New Work – New Year!

Well, a new year has begun! Last year was my best yet and it's looking like things will be even better in 2015. A big thanks to all my clients for the support.

Above is one of the videos I worked on with Tim Chesney at Make Collectve late last year. Dan Watson created some beautiful motion graphics which were just begging for sound design, so it was a bit of a dream job for me :) As well as the sound effects I also organised the voice talent and recorded and produced them here at The Garage. Both Toby Ricketts and Kathryn Shaw both did fantastic jobs.

Looking ahead at 2015 there are some really exciting jobs on the horizon. One in particular will be taking care of all aspects of sound including audio post, sound design and music production for a pretty well known TV fishing show. I'll drop another update as that job comes together, and in the mean time will be out on a boat collecting sound effects and atmospheres for the show.

Happy new year to you all and all the best for 2015.

New Website and Recent Good News

With an absolute lack of news postings on this news page I chastise myself!

Yikes, I can't believe that last post was so long ago. In my defense I've been very busy working on lots of great projects.

Along with the studio being busy we've also had a second Baby BOOM, so now we have 2 boys causing general havoc in the house :) (I told you I'd been busy)

My new website is a much more streamlined version of the old one and really reflects the direction and intention of the studio. Sound design and mixing for video is the majority of what I do and I absolutely love it - especially when I get to work with beautiful projects like this one...

Always a pleasure to work with Tim and Toby from Two Bearded Men - and in this video Tim Pierce has had some great success - Staff Picked on Vimeo and almost 60,00 views in the first 48 hours.

I created a lot of sound design for this vid but the goal was not to dazzle but to be realistic. Pretty much all of the snowboard carves and moves are done in post plus all the heli sounds and logo fx. The main point of the video is to get across Will's interpretation of life so any sound that stuck out as unreal or over the top just had to be tamed down so it didn't distract from the story and pictures.
The trailer, which you can see HERE has more of the sound design pushed higher in the mix.

Also key to the sound mix was to clean up the voice and make it nice and intimate plus get all the music levels right. Always a delicate balance!

I hope you enjoy.

Visit To Park Rd Post

Last year I recorded some ADR with Gaylene Preston for her upcoming television series 'Hope and Wire'. The series is a drama revolving around the events of the Canterbury earthquakes in 2010/11. The show looks absolutely amazing, with very high production standards and attention to detail.

Right now the show is in audio post production mode and to my luck Gaylene dropped me a line saying that I could pop in to check it out with her - PS it's being mixed at Park Road Post in Wellington...

This was an offer I could not refuse! So I grabbed some flights and headed up for the day. Now sometimes luck throws you a weird curveball and so, when I arrived my first phone call happened to be from Gaylene saying that a sincerely apologetic Mike Hedges was out with a nasty bug and they weren't mixing that day... sheesh... Bummer! Mike is one of the best mixers in the world, so one of the real highlights was going to be meeting him and watching him work for a while.

Luckily in the meantime I had done some research and realised that my old mate Toby Lloyd now works full time as Sound Recordist there, and was able to show me around. I graduated in the same year as Toby from MAINZ in 2006, and it was awesome to see him in a position like that. What a job! (jealous? me?) With Mike Hedges away, the up side was that it actually took a bit of heat off the team who were working on the project. So I had the real privilege of being able to listen to the mix and talk with Gaylene and the team about what they had done, ask heaps of questions and get a full tour of the whole place! Rest assured I acted like a total tourist.

The website describes the facility as post production heaven, and man, does it back that up - big time.

From the 2 full size theatre mix rooms, to the smaller mix rooms, foley room, ADR room and a multitude of sound design and sound editing suites, it's basically total heaven for a sound geek. For me, although the technical/gear side of things was really interesting and awe inspiring, a big part of what impressed me were the systems in place and how the whole facility works together as a team on a project. People working exclusively on ambience, foley, sound design, music or sound effects for a scene. Having people dedicated to each particular role, and then all those aspects coming together in the final mix. In most cases for me I take care of all the roles myself, so it would be pretty luxurious - but for a major feature like The Hobbit, it's truly a necessity for each person to take care of their part for the good of the team.

Sometimes when you watch the credits at the end of a film like The Hobbit it's hard to fathom how so many people can be involved in one movie. Seeing a place like Park Road Post gives you a bit of an insight into the magnitude of projects and level of professionalism that makes those films some of the best in the world. Pretty darn impressive.

Thanks Gaylene, Toby and the rest of the team that shared their time with me.

Sick Sound From The Barrel

Late last year I worked on sound design and audio post for 'The Barrel' a 52 minute surf film that explores the lure and magic of getting barrelled. Not only was it a real treat to get to watch amazing footage from the world's best barrel spots including Bali, Puerto Esondido, Teahupoo and of course Pipeline, but I was given a lot of creative freedom in terms of sound design.

Filmed and produced by renowned surf photographer Tony "Harro" Harrington and edited by Trinity Ludlow of Monarch Post, there was also an interactive social website created to share photos and experiences of surfers' own barrels surfthebarrel.com . All in all, a really cool concept.

Before I go on, check out the trailer...

Surfing videos are almost always images set to music, with little or no recorded location sound. One reason for this could be because audio isn't usually a huge priority for a guy swimming out in the line up, trying not to get killed while getting great shots!

The simple solution is to usually add some pumping music and let the footage speak for itself, which does work pretty well I must admit. However, for this film Tony and Trinity wanted to give the footage more impact so asked me to create sound design from scratch for every single wave. Yes - every single wave in a 52 minute film... so... I said OK.

Although a somewhat daunting task, I was fully stoked by the prospect and immediately started coming up with ways to reproduce the various sounds you hear from waves. In my youth :-) I spent a lot of time out in the waves around Hawke's Bay so I knew where I needed to go, but it took a bit work to get there.

As I started putting together preliminary sounds I realised that a wave is much more than just one sound. It's a combination of many different 'flavours'. Much like cooking (which I love) sound design is like putting together a recipe for a tasty dish from many different ingredients. In fact I often think of cooking and taste in terms of sound frequencies - but that's another blog altogether! ("ooh a bit more high frequency please from this lemon juice will give it a nice bite...")

I did use some stock wave sound effects, but found that alone they didn't cut it. Also because every wave and every ride is different, each wave had to be individualised with additional effects.
Here's how I broke the wave down and some of what I used for the additional sounds:

Spray off the wave (hose spraying, waterfalls with volume automation)
The crack of the wave's lip hitting the flat water (thunder claps, home made effects)
Surf board carving and spraying (hose sprays and waterfalls with volume automation)
Deep rumble for power and heaviness in the really big waves (scary subby samples)

...and others...

So in the end each wave became a combination of around 6 or 7 tracks of audio with varying ratios of each, plus individual pan and volume automation depending on the wave.

Things were getting a little intense :) Here are a screen shot showing the Pro Tools session...

The red tracks are subby sounds and more astract elements, while the green tracks are the more realistic elements. There were also music and dialogue tracks but they are off the screen in this shot. In the end I had over 80 tracks of audio.

One sound that I felt was lacking in the effects I had was the real powerful crack of a very heavy lip hitting the water. I wanted to try and record and design my own sound for this, so taking a leaf out of sound design guru Diego Stocco's book, I got a little bit creative...

After a few experiments I worked out that:

A: pouring water out of a bucket onto flat concrete sounds like someone peeing on flat concrete.

B: pouring water out of a bucket into a bucket of water sounds like someone peeing in a bucket of water.

C: pouring water into a flat pan of water gives more impact, more splash and water movement.

Still, it's not exactly Teahupoo.

So I went hunting for effects that would beef it up. In the end I doubled the water effect, panned the left and right to give a stereo effect, then used a few different things as effects. Distortion and EQ were used but the main thing was a reverb plugin called TL Space. Not only does this have nice reverb presets, but also has a multitude of really weird presets for sound design and general weirdness. i found one that almost blew my head off, so went with that.

This gave me 3 different sounds I could use - the plain water effect, a combination of both effect, and the dirty bass on it's own.

After all this sound design there was also the important work of making the dialogue, fx and music all work together to create the final mix.

The Barrel was a fantastic and challenging project to work on. The film premiered in Australia and was also featured as part of the programme for the Vans Triple Crown of surfing in Hawaii, so was a huge honour to be a part of that. Thanks a lot to Trinity and Tony - you are legends! Sick! :-)

Audio Post April Update

Over the last couple of months I've worked on some really great video projects, one of the highlights being creating the sounds of a yeti ferociously devouring an old lady! That was fun!

Here's a more recent project I mixed for Simon Waterhouse. It's a video for Ground Effect clothing who organised a team of volunteer workers to build the 'missing link' mountain bike track near Castle Hill in the Southern Alps. Simon went along and beautifully documented the project, and then the riding of the new track. Gotta say he did a fantastic job, as you can see in the video, and this just inspired me all the more to do a great job with the mix.

Mix Notes:

First job was to get all the dialogue cleaned up, compressed and EQ'd so that we had a nice even volume and tone across the whole video. Once again, Simon did a great job recording too - all the dialogue nicely captured on lapel mics - so that made my job a bit easier.

Next I added atmospheres to the backgrounds, including rivers, hillsides, and bush scenes.

Then the bike scenes! Only a couple of the mountain bike shots actually had bike sounds, so every bike sound you hear was placed in time and adjusted so it looks and sounds real. Simon had recorded various stereo bike sounds, which I went through, labelled and categorised so that I could drop in the appropriate sounds when needed. Of course, a lot of them needed to be edited, time stretched and beefed up to work well.

I wanted to emphasise some of the great slow motion shots, so created different sound design elements to enhance the speed, grit and power of the bike movement. Here are just a couple of examples of things I did:

The roaring wind blow effect that follows the bike in it's dust cloud.

This was created with two different wind noises. One was a classic whispy polar kind of wind, and the other was a low frequency rumble noise. By simply automating the volume to swell at the right point it gave the impression of a gust of wind. I also distorted the higher wind noise a little to give it a bit more grit.

Flying gravel shots.

Some of the shots such as the one below showed gravel being thrown out by the bike's tyres, but the bike recordings I had just didn't quite have the close up gravelly sound I needed. So I had to create it. The image below shows the 3 tracks I used - the bike recording in blue, then the 2 effects above it. First a nice 'whoosh' effect gave the shot more movement, but I was still missing the gravel. I had to think outside the square because I didn't have any 'mountain bike throwing gravel' effects!

My solution was to take a 'leather shoes on gravel' footstep effect and with a bit of editing and time stretching I made it long enough to give me the gravel I needed to add to the other effects. I also used this effect on some of the other close up gravelly shots. Worked out pretty good in the end!

Graphics.

I also added sound design to all the graphics, by making a really close recording of a pencil scribbling on paper. This was quite heavily compressed, noise reduced and the distorted to give the effect you hear on the video.

Lots of fun and opportunity to be creative on this project, and I've only touched on some of the things I did to enhance the sound, and in turn, over all impact of the video. Thanks again to Simon Waterhouse from Resonate, check out more of his work over at his company's website!