Fri, 12 Feb 2010 14:17

Located in New York City, Silver Sound is a leading sound studio that specializes in location recording (film or music), VO and studio recording, sound editing and design, foley & ADR, film mixing (surround sound or stereo), music composition / film scoring, music tracking, and music mixing.  Check out their website (www.silversound.us) and you can check out all of the cool projects they’ve worked on, and check out their own film competition, where you can win free sound services.

Co-founder Robin Shore was kind enough to spend some time answering our questions about working in the sound / film / music industry and share some thoughts about the Sound Map and The Smalls Street Sounds.



What is Silver Sound?  
Silver Sound is about 7 or 8 guys who are passionate about making movies sound really good.

What inspired you to get into the business?
We've all been interested in sound and movies since we were young, a lot of us started making and recording our music when we were still teenagers and most of us went to film school. In the film world sound work has this weird mystique about it that makes it a really appealing field to get into. People act as if it's some kind of magic.   

What exactly do you do?
We look at sound from a filmmaking perspective, which involves all sorts of different things. We have a recording studio in Manhattan where we create and edit sounds then mix them together to create the finished soundscape for the movies we work on. This can involve anything from recording a voice-over artist in one of our vocal booths, to playing with an old doorknob or a piece of raw meat in front of a microphone.  We also travel to film sets to record the sound during shooting and every once in a while we'll even pick up a camera and make a movie of our own.

Why is good sound important to any film project?
It's actually really hard to give a complete answer to this one because there are so many different things that define "good sound" and so many things that sound can bring to a movie. On a pretty basic level you want the audio quality to be high so that people will actually be engaged enough to pay attention. The ear is a lot less forgiving than the eye when it comes to quality and I've seen lots of really beautiful looking movies rendered unwatchable because of poorly recorded sound and bad mixes.

On another level you need a well thought out and executed sound design in order to sell the actions and the emotions you are trying to show on screen. No one is going to believe your character actually got punched in the face if they don't hear his jaw crack and no one will think your monster is scary if it just sounds like some dude yelling from across the room.

What have been the most interesting projects you have tackled?
About two years ago we were priced out of our location in Midtown Manhattan and had to build a new studio from scratch in a different space. That was definitely one of the most interesting things we've done as a company. It really made us think about the best way to use all the tools we have and forced us to learn a lot about the more technical aspects of our work.

As far as projects go my favorites are the ones that exist somewhere outside the realm of normal movies. Last year we were approached by a fine artist named Josh Azzarella who had used a computer to remove all the people from Michael Jackson's Thriller music video resulting in an odd mish-mash of unmotivated cuts and camera moves through empty rooms and landscapes. We were asked to create a sound design based on what we thought these empty environments would sound like. It's not necessarily the most captivating thing to watch from start to finish, but it posed a pretty interesting problem for us: How do you create an atmosphere of stillness and emptiness without making it sound completely dull and silent? The answer was to vary the tone of the ambient noise a lot depending on the shot, and to give a lot more attention to small atmospheric sounds that might go unnoticed if there was a lot of action happening on screen.

We also sound design and mix an episodic audio drama called the Leviathan Chronicles. I don't think I really need to explain why an audio drama is an interesting project for a movie sound designer and this one is a sci-fi action story, which makes it particularly fun for us.    

You do a lot of mixing for recording artists – what is that like?
We do work with recording artists pretty often, but we don't actually do that much mixing of music tracks. Our work with them usually involves live recording of performances and interviews, or integrating tracks that have already been recorded and mixed into the projects we're working on. Mixing a movie, which is what we mostly do, can be pretty different from mixing a song. It's usually a much longer process (most movies are longer than songs) with a lot of sound elements coming together from pretty diverse and inconsistent sources. In particular Dialogue and other sounds recorded on location can bring up a lot of noise problems that you don't often run into with recorded music

What do you feel is the future of the sound industry?
A lot of movie and video content is being released on the Internet now and there still aren't really any standards for it is far as sound is concerned. Audio quality and levels vary a lot, even between things on the same site. People are going to have start paying attention to that stuff and learning to work within some new guidelines if they’re mixing for the Internet.  I also think we're gonna be doing a lot more work in 5.1 surround even on smaller projects that are just intended for web or TV. People seem to be really interested in that now that home theaters are popular and you don't have to go to a big movie theater to enjoy something in surround sound. With people listening to things on headphones so much I think it'd be really cool if binaural recordings became more popular (binaural recording is a technique used to recreate space and directionality in a sound recording. It requires the use of stereo headphones. You can read about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_recording), but I doubt that will happen.

What’s on the horizon for you guys?
We have a couple of feature films we're about to start working on right now, as well as pretty cool abstract film project with a photographer named Stephen Wilkes. We're also organizing a couple of really great events for filmmakers in New York. Right now we're accepting submissions for our annual film fight competition where we provide free sound services to our favorite projects in various categories. Later in the year we'll be hosting a silent film festival where we pair up filmmakers with musicians then screen the films accompanied by a live score.

You are running a competition yourselves, right? Tell us about it.
For this year's competition we've opened up submissions to films in all stages of production from pre through post. Even if all you have right now is a glimmer of an idea you could still win a full day of free sound work from our top-notch audio engineers.  For specific information you can check our website.



What do you think of the Sound Map and the Street Sounds project?
It's a really great idea. A lot of people have just recently started sharing raw sound recordings on the internet like this which is great because otherwise if you need a specific sound effect you'd either have to go out and record it yourself or pay an arm and a leg to get it from a commercial sound library

What do you think makes a sound inspiring?
Clarity is pretty important to me when I'm choosing sounds to use; even if I'm not familiar with the sound, it should be distinct and be recognizable from the other sounds around it. Dynamics (variations in volume) can also really help to add character and richness to a sound.

What would you want to hear from the Sound Map?
Living in a big city like New York makes it really hard to record good outdoor sounds that don't have people or traffic or airplanes in the background. I'd really love to hear insect noises, waterfalls, birds, walking through leaves WITHOUT traffic. I think it's very difficult to get. I'd love to hear the rustle of wheat fields or cornfields in the wind.
 
More generally, I'd like to hear recordings that include something unique to their location that would be easily recognizable by someone who hears it often. For New York City that might be the distinctive ding-dong sound played on the subway when the doors are about to close and the robotic man who announces, "stand clear of the closing doors". It could also be something more personal like the sound your front door makes when you lock it, or the sound your TV makes when you turn it off.

What is your favorite sound on the Sound Map?
There's a really nice recording of an El train in Chicago. You can hear the the rhythm and all the different clanks pretty clearly which is nice because a lot of train recordings just come out sounding really fuzzy and indistinct.

There's also a really interesting one from one from Pennsylvania called ringing rocks park that made me so curious I had to look it up to find out what is. It sounds like a small bell being struck really sharply, but it's actually a special type of rock that rings like metal when you hit it with a hammer.

Any advice for filmmakers who are sourcing sounds from the Map for their projects?
Don't be lazy, keep listening until you find the right sound and make sure you listen to sounds all the way through, otherwise you might miss something good. Don't just take a sound from the map and drop the whole thing into your project haphazardly without thinking. Play around with timing until you have it just right, and experiment with stretching or shortening the sound or making the pitch higher or lower. With longer sounds you will usually have to edit out the bad parts so that your only using the pieces you like.

If you are going to record sounds to put on the map try to avoid recording yourself. In particular, be mindful of not hitting the microphone(s) or moving them around too much. Make sure that you have an adequate windscreen, this rule is VERY important and often causes loud low rumbling if not followed. Make sure that your recording environment is as quiet as possible (turn off the fridge if you have to).

To read more about Silver Sound Studio, you can contact them here at The Smalls via their member profile: http://www.thesmalls.com/members/silver-sound.go or visit their website, www.silversound.us.

MAKE HISTORY.
BE PART OF THE WEB'S BIGGEST SOUND COLLABORATION.
Tune into The Smalls Street Sounds. (www.thesmalls.com/streetsounds)