnstyles, which made some great mechanical ratcheting noises.
“What are you going to use that for?” Nolan asked.
I didn’t know at the time, but it ended up being perfect for this mock Lost commercial. See if you can pick it out in the mix.
I also made the ABC logo “swoosh” from scratch by running a pitch-shifted gong through an envelope filter along with some white noise. I think sounds pretty close to the real thing…
This video is my favorite thing at the moment
I was searching for old videos to better imitate the sound of a vintage broadcast, and accidentally stumbled upon this.
It’s a Sonovox, which is sort of a proto-vocoding device–though it’s actually closer in principle to the “talkbox” effect made famous by Peter Frampton’s “Do You Feel Like We Do.” The music from the performance would be piped into small speakers, which the performer holds up to his throat–in effect replacing his vocal chords. He mouths the words, and the sounds take shaped based on the natural formants produced by his mouth and throat.
I just love how anachronistic is it to hear this Daft Punk-esque effect in the context of a 1940s big band.
ONN – Zombie Reagan Raised From Grave To Lead GOP
Watch/listen closely during the Hannity interview section for the “ear candy.”
Zombie Reagan Raised From Grave To Lead GOP
I spent longer than I want to admit on the sound of Zombie Reagan’s leprous ear. (It’s actually two noises: his ear ripping off and the sound of it rolling down his suit, but it’s a pretty subtle effect and sort of lost in the final mix. Oh well.)
Again, all the non-dialogue sounds were done in post production. The zombie noises themselves were made by processing the actor’s screams through pitch-shifting, time expansion, and formant-modifying effects. I recorded the more subtle grunts, snorts, and lip smacks myself in my bedroom one morning. (I was actually just coming down with what may or may not have been H1N1, so I had the right mucousy quality to my voice–which I also processed through the same effects.)
Also, I’ve started triggering certain sounds through a sampler rather than manually lining them to specific visual cues. So during the “press conference” scene, for example, instead of pasting individual camera sounds to each flash, I just “performed” the sounds directly from my keyboard (musical, not computer). I imported a few different camera sounds into the sampler, then set the sampler to slightly vary the pitch, tone, and duration of each camera sound. The result sounds more convincing–like a herd of photographers at a press conference–AND it took less time to create.
Lastly, I want to give a shout out to The Onion News Network’s graphics team. Almost all the scenery in these videos is green-screened, and it’s really cool to see the visual effects evolve from story-boards, to mock-ups, drafts, and then the final version. Their motion graphics in particular have been really good lately, and as a sound designer I’m always looking to work with those little visual cues.