I found it interesting that Steve Albini was the keynote speaker at the Face the Music Conference in Melbourne late last year. Albini is best known for engineering a tonne of “records” for bands including The Pixies, Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins, but also for his own bands Big Black, Rapeman and Shellac. Many years ago … Read more Steve Albini: the internet has solved music’s problem
A few years back, Brent Heber, Australian Audio Post guy and Pro Tools expert/advocate, put together a short 20 minute video discussing the common mistakes made by fresh filmmakers with regards to sound. He starts by touching on the basics like choosing locations and microphones, before moving on to considerations for sync, timecode, and workflow. People new to filmmaking … Read more Film sound: common mistakes
I got along to see Mad Max: Fury Road at the cinema yesterday. It was pretty over the top in many ways, but that is to be expected so it was a fun ride. There would have been many great challenges for the crew working on this movie, not least for the production sound team. … Read more Production Sound challenges for Mad Max: Fury Road
Designing Sound have posted up a cool interview with sound designer Chris Scarabosio from Skywalker Sound about comedy sound design. Check it out at: http://designingsound.org/2015/05/comedy-its-an-interesting-thing-to-try-and-nail-down-interview-with-chris-scarabosio/
FabFilter have put together a really good video tutorial on linear phase vs minimum phase or regular EQ. It shows a clear example of the pre-ringing effect from linear phase EQs and some interesting examples using parallel EQ processing: http://www.fabfilter.com/video/eq-linear-phase-vs-minimum-phase
Avid have put out a series of 6 videos discussing post production mixing using Pro Tools and their new S3 interface. The videos are good. It is partially a sales pitch for the S3, but it nevertheless has some interesting aspects and techniques, such as the use of Memory Locations for showing and hiding groups … Read more Avid Post Mixing Videos
Walter Murch is the man. At least that is what I tell audio post-production students. There is an article he wrote in 2005 on the Transom website that discusses a couple of his thoughts on sound, including his approach to mixing a dense soundtrack, using the classic helicopter attack scene from Apocalypse Now as his example. … Read more Walter Murch – Dense Clarity and Clear Density
I have read a couple of articles or blog posts about on-set protocol recently. This is one of the better ones in my opinion: http://filmmakermagazine.com/92534-the-seven-arts-of-working-in-film/#.VS5wq62eDRZ
An interview in the field with Chris Watson: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02npwg1
An old friend and teacher (although I suspect he might prefer a term like facilitator) sent me a link to the following Ted Talk video by Sugata Mitra that he found particularly inspiring and fits in with his way of thinking. It discusses a little about the history of our current model of schooling and … Read more The future of learning