Multimedia
Blogs
Forum
Affordable HD
Whitepapers
Newsletters
Events
Advertisers
Blogcast
MillimeterThe Sampler
Apr 27, 2005 12:27 PM
The History of SFX Wrapped Up in One Company: The BBC
Hey, what's with you guys? We take one issue of The Sampler off from our interminable SFX history and the first email I get is, "Liked the story on Frank Serafine, but where's the SFX history?" Aren't you the people who slept through history in high school? Weren't you busy thinking about taking radios apart when everyone else was studying the Battle of Hastings? (That's England, silly, not upstate New York.) OK, this issue's installment isn't, strictly speaking, another SFX history lesson, but it does deal with an organization that has been a driving force in the field forever, it seems, and whose archive does span the entire recorded history of SFX. I'm talking, of course, about the BBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation.
The BBC's legendary sound archive includes effects, voices, and music that date back to very beginnings of recorded sound at the end of the 19th century. Through its deep involvement with the production of television programming over the past several decades, the BBC has also been at the forefront of creative effects generation. Though we in America often think of English television as somehow staid and conservative, the opposite is true: The BBC has produced a number of programs through the years that have employed very creative sound elements, and all of that has become part of the BBC archives, as well.
For instance, the popular, long-running program Dr. Who was one of the first to use sophisticated sci-fi sound effects. The show's SFX creators—Brian Hodgson and then Dick Mills—had both worked for the BBC's famed Radiophonic Workshop, which, beginning in 1958, did extensive experimentation with early electronic musical instruments and devices and used them creatively in different radio and TV productions. As Mark Ayre, archivist at the Radiophonic Workshop library, noted in an interview, "People were doing experimental radio productions in which they wanted to get inside people's heads, creating radio plays that weren't standard kitchen sink dramas. They wanted to create stuff which was more psychological, more exploratory—and you can't just go in the BBC sound effects library, brilliant though it is, and get out the sound of someone having a nervous breakdown. You need another way of telling that story. … The only way of doing that is through pure imagination and manipulation of sound in new and interesting ways."
That sort of attitude has carried through BBC productions ever since—from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (sound designer: Douglas Adams) to more recent programs, such as the acclaimed Walking with Dinosaurs (sound by Andy Sherriff and Sophie Taylor), you'll find today's sound designers creatively mixing stock sound effects with newly recorded FX, twisted and morphed electronically to become new, never-before-heard sounds. And if you ever watched Monty Python's Flying Circus, you heard the BBC effects library used in hilariously absurd ways in nearly every episode. (Similarly, the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail used extensive SFX from the BBC collection, as well as considerable amounts of production music library themes. Always looking to save a few bucks, those Pythons.)
Portions of the BBC sound effects library have been commercially available in the United States for a number of years. Sound Ideas, one of the leading U.S. FX library companies, has 60 volumes of BBC sounds for sale, covering an incredible range of topics: Households, Human Crowds, Children and Footsteps, Water, British Birds, Industry, Babies, Farm Machinery, China, Rural South America, Suburbia, The Age of Steam—the list goes on and on. Within each disc the selections get very specific—"Traffic Jam in New Delhi," "Slab-grinding Machine," "Rex Stencil Duplicator, By Hand," "Gibberish Phone Call," and "Braying of an Agitated Horse," to name just a few.
A more recent development has 165 CDs of BBC library effects available to the general public through sound-effects-library.com, which has slowly but surely grown into the largest such online resource in the world. (We'll have more on that company next time.) Another source for BBC FX online is sonomic.com.
Meanwhile, the BBC's own website offers a small of number of free FX and even some free classical music cues (by the likes of Mozart, Beethoven, and Greig) for use in non-commercial applications, such as home videos. It really would take an entire lifetime to explore the entire BBC collection, so you better get to it!
A PML Market Check: Chicago
In our ongoing, highly informal, and completely non-scientific survey of which production music libraries are being used most by leading commercial post facilities, we thought it would be fun to head out to Chicago—long the Midwest's center for radio and television production—and check in with a few studio there. There are certainly a zillion to choose from, and business appears to be brisk through the region these days.
Our first call was to CRC (Chicago Recording Company) which has been a leading facility in the area for many years in numerous aspects of recording and post. When I reached studio manager Chris Shepherd and asked him which PMLs are getting heavy usage at CRC, he chuckled and noted, "You have to understand, we use dozens and dozens; we have a basement just filled with them and we also now have lots of hard drives filled with them. We try to keep it all accessible on a central sever because it makes it easier for our guys to catalog and everything, but it comes in so fast and there's so much of it, sometimes we don't even get it up on our server before it's already in use."
CRC developed its own server system. "There are all sorts of different searches within it because we use Soundminer [software] which is a really great way to do cataloging for this sort of material," Shepherd says. "'It's definitely customized for our needs and there was plenty of input from our engineers. The guys also have their own [libraries] beyond what's shared on our servers; they each have preferences and ones they like to go back to. You'd have to ask each of them what they like. We have eight post studios here and they share the work evenly, but each is going to like different things." Additionally, CRC has three music rooms and a DVD authoring suite, and is adding two more post rooms. "It's a very busy place," Shepherd says.
Up on the north shore, in Evanston, Studiomedia is a popular destination for producers who need quality commercial or industrial post work. According to studio manager Mike Stuckmeyer, "we have quite a few but I'd say we use APM mostly, and, within that, Bruton and Carlin.
"We have tons of discs, of course, but we also do a lot of downloading now; APM is real good about that so that comes in handy. I think the business is definitely heading in the direction of downloading more and more, but to be honest it's not a big deal for us to go into the closet and grab a disc. We've certainly worked that way for a long time and it's comfortable.
"We're not a huge facility," Stuckmeyer continues. "We have two control rooms for audio and also a video suite, but we stay pretty busy. We do a lot of corporate work—sales tapes and that sort of thing—and we'll often use library music for that; maybe some head and tail music or some kind of main theme for a video. Usually what happens is one of our engineers will sit down with a client and then together they'll figure out what direction they want to go with the music. When you work with certain companies over and over again, as we do, the producer usually gets an idea of how the engineer is at picking music out and they leave more of the decision-making to him. But they still consult: 'This is the feel we're going for in this piece. It needs to support copy real well, and we don't want it to get in the way.' Or maybe in some other part they want something more dynamic. It varies, of course. Anyway, we can usually find something in the APM discs. They send out between 14 and 20 CDs a month and that's just one library, so there's a lot to keep track of, but also plenty of variety."
We wrapped up our whirlwind tour of the Windy City area by speaking with Tom Blackmore, an engineer at Post Effects who uses PMLs constantly in the course of his work.
"We have a lot of the major music libraries in their complete state: All of the Killer Tracks and their associated libraries, like Killer Edge, NJJ, and Atmosphere, and the others," he says. "We have some APM—probably a couple of hundred of the APM discs; certainly not complete, but I'm not sure anyone besides APM could have all of those. We also have a limited number of DeWolfe—a couple or three dozen discs we've found might be useful. Beyond that, we have the complete Omni, complete Network, and, to the best of my knowledge, all of the FirstCom releases and their associated libraries—Gotham, Access and whatever. We have Sound Ideas for sound effects; we don't have any of their music."
How do you keep track of them all, I ask? Do you have to listen to 15 "ambient chill-out" discs to figure out which one you like the best? Blakemore laughs heartily and says, "Welcome to my life! It's a heck of a way to spend your time! But seriously, you just have to know them. A database will only get you so far. As far as sound effects go, we use a couple of databases from Sound Ideas, because it's really hard to remember where individual effects are on discs. But for the music libraries, it is basically getting in and learning them; knowing them. I've been dealing with music libraries for more than 20 years and over that time you build a way of dealing with it. Obviously we inventory them as they come in. But through the years you learn that some libraries are stronger in one type of music than another. Like if someone wants something very cinematic, one of the first places I'll go is Nonstop—they're very strong in that. If somebody wants a very new, cutting edge rock sort of thing, I'll try Velocity, one of the FirstCom libraries. So it kind of self-edits in that way, but it does involve getting in there and knowing it."
Blakemore notes that more and more PMLs are strongly recommending doing downloads, a situation he has mixed feelings about. "We're a complete video postproduction facility," he explains, "and often one of the video editors will say, 'I've got a client sitting in the edit suite; we're looking for some kind of music like this. Can you help me out?' So I'll point them in the direction of some different CDs we have. If all these physical CDs went away, that type of sharing within the facility would go away, too. The other problem with it is that if the video editor starts browsing online and doing downloads, its very hard for the sound department to keep track of what music is being used and to then license it appropriately. If we're not careful we could get our butts sued. Right now the video editors have to get these physical things [CDs] in the sound department and we know who took what and where it went and we can double-check that it was licensed properly. Long term, I guess that's just a management issue, but it's something I'm aware of as an audio engineer."
Finally, I asked Blakemore to talk about a recent project where they'd used some library music. He says, "There's an installation in Chicago we're very proud of—a new space called Millennium Park, which is on the lakefront on the north end of Grant Park. It's got fabulous sculpture and cutting-edge architecture and these beautiful gardens. Anyway, the Excelon corporation, which is the parent corporation of Commonwealth Edison, has built a totally green building that is one of the entrances to this park, and if you walk through the entranceway there's a little display that shows the various methods used for generating electricity: wind, nuclear, geothermal, all these things. And there's a little animated video display with it that runs about three minutes. So they came to us, first of all for the graphics and video work, but also to invent some sound design that wouldn't get in people's way but had a nice sort of ambient feeling. So I spent a week putting together this piece that was based on some access music that I used as the bed for it, and the processed sounds of winds blowing and coal pouring and various ways of generating electricity. All that came together as one piece and it came out really well."
SmartSound Partners With Megatrax for New Collection
At NAB earlier in the month, SmartSound Software, one of the leading providers of soundtrack creation technology for visual content creators (profiled in The Sampler recently), and Megatrax, one of Hollywood 's premier production music libraries for film, television, advertising, and multimedia, announced a partnership to bring a new music library to the high-end film and video market. The Scene will launch in June, and combines Megatrax's high-quality needle-drop music library with SmartSound's innovative technology.
The Scene goes beyond the traditional needle-drop library method of delivering music in 15-, 30-, 60-, or 90-second arrangements. It features Megatrax music encoded with patented SmartSound technology, which allows each track to be instantly edited into a piece with a complete musical beginning and ending at custom lengths from three seconds to more than 30 minutes. SmartSound also provides instant access to audition several possible musical arrangements for each track before saving the desired arrangement to an audio file that can be used in any application.
The Scene will initially feature 10 CDs of needle-drop music appropriate for film, TV, and corporate AV productions, with additional titles planned for future release. This marks the first time that needle-drop music has been available for use with SmartSound technology.
For more info go to smartsound.com
FirstCom Puts Up New Flash Site
Also at NAB, PML giant FirstCom Music, which was mentioned in the Chicago story above, announced the launch of its all new, Flash-based website. According to the company, the site is designed for professional producers who are into more time for producing and less time looking for the right music. "The new FirstCom site makes browsing and searching our vast catalog totally intuitive," says Ken Nelson, VP/executive producer, FirstCom Music. "You have the option of scanning CDs as you would in your own library, or using a powerful new MusiQuick interface and drilling down your search to very specific keywords and descriptions. Best of all, details and downloads are easily accessible from anywhere on the site."
FirstCom clients can now download AIF, MP3, or WAV files from anywhere on the site. Other new features include new organization tools, which let customers view disc and cover graphics by library; an enhanced virtual library, which allows searches for discs in the user's FirstCom library; tools to easily save and share projects; and the improved MusiQuick (FirstCom's signature search engine), which offers more styles, moods, and instruments/groups to search by than ever before.
For more info, go to firstcom.com
Got some news about your production music or sound effects library company you want to share with our readers? Send them to me, your humble and subservient editor/work slave, Blair Jackson: blair@blairjackson.com.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
