New Short Showreel 2016

I've spent as much time with this project as I could lately, but I also have had some time to make a new demo-reel!
It is a rework of a pilot-scene for a feature we first filmed in 2009.

Good Times To Live In

Yebo people!
Having to replace gear I've put some serious cash into didn't make me a happy man at first, but reading up on the new mastering-grade system I'm considering is some seriously great reading! My preferred way of working, IE using very much analogue processings and re-ampings, especially regarding distorsion, some filtering, and several kinds of modulation, puts very heavy demands on the AD/DA's of the studio. This is a place you'd want absolute and total transparency from.

Traumatizer - Finding Further Ways Into The Darkness

Old studio - current synths

Heh, I just had to return to a much much earlier version of the cut to retrieve an entire part I up till now had replaced with an After Effects composite. Sometimes it feels like nothing happens and I wonder what the hell I'm doing with my time. Regretfully, that's a very natural part of being intensely focused for extensive periods of time - you forget what you had to begin with.
Even backtracking a single week was very rewarding for my self esteem - seeing what was made a year ago was seriously good for the morale.
There is a lot left to do, and when the edit is locked, there will be all the true (non-temp) sound design, the actual dialogue, massive Foley, and what little music there will be. And grading. Not to mention the re-dubbing mixing.

To ask why to use hardware when there are much cheaper plugins is like asking
 why to have girl/boy-friend when there are perfectly good hands

From Darkness To Light, And Keeping The Feeling

The last two years, with the last year in particular, has been...interesting... I've been deep down a black hole - I didn't even notice when the darkness fell over me at first - but though I've been terrible at updating this blog, I have actually done a lot of shit anyway when I had moments of...what the hell to call it, I'm pretty sure "moments of clarity" doesn't fit depression, but you ought to get the picture.
One day I figured "Well, this most certainly sucks" and with only a pair of options as far as I saw it, I bought myself a shiny new (working) used PS3 with about 50 games, tried to act like all was well, and locked myself up in isolation, playing through as many games as possible until that was true in the hope of distracting myself enough to be able to surface from the abyss again. Initially expected it to, or probably more correct: hoped it would take about 2 weeks, but it took four months. Starting at the end of October and ending at the very beginning of Mars the next year, during which time I finished about 30 games on the PS3 and a few on the PC.
Huh. Just realized I was kinda busy then after all.
Well, what better way to write/make a film about someone being stuck in some kind of hell than to actually live it :-)

A few thing I'm really happy about right now is several major upgrades to my studio, and one small but significant one for my video editing-station.
My DAW, which stands for "Digital Audio Workstation", is now, for one, fitted with SSD-drives for projects, and a good WD Green for library-sounds. Previously I used mainly Seagate because they where the most silent drives I had found at the time, but regretfully I realized they wasn't very reliable.
Doesn't matter now though, the WD Library-drive is only active when I want something, and takes a nap when not needed. Not very loud anyway I must say. And the SSD-drives are by their very nature not exactly deafening at all. Mildly put!
W00t!!!

A Broken Skull

A wee bit of things to come before the next thematic post is done - the new promo-pic!

Duke Of Hazards

Three.

Yebo good people!
At first I intended to make this post a themed one, but I'm first of all totally beat right now, and also sporting a nicotine-poisoning even Cthulhu speaks of with deepest respect.
First thing first.
For 18 years minus exactly one week I was living at this place, having this here weird concrete tunnel not far from where I lived. As kids, we visited the place several times during the rare occasions anyone of us actually got a hold of a (working) flashlight.... Yet, for 37 years, none of us ever went all the way through the entire tunnel - all we had was the rumours of what was on the other side. Someone said there was a humongous spiders-nest, someone else that there was a black room. Eventually, the hole making up the entrance to the tunnel, which is really not much more than a form of passage in-between a concrete wall, was almost entirely bricked up.
The thing with "almost" entirely bricked up wasn't exactly any less of a proof there was something funny and/or interesting on the other side, yet, it continued for miles and miles, and there were only so far we dared to walk, crossing over very unreliable rocks and stuff we didn't even wanna know what it was.
It was an exciting though scary place.
About a few weeks ago I returned on a whim. I figured this place, if it still existed, was far too good a location to not at least try to access. I considered several different alternatives to access it, everything from digging myself under the not very covering brick-up, to letting myself in using my...um...7kg iron key at the end of the 1m long Hickory-shaft. Make no mistake, there are nothing more sacred to me than other peoples safety, and other peoples property, in that order, but without getting into detail, neither was a problem on this very location.
Imagine of my surprise when I got there, and someone else had beaten me to it. There wasn't as much as a grain left to tell of the wall once covering the small crevasse. I was over-joyed!!! Happy as a pig in shit, I hid my stuff behind a nearby board, geared up, and began to climb down the cracked hole in the wall.
I took one look at the ceiling, and in two seconds I had gotten myself the fuck out of there again.
Being painfully aware that asbestos can be somehow less than exemplary for the health in general, I came to the mature decision to not do this without gas-mask and protective gear. There was a chance that the ceiling hadn't let off dust, but you had to be retarded to take a chance like that.

A Taste Of Things To Come

Back From The Living, Time To Kick Ass and Chew Bubble Gum Again

I've been having a little break from this project to do some work, and move. First to a new apartment, and before I was even finished with that I had to move my studio as well. I really really hate to move.

Seriously, did this bastard just moon me??

Well, shit happens. My old place is nothing but stems and bare concrete walls nowadays, and though it would had been nice to do some recording there in the dead of night, I've already recorded what I need from another identical building, and this one'll be stuffed with gear anyway. Pretty hard to justify to the viewers why there would be reconstructive machines, power-supplies and general gear in hell...though some might argue that such a place would be a natural habitat for contractors with powertools and a taste for early mornings anyway.


I wasn't happy with this forced break, but truth be told, it was probably exactly what I needed! If not to charge the batteries so to say, after all the last two months have been among the most stressful ones in years, so to get a healthy distance to the project.
Sure, even more truth be told, it meant some seriously painful realizations when I looked through the entire project again like it was the first time (a very useful aspect of ADHD I can tell you. And I'm not kidding), after all this was originally recorded with a really crappy camera, bordering to being useful at all.
Previously, as I went, I concentrated on the different sequences to make them consistent and fluent. That is indeed a good thing, but frankly I forgot about all the less then impressive parts. I had no clue what to do with them - should I process them in any way, or discard them in favor of improved recordings of the same thing altogether? Frankly, that last choice was in far too many cases not even possible, the places I've visited was in almost all cases lost forever, some of them even razed or in other ways obliterated as soon as the very next day after I was there, so...no. I had to make use of the scenes or do something else completely.

Art In The Unexpected - Basics of Sound Design

Yebo!
I often get the question what differs sound design from sound editing, and truth be told, there are different answers to that question depending on who you ask. Which regretfully is the reason why we can't win any Oscar as sound designers, only as sound editors and such.
My definition follows a pretty common opinion - it's the art of using both form and function to reach a desired goal by creating what's needed in respect for what it's intended for right there, right then. Where a sound editor might figure this nifty library door-handle sound might suit this here scene just fine, a designed approach to this could very well be based on the anxiety of the lead, striding nervously through the house, grabbing the handle with fear of what might be on the other side, meaning a careful grab of the handle with a slight grinding noise as it frictions against the un-lubed escutcheon plate, a snarling metallic yet discrete creak as it slowly turns the internal mechanism, and a firm, yet threatful, dark "clack" as the latch unlocks from the door-frame. All within approx 2 to 5 seconds, yet telling more in this time than words would ever do.

From Starlight (Mattias Titus Paar, 2011)

Sound design can also be an over-all approach. I often gets assignments where I'm to design entire soundscapes for entire feature length movies, and in these cases ambiance is a very key element for the very same reasons - a scene beginning very calmly, for example, with two friends walking through a fairly calm yet noisy midsummer urban surrounding, might very well begin with nothing but distant traffic and happy birds. Maybe some crickets or grasshoppers (I like crickets and they are most definitely found even in most urban settings with at least some kind of green areas). As the scene progresses, the two friends beginning to grind, and eventually annoyance turns into hostility.
Without even the audience noticing, I've snuck in dissonant ambient sounds gradually, replacing the happy birds and grasshoppers with crow-birds, dissonant metallic sounds, and droning aging fans. Completely changing the tone of the scene without anyone realizing, a feat almost impossible to do with music as we're extremely good at interpreting musical material instantly.

Brothers In Grime

Joy! I'm just back after a short but VERY rewarding filming with Brother Henrik! This is actually the first time we've ever worked together, but not the last! He did extremely well, and honour the production with a really really creepy Apparition. Dunnu where to put him yet, but that's a later problem.
I, and, occasionally my team, have been to several really nasty locations during this one and a half year this movie has been active, but this place took the cake. Not only that it was in danger of crumpling and collapsing with us in it - it was a very small long-since abandoned shed, probably once a summer house I guess - or that the floor was about to give under our feet. Because it did anyway. Every singe step we took. Good thing it was only one floor and no cellar. What made this even more unpleasant was that the place was stuffed with age-old rusty and decaying crap and signs of past visitations.
We kept the few scenes we shot outside and in the only safe place in the entire house. There were no way in hell we'd walk around there without armored shoes and combat gear. Or with. What we did get was totally awesome though!

/CvanC