I am a sound designer/editor, sound recordist and boom operator with experience of studio and location sound work. I have worked on a couple of feature films, various television programmes and dozens of short films including DreamWorks commissioned shorts for Fox Television, plus various commercials and pilots. I love sound, sound art, video art and other generally creative stuff. I graduated BSc Music Technology in 2005 and MSc Sound Design at Leeds Metropolitan University in 2009 during which I started a 10.2 surround sound project, which I have continued since graduating.
Candy Cabs starts tonight at 9pm on BBC1. We shot it last summer, in a few lovely locations such as Lymm, West Kirby and Hoylake. These are a few photos I took...
More information about Candy Cabs can be found at Candy Cabs BBC and Candy Cabs IMDbRyan
I know this is late and I'm certain I have missed a great record off this list, but here is my favourite music of 2010.
Crystal Castles - Crystal Castles
The Drums - The Drums
Girl Talk - All Day
Good Shoes - No Hope No Future
Hot Club de Paris - The Rise and Inevitable Fall of the High School Suicide Cluster Band - EP
Hot Club de Paris - With Days Like This As Cheap As Chewing Gum, Why Would Anyone Want to Work? - EP
Jonsi - Go
Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
Kurran and The Wolfnotes - Tour CD-R
Sufjan Stevens - Age of Adz
Two Door Cinema Club - Tourist History
Uffie - Sex Dreams and Denim Jeans
Vampire Weekend - Contra
If you're wondering how I missed out Arcade Fire, Drake, Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti and Beach House, well I haven't given them a proper listen yet. I had a whole year, but I let you down. :) Special mention to my friend @sambaconsam and his band Slow Motion Shoes, Rihanna's great list of singles and collaborations this year and to Tinie Tempah - I enjoyed his singles a lot.
Ryan
ryanmcmurray.com
I spent two days swinging boom in Norfolk on this Mob Film Company 'Hoseasons' commercial. This was the first time I boomed someone stood on a boat whilst I was on land. Long pole? Yes. My poor arms!
Ryan
ryanmcmurray.com
Last week Sony announced the Walkman will be discontinued in Japan after the remaining units are sold. Sad times for, well, everyone who ever owned a portable cassette player. When I was first given a Walkman, I thought it was amazing that I could listen to copies of my Compact Discs on cassette whilst walking around school - a strange freedom, I still feel now wandering around the city listening to music. School is when I got really into music. I don't remember when I got my first Walkman, but it was sometime around 1996, about a year after we got our first CD player at my parents' house. It was a Panasonic 'boom box' style CD/cassette/radio and it ended up in my room in about a week. Sorry Mum.
Once I had the boom box and Walkman I never looked back; I started making copies and compilations from CD's for free time at school/college. I fell in love with music sat in school surrounded by other Walkman owners (some had Alba's, but I didn't judge ;)), swapping cassettes and flicking through Kerrang, Melody Maker and NME, discussing music. Only a handful of friends had home computers with Internet access, so cassettes and our portable cassette players were our MySpace, SoundCloud, iPod, iPhones, Facebook all rolled into one - we exchanged tapes, and we talked. But having a Walkman and a group of friends each with their own device meant music came out of our homes and became social, a few years before most of us got to gigs and concerts. The biggest evolution in portable music isn't the iPod or even the MP3, it's the Walkman. The Walkman is the device that took music from our home and onto millions of streets around the world - it changed listening habits forever, which paved the way for the iPod.
Ryan
If you live in the UK and you didn't watch Cloverfield on Channel 4 a few weeks ago, you missed out. I love the Blair Witch inspired camcorder style and the fact it daringly portrays Manhattan in a state of panic less than a decade after New York was attacked on 11 September. I think this post is spoiler-free, so read on.
You know what else I love about Cloverfield? The sound (what a surprise). The style in which Cloverfield is presented allowed for some quite simple, yet satisfying uses of sound. The 'camera-man' in the film is Hud, who's voice is sonically different to the other characters - his voice has a fuller frequency range which is technically accurate, but because Hud is also our narrator (since he has the camera) his clear close-miked voice benefits the audience - his voice cuts through the sound mix to allow us to hear ever nuance of his voice, even when whispering - through his narration we 'see' what is around him, when the camera can not. The only time we are sonically shown a glimpse of what is happening to the city outside of the main characters is when the military makes it's first appearance and we hear nothing but gun-fire and engines rolling past the group. Perspective is used to keep what is happening in the city away from our ears to keep the focus on the group of friends, trying to make their way across the city. There are no cutaways of action happening elsewhere; gun-fire is often distant, and only when the action is in arms length of the camera do we feel it's impact on the soundtrack. Despite there being a fair amount of action in Cloverfield, the sound is much more subtle throughout the film. It's all about the perspective of this group of friends and the sound filling-out the image, with suggestion of what is happening outside the viewfinder of the camcorder.
Of course, if you really were stuck in a city with the military being attacked by a massive alien sea-monster, your crappy camcorder microphone would turn most sounds into clipped unrecognisable noise... but that wouldn't be a very good film.
Matt Reeves is directing the remake of Let The Right One In, which I think is a silly idea. The original is absolutely amazing and I can't remember there being an American remake of a foreign thriller, sci-fi or horror which I enjoyed more than an original.
Ryan
