Writer's Block

Emmy Nominations

Today, the TV Academy released its nominations for the Daytime Emmys. Our sound team received three nominations in the Outstanding Achievement in Sound Editing category. Our perennial winner, "The Batman" is one of the nominations; with "Legion of Super Heroes" and "Loonatics Unleashed" rounding out the three. “The Batman” has won the past three years running (the first year it tied with another one of our shows "Xiaolin Showdown") so it will be interesting to see if it will remain dominant.

We have three out of the five possible shows nominated, so a 60% chance is nice (yes, I can do simple math), but the two other nominees are very strong shows, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see either one of them take it this year. PBS’s "Curious George" and Disney’s "Johnny and the Sprites" are the other contenders.

The real bummer is that the Creative Arts show (which is where the non-exciting Susan Lucci-less behind-the-scenes version of the Emmy awards are presented) will be held in New York City this year. They have always been in Los Angeles, and therefore pretty convenient to attend. I’m confident that Warner Bros is not going to send us on an all-expense paid trip to the Big Apple, so I’ll most likely be tuning in to the webcast. I'll keep you updated.

Guillermo del Toro to direct 'Hobbit'

The man behind 'Pan's Labyrinth' has just signed with New Line to direct the 'Hobbit'. It's been a long time coming for this project to finally have a captain. As I stated earlier, it's too bad Peter Jackson is committed elsewhere and cannot direct, but at least he's producing, it's being done in New Zealand, and del Toro kinda looks Hobbit-ish like Jackson.

Here is the full Variety article published Friday.

Falling in the category of...

NOW I'VE SEEN EVERYTHING!!!


I wonder how many accidents this guy has caused, just from people around him rubber-necking. I caught this guy going down the 5 freeway on my way to work this morning.

I somehow managed to not have my own car crash while using my awesome (not so much) phone-camera to capture this tribute to automotive mental breakdown.

This is truly miscellaneous creativity, but not the variety I want to hail often. I just thought this one was to good to pass up. Do you think Xzibit would be impressed? What's the craziest thing you've done to "pimp" your ride?

Foreshadowing

A few years ago I did sound design on this film short "Foreshadowing" for Steelehouse Productions in Tulsa. It played the festival circuit afterwards. I just found out it's on YouTube.

There was no production sound to work with, so the entire soundtrack had to be created from scratch; down to the voice work by Chana and myself. (notice the exquisite scream Chana belts out near the end) John Mark Painter did the whistle-provoking score.

The director Mark Steele gave me a lot of freedom with the sound effects, and it was a great experience. We mixed it at Todd AO in Studio City.

Decisions, Decisions

I have to upgrade my field recording gear this year. I'm going to be doing a lot of sound effects acquisition for my next project, so it's time to move on from the HHB minidisc recorder. It's a killer recorder, but I'm ready to get away from minidiscs as a medium.

I've been looking at Sound Devices gear. It seems to be what I need, but now the (semi)hard decisions need to be made. Do I buy strictly for sfx recording, in which case I don't really need the timecode features, making it about six benjamins cheaper. But if I want to ever use it for a shoot, TC would be kinda handy.

There's more though. What if I want to record surround ambiences? They make 4 and 8 track recorders too, but those little additions add big bucks. So I might have to settle for stereo for now. We'll see...


Then there's the microphone debate. I'm upgrading those too. I've just about decided upon the Oktava 012's. Apparently they are in thousands of production mixers and sound designer's mic lockers, plus the price is very good for high-end mics.



But I've been impressed by the Sanken mics too. Their CSS-5 is a switchable mono/stereo shotgun mic I looked at while at NAB last year. It's impressive, but the price tag is about three times the amount of a stereo pair of Oktava's. Monday and Tuesday I'll be back at NAB cramming as much info on this type of gear into my head as I can. Hopefully I'll come away with a set plan, and an affordable one.

He Was American, and Proud of it

Ahh, to return to the day when people could speak like this on TV without anyone thinking they were crazy. This is a clip from Dean Martin's show featuring John Wayne speaking about how he'll raise his daughter.