Sound Design and Editorial

“If seeing is believing, hearing is feeling.”  -Michael Wohl

We want to help you, the artist, communicate a powerful experience to your audience.  To make that happen we insist on having character and story guide every decision we make from the shoes we wear on the Foley stage to the mood and tone of the ambience.  We want to wrap your audience in the warm, satisfying arms of great sound design and give them an experience they will never forget.

 


Final Mix

All the right ingredients in all the right amounts

Have you ever had a cookie with too much salt?  How about a fresh loaf of bread without any?  Have you tried to make a cake without sugar?  Or a pot roast without time?  Mixing sound is like cooking, if you don’t have the right ingredients, it won’t work.  If you add your ingredients in the wrong amounts, it won’t work.  A final mix needs to have both these things or the audience will be ripped out of the experience and left with a bad taste in their mouth.  As audio professionals, we strive to give the audience the most powerful experience possible, but only as long as it enhances the characters and story.  Pushing the envelope while finding that balance is what we do.


Original Music

“The information is on the screen but all the emotion is on the soundtrack.”  -Fred Newman

Music is emotion in a bottle.  It is excitement and danger and love and comfort and triumph.  Nothing in the world can reproduce an emotional experience quite like it.  And when combined with amazing visuals, characters and stories, can make even the most manly of all the manly men cry like a baby.  

 


Game Audio Implementation

Behavior matters.  Design matters.  Player feedback matters.  We design not only the sound in your game, but the systems that play the sounds.  If you want sound that is responsive to and supportive of the gameplay, we can do that.  We use industry tested tools like FMOD and Wwise and Unity and Unreal to build the systems and mix the sounds that will engulf your audience in the world of the game.


Custom Sound Effects Recording

You don’t use stock footage in your film, why would you use stock sounds?  -Dave Whitehead (paraphrase)

One of the biggest differences between big budget sound and low budget sound is the custom recorded audio that you will only hear in the big budget films.  Those sounds don’t come from a library, they are captured and purpose built for one film and one film only.  We don’t think that the big studios should be the only ones that get this kind of service.  We love finding new sounds that nobody has ever heard before and we believe that every film is a unique piece of art that deserves sound that will help it stick out in a crowd.


Foley Recording

Foley is the magic dust that, when sprinkled on a film, brings it to life.  It turns a touch into a caress.  It gives an unspoken moment meaning.  More than any other category of sound, it makes the audience believe in the reality of the world of the film.  


Dialog Editorial

We tell people all the time, if you are only going to do one thing for your film’s sound, make it dialog editing.  It takes all the rough transitions between scenes and angles and locations and smooths them into a cohesive, consistent whole.


ADR and VO Recording

Whether your project needs to mold and shape your dialog to fit an existing performance or you need to capture the sultry tones of a baritone narrator, or even capture the animated performance of a character voice actor, we can help you.


Sonic Branding

A memorable sound can be as much a part of your brand as the logo.  Every time you turn on your game console, every time you turn on your computer, every time you watch a film you are being trained to recognize a brand based on the sounds you hear.  Brand recognition goes up when a unique, identifiable sound is added.