Sleep Revolution

Hands on Sound was called in for fun day in San Francisco last week with Arianna Huffington and Uber.  Arianna was on a book tour, promoting "The Sleep Revolution" and also raising awareness to the issue of drowsy driving (hence the Uber tie in).  

Our shoot consisted of a series of GoPro cameras mounted in an SUV to capture Arianna as her driver picked up Uber passengers in downtown SF.  One lucky rider got the surprise of not only taking a spin with Arianna but also with Uber CEO Travis Kalanick.

 I had wireless lavaliers on the subjects and went the extra mile by adding PZM microphones hidden in the vehicle along with redundant mounted lavs for a total track count of six.  On "bag drop" gigs like this, redundancy goes a long way toward insuring great sound for the client.

 

Spoiled To Perfection

Recently I joined the crew of the web food series, Spoiled To Perfection on the set of Episode 5 as Sound Recordist and Boom Op. The producers describe this as a show that "unlocks the magic behind food preservation techniques such as pickling, fermenting, curing, salting and curdling.  Episode 5 focused on Sonoma Brothers Distillers and their grain to glass handcrafted spirits.

The first day of shooting took place at the distillery and featured the show's Host, Garrett Martin, guiding viewers on a walk thru on how artisanally crafted spirits are made in the distillery's  copper pot still.  We then moved onto Geyserville and spent a day at the Geyserville Gun Club Bar & Lounge learning the finer points of mixology with Garrett, the Sonoma Brothers (Chris and Brandon) and resident mixologist, Damian.

Such a great crew on this series with Leslie Simmons producing and Steve Rustad directing the DP Alan Campbell and the rest of the team.

San Jose Sharks TV, Radio & More

As the San Jose Sharks move closer to securing a playoff spot here in the 2015-16, season, here is a look back at a couple of fun TV spots we worked on for the club with Bob Kilburg & Associates during the team's last playoff run and season ticket campaign.  Go Sharks!

While we're on the subject of the Sharks, who can forget their viral video sensation from the 2014-15 Holiday Season, "Holiday Sweater"?  This one was a blast to work on.  We had a great day at SAP Center shooting the scenes and I set up a mobile recording booth for the players to record their parts in.  Song written by Bob Kilburg, recorded and mixed by Will Mitchell.  SJ Sharks Productions gets the nod on picture and video editing.

Google and Disney

 

Recently we worked on a 3 day shoot at Google's Mt View, CA headquarters on an internal corporate video that was screened at Google Engage in Anaheim.  The job had a fantastic crew, led by Director Todd Womack, and gave us the opportunity to create with some great actors who played the roles of Disney characters interacting with key Google employees.

As is often the case with corporate shoots, office complexes offer many sonic challenges to overcome such as HVAC systems, hum & RF interference, general worker walla and less than desirable recording spaces.

Challenges, but not anything that Hands on Sound couldn't clean up after bringing the recordings back to the studio.  Over time, we have developed some sets of plug-in chains that address hiss, fans, hum, wind and other undesired audio that can be distracting and take away from clean dialog.  A real client pleaser, for sure.

One fun perk on this gig was having Toy Story's very own Sheriff Woody visit our studio for a voice over session in the "Cone Of Silence".  One thing you can count on from Woody is very consistent vocal delivery and a Howdy Partner attitude.

 

The Colossus Of Destiny: A Melvins Tale

Hands on Sound is currently working on a documentary film about The Melvins, titled The Colossus Of Destiny.  We are doing the audio sweetening and sound mix for the project.  Color Grading by my one of my associates at The Shop, Mark Faulkner, is in it's final pass.  The film is packed with interviews and insights by the band members (past & present) and a Who's Who  the music world, plus archival footage of the group.

Look for The Colossus Of Destiny to be released in 2016, starting with screenings at film festivals and Melvins related events.

Pono Music Kickstarter- Looking Back

It was two years ago today that the historic Kickstarter campaign for Pono Music began.  In the first 10 hours Pono reached it's goal of $800,000 and eventually closed out with over $6 million in pledges.  Later in 2014, the Pono Music Store was launched and sales of the innovative Pono Music Player began.

Hands on Sound had the honor and privilege of being part of Pono from Day 1 in 2009 when Neil Young first presented the idea as something to begin working on.  We had just released NYA Vol 1 in multiple formats including Blu-ray, which provided the opportunity for users to play music at high resolution 24 bit/ 192 kHz.  At that time there were few options for listeners to enjoy high resolution digital music besides Blu-ray set top players and the Sony PS3.

We developed an iPad app controller that allowed for simultaneous playback and switching between audio qualities and built out a traveling sound system in a 1970's Cadillac as a demo testing/ listening platform. Listening shootouts on various DACs and compiling a library of tracks for testing lead the way to the eventual consumer player and the online store.

With the major record labels on board, there is now an ongoing program to go back to the original album masters (whether that be analog tape or digital) and make them available for sale at the highest quality possible.

Stereophile magazine named the PonoPlayer The "Digital Product Of The Year" for 2015.

“Three of this year’s top vote-getters are portables, the others being the Astell&Kern AK240 and Sony NW-ZX2. Even more interesting—but not, in my view, surprising—was the PonoPlayer’s considerable margin of victory: This was the least close race in our 2015 Products of the Year voting.”

Learn more about Pono at: https://www.ponomusic.com

Human Highway and Rust Never Sleeps films to Blu-ray & DVD

I'm pleased to report that two films we worked on the post-production and restoration of have had release dates set for Spring of 2016.  Both will be available on Blu-ray and DVD.

http://ultimateclassicrock.com/neil-young-movies-dvd/

These classics, Rust Never Sleeps and Human Highway, saw a nationwide screening last month as a double bill, courtesy of Fathom Events.

http://ultimateclassicrock.com/neil-young-movies/

For Rust Never Sleeps, we went back to the original negative of the film and had Bob Brian's team at Headquaters in Burbank painstakingly clean and restore it frame by frame.  On the audio side, I had the film mags transferred by Skywalker Sound at 24 bit/ 192 kHz which allowed Tim Mulligan at Redwood Digital to improve upon both the sound quality and overall mix.  For the home stretch, Tim and I put together a 5.1 surround system in the big room at Upstream Multimedia where we fine tuned the surround presentation of the film before it got married to picture.

Human Highway saw a much longer and indepth restoration.  It began with our team, lead by Toshi Onuki, in finding and restoring as many of the original picture elements and then working under the guidance of Neil Young to build the Director's Cut...a version that had been left on the cutting room floor in the early 80's.  Not just figuratively, but literally left as strips of cut off film…on the floor.  Added to this was some narration provided by voiceovers that Neil, LA Johnson and others had done almost 10 years ago.

I took the original 2" 16 track audio masters to Chace Audio and made Hi Res transfers only to find that we didn't have clean dialogue tracks.  This sent me on a journey of playing back the source tpaes that were recorded to a Nagra deck on set...and locating the exact takes used in the edit.

After Mark Faulkner had put all the element together for picture and sound, we went to Pasadena, where Tamara Johnson created a tremendous mix.

Here is a nice article that discusses some of this audio work that was undertaken for Human Highway-

http://www.pro-tools-expert.com/home-page/2014/9/10/the-story-of-the-audio-restoration-of-neil-youngs-human-high.html