Stagehand Work: Life is Beautiful

This is a picture of the main stage of Life is Beautiful 2014 being built. I am currently working on call with a staging company that gets hired to build stages and work events and Life is Beautiful just happened to be one of them. This job was about a 9 hour day to unload and set up all the equipment.

My position at this job is a stagehand and as such, I get work in a lot of different areas of stage set up. During this job, I had to help unload all of the equipment cases out of the trucks. This portion of the job took up about 2 hours to get everything out and sorted where it needed to go.

On this particular day, I was mostly helping set up the audio equipment. After having unloaded all the speakers, we had to push them to the end of the stage to get them into position to be set up. The speakers were stacked by 4 and there were about 10 speakers to an line array.

Another thing I had to do, was run the power cables for some equipment. All the cable had to be run under the stage and there was a lot of work to do to keep it organized. Once the speakers were up and the cables were run, I, along with other workers, had to clean the stage to make it ready for the next day performers.

All in all, the job was exhausting but it's not something I had never done before. It was really interesting to see how much goes into building a stage that was as big as this one.

Field Sound Recording: Life is Beautiful

This picture was taken of me on top of the Western Hotel in downtown Las Vegas. This was a job I did for Fremont East Studio at the 2014 Life is Beautiful festival. My job was to capture the sound of a host that was covering the events happening at Life is Beautiful.

This was my second time doing this particular job. I had done the same thing a year before for the 2013 LIB festival. My second time around though, I had already had more experience doing this type of work.

The job was for all 3 days of the festival and I was working along side a director, cameraman, and the host. My job was to get clean audio of the host while she went around and described different attractions in the festival and interviewed and interacted with people. The recorder I was using a 702 Sound Devices field recorder, the microphones I used were a Shure wireless handheld for the host and a Senheisser ME66 on a boom pole to get more of the ambience sounds.

The job wasn't difficult but what did make it challenging was that it was an all day event. We didn't get much breaks except for lunch and having to wait on standby but besides that it was work all day. It was physically demanding having to care the gear around everywhere and during the day, the heat made it much harder. However, I enjoyed being part of the production because it gave me some experience and was also lots of fun.

Location Sound: Louie Anderson

This is a screenshot of a project I had the opportunity to work on. It was the recording for a podcast commercial for Louie Anderson. The project was really last minute notice for me but I took the opportunity as soon as it was presented to me.

I was able to work on it because a colleague of mine is a comedian and had connections to Louie. He set up a project to film him doing his podcast and needed someone to do audio and asked I could do it right away.

For gear, I didn't really need much, I used a Tascam DR-100 as my portable recorder and a Sennheiser ME 66 on a boom pole. I had a lavalier mic on stand by but Louie did not want to use it so I went with just the shotgun mic.

The place we shot at was at the theater inside the Plaza casino in downtown Las Vegas.  We were able to get a little tour of backstage and the gear they used before meeting with Louie. After the initial meeting Louie went to record a podcast segment with a guest he brought in. Meanwhile, we had setup our equipment and were just on standby until he finished.

When he came to shoot, he had a good idea of what he was going to say and gave us a couple of takes to work with. We got about 7 takes we could work with and from there we just had to pick one. Louie also gave us a copy of some of his pictures we could use in the commercial, which pop up during it.

When going into editing, it wasn't too hard to find a take that was good, I had a few problems with the audio though. The A/C was very prominent so I used a high pass filter to get rid of most of it. Also, there were times where Louie would be louder in some parts of his dialog but that was easily fixed with adjusting the gain at certain parts. The last thing I added was the music as the background. I wanted the commercial to have like a lighthearted feel and I think that the music makes it come off as exactly that.

Overall, the project was easy and a great opportunity to work with someone who is recognizable and has a name and reputation.

Music Recording: Purple Bamboo Melody

This is a screenshot of video editing and music recording project I did. The project was recording a song with a gentleman named Henry Wang. Mr. Wang plays traditional Chinese instruments such as the ehru and a bamboo flute. He has also recorded music for shows on Nickelodeon such as Legend of Korra and Kung Fu Panda.

The recording process for the song was done with myself and 3 other partners. Going into the project we were all at a complete loss. We had no idea how to record the instruments. We knew in advance that we would be recording Chinese instruments but we couldn't find much information on techniques to record. We used 2 AKG 414s and 2 KSM 141s in different positions to try to get different sounds of the instruments. Also during the recording, we had a videographer shooting video so that we could edit it into a music video.

The entire song is only 3 instruments, 2 ehrus of different pitch and a bamboo flute. Although we thought we were going to have a hard time recording because of the unconventional instruments, Mr. Wang was really helpful. Having already had experience recording these instruments, he would guide on positioning the microphones to make sure we got the best sound we could. He was incredibly patient and sincere with us and he made the whole process run smoothly. We were able to get a good amount of takes for all 3 instruments. We had to cut our recording session short because he had another engagement but he gave us more than enough to work with.

The mixing process wasn't too hard. I wanted to give the song a big feel and make it feel like it was being played in a Chinese temple so I added some reverb to all the instruments with a semi long decay time to give it that sound. The ehrus had some really harsh sounding frequencies in the higher range so I added a bell curve to bring them down but still have them audible. Because both ehrus were playing different melodies, I slightly panned them to opposite sides to make them more distinguishable when listening to the song.

After mixing the song, I took the video that was shot and edited together to make a video with the finished song dubbing it.

Overall, the project was a great experience. I got some knowledge on how to record some uncommon instruments and I also got to work with a very experienced professional. At the end, Mr. Wang told us that he usually charges a high amount of money to record but because we were students, he did it for free. That was really admirable of him and we couldn't thank him enough.

Automated Dialog Replacement: Beguilement

This is a screenshot from an dialog replacement project I had the opportunity to work on. It is a short film series called Beguilement. The entire 4 episode series need audio work and there were a number of people working on the project. I chose to do the dialog replacement for the 1st episode. I did the recording of the voices and the editing.

The recording process was easy. The original actors were happy to come in and redo just their voices. The actors were really easy to work with and made the process really easy. Most of the lines were only two people and we had to schedule 2 four hour days to get all their lines done for each of them. But because we took time to get some good recordings, we had different clips to choose from and use the one that sounded best.

The editing process was a little harder. Throughout the film there are a couple scene changes that meant we had to use different processing effects to get the sound of the room they were in. These scenes didn't have too much dialog however so it wasn't too much of a hassle to do.

The real challenge came when half way through the film, the voices sounded different than in the first half. I realized that this was because the lines in the second half of the film were done on a different day than the first half. This made it so that the EQs and reverbs used in the first half of the film made the voices in the second half sound completely different even if they were in the same room. Because of this, I had to use a different EQ to make the voices match the beginning of the film. After finding a correct sound for the voices, I used a different reverb to match the reverb used at the beginning.

This took a couple of tries and I had to use different speakers and rooms to listen and hear if they sounded similar enough. I ended finding something that worked and used that. Overall, the project was a great way to get some experience on editing voices and seeing the problems that can occur during this type of work.

About Me

About Me

Audio is an important part of who I am. Being able to make something come alive just by using

the power of sound is something that I find really enjoyable. Whether the sound is heard from a laptop

speaker for one person or an array of speakers for a big audience, it all feels amazing when I bring a

piece of entertainment to life. With my determined work ethic, I strive to make every project

exceptional and memorable. My passion for audio is what fuels me to work hard and do my best in any

project I do whether it is big or small. I make my skill, knowledge, and my work ethic to speak for

themselves and make it a reflection of the person I am. I have confidence in my abilities but, being

human; I make mistakes and fail from time to time. I don’t see failure as an end to things but as an

opportunity to learn. I am always looking to learn more and expand my knowledge and I open myself up

to any opportunities that will allow me to improve. I am not afraid to step out of my comfort zone and

try and experience new things. I try to incorporate what I learn from those experiences into my work

and into my life. I believe that my ambition, my work ethic, and my willingness to learn will take me far

in life and what I do.

Sound Design: The Chase

This is a Pro Tools screenshot for another one of my sound design projects. The short film I'm using is called "The Chase", which I got special permission from the creator to use. The entire film is about 13 minutes long and the project took about 5 weeks to complete with 4 people working on it and was mix to 5.1 surround sound.

Since this was a group project, my teammates and I decided to split the film up into individual parts for each one of us; which was about 4 minutes for each of us. We each sound designed 4 minutes of the film and then brought it together to and worked together to fill in anything missing and make corrections where needed.

The part I mostly sound designed were the first 4 minutes of the film. I found this part to be fun because it included doing some field recording. There is a part where a car is drifting through the streets and because I had never recorded that, I had to go out and record it. I got with a friend and he drifted his car in a parking lot while I held a microphone and recording out the window to get the sound.

Other than this, I didn’t have to record much because not a lot happened in the beginning of the film. But once we brought all the pieces together, there was still a lot of work to be done. There is a major fight scene where there was lots of action happening and as a group we all had to throw ideas in to make it sound good and not empty.

Mixing the entire project was also a big task. Because the project was being mixed in 5.1 and we weren’t familiar with mixing in that way, it took a while before we were able to get something we liked down. But through trial and error, we were able to bring it together to get something we all appreciated.

Overall, the project took a while to be finished. It wasn’t easy and there were a lot of mistakes done. But I think that because we had so much input coming from all 4 of us in the team, we were able to bring it together.

Video Production: Pot Tea Social House

This is a screenshot of a video production project that I have done. It's a commercial for a local Asian restaurant, called "Pot Tea Social House", in Las Vegas. The commercial is 30 seconds long with a voice over and music score underneath it and it shows various parts of the restaurant.

I had the opportunity to work on this production because I had a friend who had gotten in contact with the owners of the restaurant and asked them if he could interview them and make somewhat of a documentary out of it, which I later made into a 30 second commercial. They agreed and since my friend needed help with the whole thing he reached out to me and told me what he wanted to do and I said yes.

The problem with accepting to help on the production was that I was unprepared because I was asked to help on the day of the shoot. I didn't have the equipment we needed and we had to do with what we had. My friend took his Canon 6D and we were able to get our video with that. The interview with the owners was a little harder because of the audio.

I thought that we would be interviewing the owners separately but to save time we did them together. The problem was that I only had one lavalier mic to setup on one of the owners. So I decided to mic up one of the owners and hoped we could get decent audio from the second owner through the camera. 

Once I got into editing the piece together, there was about 2 hours of film to go through. I picked out the shots I wanted to use and used the audio from the interview as a voice over. The audio from the lav mic was decent enough to use but the audio from the camera was unusable so I had to scrap the entire interview of one of the owners because there was no way of restoring it so I decided to use just one of the owners audio. There was a quite a bit of editing to do since she would stutter or pause in between sentence but that was an easy fix. What was a little harder was getting rid of the noise of the restaurant. We did the interview in the dining area so there was a lot of noise. But after using some compression and gating I was able to bring down the noise while keeping the voice clear.

Sound Design: Elephant's Dream

This is a screen shot of one of my sound design projects. It's for a short animated film called "Elephant's Dream". I took a 5 minute piece of the entire short film and stripped all the original sound from it and replaced it with my own sounds. I had about 20 different tracks throughout the entire thing and used almost all of them the entire time. I had about 7 different tracks just for sound effects, 3 tracks for background sounds and ambiance, 2 tracks for music, 2 tracks for dialogue and 6 aux tracks that I used for processing effects. Each aux track had some effects like reverb and delay on them and I used sends and returns to get them on certain tracks at certain times.

The entire project is divided into 4 different scenes. Each scene I had to take into account the way the room sounded and how the sound happening in the room would also sound. I used different timed reverbs and delays to get the sound just  right. In some scenes, the rooms were huge and because I didn't want it to sound too empty or too big the use of ambient noises really came into play during those scenes.

I think the poorest part of the whole project was the voice acting. The reason is because I didn't have time to find good voice actors to portray the characters properly, I ended using some friends and the voices came out really mediocre at best. I do, however, plan on going back and redoing the voices to get them right this time.

Overall, the project came out pretty good. It was fun to do because it allowed me to use my creativity to design some sounds that would make the story make sense.

Live Sound Production

This is a picture taken at Fremont East Studios during an event they hold every month called the Outlet. The event invites local musician and musical groups to the studio and lets them perform on a stage. The artists play live to an audience but the event is also being streamed live online.

The artists in the photo are called AZIAM, pronounced "as I am". For their performance, I was monitoring and mixing their set for the live web stream. While mixing them, I had a few things to work with. Because there was another group that performed before them, I had to quickly EQ and compress each one of the instruments and vocals. I had a dry signal coming in from the live room, which gave me complete control over how to make them sound. After processing, I put a small reverb on both the vocals to give them the sound of the studio in which they were performing.

Aside from doing the live stream mixing, I also helped on the setup of the audio equipment. Both consoles used to mix were Presonus StudioLive 16.4.2 consoles. One was used in the live room for the live performance and the other in the audio room for the live stream. We were only able to use 12 inputs because we had a shortage on microphones. We ended up using 4 wireless Shure ULX-D for vocals, 2 SM57 for snare and electric guitar, 2 DI boxes for either acoustic guitar or piano, 1 Beta 52 for kick, and a Rode NT2a for overhead drums. The last 2 inputs were for a DJ that played between sets.

Overall, the show went by pretty smoothly. It's a team effort and it's a fun night for everyone and it's great to see the production come together.