The Art of Practical Motion Picture Sound Companion Website

HOW TO USE THE WEBSITE

When you have navigated to www.focalpress.com/9780240812403 you will see 10 menu options:

Here you will find 2500 video clips, charts, and photos (many with narration and/or sound effects audio files). Throughout the book are notations, suggesting you refer to the website to watch and listen to the audio-visual reinforcements of what you have been reading.

Some photos or charts have been designed to pause until you advance to the next section. Other photo or chart sequences have been authored with narration and/or sound effects, and will advance automatically to the next photo or chart for that particular demonstration.

There are very explicit narrated step-by-step, chart-by-chart sequences that will train you how to properly bias analog stock for optimum playback and reproduction recording, as well as how to tone and properly set bias strength to record audio with as little bias hiss as possible. You may ask, “We are in a digital world, why bother with that?” The answer is simple: if you know how to work with analog, then you will qualify for thousands of job opportunities in film and audio restoration, including making new and exciting behind-the-scenes extras for new DVD sales. In order to go to the “best-original-source,” over 80 percent of the material you will be working with will be film negative and the original optical track (if the film was made before 1953) and all formats of magnetic analog track, from the mid-1940s up to the present. Note: In case you have not noticed, analog is making a comeback. If you do not know these disciplines, you don't get those jobs!

In the “Equipment Review” section, you will find additional navigation to more information about production sound equipment: microphones, mixers, and recorders. All of these charts and photos have been authored to stay in the pause mode until you advance it. This is so you can take your time to review the hundreds of tech charts, itemized lists, and so on. The author has taken a lot of time to standardize the technical specs of each brand of microphone so that the reader can more easily understand and compare each microphone.

The “Production Recording” section has numerous narrated chart sequences—everything from the proper use of a sound report to how the production mixer should slate the header of each recording tape and/or session. It even has a step-by-step sequence on how to prepare and shoot playback for musical films or music videos.

In the “Dialog Editing” section you will find step-by-step instructions on how to fill out a code book, including how to structure and name the edited dialog tracks in your edit session. You will also be taken step-by-step regarding how to handle the production audio, before and after, to properly prepare each cue for a successful final recording mix process. In this section you can watch and listen to several scenes from a film in its original production track; watch and listen to it after the dialog has been properly edited; then again with the created background ambiences and added sound effect cues; and finally with the complete mix.

In the “Custom Recording FX” section you will hear a comparison recording of the same dynamic sound of a .308 assault rifle recorded simultaneously with the exact same microphone and the same kind of cable, but by an audio cassette recorder, a Nagra running at 7 1/2ips, a Nagra at 15 ips, a digital DAT recorder, and the digital Deva. I pass no judgments on using analog versus digital; listen and form your own opinions.

This section also includes a step-by-step sequence with precise sound-effects cues for recording a car series (as you read earlier in the book), an airplane, and gunshots.

In the “Background & FX” section you can listen to the evolution from the “old” studio FX (that dominated for decades) to the “new” custom-recorded FX that have brought modern movies into its new exciting empowerment. You can view a session layout and see and understand how to layer backgrounds. Included are video clips from the award-winning film P.O.W.; you can watch the clip with only the Foley stem, then you can watch and listen to the next clip, which will have only the backgrounds. The next video clip will have the A-FX session, and the last video clip is the final mixed track.

This section also has step-by-step instructions on how the author created mushrooming flames (which is also on the DVD data disc included with this book), as well as a Pro Tools session showing the layering of various rifle shot elements to develop a Mauser 98 rifle shot for a 1928 battle epic, as well an example of cannon fire.

In the “ADR & Looping” section you will find step-by-step instructions with narration on how to set up and cue ADR (in both cue sheet formats). There are also 15 ADR video clips, complete with ADR beeps and Colin-Broad streamers, perfect for practicing with before you find yourself in front of the microphone and the scary screen with the red light!

“The Art of Foley” section takes you through how to lay out and cue Foley. Seven Foley video clips are included: three for practicing sync footsteps and four for practicing creating prop sound effects in-sync.

In the “Studio Facilities & Systems” section there are three user-profile video clips as well as charts and photos of the Nuendo editing platform and the Pro Tools ICON system.

In the “Sound Restoration & Colorization Technologies” section you will see charts with before-and-after audio clips upon which various restoration tools have been used, by John Polito and his crew at Audio Mechanics in Burbank, California. There is also an awesome photo gallery of the colorization examples that Barry Sandrew Ph.D and his crew at Legend Films did in concert with the legendary special effects designer Ray Harryhausen consulting as the colorization director. His clip will really change your mind about colorizing films!

Hopefully you will use the website as a valuable reference, just as the book will become. Remember, technology changes every six minutes. You will be studying new technological changes all the time; learn the art form—it has hardly changed since the early 1930s. If you learn the art form you will always know what technological innovation you want to use—or not use, as the case may be. Good luck and go make audio history.