A recent post on the Pro Sound Effects blog, brought to my attention by Jordan at the PseudoFish Technology Blog, outlines the details of an exciting competition that I could see Ben Burrt concocting himself.
The competition is all about creating the sound of an anmial that doesn't exist in the real world by using real world samples of real animals! Their blog has a couple of examples of what they are looking for,
which gives me hope that the entries can be varied and as creative as possible.
The prizes are the real reason most of us would try this out, so
lets take a look at them. First place comes with a prize package worth about
$5000! In it contains the Pro Sound Effects Hybrid Sound Library, a copy of Pro
Tools 11, iZotope Iris+7, a Rode NTG-3
with a Blimp (wind shield and shock mount system), along with signed copies of
The sound Effects Bible and Location Sound Bible to boot. That is a lot of loot
from this competition that anyone can complete in an hour or less.
Some of the rules for competing are that the sound effects need to
be under 15 seconds in length, you must
use one sound from the Rare Animals Sound Effects Library, and all sounds must
be cleared and licensed. Pro Sound Effects will give you a token to use for the
one necessary Rare Animals sound free of charge when you sign up for an account
with them, so no need to spend any money to enter if you don’t want to! All you
need to do after that is upload the sound to SoundCloud, connect with them via
SoundCloud, and be sure to enter by April 8th.
Next time I will be creating my entry and taking you though the
process of creating the sound. Be sure to check out the Hybrid Animal Sound Design Competition for yourself!
That sounds pretty crazy. I went to the website and listened to some of the sound effects uploaded already. They are pretty ridiculous sounding. Some of them are definitely better than others that were uploaded. If you do something pretty unique, you could have a chance of winning! Best of luck to you. I kind of want to try my hand at it as well. They don't seem to be going above and beyond with what they are doing to the sound effects, and that prize package with the sound effects library would be pretty cool to have. Thank you for sharing this! I look forward to seeing your sound design for this project. It may seem ridiculous to combine animal sounds, but it is a great way to come up with unique alien creatures. I've never tried combining animal sounds, so it will be great practice. Have you done this type of thing before on your own? If so, what are some of your favorite combinations?
ReplyDeleteI haven't actually tried anything like this, but it's something I've wanted to play with for a long time. If you create something for the competition I'd love to hear it!
ReplyDeleteThat actually sounds like a really fun competition! I went on the website and started looking at all the wacky designs and made up animals. Some of the ones created do sound as though they are stock sound effects that were just layered, they don’t seem to blend well and you can definitely tell what sound effects are in it. As well as the quality of them they don’t seem to match up with other effects within the same animal. I do think this is a fun sounding competition that I might try for myself! Which leaves me back to Jurassic Park, which everything comes down to, no one knew how a dinosaur sounded so they took a bunch of random animals to create it. Which is exactly what is going on here.
ReplyDelete