I wrote this track with Saul Richards for Kream London… it’s a darn sight harder to whistle in tune than you imagine (I soon discovered). The final sound effects and mix were done by Chris Southwell, have a look:
[vimeo 39361441]I edited/compiled this radio advert from a script proposed by the advertising agency, BBH. I was supplied with party conference speeches from the three main heads of uk government parties, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg. I then began the arduous task of picking through these hour long recordings looking for random words to make up the script… but even with all this material, some of the words had to be built from individual syllables in the edit to make the audio work. Have a listen, I think the end result was a success, it got recognised with a monthly Aerial award too, which is nice…
This film is one of a series of animations for Mini. They were projected on a huge scale on the sides of buildings, and the sound could be heard through PA systems at viewpoints where the public could interact with the films and choose what played next.
[vimeo 39362202]As the cars were all animated, we had a Mini Cooper recorded with a multiple mic setup as it was put through its paces by a test driver, who performed donuts and skids until the engine blew out. It was from these multitrack recordings that I pieced together all the car movements in the sound edit. In this particular film (Lasers) I created a bunch of laser sounds using sound effects combined with synth blasts made on a Novation Supernova 2, along with a bunch of rock and explosion sfx from the sound library.
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…
Just blown a couple of hours on this Sonic Router site, great writing and tons of music I haven’t heard before. Check it out, the SR mixes page is jammed full of the good shit.
Check out this track I wrote for Nokia starring card flourisher Max Vlassenko.
[vimeo 39361512]To go with the homemade brief, most of the percussion was recorded in my talented percussionist and friend Nick Smalley’s front room… we recorded anything we could get our hands on that sounded tasty. Everything from a humble cheese grater to a didgeridoo got hit, all recorded on my Sony PCM D50 handheld recorder. I then made selects, chopped them up and polished it all into the finished thing in my studio within Pro Tools.
Chris Cairns from Partizan and I worked on the music and sound design for this commercial together from the storyboard stage through to the final mix.
[vimeo 39362345]We started by grouping sporting activities with corresponding musical sounds. Having built samplers within Logic using library sound effects, I wrote the track based around the storyboards, and with a bit of to’ing and fro’ing we ended up with something close to the final tune. On the shoot, elements of the track were used as playback in order to sync the action, and I attended the set too in order to pick up some foley from the people on set. Back in the studio in post production, I replaced a lot of the original libary sounds within the track with the foley I recorded on set, and that was about it… anyways, have look – it’s a complex idea to execute and it isn’t without its flaws but I learned a lot from the process and the end result was pretty cool.
I did the sound design on this, with awesome music by Biggi Hilmarsson through Leland music. When this advert came into the studio at Marmalade where I used to work, the sound from the shoot was mostly unusable, I think I ended up replacing all of it with my own foley and sound effects from our libaries. Check it out:
[vimeo 39362320]I did this short film back in 2006 and it’s still my favourite short I have worked on. Directed by Barney Clay with music by MPM London, it was recognised with awards in Europe and America including the Brooklyn International Film Festival, Fantasporto and Fantasia. Here’s a clip:
[vimeo 39362292]You can find more info on the film on its myspace page.
will cohen 