CMU School of Drama


Sunday, September 28, 2008

Searching For The Perfect Wave: A Life Recording Sound Effects | Once upon a time, I was involved in a small and vastly underfunded theatre company's production... | Sept 2008

LiveDesign: "I have to say that, when I first started in theatre sound, way back in the last century (I love being able to write that), I really didn't think that it would lead to a point where I would have my name up in lights and my contribution described as “pivotal” to a play by one of the world's greatest living playwrights."

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Interesting article...it's also kind of funny. It seems really dumb to me that this woman did not have an assistant or someone to help her it sounds like she especially needed a couple hands when recording that jet and going to such lengths to be able to get an exclusive fly or whatever. I think it's so funny too what she mentioned in the article about people using specific sound effects recorded years ago that everyone is heard, and all the people who know these sound effects recognize that. I feel like I would never be able to tell which copy of a shatter or explosion I was hearing. That sounds like an interesting job though going around the world recording sound effects. I wonder if that kind of job alone gives her enough money to support her.

AShotInTheArm said...

Yeah, this is pretty awesome. In relation to Bart's comment, I'd like to know how well this woman was able to support herself throughout her career. Is it a woman? I can't tell given the author and subject. I've heard a lot of sound recording horror stories of people coming in and ruining the entire recording, there's really no way out of that situation. It goes to show how truly hard it is to record in a completely controlled environment.

Anonymous said...

This was really interesting. I loved the stories about people screwing up recordings he was doing. I can think of more ways that a person could screw up a recording than ways to prevent the loss of a take. We had the ghost hunters tv crew in our theatre back home and they spend an entire night working on getting everything they needed but also invited some local ghost hunters to the shoot. The added people created so much noise that they had to come back a month latter to rerecord everything.