Fresh freelancer

Huzzah, I’m a freelancer now !

After more than 4 years working for a studio in Paris, I’m now mister grown up independent sound designer. Fortunately I’ve got work covered for a solid amount of monthes, which is definitely a good thing; although I’m also looking forward for (hopefully short) periods of nothing, for a possible rekindling of my lost max/msp skills … I miss it !

I timed the freelance thing pretty well, as I just purchased the Hybrid Library by PSE. Anyone reading Designing Sound would be familiar with it, but I must say it is indeed a pretty sweet deal. I’m still running through all the sound but holy f*ck there are some great stuff in there. I mean, back at the studio where I worked we were literally still running on 1997 libraries, with the occasional Boom Library purchase, but mostly we did with super old stuff.  No wonder we all became pretty active field recordists on the side 🙂

I bought SoundMinerPro along with the library (a bundle was available) which is awesome.

I’ll follow along with another blog post in the near future to report how it is going with the Hybrid compared to what I used to work with.

Huskies !

Dogs ! Wolves ! Barks ! Howling ! Microphones !

My field recording sense tingled quite a lot when I learnt about this sled race in a tiny village near Paris. Sleds with wheels mind you, surprisingly super fast. They are racing through a bit of the foret de Fontainebleau once a year, or so I gathered, and those cute blue eyed dogs just couldn’t escape the wrath of my microphone. So as I pointed the mic at them, they recognized the glorious task and barked and howled, knowingly providing the material I was looking for.

Or maybe I just stumbled onto them unknowingly. We’ll never know.

What we know is that these dogs are cute and apparently hate staying idle, as they noisily demonstrate. This was captured before the race, as everyone were gathered on the village central square. There are a couple of evil humans speaking here and there, thankfully they knew that shutting up was the superior option here.

Onwards with the wolf dogs :

Recorded with MK4/MK8 > SD MixPre-D > PCM M10

Girona Train Station

Huzzah, a little souvenir from last summer’s holidays.

A souvenir from the trip back, which is, er, not the best but hey. So yes, the city of Girona in Catalunia has this fancy new big fat train station. It really is huge, and super deep, and long and all those adjectives that describe something that is not tiny.It has this incredible reverb that you rarely can experience, sooooo long and envelopping. I could only dream of worldizing sounds there, but good luck with that.

While I did have the fancy soundgear, it was all super packed in the bag and the train was coming in 4 minutes later, so to capture this magnificience I had only the ol’ faithful PCM M10. Still very enjoyable. Hopefully I’ll go back there someday and record some high definition atmosphere.

Meanwhile, enjoy :

Recorded with Sony PCM M10.

Thunder scaring a wooden window

Oh hey. It’s that time of the year again, when wood and thunder go hand to hand … ? Mh, nevermind, I couldn’t figure out a decent introduction for this post.

Here we have, a wooden panel that protects a window, which I’m sure has a name in english but I’d be damned to find it, being rattled by thunder. And there are birds in the background, who don’t seem to mind the rain pouring on their tiny heads. Oh well.

It’s one of those sounds that will probably find very little use in my day to day sound designer job, as there are a bit too much elements happening at the same time. It is a very nice Paysage Sonore, though, so there.

Recorded with MK4/MK8 > CS-104 > PCM M10

Superstition

Well, were we ever bloody well inspired by a holiday destination : le Jura.
A bit of context here : the Jura is one of the mountain regions you hear about in school, but you never ever meet anyone who's been there. The Alps get all the love, the Pyrennees too if you're Spain inclined, then are left poor old Vosges and poor old Jura. What's up with that ? So we booked our parisian asses in the car and drove over there.
Yup, we knew it : the place is fucking lovely.
So yes, go there if you're looking for peace and quiet and beautiful.
This marks my first trip with my fancy new MS set. My french peers may call me a traitor, but ORTF can go f&@k itself, I'm done carrying the dual mic and dual suspension and dual cables and all that dual business. MS is convenient, and for a hiker it just beats the rest flat.
I recorded about every declination of streams and brooks I could find (many), some nice calm fields, a few lake lapping… Short trip, though. One can only record so much before getting frowned upon by an exceptionally patient girlfriend. We were there to walk, after all.
Baume les messieurs and Chateau-Chalon were two exquisite villages to see, and so were every house we encountered. Beautiful big wooden stony places. My sound nerd mind drools at the idea of what I could find at a garage sale over there.
I'll leave you with a semi distant stream ambience. I think it is very nice.

Recorded with Schoeps MK4/MK8 – CS-104 – Pcm-m10

Ireland

Spring 2014 was good. Yes. I spent most of that time working on the upcoming movie Song Of The Sea by Tomm Moore.
I started the season with the coproducer SuperProd sending me over to Ireland, a fantastic occasion to record as many ambience as I could, and meet the crew at Cartoon Saloon.
After a couple days in Kilkenny, filled with nice people, good talks, surprisingly tasty food and joyful whiskies, I hopped into Tomm’s car for a road trip to Dingle. There, everyone was busy for a lovely animation festival… I took a peek at the schedule and would have been tempted by quite a few talks and screenings.
But that’s not the path of a field recordist, eh. Nope. Nu-uuh.
Morgen früh, I packed the gear and the sturdy shoes, got some indications from the Tourist Office lady and got on with the walking away from noise. Lovely roads and paths to walk on, in this beautiful country.
In the end I walked up and down and around for a solid 8 hours, and got some fucking great material for the movie, and that was only the first day ! Superb wind gusts on hills and through fences, magnificient silent air, beautiful calm birds in the distance, super sea scenes with cool waves.
But I’m not going to post any of this here, because I’d rather have you experience these ambiences at the cinema ! Gnihihi.
Instead I’m going to post one of the ambiences that didn’t get used in the movie : a bull doing some cows in the distance. That was the very first ambience I recorded around Dingle, so it’s about 9am in the morning. It’s lovely.

Recorded with 2xSchoeps mk4 ortf – CS-104 – Pcm-M10

Lovely country, fantastic film, the whole experience was fucking sweet. I’m very happy with the end result, the movie is beautiful, the foleys sound very nice, the music is great, the mix is sehr good, and I couldn’t have asked for a better relationship with Tomm and everyone involved in the project.
After the movie comes out, I’ll write a postmortem or something about the sound design work my colleague Alex Jaclain and I did. Yep.

Oh hey

Oh hello.
I’m just going to wave at Tomm Moore’s blog for “Song of the Sea”
I’m working as one of the sound designers on the movie, it’s nice and lovely and brillant. It’s great to do great work on a great project. My back hurts though. Stupid chair.
http://songoftheseamovie.blogspot.fr

And… Oh damn it, Look, LOOK, IT’S ME ! *pride*
http://songoftheseamovie.blogspot.fr/2014/03/sounds-of-sea.html

When I’m done working on the movie, i’ll post some ambience I recorded in Ireland here.
Superb country.

Sark island big wind

At the end of last october, me feet landed on Sark Island. A big fat storm was about to hit the place pretty hard, and the ol’ mics were up and ready to meet the gusts with open arms.

And yummy winds there were. This was recorded at the very northern part of the island, called “Bec du nez” if i remember correctly. As you can guess, the place is absolutely splendid.

 

recorded with 2x Schoeps MK4 > CS104 > PCM M10

 

Busy buzzing bees

Oh hello there, blog.
Ah, the ol’ summer business has let you quite dry and empty. I’ve had my first movie sound designer fancy job last july, followed by intensive sfx editing on various tv shows (oh hello insanely sfx packed Lanfeust).
Anyway. Back to pointing microphones at things.
Speaking of business, I recorded some busy bees last August. I left the dpa 4060s in a lavender bush for a bit. It turned out quite ok !

recorded with SoundDevices MixPre-D and stereo dpa 4060

Ah, good old blog. How i enjoy thee.

Eclairs

lightning clap. yes

Thunder, you’re a toughie.

I tried recording thunder and lightnings this early morning … I did okayish ! I am still guilty of pushing that gain knob a liiiiittle bit too much, I really should keep it even lower. It’s hard to know how super loud a big lightning is until it strikes, I’m learning step by step to adapt to it. At least now I think I pretty much locked the optimal gain for next time (hopefully…?). This is my third go at thunder and it’s quite the improvement on last month disastrous saturated takes.

There’s quite a lot of rain hitting the roof of the building in front of me, so those lightnings strikes aren’t exactly super clean, but still quite usable for sfx ! The massive one at 3:45 is quite yummy.

Recorded with 2x Schoeps MK4 > CooperSound Cs-104 > PCM-M10

Those thunders are quite the only bloody good thing coming off this insane heat we’re getting in Europe. I can’t wait for the autumn to arrive. Stupid, evil, horrible heat.

(oh yes, that crummy picture. well, that was this morning. yes this is real lightning on the picture, can’t you tell?)