Author: ha14

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Paula Fairfield – Game of Thrones Sound Design

Emmy Award Winning Sound Designer, Paula Fairfield reveals how she designed sound for the iconic creatures in Game of Thrones.

With surround sound examples and stems from major scenes in Season 7, Paula will discuss the evolution of creature sound sets: including the dragons, the wights, the Whitewalkers, the polar bear, the direwolves, and the ice dragon.

Exploring her inspirations and the challenges encountered along the way (like the dragons growing up), Paula will reveal the challenges of Sound Design for a Major Television Production such as Game of Thrones and the importance of careful planning, especially in a series that can potentially span years.

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Biography

Paula Fairfield is an International and Emmy award winning sound designer for tv, film, commercials, and basically anything that makes noise. She has eight Emmy nominations with one win for her work on Game of Thrones, along with multiple wins and nominations for her work in both The US and Canada. During her career she has had the privilege of working on tv projects such as the iconic LOST and visionary filmmakers like Robert Rodriguez, Brian DePalma, Paul McGuigan and Darren Aronofsky.

Her passion is high concept sound design and her main interest is working with visionary filmmakers, which is clearly reflected in her resume and her background as an artist. Paula is from a tiny town in Nova Scotia and has a BFA from NSCAD University in Halifax, N.S. During her career as an exhibiting artist, she was the co-director of Canada’s foremost media art center, Charles Street Video. Her art work resides in several collections worldwide, including the National Gallery of Canada. She started her commercial sound work in Toronto with Sound Dogs before relocation to Los Angeles in 1998. In 2014, she established her sound design company Eargasm Inc.

Paula will be debuting her new immersive audio work “Ocean of Tears” in 2018/9 at the University of Greenwich in London. Current projects include “Game of Thrones”, “Tom Clacy’s Jack Ryan” (Amazon, August) and the upcoming Robert Rodriguez/James Cameron “Angel Battle Alita”, due December this year.

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Richard Addis – HALO Post Production – Guest Lecture

Richard Addis (Senior Operations Manager at HALO Post Production) visited students providing an insight into the world of Post Production with examples of current recent projects.

HALO Post Production is one of the leading studios for post-production sound. Based in London’s Soho, halo provides television and film producers with the full range of post production services.

https://www.halopost.com/

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Top 10 Best Sound Designed Films of All Time?

CineFix published a video of what they believe to be the top ten best Sound Designed films.

“Everyone can appreciate a film’s visuals, but good sound are (at least) half the artistry of a movie. Today we pay tribute to some of the best Sound Design out there. Subscribe: http://goo.gl/9AGRm

From explosions in pitched battle to the judicious use of silence; from Foley effects to fully immersive soundscapes, what you hear in movies shapes the experience of watching them in ways you may not even consciously realize at the time. And these 10 movies illustrate that fact wonderfully.

What do you think of the list? What movie do you think of has having great sound? Do you think we left anything off the list, or put something undeserving on? “

Do you agree with their choices? What’s missing?

Find out more: Study Sound Design at Greenwich

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Orchestra of Noise

Luigi Russolo was one of the Italian Futurists, a group of thinkers and artists who imagines a new art for the modern world. the famous manifesto Art of Noises was published in 1913.

But, not content with just imagining new sounds, Russolo set about building his own orchestra of noise machines. The originals have been long lost but researchers developed a new array of instruments form the original patents.

https://creators.vice.com/en_us/article/43y3gm/russolo-intonarumori-noise-orchestra-or-conservation-lab

“I had a very extensive map of what he was after,” he explains. “I knew where he was coming from scientifically and aesthetically. I had spent years recreating his environment, and I had plenty of sources, diaries, poems…I feel that all the guesses I made match Russolo’s descriptions of the instruments quite well. For example, he described one of the instruments as the sound of water gurgling inside a pipe, and what I built sounds just like that.”

These instruments could be considered some of the earliest synthesisers. Tools to create new sounds are used extensively in sound design for film and media, these are sometimes electronic / digital, but there is no substitute for creating sounding objects for recording.

Find out more: Study Sound Design at Greenwich.

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Centuries of Sound

The development of recording changed forever the way in which we engage with sound. Sounds were no longer ephemeral, transient events, but physical concrete objects which could be replayed and manipulated.

Centuries of Sound is celebrating the rich history of recorded sound by releasing a mixtape for every single year of recorded sound from 1860 to the present day.

http://www.openculture.com/2017/08/the-web-site-centuries-of-sound-is-making-a-mixtape-for-every-year-of-recorded-sound-from-1860-to-present.html

Understanding the history and development of sound recording can still inspire us today. And in sound recording, sometimes the oldest tricks are the best.

Find out more: Study Sound Design at the University of Greenwich.

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SOUND / IMAGE 2017

The Sound/Image colloquium explores the relationships between sounds and images, and the images which sounds can construct by themselves.

Through a series of complementary strands – talks, screenings, loudspeaker orchestra concerts – we will bring together artists and experts to investigate sound and sound-image phenomena.

This year we are delighted to invite Yves Daoust, Holly Rogers and Bret Battey as special guests for this third instalment of SOUND/IMAGE.

 

Full Details:

http://www.gre.ac.uk/ach/events/soundimage

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SOUND TALKING

On Friday 3rd November, the Science Museum hosts an interdisciplinary workshop on ‘language describing sound / sound emulating language’

Info and registration: bit.ly/SoundTalking

Sound Talking is a one-day event at the London Science Museum that seeks to explore the complex relationships between language and sound, both historically and in the present day. It aims to identify the perspectives and methodologies of current research in the ever-widening field of sound studies, and to locate productive interactions between disciplines.

Bringing together audio engineers, psychiatrists, linguists, musicologists, and historians of literature and medicine, we will be asking questions about sound as a point of linguistic engagement. We will consider the terminology used to discuss sound, the invention of words that capture sonic experience, and the use and manipulation of sound to emulate linguistic descriptions. Talks will address singing voice research, the history of onomatopoeias, new music production tools, auditory neuroscience, sounds in literature, and the sounds of the insane asylum.

Speakers:

– Ian Rawes (London Sound Survey)

– Melissa Dickson (University of Oxford)

– Jonathan Andrews (Newcastle University)

– Maria Chait (UCL Ear Institute)

– David Howard (Royal Holloway University of London)

– Brecht De Man (Queen Mary University of London)

– Mandy Parnell (Black Saloon Studios)

– Trevor Cox (Salford University)

For more information, visit bit.ly/SoundTalking or contact the workshop chairs:

Melissa Dickson <melissa.dickson@ell.ox.ac.uk>

Brecht De Man <b.deman@qmul.ac.uk> 

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“Have we reached peak Hans Zimmer?”

Hot on the tails of our recent post about the BRAAM, comes an announcement of a one day workshop exploring the influence of the work of Hans Zimmer. The workshop looks to be an interesting day of talks taking place at City University.

“Have we reached peak Hans Zimmer?”

Wednesday 25/10, 4-6 pm
City, University of London
Music Department
College Building, room AG08
280 St John St, London EC1V 4PB

Jordan Hoffman’s recent article in The Guardian asks what many media composers are inwardly thinking: have we reached peak Hans Zimmer? The film composer has, along with his numerous acolytes, inadvertently altered what every blockbuster is supposed to sound like these days with propulsive, repetitive themes, timbral motifs, and increasing use of ‘shepard tones’. Nicholas Reyland likens the rapid spread of Zimmer’s particular style and aesthetics to ‘a McDonalds or a Starbucks colonising the world’s high streets and displacing local variety with generic conformity and a profitably limited product range developed, through hyper-efficient processes, from a few highly standardised ingredients’ (Reyland, 2015: 122). With Zimmer’s company, Remote Control, having provided many of today’s top screen composers their big break in the industry, many perpetuating their mentor’s scoring tropes, Hoffman questions, ‘maybe it’s OK to let someone else have a turn from time to time?’ (Hoffman: 2017).

The two articles that will be discussed are:
(1) https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2017/sep/18/hans-zimmer-blade-runner-2049-film-composer
(2) REYLAND, Nicholas. Corporate Classicism and the Metaphysical Style, in: MSMI 9/2 (2015), pp. 115-130.

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The Braaam™

Aidan Finden, second year Sound Design student, recently shared this podcast about the now ubiquitous “Braaam™”. This iconic is found in action films and trailers everywhere, but where did it come from? Why is it so effective?

“An episode about the type of sound The Inception Sound is, the controversy surrounding that sounds authorship, and how it’s effectiveness is deeply rooted in a millennia plus of human culture”

This podcast unpacks some good examples of compositional techniques, showing how layering and timbal fusion work to create this iconic effect, combining inharmonic and harmonic materials.

The “Braaam™” is a very good example of how a single sound can be so complex and contain may different references and associations.

We discuss this and many more ideas on the Sound Design undergraduate programme.

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Royal Television Society (RTS) Awards & Sound Masterclasses

The RTS has announced its call for works for this years Student Awards with a specific “Undergraduate Sound” category.

Deadline for submission is October 20th.
Follow the link for more details: https://rts.org.uk/award/rts-student-television-awards-2018

They have also released details of their masterclass programmes which will take place on November 15th. : https://rts.org.uk/event/student-craft-skills-masterclasses

A video of the 2016 Sound Masterclass with Emma Penny and Louise Willcox is available below: