I'm going to try and keep this short as I could rant on for a while.

I just got out from watching the 'Ghost In The Shell' remake. Every time I see something as intricate as this I realise how much I would love to work in sound design!!

I have been working with Audio for around 11 years. Most recently working freelance writing for a music library & doing a few bespoke advert briefs.

I just came out of working in a post-production studio as a runner too - It looked to be a good way in but realistically would take 5+ years to even get out of the transfer department and into a studio & even then it's mostly ADR and sample packs.

I want to learn more about sound design either by returning to university or practically, on the job. My problem is I don't know the first thing about courses or of any employers to approach that could give me what I'm looking for.

If any of you lovely lot can offer advice or point me towards information / resources that may help I'd really be happy!

Cheers!

 

my advice would be to take a snippet of a film, trailer or whatever, and sound design your own audio over it. Go through your design process and show any techniques you think make for good/unique/clean sound design in the form of a video. Build up a portfolio of videos that show how verbose you are at tackling different scenarios/scenes and portraying different emotion based on the context. Also look at what jobs are asking for in terms of experience, specific tool/DAW requirements and see what you are missing. You may already have some good contacts which will help immensely get your foot in the door. Some may also require stuff as working with surround sound, audio engines of different varieties too. You need to become a dictionary of sound design, you see an emotion in a film and you can instantly concoct a idea and translate it to a song, something that fits the context of what the medium is trying to portray.

 

I hate to be a buzzkill, because I'm into sound design myself, but there's a guy named Seamless who talks about doing sound design for either a video game or a movie, and how it was a dream of his. He says it ended up being nothing like what he hoped, where he was just given certain objectives and submitted his presets/samples into a pool to be used by the higher up guys who were doing the actual score. I think jobs where you sit down with a film and actually design sounds to go along with it are super rare, and probably reserved for people with experience/names/extensive resumes.

That said, it wouldn't kill you to check out SeamlessR on youtube. He focuses on mostly Neuro/Dubstep/Glitch hop basses, but you can learn a lot from his process and his explanations of why he does what he does. He's not a terrific speaker though, and if you're not already familiar with a lot of the concepts, his ridiculous pace can be kind of dizzying

Also in the Working With Sound forum I made a thread a long ass time ago, when I was first trying to learn these things myself, with collections of ideas from the community on good tips, techniques, ways to approach sound design ideas and resources to learn. It's called Encyclopedia of Sound Design Techniques or something

 

Really interesting, I'm familliar with SeamlessR and your Encyclopedia post. I have been offered short films and the like before but it seems to always be a 2 week turnaround and 1 man job which is sound design and score - way too much to undertake alone for me at this point.

I suppose I like the idea of it while understanding the reality is not always going to be a whole lot of fun. I think I'm more looking for up to date courses that I can go on not only to learn but to network - I feel that's most important starting up..

 

know your libraries. learn and make use of metadata and programs like soundminer so you can access the depths efficiently and prepare yourself for 'need it tomorrow'-style tight deadlines. As a step into the realm you can practice on tv commercials; do a :15, :30 & :45 version of the same spot. On another level this works becuase its a bite-size project i.e. a larger film scene can easily overwhelm you. As mentioned above, are you familiar with surround mixing? Or, would you mix for video game/apps? Is sound design your endgame goal or would you be adding music as well (orchestrals/taikos etc)? It can be daunting but start building your libraries and label your sfx clearly and extensively. If you don't already have, get a microphone as this is often an easy way to match things to picture while having the added benefit of being 100% unique. Post your results

 

Thanks @electriclash that's super helpful - I'd never shy away from a little scoring & would happily work on games and apps - I guess the endgame is still quite broad at this point?

I'd probably like to try my hand at as much as possible before I narrow it down to my strengths / preferances.. I haven't worked in surround much yet as I can't afford the set up but theoretically would be fine with it, I'm assuming the lack of surround capability at home would be an issue though?

Soundminer & Snapper are super useful at the moment - killer combo. I think organising libraries a little further would go a long way but it always seems so daunting even with renamer or similar its a long task!

 

definitely man - you could also try redesigning a movie trailer; short with lots of dynamic soundplay in there. Don't worry about knowing folks just yet, make sure you like it (& can pull it off) before thinking too far ahead of that somewhat important detail ;D haha