Paradise Recovered has been nominated for Best Sound at the 2012 IIFOC film festival! My little ‘ol name is on the ballot. Fingers crossed…
January 15, 2012
September 23, 2011
September 4, 2011
Paradise FTW!
Paradise Recovered just won Best Feature Film at the Central Florida Film Festival! Congrats to Andie, Storme, and the whole crew.
August 27, 2011
I’ve Gone and Bought the Cherry Cabinets
We have some relatives who tell a funny story about remodeling their kitchen a few years ago. They went into it wanting new cabinets, so they got a local cabinet maker to build them some beautiful cherry cabinets. Once they started seeing the cabinets being constructed, they realized that their floor would have to be replaced. Then the old appliances started to look rather dull, and after this the countertops. They ended up changing out pretty much everything in their kitchen and it’s now a stunningly beautiful place. It’s a conundrum familiar to anyone who has done remodeling. The beauty of the new outshines the old so much that you just end up replacing everything.
Last year I purchased a rather large sample upgrade to my sound library. It was a significant investment and it’s paid dividends in much better sounding work. However, the brass sounds still were not up to par yet. So a few days ago I upgraded my brass sounds and ho-lee-cow, what a difference. The portamento french horn alone was worth the upgrade cost. I’m working on a rather huge orchestral project right now and the new brass sounds are getting a workout. Check out this example:
Keep in mind that there isn’t a bit of “live” orchestra in there. It’s all midi triggered samples. Based on the strength of these demos, as well as my experience with the sample library from the past year, I went ahead and bought the brass library.
It’s wonderful. The horn makes you weep, the trumpets are declamatory, and the low brass is big and bombastic the way low brass should be, without a hint of “midi-ness” that often accompanies these libraries sometimes. The problem? Now my strings sound mushy by comparison.
The company has issued a single “orchestra-wide” sample set, which I purchased last year, and which is very good. But then they’ve gone in and started focussing on each of the individual sections (strings, brass, woodwinds, perc, etc) and started issuing whole libraries of just these sections, with much more depth and realism to their sound sets. I have the new brass set, but, like the new cherry cabinets, the spectacularness of the new sounds is making me crave the Wolf fridge… I mean the string sounds:
So now I’m listening to the online examples and thinking well, with this job I could easily pay for them… and they make my stuff sound so much better.
Curse you, cherry cabinets.
August 15, 2011
With a Whisper
The world’s first acoustic diode.
“The acoustic diode works much like the electrical component of the same name, letting current (or, in this case, sound waves) pass in one direction but blocking it in the other. Composed of a structured arrangement of elastic spheres that ferry the sound through the material, the diode can be tuned to work only at certain frequencies or to downshift the frequencies moving through the material to lower frequencies as needed….the tunable diode could scavenge energy from noisy machinery and channel it back into a transducer that converts those sound vibrations into electricity that could be fed back to the machine, reducing net energy consumption. It could also downshift sound frequencies to ranges that are optimal for energy conversion.”
July 17, 2011
HP 7.2 Sound
June 16, 2011
June 12, 2011
Paradise
PARADISE RECOVERED wins the Grand Jury prize at the deadCENTER film festival. 1000 films submitted, 100 entered, one winner. Congratulations to Andie Redwine, Storme Wood, and the rest of Team Paradise on this great achievement! That DVD box is going to have laurel leaves all over it!
yup, check out the laurel leaves so far:
UPDATE: Bad guy Mr. Sawyer (played by really good guy Andrew Sensenig) sends this email:
Good evening to the amazing Team Paradise!
My wife and I had such an amazing time at the deadCenter Film Festival this weekend, and sure wish the entire team could have attended. While we are all very excited about taking home the Grand Jury Prize, I wanted to let you all know something about this festival. Many others have a “best feature, best doc, etc”; however, they are voted on by members of the viewing audience who turn in ballots after a screening. This typically ends up being a contest much like homecoming queen, which is never an equal playing field. deadCenter Film Festival however uses a very distinguished panel of judges that live in this industry, day and night. In particular, the leading judge this year is Nick Cassavetes who has directed such films as My Sister’s Keeper, John Q, The Notebook, and Alpha Dog, as well as writing and producing some of Hollywood’s greatest films. To be voted the best feature in this festival, by such a highly esteemed panel is HUGE!!!! You all deserve a huge pat on the back.
We were also amazed at the extended conversations we had with so many audience members, and in particular, so many members of the festival screening committee and jury. They couldn’t stop talking about all the aspects of the film.
May 31, 2011
Sound Advice
March 24, 2011
Winners
Congratulations to Paradise Recovered and Storme Wood for clinching the 2011 Best Film and Best Director award!
February 21, 2011
Hey, Runner Up Ain’t Too Bad
Paradise Recovered gets the Best Feature runner up award at the DIY Film Festival. Way to go Team Paradise!
February 2, 2011
Andrew Sensenig
My friend Andrew Sensenig has a new dramatic reel up over at IMDB, including 2 clips from Paradise Recovered! Not sure why the audio in the Paradise clips is slightly muted (it’s definitely not on this end), but it’s cool to see our work up next to some big names. Go Andrew!
January 26, 2011
Yes, I Really Have Had This Conversation
Could also be titled “how not to talk to your sound department. Should be mandatory viewing for all directors and producers.
January 25, 2011
January 5, 2011
Paradise Review
“I could not keep from sobbing by the close, as the beauty and truth was too devastating to encounter directly. This is not a film in the simple sense; it is a masterpiece of art and a triumph of hope. This is not a Christian film; this is a film a Christian would make.”
A very kind and positive review of Paradise Recovered. I was, coincidentally, working on the M&E mix of the film this afternoon and watching some of the very scenes the reviewer talks about.
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December 15, 2010
Mentions
Paradise Recovered is getting some great press. Andie Redwine (the writer and producer) won the Hoosier Award, and we got a brief mention in Variety magazine just below “The Social Network” and “Black Swan”. Not bad company.
December 12, 2010
Mixing Again
I’m currently doing the “M&E” mix on Paradise Recovered in prep for the next step of production. An M&E mix (stands for “Music and Effects”) is a full mix of the entire movie minus the dialog. It is typically used in foreign language releases where they need to replace the native language dialog with foreign actors doing localized language tracks.
It’s a fun way to mix since the entire scene stands by itself with all effects, foley, and ambient sounds, but it looks like the actors are just mouthing their lines. Kinda neat.
It’s also fun to get back into Soundtrack Pro and dig back into mixing. I really enjoy this part of the filmmaking process- probably more than the on location recording since I don’t have to deal with the vagaries of recording on the set (ambient sounds, background noise, equipment issues…maddening DP’s). It’s fun to subtract things from the mix and smooth over the remaining audio. Kinda crazy that I’ve seen this movie, in bits and pieces, probably three hundred times.
December 10, 2010
October 2, 2010
You Can Find Anything on the Internet
All the sound effects of every Batman episode indexed. Wow.
September 8, 2010
Halo: Reach
The sound and music of Halo Reach. Brilliant!
“HALO: REACH” Game Audio Profile from Michael Coleman on Vimeo.