Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/161463
Audio for Commercials Soundworks/VividMix owner Dwight Cook: The studio worked on a campaign for Burleson, a large oil and gas law firm. 30 sition room manned by their on-staff composer Brad Fairman. There is a large live room for Foley that is also used to record talent, and there are two smaller iso-booths on-site. Everything is integrated and networked together. Each mix room has a Pro Tools 10 system with loads of plug-ins from Waves, McDSP, iZotope and Sonic Solutions. Gold Sound also includes two satellite rooms in the Detroit area with the same gear setup. "We are running Pro Tools 10 and I'd go to 11 tomorrow if everybody else would catch up with plug-ins," says Bryan Gold. Gold Sound has worked on numerous projects for Ford Motor Company over the years. Their latest Ford ad campaign for agency Team Detroit was called Yousses. It includes 10 spots total, five English :30 spots, and Arabic versions of all five. The actors were able to speak both English and Arabic, so there was no ADR. Instead, they performed the spots in both languages. This campaign is different from others Gold Sound has worked on in that it's for Ford in the Middle East, an emerging market for the Ford brand. The spots involve a group of guys who are frustrated by their not-so-intelligent friend, Yousses. The spots compare the way Yousses does things (not so smart) to how Ford does things (very smart). According to Gold, the spots were shot at various locations in Dubai and throughout the United Arab Emirates. He ended up only using the on-camera dialog tracks from the audio recorded on-set. This means he recreated the entire soundtrack, from ambience to Foley. For dialog clean-up, Gold relies on the iZotope RX2 Advanced plug-in. "It's a different way to clean audio," he says. "You look at it from a graphics perspective, to isolate problem areas, and clean it up that way. It's like Photo- Post • August 2013 shop for audio." For sound design, Gold fleshed out the scenes by combining stock sounds, like desert ambience, and small interior room tone, with Foley for specific events, like keys jingling or trash falling. Gold says, "I pulled from stock libraries for a lot of the ambiences. I don't need to go to the desert to get another desert ambience. The stock libraries do a good job of covering those." The majority of the Ford car sounds were authentic. Gold has amassed quite a collection over the years from his work on various Ford projects. He also records a lot of the Ford car sounds himself. "The Explorer was in a couple of the spots, which my wife drives, so I was able to record those. I'm a Ford family. My parents worked for Ford. I drive a F-150. I've done all the Ecoboost Web videos for the past three years. We did all the sound design and music for those." While mixing can sometimes feel like paint-by-numbers for Gold, he notes that sound design feels more like sculpting. Gold likes to get as much detail in the soundtrack as possible. According to Gold, even if you don't notice a sound that's been mixed down, you still feel it. "It just makes things sound more natural when you flesh it all out. All the little nuances mean the most to me, and they all translate in some way." The spots, directed by Amit Mehta with Louis Lyne as the creative editor, were mixed in stereo for broadcast in Dubai and elsewhere in the United Arab Emirates. So what does broadcast spec for Dubai look like? Gold laughs. "I don't know. I didn't use the CALM spec, I can tell you that. I'm not a big fan of more regulations. We've had a standard for TV for the past 50 years and we didn't need another one. For these spots, I cranked the levels up and I figure they'll deal with it on their end." THE LODGE Colin Thibadeau is executive producer/ senior engineer at The Lodge (http://thelodge.com) in New York City. The Lodge has two main mix rooms, one is a Dolby-certified mix theater and the other is a smaller www.postmagazine.com 5.1 room. They just completed a third mix room with an additional iso-booth. They also have several edit suites for their composers and sound designer to work in. All the rooms are networked to the iso-booths in the facility. In place of a traditional Foley pit, the hallways and lounges are wired into the main studio, so they can use the floors and spaces in the facility to record sounds when they need an environment larger than the iso-booth. The Lodge provides audio post services for advertising clients, as well as mixes several indie films each year. Thibadeau notes that their small team of mixers — three to be precise — enjoy the change of pace between ads and films. "Indie films provide a good balance to all the commercial work. We just finished an interesting 3D moonbased sci-fi/action movie called Shockwave Darkside. That was fun. We also worked on the recent Danny Glover movie called Chasing Shakespeare. We also did an amazing film called An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, which got a lot of buzz, though it's such a weird movie." On the advertising side of their business, The Lodge recently worked on a series of 25 end tags for BMW. The campaign was created by Kirshenbaum Bond Senecal + Partners in New York. The end tags are around :05 each, and get attached to various broadcast BMW spots throughout the year. There are two different types of end tags: tags that highlight a particular sport, like basketball or hockey, and tags that focus on the car. Both types incorporate a slow-mo section. According to Thibadeau, the end tags are used in a very interesting way. They go on to a million different spots, created by different agencies, or other teams within the agency, for different regions. The end tags go on different front ends, with different voiceovers and different music. So, there was no "final spot" in particular. The final spots are actually put together by the trafficking company DG. "DG apparently assemble spots like this on their own," says Thibadeau. "So they will take a particular front end, a particular voiceover for the back end, as well as a particular offer art card, and then a particular sound effect tag and then assemble it all as a spot."