LAFS Partners With Soundly
Soundly Is A Powerhouse For Film Editors
We are proud to be partnering with Soundly, an audio database and retrieval technology that allows for lightning-fast selection and addition of high quality sound for film. Check out the article written at Soundly for more information about this partnership.
An exerpt from the Soundly announcement
With the school’s emphasis on audio, sound production and post production classes dive deep into the art of sound design and mixing. “My approach to the art form is basically to make audio its own thing, not always necessarily linked to film but almost as an art form in itself,” said Andres De La Torre, Sound Design Instructor, LA Film School. “One of the tasks my students undertake is to produce audio dramas, so they delve into storytelling only with sound. That’s the approach I try to take, so they can figure out how to best utilize the art form inside a film.”
Students in the LA Film School Film classes receive a laptop with programs such as the Adobe Creative Cloud, Avid Media Composer and Final Draft. Many students work at full or part time jobs in addition to going to school, so the laptop allows them to do school work from home. With access to the Soundly library in the cloud, they can work on their projects from anywhere.
“The Soundly interface was a big hit with the students,” says De La Torre. “Everyone knows Spotify, and Soundly is essentially Spotify for sound effects. Because it’s so familiar, they are up and running with it right away. I’ll show them a couple things, how to pitch things down from Soundly, how to look for information that might be important, like sample rates. This allows me to use Soundly as a teaching tool as well.”
The Los Angeles Film School and Los Angeles Recording School encourage students to be bold and think outside the box. Using Soundly, Da La Torre noticed that students were less intimidated with sound and more prone to experiment with multi-layered sound textures. “I have a quick challenge that I do with the class: in 20 minutes, they have to create a one minute atmosphere, for a planet or something that is not a physical reality. I show them possible worlds from video games, science fiction movies, etc., and they have to come up with a complete ambience for the place,” says De La Torre. Because it’s quick, the first thing students do is open Soundly, find whatever they can to match their imagination, and then start layering the sounds. “I might show the class four images, and they each have to pick one, but they can’t tell the others. When we’re done, everyone else has to guess which image the sound belongs to. They explain their process and what they layered, and some really go outside the box, thinking really creatively, comments De La Torre. “They can start in one place, and thanks to the editing power in Soundly, they can end up in a very different place, playing back a Tiger growl at super slow speed for instance.”
