New content!

Hey folks! Just wanted to draw your attention to a new space I've created on this site - called "MUSIC & DESIGN" - which is a place for me to share some of the things I've worked on. Squarespace, my elegant and gracious web creation and hosting platform, has a template for a "music album," so I'm trying it out as a format for sampling my work. Unfortunately, I haven't yet figured out how to display all the metadata that I've so lovingly typed into each track, but I'll keep you updated if/when I do. In the meantime, check it out!

Catch up

Oof. So... October happened.

Quick recap:

• The play for which I did sound design and original music has opened at the VS. Theater in Los Angeles. It's called Completeness, by Itamar Moses, and it's a Los Angeles premiere! Go check it out, it runs until Dec 7th.

Believe it or not, there are 6 speakers hiding in this set!

• I'm just over halfway through my first quarter of teaching an Audio Production class at Cal State University, Los Angeles. It's going pretty good so far, at least based on the test and homework scores I'm seeing.
• I'm getting back into some more freelance editing for ASAP (Amalgamated Sound And Picture), cutting FX and dialog for animated shows, in particular an educational web series called "ABC Mouse."
• This month, I'll begin working on a documentary feature called The Nightmare, directed by Rodney Ascher (directed Room 237). I'll be co-supervising the sound post production with Jonathan Snipes, who you may remember helped me complete the post on Excess Flesh, my last indie feature.
• Also, looking for projects that are getting started in late December/early January. Let's talk!

More to come soon. Stay tuned...

Walter Murch on Dense Clarity - Clear Density →

In conversation with Andy Kirshner, friend and U of M Professor, and his wife, the topic of mixing came up, and how modern films have hundreds, sometimes literally 1000+ tracks available, and how these colossal projects get mixed, and this article from Walter Murch at transom.org came up, which I had never read. I'm so glad I have, now. I'm going to quote a rather large section from the article, which I hope will lead you to click through and read more. It's certainly worth it:

“The general level of complexity, though, has been steadily increasing over the eight decades since film sound was invented. And starting with Dolby Stereo in the 1970’s, continuing with computerized mixing in the 1980’s and various digital formats in the 1990’s, that increase has accelerated even further. Seventy years ago, for instance, it would not be unusual for an entire film to need only fifteen to twenty sound effects. Today that number could be hundreds to thousands of times greater.

Well, the film business is not unique: compare the single-take, single-track 78rpm discs of the 1930’s to the multiple-take, multi-track surround-sound CDs of today. Or look at what has happened with visual effects: compare King Kong of the 1930’s to the Jurassic dinosaurs of the 1990’s. The general level of detail, fidelity, and what might be called the “hormonal level” of sound and image has been vastly increased, but at the price of much greater complexity in preparation.

The consequence of this, for sound, is that during the final recording of almost every film there are moments when the balance of dialogue, music, and sound effects will suddenly (and sometimes unpredictably) turn into a logjam so extreme that even the most experienced of directors, editors, and mixers can be overwhelmed by the choices they have to make.

So what I’d like to focus on are these ‘logjam’ moments: how they come about, and how to deal with them when they do. How to choose which sounds should predominate when they can’t all be included? Which sounds should play second fiddle? And which sounds – if any – should be eliminated? As difficult as these questions are, and as vulnerable as such choices are to the politics of the filmmaking process, I’d like to suggest some conceptual and practical guidelines for threading your way through, and perhaps even disentangling these logjams.

Or– better yet — not permitting them to occur in the first place.”

— http://transom.org/2005/walter-murch-part-1/

Oh, and by the way, in this one instance, READ THE COMMENTS. Murch himself engages the readers and goes into more detail about many points. Who knew a comments section could be not only readable, but informative and enjoyable!

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*article thumbnail photo of Walter Murch mixing Apocalypse Now from rogerebert.com

The Details That Matter | Designing Sound →

Randy Thom (you know of him, I guarantee it) wrote a guest post for the website Designing Sound (click the title link above), in which he discusses the art of sound design, and how practitioners of this art have to make choices when it comes to how much, or how little, detail to provide with sound.

I find this an interesting topic of discussion given my main source of work the last 6 months or so: animation. In animation, the sound editor has to provide all the sonic details, as there is no production audio that was recorded along with the images. Therefore, it's a continuing set of choices regarding what sounds need to be there to make the story clear and focused, what should be there to make the "world" a lively and active place, and what sounds might be there to highlight and enhance the mood, action, or other emotional elements.  Working in animation has definitely improved my decision-making skills in this area, and I will be the first to admit that I'm still developing, learning, and honing my skills as a sound editor and designer with the help of my employers and fellow editors.