2009 MPSE Awards

A few of weeks ago, Chana and I went to the 2009 MPSE Awards show, and we came away winners in more ways than one.

Star Wars, Now In Mandarin

I printmastered my first foreign version of "Star Wars: The Clone Wars" mix today. It was a lightning fast mix; only three days! Star Wars is cool in Swedish though. The Dolby guy came in and monitored all the outputs with me, and I learned a lot about his side of the process.

More good news is that I've been asked to work here again next week. I'm dubbing the Taiwanese Mandarin version then. (I was to have a week off between my two weeks here) So, tomorrow I ride home, then the next day I ride back. That's a lot of riding just for 20 hours at home, but it's worth it to see Chana and the kids.

More sound news later. I gotta go. I'm getting hungry for oranges.

The Clone Wars & Skywalker Sound

I am happy to say that I have been hired by Skywalker Sound to work on the animated feature, The Clone Wars. I've been brought on to help with the foreign language mixes. We are creating about two dozen foreign language mixes for this world-wide release. I'll be re-recording the Swedish and Catalan versions, starting next week.

Excuse me while I geek-out a bit; it is such an honor for me to have the opportunity to work on anything officially Star Wars related. After all, it is the most storied and legendary film franchise in history. I'm truly thankful.

**Educational Tangent**
I have to admit, I'd never heard of Catalan before. It turns out that it is understood by about 11 million people, and used mostly in Spain and remote parts of France. I would've missed that question on Jeopardy.

It's a two week job, so not necessarily a long-term position, but one thing leads to another, as they say.


This comes at a good time, because the start date for my other "next gig" has been delayed again and again over the last several weeks. That one will happen, just not in my time frame it seems. (as soon as "Escape From Planet Earth" starts for me, I'll fill you in on all the details, and I'm also planning a video blog series based on it)

So, right now I'm just prepping the Suzuki for a long-distance run up to Marin County. It should be a beautiful ride up the coast.

Be sure and check out the Star Wars site. There are a lot of great videos to whet your appetite for this movie. From what I've seen, it looks incredible.

Skywalker Sound

I just learned that Skysound has totally revamped their WEBSITE. Now you can take a virtual tour of the Technical Building (below), which is where most of the editing and mixing takes place. Unfortunately, I can't link you straight to the tour, so just go to the website link above, then click on "About Skywalker Sound", then select "Technical Bldg. Tour". You'll need quicktime player to view the tour. The rest of the site is cool too, so enjoy.

Audio Post Production Primer

Above is a screen-shot from my Pro Tools sound effects pre-mix session for an independent feature called RSTC. The final mix for RSTC was last week. Look for it soon on DVD everywhere; it's a lot of fun.

From time to time I have friends, even family members, ask what I do. I tell them, "I'm a sound designer and sound editor for film and TV", and they say "oh, cool." Then more times than not, they follow up with the question "so WHAT do you do?"

The nomenclature of my job, like almost any industry, is specific and confusing at times. For instance, ADR stands for "Automated Dialogue Replacement". Anyone who knows how ADR works knows that there ain't nuthin' automatic about it. ADR is the process of bringing in an actor to replace a line of dialogue for a movie when the original location sound is unusable. The actor watches the scene on a video monitor, hears three beeps leading up to the line, then reads the line in sync (hopefully) with the shot on screen. This new recording usually must be finessed by a dialogue editor to tighten sync and be prepared for the final mix. There's a lot of set-up time involved as well as post-time. Automated? Yeah, right.

There are many processes involved in creating a soundtrack for a TV show or movie. My favorite is the sound design stage. You can read about the many different aspects of audio post production here at the MPSE website. There are also some good FAQ's.


Above is a screen-shot from my reconformed fx-stem session for reel 1 of the movie Hoodwinked. There were last-minute picture changes, so I reconformed (reconforming is resyncing existing sound files with new picture and filling in all the inevitable gaps in the tracks) all of the previously rerecorded tracks from April/May 2004, added more effects where we needed them, then delivered approximately 50 reconformed sessions to Skywalker Sound for the final rerecording sessions in October 2005. It was the most complicated "fix" I've ever wrapped my head around.


And finally, this is a picture of a sound design suite at Skywalker Sound in the Tech Building. It belonged to Gary Rydstrom (Jurassic Park, T2, The Titanic) for many gigantic movie making years. You can see his synclavier on the console. Chris Boyes (Lord of the Rings, King Kong, Titanic) has worked here, and Randy Thom (The Incredibles, Cast Away, Star Wars: The Return of the Jedi) now calls this suite home. Photo courtesy of custom-consoles.

More to come...