Gday again,

This week I’ve mixed some cool gigs and engineered a terrific recording session at a studio in Thornbury over the weekend – details are on my facebook page.

At SAE we’ve moved into the basics of post-production audio, continuing with the music production project, and explored a few more art-philosophy concepts in Cultural Studies.

In Audio Studio 2 we have embarked on an audio re-dub for a short scene from ‘The Terminator’, to be done by the 11 students in my group. The first step was to create a cue list detailing each required sound, along with timecode references, and assigned a main category (SFX, foley, atmos, etc). From this we allocated each person one or two sounds to capture and edit to sync with the picture. I volunteered to be the project leader to help with the workflow and be a point of contact outside the tutorials. So far there hasn’t been much activity outside classes, as far as I can tell from the google drive and cue sheets, but maybe people will show up with some content in the next session. I’m new to the school and don’t really have a working relationship with the other students yet. I’m hoping that will ease in the next couple of weeks. Looking at the cue sheet it would have been a daunting amount of work for one person to complete, and it is impressive to see the productive potential of the group when it’s all delegated out. It makes sense that this is how large-scale productions are able to create detailed soundtracks on a deadline.

I think that having a solid foundation in music production is a big help for working in post-production, particularly in terms of the practical and technical skills required. Signal flow, mic techniques, and most of all Pro Tools operations are very important and similar in both fields.  I also think that it goes the other way too – working with location sound and creating atmospheres makes you think more about what’s happening in front of the microphone rather than looking to the gear to create the right result.

In response to the idea that ‘Sound is bigger than Music’, I would say that I agree, most of the time. Music has the undeniable power to connect with an audience emotionally and this is a great asset. I also believe that this falls under the bigger scope of the sound scape, which can use any combination of silence, realistic and hyper-realistic sounds, and music as well, to create a new and immersive reality for the audience to experience. The scope of possibility here is endless. Of course there is also the inevitable blurring of boundaries between the two, with a musical approach to sound effects and the experimental palette of musical instruments which eventually makes the argument redundant, but encourages creative art in the meantime.

So yeah! Looking forward to creating some new realities.

(capturing vehicle sounds for the Terminator scene)

Cheers for reading.