New Theme!

Big thanks to all members for their patience over the past couple of months while I’ve been snowed under with a sound supervising gig on a film project in Budapest.  I am actually a fan of occasionally skipping a month here and there so that we can try and stock up our existing themes rather than having lots of smaller or untouched collections.  However, I’m not going to pretend my radio silence was a deliberate strategy!  Workload combined with the foreign travel has consumed all my spare time these past few weeks so that even managing to upload new contributions has been a bit of a struggle.  I don’t see this being a regular problem – it was quite an unusual set of circumstances – but I have decided to set up a contingency plan to avoid disruption of the club’s momentum should a similar scenario occur again in the future.  More news as and when………

Right, back to the theme:

‘City Skylines’ has been chosen by London-based Sound FX Editor / Designer, Tony Gibson, who I was happy to welcome to the club for the first time earlier this year.

Tony has won an RTS award in 2009-10 & a Music and Sound award in 2011 for his work on the popular TV series, Misfits.  He also picked up ‘TV Sound Editor of the Year’ award at this year’s Conch Awards in the UK.  He currently works for the post facility, Molinare in London.

Here’s Tony’s brief for our latest theme:

“Underneath every great audio tracklay is something that to most people goes unnoticed.  But to the people who work in our field they are the bed that everything is built up from.City Skylines are very important to the our work, they help to create a base for all of our dialogue, effects and sound design to blend together and create our overall sound track.These are none specific in nature but are very indispensable to what we do.”

 

I’ll second the importance that these recordings are non-specific atmos beds rather than a collection of traffic passes.  My personal view is that different senses of space are useful so perhaps we can experiment with different stereo or quad, etc. recordings.  On the flip side of that, corresponding mono recordings are also useful for helping fill the centre speaker on occasion – but maybe that’s the dialogue editor in me talking!

My experience of collecting this type of recording is that it’s best to go high:  Tops of buildings or other raised viewpoints over an area of the city gives you the necessary distance from the urban melee of traffic and people so that you get that generic ‘roar’ rather than any sense of specific details.  If you simply stand on a street corner, you’ll pick up too many close sounds like footfalls and car passes.

Any further input from fellow sound collectors is more than welcome in the comments below.  Good to be back and thanks again to all of you for your patience!