Sound Design, Film Audio, and Mastering

Film: ROACH
Recording engineer and mastering engineer on ROACH, an experimental animated film by schnudlbug video.

All of the dialogue was recorded in my studio. I coached the voice actor through multiple takes, then edited and packaged the files for delivery to the filmmaker, who handled the mix. The finished audio came back to me for mastering. Because the film aimed for a lo-fi, gritty look, the mastering process included sending the audio through a running VHS tape head and back into Pro Tools, on top of the more standard DSP workflows

Screens: music and sound design for the “Ice Blue” version of ROACH
With my collaborator Jordaniel Bennett, in our ambient project Screens, I composed the music and handled part of the sound design for the “Ice Blue” version of the film. We stayed true to the glitchy, gritty aesthetic of the original and brought a retro electronic, psychedelic approach to the compositions. The video below begins at the buildup to the most intense segment.

Audio Cleanup and Restoration: Music and Live Recordings

Even under ideal circumstances, performances can be unpredictable and sometimes you have to clean up less-than-perfect audio. Whether it be removing noise through surgical EQ or looking at spectrograms to find the culprit, listening back to clean audio after shaking off the dust and polishing the scratches is something I find deeply satisfying.

In music, this often looks like bleed from a click track, excessive saliva sounds in a vocal track, or a clipped microphone because the performer was getting really into it.

I am also employed by the Vancouver Art Gallery, where we hold frequent artist talks that I record and that are published on the gallery’s Vimeo account. Sometimes these talks require cleanup to remove noise, clipping, or any of the other things that can interfere with a live recording.

For most cleanup and restoration work, I use iZotope’s RX software.