Ben Burtt sound designer

Ben Burtt is a sound designer that has worked on films such as Star Wars, Blue Planet and most recently Wall-E. This video shows some of the techniques he uses on Wall-E, its incredible to see how sound designers work on animated feature films, as they is no sound from the environment/location or characters, all the squeaks, buzzers and atmosphere have to be created by the sound designer. Wall-E is an incredible film as there is little to no dialogue from the two main characters Wall-E and Evie. They can just about to say each other’s name, but mostly use buzzers and mechanical noise to communicate feeling and emotion, yet we fall in love with these two characters.  

Reaction to week 3 Booming and Mixer .

In this weeks workshop we partnered up with the cinematography group and practiced booming. We had been taught how to boom previously but never using a Wendt Audio Mixer as well. I had used mixers before when recording live music.

We split into groups of 3 and was then partnered up a group from the cinematography class, who where taking it in turns to act out a scene on Pulp Fiction while the rest of the people filmed or directed. Our job was to record the sound using the zoom. We took it in turns to boom, check the levels on the zoom and the mixer.

The Canon fx100 allows you to plug microphones directly into the camera, this provide its own problems as we had follow the movement of the camera and make sure we weren’t getting in they way but still making sure we where getting clear and crisp sound.

Foley Sounds

My second workshop of the year was all to do with Foley sounds, which is possible my favorite section of sound. We started by looking at a couple of different clips including clips from Black Swan, Breaking Bad and Games of Thrones. Looking at where Foley sounds are used, I was quite surprised at how much foley was used, even sounds that could be synced E.G footsteps the sound designer or director opted to use foley instead.

We where then given a Zoom, Sennheiser 416 and a hydrophone (underwater microphone) then a random bag of stuff including, cornflower, slinkies, music boxes, umbrella, fruit/veg and other random stuff. We then split up into groups of four and started to record the different sound.

The Sennheiser 416 was great at capturing the high quality sounds and was very precise when it came to capturing quite delicate sounds like the music box and the crush of the celery. The hydrophone was great at capturing them quite abstract sounds that we often cant hear with our own ears, we attached the hydrophone to the end of a slinkly which created this very abstract Sci Fi sound.

It was really important to have an imagination when recoding these different sounds as with out the visual images it was easier to picture the sounds as something eles. snapping the celery could be breaking someones arm, cornflour could be someone walking on snow. The strangest sound we came across was the toy screwdriver I'm not sure why but to me sounded like a baby dragon crying, not everyone would agree with me on that one but i think having an imagination when doing foley is really helpful, as one sound can be changed and manipulated to sound like something totally different. 

Solaris Workshop

Our first lecture back was a good introduction to the sound module and the software we would be using in the semester. Its been quite awhile since I had use Pro Tools it was good to have the introduction and recap on the skills I had learnt last year.

We started off by looking at some of the short cuts, which I had found very helpful, it’s always great to know short cuts to help work more efficiently.

Letter

R- Reduce/zoom out

T- Expand/zoom in

Z-Undo

X- Cut

C- Copy

P- Paste

D-fade in

G- Fade out

F-Cross fade

Numeric keyboard

+ Nudge frame forward

_ Nudge frame back

After a quick recap and learning a couple of shortcuts we where given a short clip about two minutes long clip from the 2002 film Solaris, directed by Steven Soderbergh, I hadn’t seen the film so I wasn’t quite sure on what tone or mood the film was trying to create. We where given the sound clips which we downloaded from the student sever, which we then matched up with the clips on the screen, this was fairly straight forward the only real difficult I came across was matching the sound of the footsteps, as non of the sounds weren’t in sync.

clip from Solaris

The exercise was all about manipulating sound to create a sense of atmosphere, mood, tone and emotion to a clip that had no sound. We wasn’t told what our brief exactly was but we where told that it was very similar apart from we would have to go and record the sound our selves using a mixture of in sync and Foley sounds.