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Sound Effect Design for Planetaria and Space Theaters
Bowen Technovation was one of the first audio shops to coin the term "sound design", probably as early as 1986 or so. Use of this term simply indicates we possess a great awareness of how all sound effects elements fit together to create a total sound environment. Our clients always rave about the neat sound effect work we perform on their projects. Especially the multichannel surround soundtracks. And we love doing kids stuff. Here are some resources we use to create the right sound design for your planetarium show or large-format dome preshow tour. Sound Effect Libraries
I don't like those little spiral bound books listing the sound effects, so our sound effects are located very quickly using a couple of software search programs. We have the little books on a shelf if you prefer to use them. It's ok with us. If you ever sneak back into our tape library you'll see a whole bunch of DAT and reel tapes of sound effects we have created ourselves, mostly for documentary video projects. These are catalogued in our computers, too! You may use them if you like. I would rather pull out these tapes than Foley the salt mine explosion again! Sweetening Oh, yeah. One of the most important services we can provide as sound designers is that of sweetening. We match up the dialog from your many different production locations. Fix those little slurps, ticks, and pops from your video edit, and repair that perfect take of on camera talent...perfect except that he turned his head away from the lav at the end on his lines. Hey, we're magicians in this area. A More Creative Approach to Sound Design We began working with computer synced sound effects in 1985. It was our creative approach to sound effect design that brought Spacequest Planetarium producers Sharon Parker and Wayne Blankenbeckler to work with us. These and other planetarium producers especially liked the way we invented sounds to enhance their special effect and Digistar sequences. In producing our very first planetarium soundtracks, we came to the conclusion that we hated using china markers and razor blades to build our sound effects packages. Because we began to find ourselves stacking up layers and layers of sound effects to get the perfect final result, here are some of the modern sound production techniques we have developed at Bowen Technovation : Sampling
In the mid 80's we perfected the art of triggering digitally sampled sound effects to match SMPTE time-code addresses on video or audio tape. This is still a very valid production method. We simply record shorter length sound effects or sound effects that are very repetitive or rhythmic in nature into our Kurzweil and Akai samplers. Our Mac computers then "play" these sound effects back at exactly the time-code addresses we desire. The "hits" can be shifted any number of frames forward or backward. This is a great technique to use for supernova explosions, collisions, alarms, footsteps, door slams, screams, swooshes and zaps. Very fast because there is no delay in waiting for audio tape to lock up to your video master tape. Digital Audio Workstations These are the "Swiss Army" tools of the audio profession. We can record and assemble stacks of sound effects, dialog, and music, change tone and eq settings, and automate the final mix right in the workstation. Workstations are completely random access and our workstations are so fast that you can move from the start of a production to a point one hour into the show in less than 1 second! No tape winding or sync waits! Another neat thing about our disk-based workstations. We keep a "Take Directory" or hard disk file of your most often used tags and sfx, then can drag and drop them right into the perfect time-code locations in your productions...without rerecording.
Digital Tape Digital tape is still the best way to handle really long segments of ambiences, nat sounds you bring to us from your video tape production, and music. Example, we might use a digital audio workstation to build a sound composite of PM crickets layered with a running stream, an occasional dog bark, and a crackling campfire. We then might transfer this mix to digital tape to free up memory in the workstation. Or we might edit dialog for a 30 minute show in the workstation...dump the dialog over to digital tape...and go back to work on the workstation with sound design. Computer Automated Mixdown Our mixers have featured Megamix automation since 1989. Computer assisted mixing is a must when working with complex planetarium audio packages and long format programs. At our place, software running on a Mac computer remembers all of our fader and mute events, and plays them back synced accurately to picture. This not only allows us to perform mixes that would otherwise be impossible, but also means we can easily reload the mix file and revise the mix accurately for years to come. Need a Demo...fast? or do you have time for a visit? We have some pretty nifty samples of sound design work we have completed on CD, DAT, cassette, or videotape, but you want to know what we will do for you, not what we did for someone else. After you hear our demo...come on over and hear some samples at our place. You"ll like it! Call us if you want to hear our soundtracks in a planetarium. There are about 200 sites where you can hear our work, so we should be able to find one near you. And of course, our studio is set up for multichannel surround sound monitoring, but a planetarium is the best place to hear our surround sound mixes. Great! How Do We Get Started? Sound design for video/film based projects takes place after your rough cut or final edit. You deliver a 3/4" work print to us with SMPTE time-code on the address track and any reference audio from your master mixed on audio track 1 and 2. This allows the use of two separate audio channels for split track monitoring. Your project will move more smoothly if you burn in a visible time-code window. A specification is included below for this 3/4" workprint. If we need to include edited audio from your video master, please supply this lay-off on time-code DAT. We recommend you leave the tracks split-track so we can properly integrate this audio and provide you with a final synchronized mix. We then lock our computer systems up to the time-code from the work print and begin designing your audio package...integrating the best in computer- based workstations, digital audio tape, and MIDI samplers. The Mix After our music, dialog, and sound effect work is completed, we can deliver our product mixed in many different formats. Whatever you need works for us. Some of the more popular mix formats for planetaria include: Four to six channel surround-sound mix on ADAT digital 8-track. surround sound is our specialty! we prefer to work with discrete 6-channel mixes, and very much dislike the unpredictability of prologic. but we will mix and encode prologic upon your request. we are ready to move forward with ac-3, also called 5.1 surround as soon as the industry supports the format in full, which will happen simultaneously with the advent of dvd and hdtv. hmmm...my project is not a post score We begin sound effect design for planetarium projects in a couple of ways. Producers often record and edit the narrative/dialog tracks in their own locale, then send them to us to proceed. Sometimes the script is sent to us to produce using the excellent talent pool available in our region. Approval takes place by phone patch or by cassette tapes. Music and sound effects are composed to the narrative timing and a mix is completed. Specifications for Video Work Print 3/4" video tape Audio channel #1- audio from channel 1 of master Address track-exactly same time code as master, re-generated, not dubbed Time code window burn-small and in lower right hand corner, if possible Audio layoffs DAT with cue track time-code from master Please keep all audio layoffs split track For layback we mix to: DAT with cue track time code Unless stereo, all Bowen Production mixes are split track with: SFX Layoffs from our Library for Post Recorded in same formats as material for layback with time code
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Our extensive digital sound effects library at Bowen Productions actually consists of a collection of a number of libraries. Our largest library is from "The Hollywood Edge". This company is owned by Oliver Stone and some guys from the 12 time Academy Award winners Soundeluxe. Same sound effects as used for all those big-time movies Oliver and the guys have made.
Oh, and still another neat thing about workstations. We edit using visual representations of our recorded sound. These "pictures" are called waveforms. Visual waveform editing allows us to edit to .00002 seconds....that ought to get rid of about any lip smack, huh?