Last year I worked on a fun and challenging promo for QI – Stephen Fry’s popular program on the BBC. The very kind Victoria O’Connell and her colleagues at BBC Worldwide entered it into the PromaxBDA Europe awards 2013, and it won a silver!
It was directed by Michaela Lowe, and my talented colleague Simon Thompson helped me with a couple of initial tests and research – here it is again if you aint seen it:
[vimeo 40188417]I have just finished up some trailers for this new BBC wildlife series coming out in January, I can’t lie it was f’ing good fun working on them.
They were directed by Claire Norowzian from Red Bee, and edited by Thomas Ioannou.
I always think of the BBC wildlife series as having really great sound design, hyper real stuff as if the sound recordist has a mic right in the subjects’ faces… in these trailers there was quite a bit of work left to do, so I picked through shot by shot and added details where I thought it would help that sort of macro look on things. I spent a fair bit of time pitching elements of the sound to the track to try and stick it all together… you probably wouldn’t notice most of it but stuff like the pitched cicadas on the flower timelapse and the whale pitched up to match the vocal in the track as we go from the sea to the waterfalls kind of help stick it all together.
I also did a bit of filtering/effecting of the track to make it fit into the scenes – for instance filtered under the water, then a bit of uplifting washy stuff as we come out and over the waterfall. Btw the track is ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ by Roberta Flack… it’s a beauty. Have a look at the teaser here and look out for the other trailers on the telly innit:
[vimeo 56367550]I have been asked a few times to do tunes out of sound effects, a nice idea but often conceptually flawed… in this case Michaela Lowe from the BBC’s idea was a good one as the source material to work with was so rich in terms of pitched sounds. I completed the sound design and musical arranging in my studio before handing a Pro Tools session over to Envy for a final mix with the VO.
The brief was to take the buzzer noises from all the QI shows, and make a stirring British tune out of them. Michaela and I researched various classic British tracks and decided on Land Of Hope & Glory – I suggested that to underpin the sound effects track with a real recording would tie the whole thing together so we chose one and started by making a 60 second edit that would work in terms of buildup etc.
The next step was to take the buzzer sounds Michaela provided (dozens from several series), and edit/load them into samplers within Logic Pro (Kontakt) – I grouped them as per how I deemed they could be used: bells, horns, human, sfx tuned and rhythmic sfx. Then within each group I sorted them in to order of pitch, and then fine tuned each sample to match a note.
From that stage it was a case of trying different sequences out and getting the right balance between comedy effect and musical correctness – and also not giving the tune away too early. After getting the sequence right, I rendered the different tracks and took them into Pro Tools for fine tuning – have a listen to the end result.
This is a real golden oldie, directed by Team Stush at Partizan back in 2006… half of them got food poisoning in the making of this.
I took the classic track ‘Hooray For Hollywood’ and remixed it adding a squelchy bass and some extra drums. Then I sampled the end of the track and automated the end point of the loop in Kontakt (sampler) until it became a pitched note, finally squawking to a finish as the fruit dance enters the can. Add sfx et voila! If that didn’t make sense, watch the film and that should clear things up.
[vimeo 39361815]I did the sound design for this short animation many moons ago for Olly Courtney (when he was at MTV).
I seem to remember we had less than two hours to make the soundtrack, so I grabbed a few rough tunes that I was writing at the time, sped them up beyond musical recognition, chopped them in, added a load of scrunching sweet wrappers for foley, a few sound effects of apples crunching and vines growing, stuck Olly’s voice through a Roland vp9000, et voila! Sometimes having no time to think and chew on things can produce great stuff. It can also mean you end up with a load of crap, just very quickly… anyway you be the judge:
[vimeo 39362171]This promo was directed by Derek Best at Nickelodeon and animated in house I think. I wrote the track for this with the multi-talented Simon Thompson, with chopped up vocals from Amanda Moocha. Most of the drum hits were from the ‘Driven Machine Drums’ collection, with bassline courtesy of my SH-101:
[vimeo 39361492]Them kids love to dance… I liked this track lots, but before Simon got to work on the vocals it weren’t nuthin special – a bit of collaboration can go a long way. Btw the end voice-over is Lewis McLeod in one of his many guises…
will cohen 