Inglorious Bastard

Usually if there's a seminar or industry meeting about pro sound, it understandably takes place in New York or L.A. While this is all well and good, it doesn't do much for the rest of us who don't live in the major markets unless someone takes it upon themselves to shoot and post it online.

This time around, Advanced Broadcast Solutions is offering free educational sessions inventively named "Understanding the Bastard Child of Broadcast" to folks here in the Pacific northwest. Snip, via Creative Cow:

“Audio never seems to get the respect it deserves, but it’s an essential part of television production,” said Mark Siegel, President of ABS. “With recent advancements in digital technology, audio has also become more complicated than ever. Our ‘Bastard’ tour is designed to help industry professionals stay current with audio technologies and techniques.”

The educational sessions will provide instruction on 5.1 monitoring, mixing and encoding, and creating the highest audio quality in facilities. Additional topics will include dialnorm and loudness issues, as well as the recent developments in the wireless spectrum. Program content is designed for broadcasters, but all video professionals are invited to attend...

The ABS “Understanding the Bastard Child of Broadcast” tour schedule is:
Oregon Public Broadcasting, Portland, Ore. (July 20)
KEZI, Eugene, Ore. (July 21)
KOBI, Medford, Ore. (July 22)
KSPS, Spokane, Wash. (July 24)
KCTS, Seattle, Wash. (July 27)
KBTC, Tacoma, Wash. (July 28)

Link.

AES Updates Website, Adds Social Networking; Still Won't Friend Me

The venerable A.E.S. has revamped their 12-year-old website (that's 147 in internet years), adding more interactive features and media content. Snip:

"We have dramatically revamped the AES electronic library, which includes over 12,000 scientific papers published in the AES journal or presented at AES events over the past sixty years. The site has streamlined countless tasks ranging from becoming a new member to discussing Journal articles and interacting with your local AES section..."

"The new www.aes.org site provides some fantastic new social networking features with direct links to committees, Facebook-style member profiles and a highly sophisticated publication search engine" AES President Jim Anderson concludes.

"The social stuff is off the hook: you can totally 'mic' a friend to see what they're doing at any given moment, like making a sandwich or catching up on their Tivo backlog. Or, you can 'fade' a member if they turn out to be a hater, whatevs," he continued. "Thanks for the add, dude! Late...". Anderson then made an awkward hand sign of some sort and ambled off.

{Extra points to whomever can distinguish what was made up in the above.}

Link, via Pro Sound News.

The Iceman Cometh...No, Wait, I Guess It's Just Randy Thom

Michael Coleman's next clip in his ongoing series for Mix Sound For Film Profile Series is up, this time talking to Randy Thom about sound design for Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs.

"Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs" Sound for Film Profile from Michael Coleman on Vimeo.

Link.

Transducers 2: Revenge Of the Ribbon

Today, engineer emeritus Dave Moulton walks us through some basic facts about transducers, in this case microphones, and their impact on recording audio:

Also, you should know, microphones don’t detect sound the way our ears do – they lose a LOT of auditory information. A couple of lossy quirks of microphones, vis-a-vis our auditory system, need to be noted. They dramatically affect the way we use mics.

Quirk number one is that microphones cannot distinguish the angle of arrival of various sound artifacts (as our ears do), so that all artifacts are merged into a single wavetrace that does not contain directional information. At the same time , the spectrum of that wavetrace is affected by the inability of the microphone to detect frequency equally in all directions.

Quirk number two is that microphones cannot integrate sound artifacts over time and sort them by phase (as our ears do), so that all early reflections (profoundly useful spatial cues for us humans) end up being interference effects for the microphone.

The net result of these quirks is that a great deal of sonic information that us humans use to make sense of the sonic world around us is lost at the microphone. The two-dimensional map of energy over time that comes down the mic cable is NOT a reasonable representation of the aural information that we humans use.

This is all academic until you get on set, and an inexperienced producer or director will wonder why sound needs another take because of an airplane they couldn't hear, or why they need to hold the roll because of a nearby leaf blower. The mic will hear all, in a much different way than our ears (and more specifically, our brains) do; what seems like a negligible noise on set becomes insurmountable once it hits the mic diaphragm. Understanding how the mics work is tantamount to understanding how lenses capture light: you can do more with them when you fully realize their capabilities and limitations.

Link.

Nerd Is the Word

Beyond being a sound mixer, I am an unrepentant film nerd. My tastes range from big-budget spectacle to experimental indie dramas; often I describe my primary filmmaking influences as "the two 'Bergs: Spielberg and Soderbergh".

As noted previously, I also have a thing for outmoded media technology. Recently, the three met in a planet-melting trifecta when Steven Soderbergh came to a roadshow screening of Che at Cinema 21 here in Portland. There was a Q & A after, where he fielded questions ranging from the political to the technical (this being one of the first full-length features shot on the RED).

Sitting down on the job: Soderbergh braves the crowd of cinema hipsters.

Beforehand, though, I was able to spy Mr. Soderbergh on the street, as he gamely and patiently signed autographs. Thinking there might a chance for a signature, I'd brought my Criterion Collection laserdisc of sex, lies and videotape. Soderbergh, eyebrows raised, held the box for a moment before noting, "There are things on here you can't get anywhere else."

Sadly, he's right. As technology continues its relentless forward march, occasionally there are extra materials (either from licensing issues, or worse, market disinterest) that aren't ported over to the newer formats. The CC laser contains a deleted scene; '89-era interviews with Soderbergh; and the script (which is also available in a wonderful book). But the most interesting is a black and white 16mm short film, entitled Winston. I always find a filmmaker's early works fascinating, as you generally find the seeds of certain visual or narrative themes that recur throughout the rest of their career.

Now, with more Soderbergh!

So, yeah, that's a particular favorite of mine. And while I'm not usually one for autographs, this one is pretty near and dear to my geeky little heart. (After he signed it, he quipped, "There. Now it's worth ten dollars.")

Tet-ro, George...

Today's goodie comes to us courtesy of Michael Coleman, part of his ongoing series of videos on sound-for-picture for Mix Magazine Online (he has a dedicated channel on Vimeo that you can subscribe to here).

In this clip, re-recording mixer Pete Horner talks about the soundscapes created for Francis Ford Coppola's upcoming film, Tetro.

Please to enjoy:

"Tetro" Sound for Film Profile from Michael Coleman on Vimeo.

(And yeah, the title's a bit of a leap for a lame joke, but cut me some slack; this is pre-coffee bloggage here, people....)

www.tetro.com
www.colemanfilm.com

Einstein Was Probably One Of Them

Oh. Hey.

Remember that scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind? When all those people that had been missing, some for more than thirty years, and then suddenly they're returned by the "benevolent" aliens who had forcibly abducted them, and they're dazed and disoriented, and they have, like, all of this catching up to do, having been gone, and out of touch, and waaaay out of town, for the aforementioned thirty years? Remember? With the Carlo Rimbaldi puppets and the sunglasses and the swelling music score and Lance Henriksen in a non-speaking role as one of the government agents?

Yeah, it's kind of like that....

So, yeah, I'm back. Besides the rather trying task of finishing up the post mix on Everyman's War (why did I choose a war movie as my first feature-length post project?), I also took on another feature as Production Sound Mixer. My second full feature, Golf in the Kingdom was shot on location at the Bandon Dunes Golf Resort on the coast of Oregon. Caddyshack quotes abounded, as did the unpredictable weather. We were pounded by wind and rain and by the occasional errant golf ball, but we survived.

The temperamental Oregon coastal weather...

The movie was shot on the RED ONE, so we opted for double system with dumb slates. We rolled a Sound Devices 744t in a triple mirroring mode, which meant that we were always recording audio to three places: the internal hard drive, the internal compact flash, and an external bus-powered Lacie Rugged firewire drive. At the end of each day, I would make an archival back up to DVD-R, then hand the Lacie over to DIT Sean Rawls. Sean would then do a drag'n'drop of the day's audio onto the same hard drive as the picture files, and then ship that drive to post. After a few discussions with the DP and post, it was decided that we would shoot and cut at 23.976 frames per second, and then pull up the entire film to 24 frames at the DI stage. This meant that we would keep our sample rate at 48 khz, since the frame rate wouldn't change between shooting and cutting.

Boom swinging was shared between Creed Spencer and Eric Goldstein. We employed a smorgasbord of mics, dependent on gear availability (low-budget show) and the needs of the scene. Exteriors were handled by Neumann KMR-81 and Sennheiser 416 short shotguns; wireless duties were split between Lectrosonic 200s, 187s, and Sennheiser G-2s. Sanken COS-11 and Countryman EMW and B3 lavs fed the wireless.

Invisible boom pole: Creed Spencer rocking Bandon, OR

Considering the fact that we would be traipsing across open golf courses, I bought a beefier cart for the show: the Rock N Roller Multicart with a top shelf option and pneumatic tires. While it lacks the lip of a Magliner (convenient for attaching clamps for hanging cables), we made do, and the cart got us where we needed to go.

A camera, a cart and a stump

This was my first film gig with name talent. Being professional about that sort of thing means minding your manners and simply going about your business, which I managed to do for the most part. But, at one point, I had my head buried in the cart trying to work out a technical issue, and Malcolm MacDowell completely ambushed me by politely introducing himself, causing my brain to completely blank itself like a shaken Etch-a-Sketch. I finally muttered, "Hello, my name's Christian," to which he replied, "Are you sure?" My boom op found it a lot funnier than I did.

Welly welly well. From left: Tony Curren, Julian Sands, Mason Gamble, David O'Hara, and Mr. MacDowell.

At any rate, I'm back, and will be posting more consistently, though I ask you to bear with the first few, which will involve a lot of not-so-news as I clear my "to be blogged" folder.

Stay tuned.