A handful of videos I’ve worked on for the Onion News Network have gone up in the past few weeks, and I haven’t updated the site:

Kentucky Violated NCAA Rules While Recruiting Basketball-Playing Dog
Boy’s Tragic Death Could Have Happened To Any Family With 20-Foot Pet Python
Filming Of Congressional Reality Show Disrupts Committee Meeting

New Law Would Ban Marriages Between People Who Don’t Love Each Other

The Onion News Network provides some food for thought on Valentines day. It’s not right that there are couples who DO truly love each other but still aren’t able to express that love through marriage.

As for sound design: The original recording only had 20 or so people chanting, so I had to do a lot of copying, pasting, looping, and panning to beef up the crowds. For the chanting in the reporter’s background, I submixed the “foreground” chants, added reverb, delay, rolled off the high EQ, then decreased the stereo image just shy of mono. That gave sense feeling a huge crowd in the distance, off-mic from the reporter’s scene. Also–though you can’t really hear it in the mix–I recorded some fo the reporter’s outdoor ambience sounds on my roof during New York’s so-called “snomageddon.”

I was on the roof a lot last week.

NASA Scientists Plan To Approach Girl By 2018

I spent a little time getting the right “room sound” for this one, but there aren’t a lot of overt sound effects. I did, however, have some fun with the Q&A section toward the end of the piece.

Obviously the goal was to make it sound like a real press conference, so I listened to a few examples. When reporters ask questions, sometimes they’ll pass a wireless mic from person to person (though this seems more common in town-hall style meetings as opposed to press conferences). More often, there’s just one noisy mic picking up the sound of the entire room, and usually it’s nowhere near the reporter asking questions. So in order to make the reporter audible, they either crank up the volume and/or add a ton of dynamic compression–this makes their voices louder but also introduces a lot of background noise.

I decided to split the difference between emulating both approaches; the reporter would start asking a question through a noisy room mic and somebody would eventually pass her a handheld mic. The original audio for this bit was pretty clean, so I ran it through a subtle overdrive effect and then a reverb plugin to emulate the sound of the reporter “in the room.” Then I mixed that with some generic “electronic hum” noise and a recording of me fumbling around with a hand-held mic. I faded-in the reporter’s voice as the hand-held mic “gets closer” to her, and then ran the entire submix into a heavy compressor plugin. I added some low-midrange EQ and a little more reverb on the submix after the compressor to fake the “boominess” a of mic before it starts to feed back. Lastly, I added a little general crowd murmuring before each question, as if the reporters were jockeying to ask a question.

All this for a couple of seconds of noise, but I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

How To Put The Spark Back Into Your Relationship With Your Cat
There’s not a lot say about this one from a sound design perspective; it was pretty straightforward.

…so we had to use the roof.