I’ve started working with BWN in LA as a freelance sound designer and composer.
Check out their site, they’ve got a great reel and a really talented group of in-house composers. I’ve already learned a lot about delivering great sounding queues on a deadline.
So far I’ve been close mic’ing cymbals, brushing up on my Logic 8 skills, and getting used to the Native Instruments Komplete collection – Battery, where have you been all my life.
How did composers pound out 30 sound-a-like queues before Logic?
The Autry National Center hired Black Dollar to do sound design for a video piece in the new Cowboys and Presidents exhibit.
The Autry needed a convention soundscape to play behind a slideshow of former presidents roughing it like cowboys. It had to flow seamlessly from decade to decade while not showing any particular political bias.
I didn’t have access to university archive or old new reels; I had to rely on the internet to give me my material. I used Miro to download any and all convention related material I could find on YouTube, Google video, etc. After stripping out the choice audio from the convention footage, I added in some crowd sound effects from my personal library and mixed it all together with DP5.
When you go to the exhibit, you’ll hear the audio as you walk in.
Here’s what the Autry has to say about the exhibit:
During the spring and summer of 2008, April 12 through September 7, the Autry National Center will premiere Cowboys and Presidents. This national traveling show will explore the fascinating and ongoing intersection of cowboy culture and presidential politics from Theodore Roosevelt to George W. Bush.
The exhibit will explain how the presidency became intertwined with the emerging image of a heroic American cowboy at the turn of the twentieth century and will explore the ways that U.S. Presidents have used this powerful iconographic symbol to define themselves and their administrations to the nation and the world. It will also show how the press, foreign governments, and domestic political opponents have found cowboy imagery useful in criticizing presidential policy and leadership.