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Sound effects for film and animation

Bee_Abney said:
If we are looking for some kind of training, we can break it down into parts. Maybe there could be some good courses on those elements. So, sample editing, for instance. Surround sound. Physical modelling. Did doing that help at all? Or are all these elements poorly served.
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I've gone at it by taking a very specific type of Sound Design as my focus, in this case Horror and Suspense. I've been able to find some interesting videos and articles on it and have applied them to my experiments and recordings.

So yes, individual elements are represented if you know where to look, but it causes you to be stuck to youtube and requires application of searching skills and you kinda have to guess at what it is you need. That's fine of course, but it means that things take time, you have to gather information piecemeal after all.

It's why I'm certain that tackling it as a group or unit could be useful in the right circumstances. I know that having to focus my research and experiments into one direction has caused me to develop tunnelvision and neglect other facets. There's also the very annoying fact that I don't know what I don't know. There's no source that takes you by the hand. That's the frustrating part.
 
Crowe said:
I've gone at it by taking a very specific type of Sound Design as my focus, in this case Horror and Suspense. I've been able to find some interesting videos and articles on it and have applied them to my experiments and recordings.

So yes, individual elements are represented if you know where to look, but it causes you to be stuck to youtube and requires application of searching skills and you kinda have to guess at what it is you need. That's fine of course, but it means that things take time, you have to gather information piecemeal after all.

It's why I'm certain that tackling it as a group or unit could be useful in the right circumstances. I know that having to focus my research and experiments into one direction has caused me to develop tunnelvision and neglect other facets. There's also the very annoying fact that I don't know what I don't know. There's no source that takes you by the hand. That's the frustrating part.
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Yes, not easy. Perhaps we could get a sound design category instituted here or on another forum.
 
3DC said:
Here are my 3 main parts I guess:

We are strictly talking about sound effects for film and animation so all tools or plugins should focus on this. This alone is huge topic so wondering into synthesis and effects for music production is counter productive.

"Foley" is analog version of getting the sound effect while sound processing trough DAW tools and plugin is digital version. Combining the two techniques for sound effect is OK however mixing the two when learning is not a good idea.

Analysis of sound effects pipeline that is from Foley recording tips to tools, plugins and techniques used in DAW - with practical examples.

In simple words Foley is stage one, sound effects pipeline with tools and techniques is stage two and integration into movies is stage three.
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How much for the course? There's gap in the market...
 
3DC said:
Are you going to make it? Cool. :thumbsup:
I would say online courses are around 50$ these days unless you are planing to do something more advanced then you can charge whatever you want I guess.
I have several books about the subject for "analog" or "foley" part but I am very weak in digital part of sound effects. That's why I started this thread. :P
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Is that the time? I think I’m needed somewhere else. Good luck with the video...!
 
I might, one day, once I feel I'm adequately versed in the subject.

Working on a youtube video 'series' thing detailing how to be bad at things though. This'll probably come up some day. Hopefully. Once I get my ass into gear.
 
Crowe said:
My university courses and books didn't have this problem. There's thousands of advanced guitar courses, thousands of piano books giving you useful exercises. Sound design? Almost nada that's actually useful.
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And you'd be wrong, you just haven't found them yet. I've read most of these & collected up & blogged this list a decade or more ago... Back then there were very few resources about sound design online, now there are many.... Keep in mind this is not a new field - sound editing and sound design has existed for many decades, and many techniques precede digital/DAWs etc...

Here are a few very relevant books I highly recommend:

The Practical Art of Motion Picture Sound by David Lewis Yewdall

Audio-Vision by Michel Chion

Soundscape by Larry Sider

Sound-On-Film: Interviews with Creators of Film Sound

The Sound Effects Bible by Ric Viers

The Foley Grail: The Art of Performing Sound for Film, Games, and Animation by Vanessa Theme Ament

Sound Design: Expressive Power of Music and Sound by David Sonnenschine

Dialogue Editing for Motion Pictures: A Guide to the Invisible Art by John Purcel

Film Sound: Theory and Practice by Elisabeth Weis & John Belton





And a great quote from THE FOLEY GRAIL:

EKnnaVOXYAAHcAy.jpeg



Some people think sound design is about what plugins you use...
 
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3DC said:
Here are my 3 main parts I guess:

We are strictly talking about sound effects for film and animation so all tools or plugins should focus on this. This alone is huge topic so wondering into synthesis and effects for music production is counter productive.

"Foley" is analog version of getting the sound effect while sound processing trough DAW tools and plugin is digital version. Combining the two techniques for sound effect is OK however mixing the two when learning is not a good idea.

Analysis of sound effects pipeline that is from Foley recording tips to tools, plugins and techniques used in DAW - with practical examples.

In simple words Foley is stage one, sound effects pipeline with tools and techniques is stage two and integration into movies is stage three.
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"Foley" is actually performing sound effects to picture in sync, on a foley stage.
Footsteps, spot effects with props, rustles. Its all about performance and character.

It is not stage 1. Stage 1 is a spotting session with director

Foley does not usually start until very late in a film's post schedule due to the desire to record foley to a locked picture (or at least a fine cut, as conforms are inevitable)
 
timprebble said:
And you'd be wrong, you just haven't found them yet. I've read most of these & collected up & blogged this list a decade or more ago... Back then there were very few resources about sound design online, now there are many.... Keep in mind this is not a new field - sound editing and sound design has existed for many decades, and many techniques precede digital/DAWs etc...

Here are a few very relevant books I highly recommend:

The Practical Art of Motion Picture Sound by David Lewis Yewdall

Audio-Vision by Michel Chion

Soundscape by Larry Sider

Sound-On-Film: Interviews with Creators of Film Sound

The Sound Effects Bible by Ric Viers

The Foley Grail: The Art of Performing Sound for Film, Games, and Animation by Vanessa Theme Ament

Sound Design: Expressive Power of Music and Sound by David Sonnenschine

Dialogue Editing for Motion Pictures: A Guide to the Invisible Art by John Purcel

Film Sound: Theory and Practice by Elisabeth Weis & John Belton
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Thank you for this list. It's wonderful how this forum can put us in touch with people who know more about an area or aspect of sound.
 
Bee_Abney said:
Thank you for this list. It's wonderful how this forum can put us in touch with people who know more about an area or aspect of sound.
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For some background, I retired from film sound design a few years back to make HISSandaROAR my full time occupation... My film sound career = 40 feature films as sound designer/sueprvising sound editor (from no budget indie up to us$30mill studio films like 30 Days of Night, Boogeyman etc) as well as hundreds of hours of series TV, docos, short films etc... and a few animated shorts... Those projects scaled from minimal team of me (sound designer/FX/AMB) and a DX editor, through to supervising a team of 10 or more on larger projects...

But regardless of scale, sound design is about story.

(FWIW i do plan to launch a study course in sound design for film, and I intend to do it by walking through the entire process. From reading a script, pitching for work etc through all stages of sound editorial, conforms, predubs, mix, M&E, deliveries etc... If I try to create it as one huge study course, it would be very expensive (due to the time involved) and would take me a year or more to create. So my plan is to create it the way some people have written books, ie one blog post/bird at a time.

I used to do this to a degree on my blog (eg 100 sounddesign posts) but best of all was back when I used to have virtual interns, and I documented the entire process with them on Taika Waititi's film BOY. So it is that kind of approach, including providing source material for exercises (eg how to cut a fight scene, with a little fight SFX library & a video to work to)

It won't launch until 2022 & will be hosted at my HISSandaROAR site (need a lot more than youtube for it) I'll add a comment here when it starts...
 
timprebble said:
For some background, I retired from film sound design a few years back to make HISSandaROAR my full time occupation... My film sound career = 40 feature films as sound designer/sueprvising sound editor (from no budget indie up to us$30mill studio films like 30 Days of Night, Boogeyman etc) as well as hundreds of hours of series TV, docos, short films etc... and a few animated shorts... Those projects scaled from minimal team of me (sound designer/FX/AMB) and a DX editor, through to supervising a team of 10 or more on larger projects...

But regardless of scale, sound design is about story.

(FWIW i do plan to launch a study course in sound design for film, and I intend to do it by walking through the entire process. From reading a script, pitching for work etc through all stages of sound editorial, conforms, predubs, mix, M&E, deliveries etc... If I try to create it as one huge study course, it would be very expensive (due to the time involved) and would take me a year or more to create. So my plan is to create it the way some people have written books, ie one blog post/bird at a time.

I used to do this to a degree on my blog (eg 100 sounddesign posts) but best of all was back when I used to have virtual interns, and I documented the entire process with them on Taika Waititi's film BOY. So it is that kind of approach, including providing source material for exercises (eg how to cut a fight scene, with a little fight SFX library & a video to work to)

It won't launch until 2022 & will be hosted at my HISSandaROAR site (need a lot more than youtube for it) I'll add a comment here when it starts...
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Brilliant news. The modular release is perfect for many reasons - better for you and us.

By the way, it has been some years since I saw it, but I still remember the great sound on 30 Days Of Night. You could hear the cold.
 
Bee_Abney said:
Brilliant news. The modular release is perfect for many reasons - better for you and us.

By the way, it has been some years since I saw it, but I still remember the great sound on 30 Days Of Night. You could hear the cold.
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Thank you. Funny to think back to then - I only started to fully appreciate the community of sound recordists and designers around the planet, on that particular film. We worked on it during summer in NZ 2007, so there was no way for us to record snow, ice etc.... We did experiments first with rock salt, and then in foley, and achieved plausible ice/snow foots using corn starch, which had been wet & then dried so it had a crust... But I posted a photo on my blog of our experiments and a sound recordist in Sweden saw my post, commented he was a recordist & there was a big storm approaching so he could do some recording for us! This was back in Feb 2007 (this blog post) and we got help from so many people...


Another aspect of 30 Days that was really brilliant (and 100% due to the director) was the vampires screeches. David Slade (dir) taught the vampire actors to screech on the inbreath. If you try it, a screech on the inbreath sounds so much more intense & constricted... When we came to work on the vampires final vocal sound design I sat in on ADR sessions where we got a range of 'character' voice actors to try ideas eg gargle yoghurt & then screech/slurp etc... We also got a few heavy metal singers in, to see what they could do - one singer claimed she could sing tritones & she could definitely somehow make multi-pitched screeches...


sorry this is getting offtopic...
 
timprebble said:
Thank you. Funny to think back to then - I only started to fully appreciate the community of sound recordists and designers around the planet, on that particular film. We worked on it during summer in NZ 2007, so there was no way for us to record snow, ice etc.... We did experiments first with rock salt, and then in foley, and achieved plausible ice/snow foots using corn starch, which had been wet & then dried so it had a crust... But I posted a photo on my blog of our experiments and a sound recordist in Sweden saw my post, commented he was a recordist & there was a big storm approaching so he could do some recording for us! This was back in Feb 2007 (this blog post) and we got help from so many people...


Another aspect of 30 Days that was really brilliant (and 100% due to the director) was the vampires screeches. David Slade (dir) taught the vampire actors to screech on the inbreath. If you try it, a screech on the inbreath sounds so much more intense & constricted... When we came to work on the vampires final vocal sound design I sat in on ADR sessions where we got a range of 'character' voice actors to try ideas eg gargle yoghurt & then screech/slurp etc... We also got a few heavy metal singers in, to see what they could do - one singer claimed she could sing tritones & she could definitely somehow make multi-pitched screeches...


sorry this is getting offtopic...
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I love hearing about this stuff. The screeches were particularly special. There was an alienness to the sound, making what could seemed animalistic into something more like a force of nature.
 
timprebble said:
And a great quote from THE FOLEY GRAIL:

EKnnaVOXYAAHcAy.jpeg



Some people think sound design is about what plugins you use...
Click to expand...

makes me want to sell everything.

funny, I've recently been going through mixes and tracking with stock plugins to see how close I can get compared to my 3rd party collections.

it's embarrassing to hear how sometimes it's better.

watch for my blowout sales!
 
Zoot_Rollo said:
makes me want to sell everything.

funny, I've recently been going through mixes and tracking with stock plugins to see how close I can get compared to my 3rd party collections.

it's embarrassing to hear how sometimes it's better.

watch for my blowout sales!
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I'd like to point out that in the 'Favorite Sound Mangling tools' thread, Timprebble has a pretty nice list of (to me) somewhat expensive Sound Design Plugins. So I don't think 'selling everything' is the answer here.

Thanks for chiming in Tim! It's nice to have someone who knows what they're talking about share some advice. I notice that there are a couple of books I haven't tried yet in that list, so I guess it's back to reading!
 
Crowe said:
I'd like to point out that in the 'Favorite Sound Mangling tools' thread, Timprebble has a pretty nice list of (to me) somewhat expensive Sound Design Plugins. So I don't think 'selling everything' is the answer here.

Thanks for chiming in Tim! It's nice to have someone who knows what they're talking about share some advice. I notice that there are a couple of books I haven't tried yet in that list, so I guess it's back to reading!
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hyperbole as a comedic device
 
Thanks for encouragement all...

Two ways to reliably keep in the loop with progress with this (& everything else HISSandaROAR) is:

1. via HISSandaROAR email newsletter - can join here: https://eepurl.com/j5ZL
2. via rss HISSandaROAR feed is here: https://hissandaroar.com/v3/rss
(I'm a big fan of rss - there is no social media algorithm getting in the way, or trying to sell ads etc)

I am aiming to have the first post up before end of year, and from New Year to then be posting weekly, at a minimum.... Also any freebies etc come via the newsletter (& the end of year present this year is going to be special: test recordings from my pair of new Sanken CUX100k microphones which are flat up to 100kHz!!)

@Crowe re plugins I own, I hear you! For example I could never afford to buy SoundMiner Pro when starting out, or for many years after... but once I could justify it due to confirmed work, it paid for itself on the first project with time saving and achieving more/better work in the available time.
But it is one aspect of the course I will avoid as much as possible ie reliance on expensive plug ins and tools. Learning how to edit and manipulate sound will be the basis - and while I use ProTools, the techniques apply to any DAW. I also believe WHY is as important as HOW. A list of plugins or techniques means little without the motive and intent.
 
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