When you first start working, any work is good because experience is invaluable. Getting to witness and contribute to something as complex as the soundtrack to a film is the best learning you will ever do, as it is when you discover which of your skills have practical use. It might be fun & impress your friends making robot sounds or whatever, but if you never work on a project with robots in it then later in life you might wonder if that really was the best way to invest your time. When you’re working on an actual project, everything you do is specific to making the project better. Also w ..read more

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The first video I ever uploaded to Youtube was this one: Reversing a car into a pile of fridges – video was uploaded on 18th March 2007 and has had 93k views Pretty good for a 4 second video, but I suspect the duration had more to do with upload speeds back then than anything else… It was one of those fun opportunities where a friend had a car which could no longer get a WOF, so it couldn’t be legally driven on the road and apparently to the owner wasn’t worth anything. So they donated it to us, a Ford Telstar, to record sound effects. The first problem to solve was WHERE to record it, as w ..read more

Someone got in touch recently, keen to buy their first sound libraries but a little overwhelmed by the choices. So they asked what would I recommend? Funnily enough I had been thinking about exactly this i.e. building a “Sound FX Editor Starter Pack” so I will work through some ideas and choices, but I am also totally open to suggestions. Is there a combination you would be interested in? First, I’ll outline my own approach to building my own personal sound library, as a sound effects editor & sound designer. Fairly early on in my career I realised that once I had ProTools the next thing t ..read more

Back in 2009 I had the great pleasure of being the Sound Designer and putting together the sound post team for Taikas film BOY, and as it is one of the favourite films I have worked on I thought I would use it as a case study. If you would like to take part in this film sound study, you will need to get a copy of the film yourself. First so that you can watch it with no prior knowledge, but also so you can refer back to scenes as we discuss them. BOY by Taika Waititi at IMDB I did a quick search to see where it is available for streaming or purchase. My results will be skewed to my location ..read more

Rule #1: There are no rules. There are as many ways to make a film as there are potential filmmakers. It’s an open form. Anyway, I would personally never presume to tell anyone else what to do or how to do anything. To me that’s like telling someone else what their religious beliefs should be. F*ck that. That’s against my personal philosophy—more of a code than a set of “rules.” Therefore, disregard the “rules” you are presently reading, and instead consider them to be merely notes to myself. One should make one’s own “notes” because there is no one way to do anything. If anyone tells you ther ..read more

So I’m busy working & have my usual bunch of apps open – ProTools, RX, Scrivener, Email… And suddenly my Mac UI starts going slow like its about to crash…. WTF I have 64GB of RAM, it can’t be the apps… So I boot up Activity Monitor and WTF? AvidLink, which I have zero use for, is using 96.6% of my Macs CPU! I Force Quit it and my Mac becomes responsive again… My next thought: can I delete AvidLink? What use is it? “Avid Link is a free app for anyone looking to find, connect, and collaborate with other creatives, promote your work, stream video, purchase and manage products—all in one inte ..read more

The next subject I’d like to discuss with regards to sound editing is the idea of changing scale. This can be simply split into two categories ie making a sonic event seem larger, or making it seem smaller. When someone has no experience with actual sound editing they might easily mistake both of these needs as being solved by plugins. But that is often not the case. Keep in mind we are discussing sound editing, rather than mixing. It is also about more than simply playing a sound LOUDER or quieter. What not to do: I saw a reddit thread ages ago where someone was complaining about how their so ..read more

Thanks for feedback on EDU008 SYNC part 1. While it is fairly dry & technical subject, it is incredibly important on every project to verify the sync workflow. Most experienced sound editors will be able to share a sync horror story from their work. Unfortunately it is often in non-pro work that such issues can be a challenge eg people shooting multiple formats & frame rates, in the same project without regard for audio ramifications. At the end of this post I’ll add two more sync issues that you should be aware of (audio sync offsets with MP4 delivery, and verifying playback sync with ..read more