Update
1. June approaches. Nothing is done.
2. The Scout lives. The computer does not.
3. Calculus goes poorly.
4. I find math, even (especially) math I don’t understand, to be particularly inspiring.
5. Rocks. They are still the fucking schist.
6. Geologists make the bedrock.
7. I am done with bad jokes.
8. I sort of want to start up The Five again.
9. GSR is a punk.
10. Those double super secret goals of mine come along nicely, most days.
11. All is well on the guitar front.
12. Shortly, I shall take yon Scout up Elephant Hill in Canyonlands National Park.
13. Booze is involved.
14. So are rocks.
15. No real complaints.
16. Fuck you, I am NOT selling my rowboat.
February 19, 2009 at 2:47 pm
I was hoping I’d be travelling out through the canyons about now, but they scuppered that idea for the moment. Shame. I’ll be doing it eventually, but it doesn’t look like that will be until we start post prod in about mid 2010 (believe it or not).
Listen to the sounds for me. Tell me what you hear.
February 19, 2009 at 4:08 pm
can you do elephant hill with stock suspension? always wanted to do moab with the jeep, but i’m not skilled enough to drive it without major mods…
February 19, 2009 at 7:36 pm
You may as well sell it before the crackheads steal it.
February 19, 2009 at 8:00 pm
Anaglyph: I will. Most of the time out there, I hear an interesting sort of turbulence through the jointed rock. The canyons have a howl to them. It’s hard to explain, I guess. You always hear bad howling through the trees sounds or bad sand blowing over dunes sounds when people make movies about the deserts of the Colorado Plateau. It’s not those sounds. It’s not open or stifling, just sort of empty. I am obviously not a professional sound describer.
Daisyfae: Fuck yeah, the Scout can do that shit. Also: I fine you 300 Caseybucks for questioning it. I honestly have only went up it once, years ago in a 75 Scout running 30’s and stock suspension. I drug a lot of bumper, but I think the shorter wheelbase and smaller rearend of this one should help. We shall see. This Scout has more power, but it’s geared funny.
If you ever come out for some Jeeping fun, I’ll show you around. 21 Road is harder than most of Moab and the camping is better.
Chickie: Motherfucking crackheads. At least the boat is up in my parent’s pond where it’s safe from the city hooligans. But I think to keep my dad from just assuming it’s his, I have to move it to my place. We’ll see how the crackheads do.
February 19, 2009 at 8:09 pm
It’s hard to describe sound – we don’t have the language for it. We have lots of words to describe things we see, but we are quite crippled when it comes to talking about sound.
On a tangent, but related to your last post, I discovered this morning that someone stole my boots. I left them out on the porch because they were pretty filthy from working in the yard, and some shithead pinched them sometime during the last few days. Doesn’t that have to rank as one of the unquestionably shoot-on-sight crimes: stealing someone’s boots?
February 19, 2009 at 8:25 pm
In Colorado it sure is. Let me know if you need a loaner gun.
Yeah, I spent the last few minutes trying better to describe the sound. I guess it has the wide band/HF hiss of regular white noise wind sounds, but I think the sound is altered by the fact that the air is thin* and most canyons are shaped (though obviously random) a little like those long reverberation tubes with the baffles that goofy producers would keep around in the sixties. Another aspect that colors it all would be the dryness. There’s no latent moisture, either on the ground in lakes or ponds, in the foliage, or in the air. I think you lose the dampening effect and sounds seem farther away.
One of the absolute most amazing audio environments you find are potholes. They’re 10-30 ft cylindrical holes bored into the exposed rocks by water erosion, sometimes hundreds of feet deep, with water taking up about 80% of their volume, depending on how high up the next joint is to let the creek continue out. I did an admittedly lame post about a local set of potholes a while back. It’s hard to describe (again), but I swear you can even hear the difference inside a metamorphic basement rock pothole vs. the eolian sandstone holes.
*most wind in the trees noises seem to be simulating low altitude deciduous forests. The thicker air, tighter environment, and scattering of trees sounds nothing like wind in canyons, but that’s what most movies use. I sort of hate it.
February 20, 2009 at 6:38 pm
The fact is that in most movies you’re hearing generic ‘wind’ sounds that have been collected over the years and integrated into libraries. Hardly anyone bothers to go and record purpose-made sound. To be truthful, mostly it doesn’t matter, and mostly you don’t ever get the time to do it anyway. I’ve had huge luxury on the film I’m currently on, though, and we’ve recorded a lot of stuff, and will do a lot more. I’ve also spent time ‘making’ a whole lot of atmospherics electronically – something that rarely works for realistic environments, but has been quite valuable in this case. Now that there are so many great ‘convolution’ spatial simulations out there, you can make some pretty mighty stuff if you know what you’re doing.
One of the things we aim to do is to do some convolution recordings around the desert – basically (I’m just assuming you don’t know how they work, so stop reading if it’s old news to you), we are now able to make acoustic ‘maps’ of environments. These maps actually simulate the place they’re recorded – so much so that I’ve stopped using conventional reverbs in favour of them. It works like this – you fire off a pistol, or make a ‘tone sweep’ in the place you want to model, record the sound and then give the resulting sound file to an app that analyzes the reverb and eq characteristics in very high detail. The app then creates a profile of that place, which can be applied to other sounds such as dialog or fx. The results are hugely impressive. It takes a bit of time to do, but I’m now building up quite a library of modelled rooms & spaces. Of course, you can do it outside as well, although I’ve not done too much of that. Canyons & caves would be awesome.
February 21, 2009 at 5:53 pm
They use something similar to map caves and drill holes. We had a few that would. It used a tone instead of a gun, but same thing, I’m guessing. I’ve seen some very intricate cave models, even with mapped pockets of water, made with the firecracker and microphone method (oversimplified).
We had a sort of developing technology going on site one time to map on of our holes. It’s amazing how far a straight metal pipe drilling a hole can deviate from its course.
Of course, my Luddite tendency, were I to make a movie, would be to just record shit in the canyon, but it would run far over budget and no one would care how much “realer” the sounds were.
But my favorite sounds still come from vacuum tubes.
I’ll write down what I hear out there. I have been noting it often since this subject came up back in December, I think it was.
February 23, 2009 at 1:33 am
>>Of course, my Luddite tendency, were I to make a movie, would be to just record shit in the canyon, but it would run far over budget and no one would care how much “realer” the sounds were.
Not Luddite at all, and personally, I still do plenty of that. But it is restricted by how indulgent the production will let you be, or how much spare time you have. Suffice to say, most of the films that I work on get a lot better value than they actually pay for…
February 23, 2009 at 8:31 am
Yeah, I have noticed that phenomenon in a lot of fields. Where a company gets way more than they paid for. I think some people may enjoy what they do and work for more than money, an idea I find absolutely appalling.
Of course, I’ll spend two days getting the shades of purple right on one of my maps. So I am a hypocrite.
February 23, 2009 at 7:51 pm
Re: #9 – John Elway is a Punk.
February 23, 2009 at 8:34 pm
Interesting. This doesn’t have anything to do with him leaving the Colts and your latent abandonment issues, does it?
February 23, 2009 at 8:48 pm
He never left the Colts because he never went. He was a whiny bitch – like Eli Manning if you will – and then history rewarded him for some godforsaken reason.
February 23, 2009 at 8:53 pm
I’m sorry no one is there to hug you.