My name is Keith Alexander
I live in Dublin Ireland
and I'm an Audio Post-production Professional.
My specialty would be;
being diverse in my specialties,
if that's an answer?
I do everything.
I mix,
I edit,
I do Foley,
I record,
whatever the project requires,
I end up doing it
or I oversee
it being done.
I'm designing movies,
designing TV shows,
cutting TV shows,
mixing TV shows,
mixing films.
We could be dubbing films,
so absolutely anything
could be happening
at any stage during the day.
What gear I use
generally is Pro Tools
from Avid,
a digital audio workstation
running on our Mac.
We have the desk interface with that,
it's all running,
you know,
full surround sound
from mono to stereo etc.
The other piece of kit
that I absolutely adore
is Steinberg Nuendo.
We’re the only ones in Ireland
using it but I use it a lot because
I interact with my clients in Germany
and it's all over Germany.
I love it because everything comes in the box.
There's no add-ons.
There's no nothing.
You literally get everything you could
possibly want for any sort of
post-production workflow;
be it film,
TV, game,
they've a very significant game interface,
and ADR, an ADR section
that is just second to none.
When I'm recording,
I'd generally be recording in stereo
or surround,
and I find that my Zoom H2N
really covers an awful lot of bases.
This is it,
this is my H2N
and on here is a switch
and I can switch between
Quad recording,
Stereo recording,
MS, XY
to channel surround
and this is just,
if I'm on my bike
and I see
something that I need to record,
I can jump off my bike,
have this set up in
less than a minute
and recording in full surround sound.
There's five caps in here
and they just sound gorgeous.
If I need a stereo recording,
I have a Rode iXY
which is just two stereo pair,
plug straight into the iPad,
iPad software,
hit record, it happens.
This is a rugged little fella,
and it does most of my recording,
records to SD.
Generally I would use this.
For something more specific,
of good field stereo recordings
that I want,
I'd probably bring my iPad
because of the quality of the Rode mics
on there as well
but the caps on this
sound absolutely gorgeous.
So that's my main recorder
just for finding noises
and taking pictures
of where I’ve been, you know.
We just finished a big project for underwater stuff
and the whole series is shot underneath
the ocean and you got all these creatures
and they go lumbering
and they’re gluttonous
and they’re slow-moving
and then you got other small shrimp
and fast moving, you know
and just they're alert all the time.
So that derives a sort of sound design in itself.
Let's take for example the weighted creature
and what we do is,
we do a thing called Foley
and that Foley is basically recreating,
because your man
wasn't shooting any hydrophones
or anything and these creatures
are so small
you just,
there's no audio coming from them,
so I've got to recreate everything
in the studio,
so with the heavier creatures
we got to get a sense of,
are they moving across sand,
so I could be getting,
you know,
breezeblocks and wet,
getting a big
tank within the studio,
wetting down aload of heavy sand
and getting the breeze block
and pressing it across there,
so it will give that
[SQUELCHING SOUND EFFECT WITH MOUTH]
so now you've got a base
to start working with.
If it was rock you could be getting
two breeze blocks
or two granite blocks
or whatever else
and dragging those across
each other,
so you get a sense
of the weight
and that slowness
of him walking across,
whatever he's going across.
So there's a lot of sound effects used
depending on what the production is.
Is it using 5.1?
Is it in stereo?
What's the delivery
at the end of the day?
The 5.1 gives you much more scope
for playing with sounds in the background
and the foreground,
moving stuff around the room
and that sort of stuff.
Rochester's going to have
that resonance forever
of George Eastman and Kodak…
We just finished this documentary
about a place in upstate
New York, Rochester,
and there was an awful lot of shots
of street shots but they're all mute.
There's no budget for me to jump on a plane
and go to this exact place
so I took my surround recorder
and I just went out in the local
street. So you have to try
and get a sense of areas
that you would find the
same sort of weighted traffic,
maybe not
big trucks or whatever
because that would be a distinctive sound,
or you don't want to go near a fire station
because the actual noises of the engines
are far different
but you can get a sense
of the movement of the traffic.
If I need to bolster the bottom end
to give it a more weight
and more noise, or the perspective.
I love water.
My favorite subject
would be
probably air and water.
From the monumental orchestral cacophony
that is deep down in the water
and the big bass noises
that travel through that,
to you just sitting beside
a slipway
and you got your recorder,
you got your cans on
and there is just a little lapping.
There's a whole dynamic there,
you know, I mean it is the full orchestra
of what the sea delivers to you with sound
and that's the same with air.
The first time I came across a recording
device would have been as a kid
and we had this old Ferguson,
big piano button tape recorder.
I shouldn't be saying this
but it was mainly used for my brother
and sister to make up
“mixtapes”
from the radio.
I was only a child
but I asked my dad;
Can I buy a tape?
because I saw my brother
and sister using this machine
and “don't touch that
because that's very expensive.”
Okay yeah, yeah.
Suddenly I was allowed
to buy my own cassette tape,
that's just, so I brought it home
and it was in red BASF
and it was a square cassette tape
and I brought it home and it's like,
manna from heaven, you know,
and I went home and I opened
the cellophane and there's a whole
ceremonial thing
and I got the tape
and I put it in the Machine
and I hit record
and it happened,
it's just record
and I just turned it off again
and then I hit play
and then suddenly,
I heard
what I had heard just
five seconds ago,
and you were hearing the building.
My mother was having
a conversation downstairs,
you know,
you could hear the
water running through the radiators,
holy moly, it was unbelievable,
you know,
that suddenly
this whole world
was opened up to me,
that you could capture
like a time machine,
everything that was around me,
in that space around me,
you know, it was amazing.
What I do in my spare time
is motorcycling,
definitely motorcycling.
I have to be outdoors.
I can't stand roofs,
so I need to be either out in my garden
or up the mountains,
or out in the sea.
We have a kayak,
a big giant kayak
and either grab one
or many of my kids
and we'll just jump in the boat
and go out into the Irish Sea
and sit out there for three hours.
Tips and advice to myself starting out;
talk to people,
do what you can,
knock on as many doors
because if you want it
you need to chase it
and unless you chase it,
it's never going to happen.
So chase your dreams.
Do everything you can to achieve that dream,
you will end up doing loads of free hours
or whatever else
and you hopefully will be
in places that you learn from people
that will give you invaluable information
and I fully, fully believe
that nothing goes to waste.