Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/161463
w The Lodge worked on 25 end tags for BMW that contain slow-motion footage. hen you hear Hollywood, you think films. When you hear New York, you think commercials. But perception isn't always reality anymore. Yes, films are shot in LA and agencies are big in Manhattan, but other cities — including Miami, Detroit and Houston — are getting into the commercials game. HEARD CITY Eric Warzecha is an audio engineer at New York's Heard City (http://heardcity.com) which opened in early 2012 with five audio suites offering identical systems. This allows Heard City to rotate their six mixers, and projects, seamlessly throughout the facility. All the rooms are networked to a central server, so any project can be opened in any room. Warzecha, who has been at the studio since last July, says, "When we walk in the door in the morning we don't have a specific room that we go into everyday. We like to keep it fresh." He notes that the mixers often share sessions. Instead of keeping their audio tricks to themselves, we all want to work together, and share what we learn and know." That is the heart of what Heard City is all about, pooling the talent of the mixers and sound designers to provide the client with the best work possible. The rooms at Heard City all run Avid's Pro Tools 10 and are set up for 5.1 mixing. They are various sizes to accommodate any number of people attending the session. They also have a sixth suite set up for cinema work, but that doesn't make it off-limits for advertising clients. "I've been in situations where I'm doing a radio spot in the cinema room, where there are 15 chairs," says Warzecha. So there were all these people in this huge room with a movie screen in it, and we're recording VO for a radio ad." While Heard City has many advertising clients, they also do television and film work. Warzecha recently completed a Web project called Dewar's Highlander Honey Presents: The 3B Printing Project, for advertising agency Sid Lee in New York. The Web project included a :60 trailer and a three-minute behind-the-scenes video that explains how they made the 3D honeycomb sculpture of a Dewar's beer bottle. "They call it the 3B printing project, which is a play on 3D printing," says Warzecha. "They 3D printed the shell of the Dewar's bottle to make space for the bees to build a hive. Bees make hives inside of things, so it's a clear plastic shell and inside is a sculpture of a bottle. With these two pieces in place, it creates a space where the bees are able to make the hive, and it's in the shape of a bottle." The trailer follows the beekeeper on his journey through a building to the room where 80,000 bees are busy making the massive bottle-shaped honeycomb. Quick cuts of bees are interspersed with shots of the beekeeper walking. There is a quiet, building tension that culminates to the end of the spot, from the sparse beginning to the final moment where you see the 80,000 bees. "In mixing it, I had to make sure I kept that dynamic build, from a subtle tension to a big explosion of bee sounds at the end." The agency provided most of the bee sounds, and Warzecha pulled additional bee sound effects from the massive library of sounds at Heard City. Interestingly, Warzecha knows a beekeeper, and they make their own honey beer. But since the 3B project had such a short turn around time, he was unable to capture field recordings of actual bees. "I wanted to badly, but it didn't work out with the timeframe of the spot," he explains. "We're trying really hard to get involved earlier on projects, even if it's a couple days in advance so we can do some of the fun things like record live bees." In one scene, the beekeeper is carrying a bottle with bees in it. Warzecha used the Audio Ease Altiverb plug-in for the sound design in that section. "Altiverb has some neat 'inside bottle' presets that I used on those bee sound effects." The music track on the trailer begins with sparse pizzicato strings that build to a tense ending. Warzecha created background drones to help fill in the soundtrack and further support the feeling of tension. He used the Spectrasonics Omnisphere soft synth plug-in and an OP-1 MIDI keyboard by Teenage Engineering to create the drones. "I tried to make drones that complemented the music track. I didn't want the drones to stick out; instead, I wanted them to help build the tension up to that main scene at the end." The trailer and the behind-the-scenes video were mixed in stereo. Since it's for the Web, there are no set standards for output level. Warzecha confesses his levels were "all the way up. I mixed it pretty loud." GOLD SOUND Bryan Gold is a sound designer/president of Gold Sound (www. goldsound.com), a full-service audio post facility located in the Detroit area. The main 6,000-squre-foot facility has four surround mix rooms with Avid ICON D-Control surfaces, as well as a compo- www.postmagazine.com Post • August 2013 29