On top of her five wins, Jill has a staggering 21 more Emmy nominations to her name. She gave a talk to students that ran the gamut from the history of Foley – that would be using props to create sound effects that match the picture – to her own career and life as a Foley artist.
“Eventually, her lecture became more of a Q&A, which I enjoyed very much,” says student Erin Hembrador. “She covered both the technical and personal skills needed in the field and was willing to answer any questions we had.”
“Jill spent some time talking about her current work on the show Sons of Anarchy,” student John Born says. “She described her very physical job of watching the characters on screen and then creating real-time sound effects to correspond to their actions scene by scene. This is an important job, because it brings out the depth of a performance and gives it the larger-than-life feel needed for TV and film.”
It’s that physicality that makes Foley such an unusual pursuit. ”You need to drop your ego, forget about yourself, and gracefully be the character on the screen,” says student Maria Luz Orozco.
“Jill herself has an extensive background in dance,” John explains. “She described how her skills with rhythm and timing gave her the edge needed to perform in real-time along with the quick movements of the characters on screen.”
Like many guest presentations at VFS, it didn’t end when the lights came up. Erin was one student who benefited from Jill’s presence outside the Sound Theatre: “After her presentation, I approached her with a question regarding my final project, in which I was having trouble coming up with the sound of movement for a creature,” she says.
“She was happy to help, checked out the visual for my project, and came up with a creepy sound using quarter-inch tape and pieces of straw within seconds of being in the prop room. She then told me to add a wet chamois to it, so I went to Canadian Tire, came back to school, set up a Foley room, and it sounded great!”
Last week, Sound Design for Visual Media students got to spend several days with Scott Sanders and Perry Robertson, whose recent credits as partners include Up in the Air, as well as countless blockbuster solo credits. As with Oscar-winning Sound Mixer Ray Beckett in June, students spent most of the week with the duo. Here, student Jesse Barden writes about the experience.
By Jesse Barden
Student Jesse Barden, flanked by Perry Robertson (left) and Scott Sanders (right)
This past week, the students of the VFS Sound Design program were paid a visit by Scott Sanders and Perry Robertson. We had been looking forward to their arrival for months, excited to meet and learn from two of Hollywood’s most prominent sound designers. These men have been partners in sound for many years, and have more recently become business partners as they founded Ear Candy Post in LA. Perry and Scott have been creating spectacular post production sound work for films such as Rambo and Up in the Air, as well as numerous other Hollywood blockbuster titles.
During private instruction with our class, Perry discussed the concept of focus – how to draw the audience’s attention to what needs to be heard. In that regard, he stressed the important role of dialogue, and that it is central in conveying the story to the viewers. He taught us how to give it clarity while ensuring that the rest of the sounds remain adequately present. Perry used Pro Tools sessions from Rambo to demonstrate these concepts. In terms of editing, Perry touched on ways to edit production dialogue with ADR – the goal being to make potentially unnatural transitions sound clean and seamless, to reduce any chance of distracting the viewer from the story.
Scott demonstrated some of his techniques in sound design, using examples from both Rambo and Jennifer’s Body. He showed us how he went about designing some of Rambo’s frenetic battle scenes, wherein he gave different weapons their own distinct sound to subtly convey the character of the user. One Pro Tools session, dedicated entirely to gunfire, was comprised of nearly 300 tracks divided into gun mechanics, discharge, fly-bys, and impacts. That level of detail was impressive, and the result is intense and impactful.
I was fortunate enough to attend a lunch held for Perry and Scott last week. This gave us some time to set aside technical practices in sound editing and talk about things such as the film production process, business, and about how these two men got to where they are today. They spoke about the chances of landing that dream job in the entertainment industry, pointing out that a certain amount of luck is always required. Still, they remained optimistic, encouraging us to “make our own luck” by working hard and being determined.
Perry and Scott were wonderfully positive and encouraging; they answered our questions before we could even ask them. They would often forget about break times or intermissions, and continued to chat or take more questions. They told us, “When you love your work, you want to talk about it.” And how true it was, as we all experienced their passion for their craft, and the enthusiasm to pass their knowledge on to us. At one point during a lecture, a student in the crowd asked Perry and Scott, “Where do you find your inspiration?” It struck me then that these men are inspiration; they are the ones who construct the emotional core of the films we all love. It is their work that we respect.
This past week was an amazing learning experience and a total inspiration. I extend my sincerest thanks to Perry and Scott – and their wives! – for taking the time to come and share their knowledge with us.
In early July, the 2010 nominees for Primetime Emmy Awards were announced, an experience Sound Design for Visual Media graduate Melody Drolet, who is among the honourees, can only describe as “a little surreal.”
Melody and her colleagues at the highly-respected Vancouver-based audio post-production facility Sharpe Sound are nominated for Outstanding Sound Editing For A Miniseries, Movie Or A Special for their work on the Syfy miniseries Alice, a reimagining of Alice in Wonderland.
For the 2007 VFS graduate who was a sound effects editor on Alice, it’s a big highlight in a young career. Melody will be heading to L.A. in late August to attend the gala, but for now, we managed to get her reaction to the nomination and some background on her professional life.
Hi, Melody, and congratulations on the Emmy nom! Let’s hear your origin story: was there a moment in your life when you realized that sound design was something you wanted to do for a living? How did that come about?
Melody: I actually stumbled on the Sound Design program at VFS by accident… sort of. I was 25, living in chilly Winnipeg, Manitoba, and doing nothing really important with my life – unless you consider waitressing important!
I decided I needed a huge change, so I started shopping for schools in BC. I found VFS and started looking into the various programs offered. That is when my life changed forever. I found the Sound Design program, read about the courses, and was, like, “I can do this for a living?!” Rad. I had no idea that such a program existed!
I called right away and spoke to an advisor. I was so excited. It was all over after that. I started saving every penny I made for school.
I suppose I was always interested in sound, looking back now. My sisters and I would “broadcast” radio shows to our friends and family via pre-recorded cassette tapes. I had no idea at the time, but we were actually incorporating foley into our radio programs – recording all sorts of sound effects from around the house to make the program more interesting. Back then, I thought that clapping your hands sounded like tap dancing!
I knew the program at VFS would be a challenge for me – and it was. But I managed to graduate at the top of my class and I loved every minute of being there.
Like many sound professionals, you wear a lot of hats – sound effects editor, field recordist, sound designer… Do you have a favourite?
Melody: That is a really hard question to answer! Right now, I am doing mainly FX editing, and I love it. It is really challenging. You have to get everything absolutely perfect. There is not really any room for error because you are designing sounds to match what people are physically looking at on the screen. Everybody knows what a door sounds like, for example, so your door better sound like that specific door. If you are doing more special effects design, there is more room for interpretation, so you have more room to play and get really creative.
Field recording is really, really fun! I was actually just in Thailand a few weeks ago and I recorded a bunch of really awesome sound effects! It’s a rush. You get to go out into the world, instead of being cooped up in a windowless room for 12 hours a day, and just listen. There are a lot of really neat sounds you can record if you just take the time to listen and explore! I know that sounds really cheesy, but it’s true!
A favourite… I’d have to say design. That’s what I’m aspiring to become. An amazing, amazing sound designer. I have a long, long way to go, let me tell you! The longer I’m in this industry, the more I realize I have a lot more to learn… which is good. I never get bored!
Our readers might not know what an SFX editor does. Could you explain your responsibilities on Alice, for example?
Melody: An SFX editor creates – either by using his or her own recorded sounds or piecing together an original sound made up of a selection of library sounds – sounds for picture which actually physically exist in real life. For example, doors, vehicles… I find myself editing a lot of fight scenes as well.
Working on Alice, I was responsible for all of the doors, the fight scenes, horses, some specific background effects, and a lot more. In the case of Alice, the vehicles, like the Scarab and the flying flamingo racers, were the job of the designer. You normally do not find flying motorized flamingoes in the real world.
When you started work on Alice, did you have any idea you were working on something special, from a sound point of view?
Melody: I knew Alice was going to be a lot of fun and a lot of work right from the start. I was also totally nervous, because it was my first time working with two of the best designers around, Kris Fenske and James Wallace. There was so much going on in the film, it was great! I even got to do a few “design-y” effects myself! I really enjoyed the opportunity to get creative and work on such a great show.
When and how did you find out about the Emmy nomination? How did it feel to have your name listed there?
Melody: Oh, gosh, my roommate works for Sharpe Sound and actually sent me a goofy text message letting me know I was nominated! I kind of still can’t believe it. It all seems a little surreal to me still! I am very proud to be listed with the others on the ballot. They are amazingly talented people. I almost feel like I don’t deserve to be listed alongside them! But I worked very, very hard on the show.
I’m heading down to the Emmys the weekend of the 21st of August. I think it’s one of those things where it’ll finally hit me walking down the red carpet or something. Hopefully I don’t pee my pants right then and there. That would be embarrassing… although they do say any publicity is good publicity… ha ha!
Thanks, Melody, and good luck at the Emmys! Readers in interested in seeing what Melody’s up to in the sound field can check her IMDB profile and her personal portfolio site.
Continuing from Monday night’s screening of Up in the Air, one of many films Sanders and Robertson collaborated on, the duo kicked things off with their personal stories of how they came to work in the film and television industry.
Scott Sanders
Sanders was a guitarist-turned-aspiring recording engineer who started off with a janitor’s gig in a sound studio. With a joking fondness for those days, he recounted cleaning the bathrooms of stars like Phil Collins and Stevie Nicks.
“Cleaning that studio was where my audio education began,” Sanders said.
During his graveyard shifts, he started showing a curiosity in what the audio technicians were doing and — lucky for him — they taught him all about it. Shortly thereafter, he put down the mop for a mic. The studio where he worked eventually retrofitted their facility to accommodate post-production sound projects and he cut his teeth in the film and television industry working on the Dinosaurs series.
Perry Robertson
A self-described “preacher’s kid”, Robertson found his profession through an internship at a sound studio that gave way to working in live televised sporting events. After pursuing that path for a time, he went back to a Dallas studio and worked on his first scripted series, Barney & Friends (yes, the big purple dancing T-Rex).
“My dinosaurs were tougher than yours,” Sanders joked.
Robertson then took the plunge and moved to LA — where he said he had no job, nowhere to live, and no girlfriend. That all changed in a matter of weeks when he started networking with all the right people, found steady work, and even met his future wife. (A good month, indeed!)
On ADR (Automated Dialogue Replacement)
Sanders and Robertson discussed how directors have love/hate points of view on ADR. After working with Jason Reitman through all three of his feature films (Thank You for Smoking, Juno, and Up in the Air), they know that he will continue to shoot a scene until he gets the best on-set sound to avoid sending his actors to the studio for ADR.
As Robertson explained, ADR — whether it’s good or bad — can have a massive effect on a film: “I’ve seen Laurence Fishburne go in and change the entire tone of a movie with his ADR,” he said.
Ear Candy Post Meets Rambo
When the studio Robertson and Sanders were working for was bought up by a larger company, they decided to gather a small team and found Ear Candy Post. After seven years, they’ve worked on some huge films, and they gave Sound Design students a little taste of their working process.
They screened one clip of Sylvestre Stallone’s most recent Rambo film, first illustrating the kind of temporary sound effects the picture department will supply them with in order to convey the general idea. Sanders and Robertson will then use those placeholders as a guide for their work, which then has to be approved by the director — who, in this case, was Stallone himself.
They soon came to learn that if the gunfire sounds weren’t always in the red on the mixing board, they weren’t doing their job.
Sanders explained that Rambo, with its countless explosions and war cries,was actually an easier film to do sound for compared to another recent one they worked on, Lars and the Real Girl. That film was shot in a very quiet, snow-covered Wiconsin landscape that required much more attention to sound than they had anticipated.
“You can cover things up with explosions,” Robertson joked, but that’s not the case with quiet domestic scenes though.
The Advantages of Today
“You’re in such a better place than we were when we were your age,” Robertson said, referring to Sound Design students’ ability to experiment with top-of-the-line VFS sound equipment and the ease with which they can access and use software like ProTools.
“The tools are no longer the problem,” Sanders said. With the increase in accessibility, the aspiring sound designer has to put all the more effort into learning the soft skills that will make their work stand out amongst the crowd.
The talk wrapped up with a lively Q&A session during which Robertson and Sanders answered all questions about their work, backgrounds, and the industry.
Their visit to the Sound Design for Visual Media department wraps up today, but there are more great stories and advice to come from two of the top sound professionals in Hollywood!
Right now, something amazing is happening on the VFS Entertainment Business Management campus: a groundbreaking, truly unprecedented cross-discipline project that’s tapping the expertise of students and alumni from programs across VFS. Visual effects artists, actors, makeup artists, designers… they’re all bringing their talents to bear on a project guided by EBM students.
It’s called The Interactive Lovecraft, affectionately known by the internal codename Project Space Squid, and it’s bringing new life to the work of legendary sci-fi/horror writer HP Lovecraft, whose tales of insanity, monsters, cults, and impossibly old gods, are hugely influential to this day.
Teams of VFS students and alumni are creating a cutting-edge transmedia interactive magazine experience for the tablet marketplace, and laying the foundations of a model that future students will be able to experience with other public domain work as part of the Entertainment Business Management program. The end result – incorporating text, video, and games – will include adaptations of five seminal Lovecraft stories: The Call of C’Thulhu, Dagon, The Dunwich Horror, The Rats in the Walls, and The Music of Erich Zann.
Here is an excellent teaser video they’ve put together, explaining the project’s development and showing a lot of the progress so far.
The Interactive Lovecraft will be available to the public in the fall, and, in the spirit of public domain and open source, all proceeds from its sales will go to the Wikimedia Foundation.
In the meantime, the students and grads are keeping an active development blog, where you can find all the latest and get real insight into what goes into creating a project of this magnitude.
Over the next week, Robertson and Sanders will be sharing their wealth of industry experience with Sound Design students.
They’ve collaborated on the sound for such acclaimed films as Up in the Air and Juno, and also hold a number of solo credits on Kill Bill, The Bourne Identity, Thank You For Smoking, and Any Given Sunday.
Over the next few days, Sanders and Robertson will be giving several lectures to students, covering everything from how they broke into the industry over 25 years ago to the unique on-the-job challenges against which they’ve found such success.
Both men have been recognized by their peers with Golden Reel Award nominations a number of times, and Sanders has been singled out with an Emmy nomination for his work on HBO’s Live from Baghdad.
Stay tuned for more news about our special guests this week!
The project is about uncovering the most exceptional talent working in video today: the talent that inspires us, challenges us, surprises us, and changes the world.
In short, it’s about celebrating an entire medium and its power.
Developed by YouTube and the Guggenheim Museum in collaboration with HP, YouTube Play hopes to attract innovative, original, and surprising videos from around the world, regardless of genre, technique, background, or budget. This global online initiative is not a search for what’s “now,” but a search for what’s next.
YouTube Play is looking for submissions – including animation, motion graphics, narrative and non-narrative films, music videos, or something entirely new – of under 10 minutes in length that were created within the last two years. Up to 20 videos will be chosen to be presented at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, as well as Berlin, Venice, and Bilbao.
The deadline to submit is coming fast – July 31, 2010. Find out more, read the guidelines, and submit your work now at youtube.com/play.
Despicable Memay turn out to be one of the bigger surprises of the summer. It’s not from one of the true giants of 3D animation – no Pixar, no Dreamworks – yet it still looks fantastic and early reviews are pretty much all positive. Roger Ebert, for one, calls it “funny, energetic, teeth-gnashingly venomous.”
It’s an animated film, so let’s first tip our hats to 3D Animation & Visual Effects grad Justine Codron, who worked as a Lighter on the production. (In fact, that’s what she was working on back in October when we spoke to her.)
But we’re also celebrating three Sound Design for Visual Media grads, who all contributed to the film’s audio experience thanks to their work at storied Skywalker Sound. (And yes, that means they work at The Ranch. With some of the true legends of film sound.)
The three grads -
Sound Effects Editor Jeremy Bowker
Sound Recordist Nia Hansen
Assistant Sound Effects Editor Jessica Lemes da Silva
You’re doing us super proud, guys. First, Crackdown 2, then an Emmy nomination, and now Despicable Me – and that wraps another great week for VFS Sound Design!
Nominees for the 62nd Primetime Emmy Awards were announced this morning, and seven VFS grads are up for four awards!
They include Sound Design for Visual Media alum Melody Drolet, a Sound Effects Editor on the Syfy miniseries Alice, who’s nominated for Outstanding Sound Editing For A Miniseries, Movie Or A Special, as well as a number of Animation & Visual Effects grads.
Alec McClymont, a 3D Animation & Visual Effects who picked up an Emmy in 2007 for Battlestar Galactica, is nominated twice – for Outstanding Special Visual Effects For A Series (Stargate Universe, “Air”) and Outstanding Special Visual Effects For A Miniseries, Movie Or A Special (Virtuality).
For mid-’90s VFS alum Craig Van Den Biggelaar, by the way, his nom for SGU is the eighth of his career!
See the full list of nominees here! And here are the VFS grads up for awards this year:
Outstanding Sound Editing For A Miniseries, Movie Or A Special
Alice – “Part 1″
Melody Drolet, Sound Effects Editor
Outstanding Special Visual Effects For A Series
Stargate Universe – “Air”
Andrew Karr, Digital Effects Supervisor
Alec McClymont, Lead 3D Artist
Craig Van Den Biggelaar, Key Visual Effects Compositor
Stargate Universe – “Space”
Jamie Yukio Kawano, Lead 3D Artist
Robert Bourgeault, Lead CGI Artist
Outstanding Special Visual Effects For A Miniseries, Movie Or A Special
Virtuality
Andrew Karr, CG Supervisor
Alec McClymont, CGI Artist
Daniel Osaki, CGI Modeler
Crackdown 2, the Xbox 360 sequel to the bestselling 2007 shooter, comes out today, and three Sound Design for Visual Media grads – Robbie Elias, Noa Lothian, and Kyle Fraser – were part of the relatively small Microsoft team responsible for the sound. Including lots of things going boom.
“I actually recorded and edited all the explosions used in Crackdown 2,“ Robbie says. ”We recorded them just outside of Seattle using a friend of a coworker of ours. It was a blast. We got some great source for me to use. The most interesting sound came from burying a hydrophone three inches under the ground, where the explosions were being set off. It sounded like a great low frequency sonic boom.”
Collectively, their work on Crackdown 2 involved recording everything from Tesla electric sports cars to broken glass.
“My favourite sound in the game was the shopping cart,” he explains. “Kyle actually stole and beat up a shopping cart from a local grocery store. It sounds great.”
Not sure what these are?
Sound Design for Visual Media students got a surprise last week – a visit from five-time Emmy winning Foley artist Jill Sanders.
In early July, the 2010 nominees for 
I suppose I was always interested in sound, looking back now. My sisters and I would “broadcast” radio shows to our friends and family via pre-recorded cassette tapes. I had no idea at the time, but we were actually incorporating foley into our radio programs – recording all sorts of sound effects from around the house to make the program more interesting. Back then, I thought that clapping your hands sounded like tap dancing!
Melody: Oh, gosh, my roommate works for Sharpe Sound and actually sent me a goofy text message letting me know I was nominated! I kind of still can’t believe it. It all seems a little surreal to me still! I am very proud to be listed with the others on the ballot. They are amazingly talented people. I almost feel like I don’t deserve to be listed alongside them! But I worked very, very hard on the show.
VFS 
A self-described “preacher’s kid”, Robertson found his profession through an internship at a sound studio that gave way to working in live televised sporting events. After pursuing that path for a time, he went back to a Dallas studio and worked on his first scripted series, Barney & Friends (yes, the big purple dancing T-Rex).
They screened one clip of Sylvestre Stallone’s most recent 
“The tools are no longer the problem,” Sanders said. With the increase in accessibility, the aspiring sound designer has to put all the more effort into learning the soft skills that will make their work stand out amongst the crowd.
VFS is pleased to welcome Sound Editor 
Nominees for the 
