Clients From Hell

I've been around a bit -- recording and editing voice-over sessions, doing original sound designs for plays and musicals, mixing a live band or two, working as a house technician for comedy acts and dance and multi-media. So I could say I have a list of warning signs for when you are going to be dealing with a Client From Hell.

But here's the rub; you always are. The expectations of what can be accomplished with sound are almost always wrong. The client will never accept the time it will take, the equipment needed, and what it will cost.

Be that as it may.

"I know sound." -- they don't. The people who actually know what the hell they are doing never say this. They don't talk the talk; they walk the walk. Really, everyone will try to tell you they understand the sound better than you do; the "I know sound" people are simply a wee bit more arrogant and even harder to understand (as they insist on phrasing everything in terminology they only think they understand.)

And related to that:

"I know what I want, I just don't know the technical terms." -- they don't. They are using this supposed lack of a common technical vocabulary as a shield to protect them from having to admit that they don't know what they want. Technical terms apply to technology. They are paying you to work the technology. It is, absolutely and explicitly, your job to figure out how to implement their creative needs. Using technical terminology is an attempt to dictate the tools and processes for you, constraining your work and cutting both you and the client from the ability to realize the creative goals.

This phrase is also a signal of another related attitude:

"I don't know what all those buttons do but..." -- what this really means is "Your job is so simple I would be doing it myself if I had the time." And they are wrong. Their first mistake is assuming that the tough part is figuring out "what all the buttons do." No...that's the easy part. Where skill begins to come into play is understanding why and when to use those buttons.

"Show me something and I'll see if I like it." -- means they have no clue how much time this takes. Yes; in a perfect world (and there are such worlds, I've been there. Rarely) you can indicate directions with a sketch, get that approved, purchase materials/record tracks/whatever, get the rough approved, polish that up into the final cue or mix or setup. Reality is that it takes skill, a lot of skill, to intuit from a smaller clue like a single microphone being soloed or a rough sketch of an effect what the final mix will sound like in context. Reality is that the client will focus on all the rough edges, forcing you to do time-consuming final-quality work before they reject it. These are, yes, the same people who will solo a single instrument on stage and tweak it forever with absolutely no grasp of what it will sound like seated in the final mix.

And, yes, within those conversations is usually invoked:

"I can tell just by listening..." -- no they can't. No-one can. Every seat is different, every performance different, every set of speakers different. The actual cue or mix in show conditions is a minimum, and then it much be heard from as many different parts of the house as possible. But then, these are the same people who will critique a mix from on stage.



Here's a few slightly more subtle ones from the world of FOH (aka music performance). Lack of a tech rider. A poorly constructed tech rider. The best ones are when they give you a printout of an email that has been passed through a dozen levels of reply in a chain of Chinese Whispers that finally drilled down to something like, "We need four microphones."

The band arriving half an hour before showtime. Surprisingly common. It is a given that said band will have a completely different line-up than what the client had been describing up until that moment. And inevitably, that same management drone will grab you away from the very moment you are greeting the band with a "Can we have a Sound Check in...?" (insert original schedule, before the band ran late).

From live theater, "The guy who used to do our sound." Someone was there, they might have even known what they were doing, but they were kicked out without notice and left no documentation, and all the things that needed to get repaired, restored, or returned after the last show didn't. And no-one even has the keys -- but the client still expects at least the service they had last show; as a baseline, with the newer and better sound tech building upon that with all the skill they aren't actually paying you enough for.




Inspired from reading at a website of stories by the same name. My last two or three clients were all wonderful to work with and I had no troubles with them.

I am not left-handed

I'm taking a day or two off work to let my injured thumb heal. I needed it anyhow -- got a cold to get over as well, and I could use some uninterrupted time for prop work.

Amazing, though, how many things one uses a right thumb for. I've even trained my left (I'm a self-taught touch-typist) to hit the spacebar instead, but it throws me off.

Anyhow.

I've three variant holocrons coming along. Still trying to problem-solve on the related lighting and USB issues.

I hacked up my prototype today to try several different arrangements of an external USB connector. The latest try is trying right now. I think the best lighting is going to come from a diffusion cube suspended inside, and the simplest way to attach the circuit board that maintains easy access to it is to come up with a platform that glues right to the bottom lid. That way, the USB connector travels with it, no dangling wires.

As clever as I've tried to be with the USB jack, it still seems to mean there is both a visible seam and an even more unsightly hole in the side. Hence the quick repair and paint job so I can put it all together and eyeball just how bad it really looks.

And...it works. The hole is a trifle ugly but small enough you can more-or-less ignore it. And there's no distressing light leak either.

The neopixels I want are still on back-order. Might end up hand-soldering raw "5050" LEDs (those are the RGB's with integrated WS2811 driver chip) -- they have a poor survival rate when reflowed. Would save $3-4 in parts, but also would make the diffusor cube mandatory.

The revised Eagle CAD is coming along. I've got everything in a 2" x 2" footprint now, even the user programming buttons, and it still looks routable (the auto-router digested it without issue). Pulling the USB jack off the board will make it even easier.



Drat. But that was two days off from work. Sick days, yes. And I did a little cleaning, laundry, etc. But there's still enough to do on the laser files I'm not sure I'll even have those done in time to do on the weekend. And I've a promise to run off more grenades and some 10mm caseless rounds as well...

Hol-oh-no

I stuck pictures up of my first production prototype and so far all the responses have been for a fully-assembled and wired Holocron.

This isn't what I got into the project for.

I wanted to make available a kit; a kit that had better aesthetics than the one kit I knew of, that assembled easier (not hard!) and that was if possible cheaper. The majority of work I've done on the mechanical design has been in aid of making it easier for other people to assemble one (if it was just me, I'd build a jig and slap glue over the pieces and there it would be).

Probably thing to do is to finish up the samples of the alternate designs and see if I can entice more people into getting the kit instead. Or deal; assembly is really not that onerous (after all, I did do all that work to make it easy!) and figure out how I'd have to price them to be worth it to me.




Oh, but the lighting circuit just isn't working. And there's worse. I just did an experiment. Faked up a box of translucent white 1/16" acrylic and stuck a 3W Cree in there. And it looks wonderful. I'm willing to deal with a dark spot on the bottom -- the holocron opens up there anyhow so the illusion suffers already at that angle -- so I can probably make this work with a circuit board lying on the bottom of a diffusor cube.

The cube shape is just barely glimpsed, but gives an incredible sense of depth and complexity..and almost tesseract-like effect, which can only be enhanced by detailing the cube with some black acrylic or vinyl decals.

The alternatives I have aren't wonderful. Assuming I can't come up with a simpler way to cover at least the 180 hemisphere, either through-hole Neopixels that can be bent outwards, or make my own mini circuit boards with right-angle headers.




Well, okay. I need to fix some issues with the files, laser off enough pieces to fix the magnet problem on the first production proto and complete the Imperial, Temple, and perhaps a second Stolen (mostly because I already cut most of the shell parts for one already). But I might not get to the laser this weekend; I also have to problem-solve this new idea of an inner cube, and how it gets attached.

Holonought

The lighting circuit doesn't work.

Basically, the circuit board is just too damn big. Also, the current neopixels are a pain to work with.

So my current idea is to break up the board into two parts; the upper part being the CPU and LEDs, the lower part containing the USB host and Lithium Polymer battery charge circuit.


Also, there's something odd going on with the magnets. The lid seems to want to hover just slightly ajar. I think I need to move the magnets so they are attracting straight in instead of sideways. And I finally figured out how to do that. And it should even allow me to shrink the border slightly for a nicer (and more canonical) look.

I need to cut a new diffusion shell anyhow (to improve the snap-fit) so for my alternate "stolen" holo (which has narrow edges but is otherwise design compatible) I will do one without laser-engraved diffusion, and experiment to see if judicious sandpaper application can get more of the canonical look. Plus be a cheaper kit offering.

Meanwhile three other shells are in various stages of assembly and painting. Given the time to run off more diffusion pieces, I should end up with four holocrons lying around...

Sam I Am

I need another project -- or a story idea -- like I need a thing that is not needed. But try telling that to the Plot Bunnies.

Like the bunny that came this afternoon muttering, "No one leaves!" in archaic Japanese. I just can't seem to leave Yamatai alone. Well, here's the latest wild idea; leave Lara Croft home. So this becomes Samantha's story...and the rest of this meandering sketch-in-progress goes below the fold.


Edit to add; I went ahead and started it, and I just put up Chapter Five.   The changes from the game get larger and larger from this part in, though, which I assume means I'll have to spend longer on each chapter as I try to figure out how to make things work properly.

Physics of Sound : Addendum

aka "We're doomed, doomed." c.f. "Kids these days..."


In my previous essay I emphasized how real-world physical acoustics leaves fingerprints in recorded sound. For instance; record in your living room, and unless you smother it with excessive post-processing, anyone listening will know it was recorded in a living room. Which is fine, unless you meant for it to sound like it was recorded on a wind-swept moor.

The corollary is that acoustic physics can be the easiest way to load desired information into a recorded sound. Want a cue to sound like it is coming from an iPod speaker? Play it back on an iPod speaker. Or play it back on that speaker, record the result, and play that back! (Leaving aside whether placement in space is also desired for that particular effect).

However.

Your audience is increasingly not getting that necessary reference to the real acoustic world. They are increasingly surrounded by processed sound. By amplified sound, by reinforced sound, by manipulated sound, and more than anything else by recorded sound.

This is the latest serve in the volley between audience and sound designer. First one could be said to start back in the Mystery Plays. By the time of Opera and Vaudeville, a whole symbolic language had been built of artificial sounds, standing in for elements of the desired environment; mechanical effects from the slapstick to the thunder run and the wind machine.

This is a trend developed through the golden age of the radio play and the early sound films, advanced by creative directors like Hitchcock and Wells, and reaching fruition sometime in the 70's when film sound became a fully designed element; no longer thought of in terms of mere reproduction, but a canvas of substitution. Film sound has become akin to film editing in being a language the must be learned by the audience, until they accept without thinking that the cry of a red-tailed hawk means the mountain on screen (whether it is meant to be in Peru or on Barsoom) is tall and majestic.

A Hollywood gunshot or fist no longer sounds much like any "real" gun or fist, to the point at which the sound designer takes a risk in putting out a sound that goes against that programmed expectation. The otherwise unmemorable action film Blown Away went through expensive effort to record the actual sounds of explosives before test screenings forced them back into the stock, expected, "blowing on a microphone" effect that was itself a relic of earlier and more primitive microphone techniques.

The next volley is amplified music on stage and ADR dialog on film; an audience raised to expect the kind of pristine vocals and instrument reproduction possible in a studio (or with studio techniques laboriously introduced into every available cranny of production audio and married as seamlessly as possible with studio re-takes). The audience of 1940 heard mostly unreinforced voices on stage, even on the musical or in opera, from the pulpit and even from the podium and bandwagon. Now, reinforcement is omnipresent. And the vast majority of story and song that is delivered to the theater audience is outside of that still-acoustic space.

In short, the audience is used to hearing every syllable clearly, every finger pluck clearly. They don't have to pay attention, much less strain, when listening at home to radio or television or recording, and they aren't listening to unassisted voices in an acoustical environment in the movie house or concert stage. With rare exceptions.

And they have brought those expectations to live theater. They expect to hear dialog as crisply, and with as little effort on their own part, in that still-acoustic space. So the poor theatrical -- and even operatic -- sound designer is forced into ever more technologically sophisticated (and expensive) systems to reinforce and amplify and (usually less successfully) clarify.

So now we come to the last salvo. And that is an audience who spends a significant part of their waking life with earbuds in. They no longer have any first-hand experience with a physical acoustic environment. To them, the sonic cues that tell how far away a sound is, or how big a room is, are those created by designers -- by film and television sound designers, but even more frequently by game programmers.

Just as we can no longer trust our audience to understand an actual recorded gunshot -- how we need to present them with the fake, wrong, ersatz gunshot they expect -- we can no longer trust them to pick up environmental or physical acoustic clues that mimic or are taken from the real world. To them, increasingly, distance is reverb and a shout is merely volume.

We may, as designers, have to learn this new and artificial language instead if we wish to communicate with our younger audience.

But then, the way some trends are going, we might just put aside the microphones entirely and put the whole thing in the form of tweets.

Yamatai II (fanfic thoughts)

I've written before about my issues with the reboot "Tomb Raider" (2013). I'm left with no firm idea of how one could have made it a better game. However -- and topical in that a movie is apparently about to enter production -- one can put aside questions of playability and game balance and ask only what would make a better narrative.

And this is another rambling ranting essay, so the rest is below the fold.