Ann Stroeber- On Campus Event

Senior Portfolio 9-11:20pm class -- attendance is optional.

Senior Portfolio 12-2:20 pm class -- attendance is MANDATORY.
All afternoon meetings are postponed until Tuesday 9/11

Blog responses due by Friday the 7th by 5 pm.

Kinetic Imaging welcomes sound designer, Ann Kroeber, Thursday, September 6 at noon in the Student Commons Theater.

Ann Kroeber has supplied sound effects for such diverse films as The Black Stallion, The English Patient, Gladiator, the Lord of the Rings films, Hidalgo, The Horse Whisperer, the recent Star Wars trilogy, and many others. Kinetic Imaging’s Stephen Vitiello spoke with Ms. Kroeber and tells me this…

Although she is often called upon to supply sounds from her huge collection of animal noises/vocalizations, she is also renowned for her unusual recordings of sounds from everyday life, many recorded with a FRAP (Frequency Response Audio Pickup) contact microphone custom-made many years ago by an English audio guru named Arnie Lazarus. In fact, the Hollywood Edge FX library even put out a disc of her FRAP recordings–Common Sounds Heard in Uncommon Ways—as part of a three-CD set called Sounds of a Different Realm. The other two of the discs are dominated by the work of her late husband, Oscar-winning FX designer/editor Alan Splett, who did groundbreaking work with Carroll Ballard, David Lynch, and other directors before his untimely passing in 1995.

I checked in with Kroeber recently to talk about her sound design work on Ballard’s forthcoming film Duma, about the adventures of a young boy and a cheetah in South Africa (set for mid-February release; the article will appear in the March issue of Mix), and while I was admiring her wall of hundreds of SFX audio tapes in her office at the Saul Zaentz Film Center in Berkeley, she revealed that many of the reels were from Alan Splett’s one-of-a-kind collection of sound effects compiled by the American Film Institute through the years.

“Alan worked at the AFI when he was doing [David Lynch’s] Eraserhead,” she says. “He was hired to catalog their sound library, and he also made copies of the tapes for himself as part of their arrangement. Then there was a flood in their basement and [the AFI’s] copies were ruined, so then Alan had the only copies. And it’s just amazing stuff. There’s all sorts of World War II airplanes that were done for old movies. There’s traffic in the ’40s and ’50s in different cities–it just sound so different that what you hear now. There’s people’s voices–old walla; it’s different, too. And the sound quality on a lot of it is awesome. I’d love to work with the AFI to make it available.”

Ideally, Kroeber could get a grant to pay for digitizing the entire collection and putting it up online, making it available to students and sound professionals for the first time. Nothing is in the offing at the moment, but perhaps something will soon materialize.