The Boom Box Post blog provides insights into the creative sound design process of Boom Box Post's owners and employees.
Viewing entries by
Kate Finan
As a sound effects editor, you are likely part of a team of editors who eventually hand their work off to a re-recording mixer. It’s important to understand that the way that you organize your work is often just as important to your mixer and the final end product as is your creative quality.
We are extremely proud to announce the release of our latest Boom Box Library: The Pinball SFX Library!
The Pinball SFX Library features 830+ custom-recorded sound effects from a vintage pinball machine such as bumpers, pistons, coin return, bonus balls, game play, flippers, metal doors, jackpot, plungers, scoreboard ticker, power on, power off, startup sequence and more.
By the beginning of this year, Boom Box Post had fully moved into our new facility with three Atmos mix stages, three 5.1 mix suites, eight sound design/editorial suites, and full client amenities. So, when Women’s Audio Mission reached out to revisit the idea of having an in-person workshop focused on sound for television and film that would meet the needs of their Los Angeles membership base, we had the perfect space to accommodate it.
I recently listened to an episode of the Ezra Klein Show podcast titled “Tired? Distracted? Burned-Out? Listen to This.” I don’t know about you, but as a parent of two small children, a business co-owner in a time of entertainment industry upheaval, and a creative professional who tries to eke out every last ounce of creative juice that I have on a daily basis, this title really spoke to me. I must say that I was riveted for the next hour as the host, Ezra Klein, and special guest, Gloria Mark, University of California Irvine professor and author of the book Attention Span, discussed how attention is not just a productivity tool, but part of our well-being and a precious resource that can be easily depleted, but also fairly easily restored if you know what to do.
We are extremely proud to announce the release of our latest Boom Box Library: The Typewriters SFX Library!
The Typewriters SFX Library features custom sound effect recordings from both manual and electronic typewriters. Models include the Smith Corona electronic typewriter, Olivetti manual typewriter, and Olympia manual typewriter. Sound effects include typing, page scroll, page return, bells, beeps, clicks, slides, levers, and more.
We are extremely proud to announce the release of ultimate Boom Box Library: The Everything Bundle!
The Everything Bundle includes all sound effects libraries released by Boom Box Library at the time of purchase. Click on the images below for more details about each library.
This year, I was invited to be on Impact24’s 5th Annual “Hollywood Game Changers: A Conversation with the Women Behind Popular Film and TV Projects” panel at San Diego Comic Con. I was humbled to be joined by other amazing women from across the entertainment industry, such as Ashleigh Hairston, EP/Voice Actor on Nickelodeon’s The Fairly Odd Parents: A New Wish; Joy Ngiaw, composer for WondLa, Skydance’s epic new animated series; KC Cavarozzi, Co-Founder of On Camera Audiences, and more.
As a mixer of a lot of Disney content, I have years of experience mixing musical numbers (or songs, as we call them). As someone who came into post-production sound mixing from a classical music and music engineering and mixing background, this is one of my favorite parts of the job. It brings me so much joy to have the privilege to integrate amazing Broadway-style musical numbers and carefully crafted pop songs of all genres into the stories that kids consume. A great song can be a wonderful extension of the story–not just adding a little pizzazz, but bringing the entire story to new depths.
A few weeks ago, Chad Anderson of Filmmaker U invited me to chat with him about sound for animation. Filmmaker U is a website that creates courses for film professionals to deepen and diversify their skillsets. So, as a huge proponent of being a lifelong learner, I was very excited to add the topic of animation sound to that knowledge base for their audience!
We are extremely proud to announce the release of our latest Boom Box Library: The Percussion SFX Bundle!
The Percussion Bundle includes all four sound effect libraries in the Percussion Collection: Cymbals & Gongs, Magic Chimes, Hand Drums, and Auxiliary Percussion. All libraries contain high-quality recordings of professionally played percussion instruments. Various sticks and mallets were employed at numerous tempos and volumes.
We are extremely proud to announce the release of our latest Boom Box Library: The Auxiliary Percussion SFX Library!
The Auxiliary Percussion SFX Library is the latest member of our Percussion Collection and contains a wide variety of professional percussion sound effect recordings. Instruments include a bamboo horn, various tambourines, cabasa, castanets, claves, cowbell, various maracas and shakers, flexatone, toy glockenspiel, guiro, harmonica, kalimba, triangle, rainstick, sleigh bells, spoons, train whistle, and wood blocks. Each instrument is played at numerous tempos and employing various techniques.
We are extremely proud to announce the release of our latest Boom Box Library: The Hand Drums SFX Library!
The Hand Drums SFX Library is the latest member of our Percussion Collection and contains a wide variety of professional percussion sound effect recordings. Instruments include the den den, djembe, doumbek, frame drum, and udu drum played at numerous tempos and employing various techniques.
For this library, all drums were played by our co-owner and classically trained orchestral percussionist, Jeff Shiffman, to achieve an incredibly high standard of quality.
We are extremely proud to announce the release of our latest Boom Box Library: The Cymbals & Gongs SFX Library!
The Cymbals & Gongs SFX Library is the latest member of our Percussion Collection and contains a wide variety of professional cymbal and gong sound effect recordings. Instruments include China, crash, ride, splash, and toy cymbals and large and small gongs played with various sticks and mallets at numerous tempos and volumes.
We are extremely proud to announce the release of our latest Boom Box Library from the Robotic Creations Collection: Vocalizations! You can now also purchase this new library by itself or bundled with Futuristic Weapons and Heads Up Display in the Robotic Creations Collection Bundle.
This library features the high-tech sci-fi vocalizations of each distinctive robot from our Robotic Creations Collection. You’ll find coughing, cheering, crying, efforts, growling, groaning, breathing, humming, impacts, screaming, singing, sneezing, snoring, and more.
This month, the Comic-Con Museum in San Diego held a one-day symposium titled Storytelling Across Media which provided professional panels geared toward aspiring writers, artists, musicians, and media professionals interested in the art of storytelling. I had the pleasure of being invited to be a panelist on the topic of “Storytelling in Music and Sound.” They invited an array of industry professionals and asked us each to invite a collaborator of our choosing in order to delve into our collaborative processes of using music and sound to further our storytelling. I was ecstatic to have been invited, and immediately thought of bringing Greg Nicolett, the underscore composer on Pupstruction, to join me.
We are extremely proud to announce the release of our latest Boom Box Library: Foley Essentials!
The Foley Essentials SFX Library contains footstep, scuff, and drag sound effect recordings on a variety of surfaces. Surfaces include dirt, creaky floorboards, brick, leaves, grass, gravel, mud, sand, snow, water puddles, and wood. Each surface was walked with several shoe options including leather dress shoes, high heels, and sneakers.
By the beginning of this year, Boom Box Post had fully moved into our new facility with three Atmos mix stages, three 5.1 mix suites, eight sound design/editorial suites, and full client amenities. So, when Women’s Audio Mission reached out to revisit the idea of having an in-person workshop focused on sound for television and film that would meet the needs of their Los Angeles membership base, we had the perfect space to accommodate it.
We are extremely proud to announce the release of our latest Boom Box Library: Women and Men! You can now also purchase this new library by itself or bundled with Babies & Kids as the Human Vocalizations Bundle!
The Women & Men SFX Library contains a variety of custom-recorded adult female and male vocalizations.
As many of you know, in 2017, we branched out from our post-production sound business, Boom Box Post, to start Boom Box Library. BBL (as we call it around here) is a sound effect library company which allows us to share our sound design work with other professionals, and also contribute to the creativity of our community members with custom-recorded libraries that we feel fill a void in basic materials. In short, our award-winning sound designers are creating sound libraries that we ourselves want to use.
For many of you who freelance or have unpredictable schedules, adding library creation to your business ventures could be just the thing you need. But, while recording or designing the sounds may be totally in your wheelhouse, there are a lot of other things that go into being able to sell your libraries. And that’s the end goal, right?
The Futuristic Weapons sound effects library features a wide-sweeping collection of high-tech sci-fi weapon sound effects. Each weapon sound effect has been sound designed from the ground up to match the life, characteristics, and personality of one of our five Robotic Creations robots. Because the robot personalities range from Mimo, the friendly robot buddy, to Firewall, the gigantic mech suit, the range in weapons is extreme. You’ll find sounds like a zip line, boomerang, water gun, laser blaster, futuristic gatling gun, mayhem blasts, and everything in between.
