Much like my trip to the Nez Perce reservation in Idaho, Black Dollar Productions was hired by the Autry National Center to handle audio on a film shoot in Second Mesa on the Hopi reservation in Arizona.

The majority of our filming took place in a corn field where the Hopi have dry farmed corn for hundreds of years.  We filmed an elder telling his niece about the Kachinas and how they watch over the Hopi people.

Hopi is beautiful place, somewhere everyone should visit and learn about

Black Dollar Productions was hired by Image Line Productions to handle the voice-over duties for Shell’s promo video for the 2009 Eco-Marathon.

The Eco-Marathon is an international competition between university student teams each attempting to build the most fuel efficient vehicle.

Here is a sample:

Download audio file (shell.mp3)

From the Shell Eco-Marathon site:

• challenges students around the world to design, build, and test vehicles that travel further using less energy.
• is an educational platform that encourages innovation, reinforces conservation and fosters the development of leading technology for greater energy efficiency.
• is a global forum for current and future leaders who are passionate about finding sustainable solutions to the world’s energy challenge.
• is a visible demonstration of Shell’s deep commitment to face head-on the growing demand for energy worldwide in a responsible way. It is an invitation to others to do the same.

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 Productions to handle audio for a film shoot on the Nez Perce reservation in Idaho.

We flew to Portland then Spokane then drove to Lapwai, ID to spend five days filming a pow wow, the land, and personal interviews.

It was a unique and wonderful opportunity to learn about Nez Perce history and culture. Vegetarian is actually an Indian word – it means lousy hunter.

Thus began Me Mountain – a combination of afrobeat and post-punk.

We recorded the drums and foundation loops live using a pair of C414B’s as overheads and a couple of MD421′s on the kick and snare. We ran those four tracks into my RME Fireface 800 and Digital Performer over a few hot days in our practice space.

I like the results. Would you like to join my band?

Circling the Bowl
Download audio file (circling_the_bowl.mp3)

Bury the Effects
Download audio file (bury_the_effects.mp3)

The Husk
Download audio file (the_husk.mp3)

The New People
Download audio file (the_new_people.mp3)

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.

I had the great pleasure of mixing 6 songs on the new City of Progress record, Human Machine. To be fair, Max had already put the mix together in DP4, all that was needed was some EQ, a little automation, and some Vintage Warmth.

Once you go Vintage you never go back.

Two of the robot voices were default Mac text-to-speech voices. The other two, the bawdy Brits, were GhostReader voices. I split the main script into four character scripts and exported each characters lines to audio. After timing the stop motion in Premiere, I chopped up each characters audio in Digital Performer and edited it all together with sound effects and Kraftwerk.

Black Dollar Productions recorded and edited over 2500 GRE/SAT words, definitions, and sentences in preparation for testwisers 2007 site launch. For a glisp of the finished product, try testwiser’s online demo.

Listen to a sample:
Download audio file (vocab.mp3)

About testwiser.com:

Testwiser has been authored by expert test takers who scored in the 99th percentile on the verbal sections of the GRE and SAT, with advice from skilled teachers and real students. The Testwiser system is proven to help students succeed in learning the vocabulary essential to their test.

One day Arlo said to his friends, “There’s this writer, Jonathan Lethem, he has this really neat idea, and in the spirit of this idea he started a project.

And you know what else? He’s coming to the bookstore to read from his new book. Why don’t we actually write one of the songs from his book and play it at the reading?!”

Arlo made it happen. We wrote the song Monster Eyes from You Don’t Love Me Yet and played it at the reading.

Download audio file (monster-eyes.mp3)

Imagine a heart warming situation comedy about a group of friends learning to love in the big city.

Now imagine this show has no budget.

Now imagine the credit sequence to this show.

The Cannonball Run Scavenger Hunt was a bicycle scavenger hunt organized by Urban Bike Assault recreating the magic of the Cannonball Run on the streets of LA.

Black Dollar Productions rode along and filmed the ride. The short film documenting the day’s events went on to play in the 2006 Bicycle Film Festival in LA, the 2006 Filmed by Bike in Portland, and the 2007 Celluloid Cycles film festival in Melbourne.

I couldn’t find a version of the Cannonball Run theme song without the sound of revving engines drowning out the music. I used Reason and Pro Tools to cover the song.

Bicycle Film Festival
Celluloid Cycles
Filmed by Bike
LAist