Make Some Noise! How Sound Design Artist Ali Lacey Uses Bathtubs and Pickaxes for Art | No Film School

Sound design is an incredibly imaginative, resourceful, and complex art form. The unique process of creating sounds is something that, like all creative endeavors, can't fully be taught in a class or tutorial, but felt, explored, and discovered. Sound+Shelter produced an intriguing profile of sound design artist Ali Lacey, in which we get to see the peculiar method and tools he uses to produce sound, giving us a closer look at the wider world of sound design. Continue on for the video.

If you tend to pick up your sound effects and ambient tones from libraries and collections online, this video might inspire you to trade in your mouse for a pickaxe. Lacey, who is also a folk/indie music artist based in Wales, takes an interesting approach to sound design. He sees instrumental capabilities in just about everything -- a bathtub, an oven, a shovel, even (what looks like) a window shutter.

Using an assortment of wooden drumsticks, bows, sledgehammers, percussion mallets, and yes, a pickaxe, Lacey creates simple sounds that filmmakers could easily use to create the right ambience in their movies. Case in point, who knew that banging a strung-up metal bathtub with a mallet would produce the perfect heavy, dark, and anxious sound effect?

Though Lacey composes a full musical piece from all of the sounds he records in the video (which obviously takes some incredible skill that not all of us possess at the moment), his inventiveness is truly inspiring and will surely get your creative juices flowing. So, grab your mics, raid your tool shed, and take a trip to the salvage yard and make some sounds of your own!

Do you have experience with a similar type of sound design? What kinds of objects do you think would produce some cool sounds? Do you have any advice or tips for us? Let us know in the comments below.

Link: Ali Lacey's website -- Novo Amor

[via Storm+Shelter & Film School]

audio sound sounddesign

28 Years Later iPhone

Why Did Danny Boyle Shoot ‘28 Years Later’ on an iPhone 15?

Here’s everything we know about the reports of the new ‘28 Years Later’ thriller being shot on an iPhone 15.

Move over, Sean Baker and Steven Soderbergh—Danny Boyle is the latest director to make the bold choice to shoot his latest feature film on an iPhone. Why, you ask? Partly, perhaps, because the team knows it will get them some nice headlines like this one. And partly just because they can.

Whether you love or hate the idea of shooting professional video on iPhones, it’s hard to argue that these latest smartphones aren’t capable of high-end video.

The iPhone 15, which is what Boyle and his team reportedly used for the long-awaited follow-up to the original 28 Days Later in 2002 and its 2007 sequel 28 Weeks Later, in particular, has proven to be a major step forward for Apple and was very much promoted as a filmmaking-capable camera.

Still, as is always the case with these smartphone-shot feature films, there’s more to the story than just the headline here. So let’s explore how Danny Boyle and his team were able to shoot 28 Years Later on an iPhone.

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