Tech Track

Tech Track

Ezine Fall 20 20

Table of Contents Introduction

Computers

Games

Film

Tech Track 04

6-9

10-15

16-21

22-33

Operating System Usage

10

The Theory of Moore's Law

12

Tabletop Games vs Video Games

16

Austin Game Stores During the Pandemic 18

Animation: Getting Started

22

Animation for Amateurs

24

Let Creativity Shine with Adobe

28

Sounds Good!

30

34

Tech Track 05

Letter from the Editors

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Dear readers Thank you for taking interest in our magazine!

We hope it gives you some insight, knowledge or a better understanding of the amazing science that defines our world. It impacts and benefits so many people in so many ways, from understanding the laws of computing to providing creative outlets to free thinkers and allowing imagination to grasp science. Your interest in science and technology and the many opportunities it presents to the people who use and interact with it is important to us. We hope you enjoy this magazine, and hopefully it inspires you to learn more about how science and technology helps shape not just ourselves, but our world.

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Meet the Editors Hi! My name is Ava Saldivar and I am a 9th grader at LASA HS. I enjoy reading, hiking, and singing. A few other interests are dancing, gardening, and playing with my dogs. My goal is to go to college and major in biology, so this magazine was fun to work on. I hope you liked the magazine and learned something from it too!

Hello, My name is Richard Huang. I am a freshman at LASA High School. I love math and playing chess! I hope you like the magazine!

Hello! My name is Ana Garfield and I am a freshman at LASA. I spend my free time drawing, watching tv and hanging out with my cats, Lola and Java. I hope you learn something new and enjoy the magazine!

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Hi, I?m Mayer Stanley, a bored freshman. I like to draw, ride my bike, play soccer, and make stop motion animations. The best form of entertainment I have is watching my chickens run around and do stupid stuff, and likewise that's how I spend most of my time. I like making stupid remarks that I pass off as jokes, and thus I am a master at making conversations awkward.

Hi. I?m Lucas Benevides. I am an amateur artist, writer and programmer. I was born at a very young age. I am a big fan of technology. Technology will serve to advance humanity. It is people like us who will be inventing it.

Hello, My name is Jesse Silverman! I?m a freshman at LASA like all of the editors. I love computers and games. I?m very competitive and a bit of a perfectionist. I hope you enjoy the magazine!

Tech Track 09

Operating System Usage Who Controls Your Device

By J es s e Si l v er man

Mobi l e OS us age i n t he US I n t he Uni t ed St at es mos t peopl e us e I OS or mor e c ommonl y k nown as Appl e

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Mobi l e OS Us age i n t he Wor l d

Wor l d wi de Andr oi d c ont r ol s t he maj or i t y of mobi l e dev i c es . You mi ght r ec ogni z e t hes e br ands as Sams ung or 1+.

OS Us age i n The Wor l d

I n gener al t he mos t popul ar oper at i ng s y s t em wor l d wi de i s Mi c r os of t .

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The Theory of Moore's Law What it is and How it?s Used

By J es s e Si l v er man

Moore?s Law is the theory/ process of technology improving and at what rate it does so. It was made in 1965 by Gordon E. Moore. In more technical terms Moore?s Law is measured in the number of transistors you can fit on one chip. A transistor is a tiny object that can switch an electrical current, meaning that microscopic on and off switch.

A transistor is around ten to twenty nanometers. To give you perspective, a molecule is around 2 nanometers.

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Tr ans i s t or : Mi c r os c opi c on and of f s wi t c h.

You might be wondering how transistors work. The answer is quite simple.

Transistors are made of something called a semiconductor. Semiconductors, like silicon, only let electrical currents through at a specific voltage threshold. They can become so small because they can be made from a single element or atom.

Moore?s Law measures how fast we can shrink transistors without overheating the computer.

How important is it to know this information anyway? James Shockey, a computer science teacher at LASA says, ?It is really more a conversation item than a practical concern for most programmers,? Shockey said ?This is more a concern of chip designers and has to do with the chip manufacturing process. What matters is the technical issues that affect the process that Moore was referring to.?

Cooley went on to say that Moore?s Law was not just a prediction, but a standard. ?The thing that you also don't really see much of outside the industry is, that's not an accident, that didn't just happen,?

Cooley said ?The industry has thousands of companies that have to work together to make one chip.

It's like everything from companies that write software to help you design the chips, like CAD software, companies that make the chemicals that we use to manufacture it, equipment makers, people that dig up the silicon out of the ocean, it's just sand.?

Moore?s Law is focused on chip design and not necessarily coding.

Daniel Cooley, Chief strategy officer for Silicon Labs discussed Silicon labs?possession in this process. They play the role of designing the chips and send the models to be made by someone else. ? Silicon Labs is a chip design company. What that means is we design the chips, we don't build them ourselves,? Cooley said. ?It's like a graphic designer who designs a T-shirt, they don't actually have a factory with cotton and all of that printing equipment, they send it off, and they get a T-shirt that comes back to them. They send their design to the manufacturing company, and then in the mail, they get a T-shirt. That's kind of what we do, but for chips, we design chips, and we send the designs to a factory where the chips are actually manufactured.?

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Making chips is an intricate process that requires time and patients. It also can?t be done alone. Thousands of people work on one piece of technology sometimes no bigger than your hand or even smaller. ?The company making the chemicals is making the wrong chemicals, the company making the equipment's making the wrong equipment, and so on all the way up the stack, and no one's ready,? Cooley said. ?So eventually, people just jumped on this and said, Okay, let's just use Moore's law as our roadmap and build around it. So it wasn't like his prediction in 1965 was organic?

In order to achieve reliable efficiency technology companies learned they had to work together and be a cog in the giant machine being Moore?s Law.

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by Si l i con Labs.

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?When Gordon Moore made his prediction, one company could do all that stuff Intel was doing, they had their own factory where they made their own chips and designed their own chips and, and built their own chips and everything,? Cooley said. ?But over the years, and especially Moore's Law got really complicated. The factories cost billions of dollars, and not every company could build their own factory anymore. And the chemicals got so complicated. And the processing steps got so complicated, even people that make light bulbs used in these applications got phenomenally complex.?

This machine was always needed.

One company could make their own product without anyone or anything else. As technology became more and more compact and complicated people simply couldn?t make their product alone.

?Even to make the kind of right light bulbs to do all the etching on the patterning on the glass plates and stuff,? Cooley said. ?You eventually have hundreds of companies that have to work together, the only way to do that is to make a road map that everybody can look at. Yes, he was right and it was true for a very long time, but also the industry made it true.?

Moore?s law will go on for a very long time. What about the end of Moore?s Law. Theoretically, Transistors can get to the size of atoms, but what comes after that?

Shockey guesses that quantum computers and biological computers will come next, but Cooley argues that Moore?s law will begin to be measured in efficacy.

With the evidence provided in the near future efficiency will become a larger topic of conversation.

What is efficiency exactly?

Efficiency isn?t the amount of raw power. It?s what we can accomplish with that amount of power.

Efficiency is trying to make the most out of limited resources.

Specifically, Cooley thinks computing will become more heterogeneous.

What this means is that computers will move tasks to where they will be done the quickest. For example, running complex equations would be best done in the area of a computer called the GPU or graphics processing unit. Also, we will become more energy efficient.

That means it will take less electrical power to use computers. A fascinating example would be your brain. It only functions on around 25 watts of power and is incredibly complex.

Moore?s Law isn?t just a graph. It?s the future of technology and possibly the world.

?I look forward to that, for technology, for computing. Just this pervasive, secure, safe computing.

We have computers, we have phones, but that is only the beginning and it's not really safe yet. Look at all the malware and viruses. Now once you have this kind of safe, secure, pervasive computing, you can just start sending data left and right anywhere you need to at any time, just like power, today, we can send it anywhere. And it doesn't most of the time burn down the forest and it doesn't most of the time burn down the forest and it doesn't exist enables our lives for things like washing your dishes, and also the fun stuff like maybe watching Netflix on your TV.

I'm computing is gonna be the same thing. It's just not there yet. It's still on this massive growth, electricity tools I don't know 100 years, kind of the 1870s or 1880s till maybe a little bit after World War Two, maybe even further, depending on how you measure it.

And I'm not joking. We're still in the early days of computing. It just doesn't seem like it because you and I are living in it. What am I looking forward to? The power of computing everywhere, secure, safe, reliable, cheap, value add value creation. I think it empowers individuals, and it makes the world a better place.?

Cooley said, discussing his hopes for the future of technology.

It is almost an inevitability that we will get there through hard work and improvement. Just like every other industry, we will master computing and keep innovating.

There is no true end to Moore?s Law because it will adapt and transform with technology. There will just be different sagas of it.

Technology, in the end, will never stop.

To s ee t he t r ans i s t or i n y our dev i c e y ou woul d hav e t o us e a v er y power f ul mi c r os c ope!

Tech Track 15

Tabletop Games Who's the winner?

by Luc as Benav i des

7.2 billion The estimated global market value of tabletop games

Forecast to reach a value of 12 billion U.S. dollars by 2023.

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While the number of tabletop gamers is not known, there are estimates of 6-15 million players worldwide, though it could easily be more. much more.

of

Video Games 164 million adults play video games in the United States.

by 2022, the video game industry could be worth 196 billion.

In 2018, people spent

43 billion on video games.

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We're all stuck at home, Now what?

How game stores in Austin have been dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic

By Luc as Benav i des

The i nt er i or of

Ti t an Moon bef or e t he pandemi c .

I mage pr ovi ded by Bal e T.

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These days, most people (who can) are sheltering-in-place with the COVID-19 Pandemic. Because of the general boredom, many of them are looking for entertainment at home and they?re turning to or rediscovering games. Tabletop games can foster friendship and connection while engaging in a social activity that is creative and collaborative like D&D, mildly competitive and focused on problem-solving such as Werewolves or Mafia, or highly competitive and soul-crushing like Monopoly. Some games are viewed as intellectual challenges, like Chess or Go, or mindless and silly like Apples to Apples, Uno or Sushi Go! There are hundreds of different games geared towards different audiences, ages, interests, and purposes. Many people like playing board games and tabletop games with friends or at the game store, but right now, that just

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isn?t a viable option. Because of this, both stores and customers have had to change.

Some game stores, such as Titan Moon Comics, have branched out into new mediums of retail such as shipping and delivery, as opposed to buying in The pandemic has been bad news for person. Haley is a manager at Titan businesses across the nation, losing Moon Comics; ?For me personally, It them money and customers, and takes an open mind to do things in a requiring extra safety precautions. new way.? She also said that ?the One type of business that has been shutdown has allowed us to branch out significantly affected is Game Stores. in terms of product offerings when Game Stores are where you buy and people are staying at home, staying play board games (e.g., Dungeons safe.? She felt that, for Titan Moon, ?it and Dragons, Ticket to Ride, Settlers was very important to us that we of Catan, Sushi Go!), card games continued to offer our customers their (i.e., Magic the Gathering, YuGiOh, escape from the craziness of the Pokemon), collectibles, miniatures, world.? and comics. Unfortunately, all of these things involve human While Titan Moon has implemented interaction. Because of this, many precautions such as limited capacity or customers, finding themselves unable curbside pickup, it is not the only to meet with friends, have switched to game store that has had to change its things such as playing virtual tabletop practices during the pandemic. David games or playing games through Wheeler founded Dragon?s Lair in platforms such as Zoom and Discord. 1986. Back in the 80s, comic books Gamers have been learning how to and tabletop games were not well play the games by watching live regarded, which was yet another streaming instruction, or YouTube reason for him to create the store. Mr. Gr ad Pr i x Rot t er dam i n 2009, s uc h gat her i ngs ar e not tutorials.

Wheeler wanted there to be a place I mages pr ov i ded by Sebas t i anpeople Ri t t who au loved comics and where echTT rack 26 20 TT ech rack

games could come and sit and play together. He says Dragon?s Lair is a space for everyone, including LGBTQ people. Wheeler is proud that Dragon?s Lair has such a diverse community. ?I have four stores and some of them are struggling more than others. But we're in a pandemic and we're going to come out the other side,? Wheeler said. ?We will still be here for our customers, and vice versa.? During these times, the Dragon?s Lair Community has been very supportive, and so has Dragon?s Lair.

While game stores may be confident about surviving the pandemic, there are other concerns about their business in general, namely video games. As video games are increasingly popular, it is no surprise that they might encroach on the tabletop game territory. One way video games might impact tabletop gaming is that video games are accessible at home, and you can play online, without having to physically interact with other players. s af e any mor e.

Video games have mostly been geared towards the teen-age boy shoot-em-up

demographic, but are starting to get in on the full-spectrum of audience interests, with games like Myst and Riven, Minecraft, Zelda Breath of the Wild, Firewatch, and Untitled Goose Game.

In recent times there have been games such as Magic the Gathering (MTG) Arena and Baldur?s Gate 3 that are video game versions of popular tabletop games. ?I've seen video games that complement D&D or other games for decades now.

Baldur's Gate 1 (or, as we called it then, Baldur's Gate) was based on the D&D engine,? Wheeler said. ?On the whole, I don't think that it has influenced board games, or RPGs, one way or another. If anything, it may have brought more people to play Roleplaying Games or other types of games based around a strong video game. The Dragon Age video game spawned it's own Roleplaying Game. Civ, having been originally based on a board game, resulted in a card game as well as another board game.? Video Games may serve to improve tabletop games, by introducing new ideas and bringing them more players. In the future, famous video games may find themselves in a board game format.

What will happen moving forward?

While the future may be uncertain, it is important to adapt to the current circumstances to survive. Whatever happens, we can know that game stores will certainly be very different, both in the way they sell and distribute products, as well as the products that they sell.

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I mage pr ov i ded by J es s i c a Bur t on.

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Animation - Getting Started

By May er St anl ey

The Things You Need Everything from filming to editing

1 Programs- you need a digital program to edit and shoot with. If your looking for low budget, Stop motion studio on iPhone is the way to go.

Source: Motion Design School

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2 Object of Animationyou need something to animate. anything can work- Paper, clay, even a rock, if you are creative: with stop motion, any everyday object can come to life.

Camera- you need to capture your animation so it is able to come to life.

If your a beginner, a smart phone works fine.

3 4

Surface to Animate onany old tabletop is a good choice that you will most likely need, with many diverse uses, from clay animation to paper animation.

Graphics made using Gravit.

5 Lighting- lighting can make or break your animation. You don't want any flickering or lighting changes, so cover up any outside light and get two lamps for good light.

6

Tripod- having your camera attached to a tripod greatly improves the quality of your animation, and keeps the camera still.

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Animation for Amateurs The inspiration and kickoff to your stop motion journey

By Mayer Stanley

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Imagine a rock, normally dull and stationary, acting like a jet airplane.

Dipping and curving through the air like leaves in the rivulets of a river, or swerving unpredictably like a butterfly on the breeze. You might think it to be impossible, right? How could a single rock do all that? How can something so lifeless become so lively? Well, with the help of some set pieces and a little camera magic, it can do much more.

Animation. We see it everywhere, from feature films to commercials to video games. It has hugely influenced the entertainment and advertising industry, and is a prominent part of the digital age. In fact, our day-to-day lives are influenced by animation. If you are looking at a screen, you're most likely looking at an animation of some form.

There is one kind of animation that is particularly mesmerizing: stop motion animation. The act of placing an object in front of a camera, taking a picture of it, moving or rearranging it slightly, and taking another picture so that it looks like the object is moving. It sounds so simple on paper, but in reality it is anything but. Whether you?ve seen the stop motion animated films of Wallace and Grommit or LEGO stop motion animations on YouTube, you?ve probably seen or heard of it at one point or another.

Stop motion is truly one of the most interesting and visually stunning forms of animation out there.

Virginia Rowland is a teacher, filmmaker and animator who teaches an animation class at Lamar Middle school. She has many years of experience with digital media and

animation and has made several short films. ?What really got me interested in college were these experimental film classes I took,? Rowland said.

?One of my instructors really got me into experimental film and I took a super eight class, so I started making video collage, and I would just go around everywhere with my camera and film interesting things I saw.?

Nowadays, filming and editing your own movies and animation is easy, because almost everyone has a phone. There are a lot of free programs people can use to get started creating media, and Rowland says any animation or film you want to make is right at your fingertips. ?Everyone has a phone,? Rowland said. ?I used to think, ?Man, I wish

I had always this little camera on me that I could walk around with and get the weirdest things that I see,?and now we all have our iPhones and free programs. All my students are using all kinds or free tools, Flipaclip, Stop Motion studio, iMovie. And then of course, more professional, nonlinear editing where you can layer video, layer audio, and more on programs like After Effects.?

Animating or film-making in general is a great way to express yourself, and can be an alternative to writing essays in school. Many people find films and animation to be one of the most expressive forms of art; and allows you to show your perspective to others and really tell a compelling and interesting story. ?In school, my teachers would say, ?write a paper on this or that,?and I would just say ?can I make a movie instead??? Rowland said. ?I think video collages are a good beginning thing to do, and they bring the third dimension to a 2D piece.

They are something I used to do a lot. And it was good practice to go back through things, not Tech Track 25

just shoot them, but then make the edit too.?

In animation, there are many different mediums and types of

camera lists, where you just paint on the film, some of those can create the most dynamic and creative movement. Drawing on a film tape frame by frame. like stop

acted in various short films. She has over 15 years of experience in film-making. ?My profession is split in half,?

Mokry said. ?I'm an artist, and

An ani mat or wor k i ng on a s t op mot i on f i l m r epos i t i ons a c har ac t er wor k i ng on a s hot . I mage pr ovi ded by asi f aeast .

animation to choose from, ranging from digital animation to stop motion. And even within stop motion, there are so many

motion object animation. You think of different people who do things like that, Pez, Evelyn Lambert, Norman McLaren. So many animators who, if you see their stuff, just totally amaze different materials and objects you you and convince you to make can animate and ways to do so. something like it yourself.?

Claymation, paper animation, 2D, LEGO, found object animation, the Vanessa Mokry is a film and media teacher who has been teaching range of possibility is huge. audio-visual production at the Liberal ?I like experimental animation,?

Arts and Science Academy since Rowland said. ?What you call 2007 and has written, directed and Tech Track 26

I'm a creative person. But I'm also a teacher who's trying to inspire young people. And that's probably what's made me stick with it, because every year I get so inspired by what I see the students do with the new technology, new tools, and new stories.?

Most people who are starting out making films don't have any fancy high tech or high budget

equipment or software. One of the things that draws people away from film is the equipment you need for it. Although there are many things that you can make with a low budget, they do have their limitations. You have to learn how to not only work with those limitations, but even use them to strengthen your film or animation. ?Figure out how to tell a story in pieces and in angles. Make it so that it works with your low budget,?

Mokry said. ?Everybody can make a film, but probably not everybody should. Just because you make a film doesn't mean it's going to be good, and it's going to go anywhere. So you still have to have something to say and be able to say it intentionally with visuals and

other aspects of elements that will tell the story.?

Many people have a hard time getting anywhere with their films.

The path to actually making animation or film for a living is a difficult one and very few people actually make it to the professional level. But no matter your animation goals or how experienced you are, practice is key. ?Make a movie,? Mokry said. ?And then you know what you do after that, you make another movie. And then you know what? You'll learn.

Because you make another movie.

Every opportunity is a learning opportunity. So take every single opportunity that you get to learn.

And at some point, after you've made a number of films, you start

to figure out your voice, you start to get better, you start to also have your intentions come through.?

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Let creativity shine with Adobe Are you new to the Adobe Creative Cloud?

Try using these programs in your upcoming projects.

By Ana Gar f i el d

Premiere Pro Adobe Premiere Pro is an amazing program for video editing. Its nonlinear timeline allows for precise, high quality edits. Premiere Pro is perfect for beginners and professionals. It lets users to add titles and sound effects, and it's very easy to use with other Adobe programs. Try editing your next video with Adobe Premiere Pro!

I nf or mat i on pr ov i ded by Adobe.

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Photoshop Adobe Photoshop is an extremely useful program that serves several different purposes. It allows you to edit and manipulate photos, create digital art work and put together animations. Its large collection of brushes and tools allows for precise editing that is appreciated by beginners and experts alike.

Audition Adobe Audition is an extremely powerful DAW (digital audio workspace) that allows you to edit and mix sound without destroying it. Audition can be used for editing or creating music, recording and mixing sound for a project and compiling sounds for movies. This intuitive program will make any project easier to work with.

Gr aphi c s made wi t h Adobe I l l us t r at or

Illustrator Adobe Illustrator is a vector based art program that allows clean illustrations to be created. Since it uses vectors instead of pixels, it can be resized without losing image quality and resolution. This makes illustrator files convenient to use on logos, websites and things that need to be printed. The quality will never decrease and your project will look professional.

InDesign Adobe InDesign is a high quality software that is used to create professional layouts for print and digital publishing. It has easy access to several fonts and other features that make it extra useful when designing spreads. There are even tools that wrap text around a subject or find colors for you!

After Effects Adobe After Effects is the perfect software to add motion graphics and effects to your videos. It makes it easy to combine video layers with photos and rotoscope things out. After Effects allows you to create the professional and seamless finish that every video editor wants.

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Sounds Good!

Specialists Explain the Art of Audio Technology

By Ana Gar f i el d

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The movie starts, and the immersive sound teleports you into the story. You aren?t in the theater anymore, you?re in the middle of an intense action scene. You can hear the blades whooshing around as the fighting continues, and your eyes are glued to the screen. Even after the movie ends, you can still hear the clank of the swords, almost as if you were in the film.

Audio technology allows movie directors to express their creativity in a way that is unique in both the tech and the art world. The work that the sound editors and mixers produce makes the movie sound clear and any edit that is made is seamless. Every detail that the foley artist adds or the sound designer creates puts you in the world of the movie.

Good audio in a movie enables the audience to become so entranced that they feel like they?re inside the story.

And if the sound team is successful, you won?t even notice the work they put in.

Wayne Bell, Susan Fitz-Simon and Glenn Eanes work at Soundcrafter, a post-production audio company in Austin, Texas. They have experience in every step of the post-production audio process. ?Sound editing is taking thousands of little audio clips and cutting them up, putting fades on them and making them sound seamless by listening to, for example, the background sounds in the dialogue. You might hear air conditioning in one shot and not in another, and you have to try to clean those things up to make it play very smoothly,? Eanes said.

Sound editors have to replace missing dialogue, record and cut in effects and clean up different audio clips so they flow smoothly. Most of this editing is done in Pro Tools.

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Jacob Weiss, the manager of media production services in the Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services (LAITS) at UT Austin, says that Pro Tools is the industry standard for sound editing.

completed, including mixing.

?There's a lot of ways that you can record audio, but Pro Tools was one of the first computer programs to do it in the 90's. It's sort of known as the industry standard, so a lot of people use it. They use it in movies, every Grammy Award winning album is produced on Pro Tools, you get the idea,? Weiss said.

The other part of a mixer?s job is sitting with the client and making sure that the work fits their needs.

?Mixers have to make all of the [audio] tracks [in a project] weave together to sound like it's one single continuity. It's a big mess, and the mixer is the guy that's stuck trying to fix it,? Bell said.

While mixing, the volume of different parts is controlled. This allows the mixer to emphasize parts of the audio by making it louder or quieter. A mixer could lower the soundtrack so a conversation can be heard and then Since its release in the 90s, Pro Tools raise it when things start to get intense. has proven to be extremely useful. It Korey Pereira is the owner of Soularity allows different audio jobs to be Sound, a post-production audio Tech Track 31

company that is based in Austin, Texas. across with just audio.

He works as a mixer, along with other As new Pro Tools updates come out, positions, when he does the audio for the number of tasks that it can a project. complete increases. It can now run 768 ?As a mixer, it's my job to understand audio tracks, and it?s compatible with the director's vision and help the multi-channel formats like Dolby Atmos. audience understand that vision while Many mixers, including Pereira, use also understanding what the characters Atmos to create the perfect on screen are trying to say. A lot of environment for their projects. that involves the finesse of trying to Dolby Atmos is an immersive sound get things sounding the way a movie format that puts the audience in the sounds to a point where there's a lot of energy in a big scene, but you can movie by having several speakers surrounding a room. The extra speakers still hear people talking. That's really important, at least to me, that you can make the sound come from every part always hear what people are saying. of the room, fully immersing you in the And then occasionally, when you get story. When a mixer works in Atmos, into weird head spaces, you may want they have full control over how the audience hears the sound in their to obscure that intentionally. If project. someone's distracted, you may start muffling different sounds and changing the way the audience is hearing. That's part of the mixing process,? Pereira said.

The control over the sound lets the mixer, in conjunction with the director, be creative in how they get a message

said.

The grid in Atmos represents the theater. The mixer can control which speakers the sound comes out of, the intensity of the sound and where it goes. The complete control that mixers have allow them to create realistic sounds for their movies.

?Let's say I was making a scene where someone is triggering a memory and they look over to the stove and hear a kettle that starts whining,? Pereira said, ?I might start with a really small dot panned a little bit to the right, right where that kettle is. But then as we start going into their head, I might make that ball get bigger and bigger and bigger, and then start moving up into the air and get to a point where it's now coming from every speaker ?When you work in Atmos, you have a around me and above me. Then I grid that looks like a room and a little might add a little low frequency dot. I can choose how big the dot is, element to it to make the subwoofer and I can move it up and down, start rumbling. And then you're in this forward and backwards, and have full crazy surreal space that I can then control over where it moves. And it's all morph into the memory that they're in real time and automatable,? Pereira flashing back to and thn have a

Dol by At mos Pr oduc t i on Sui t e al l ows f or mi x i ng i n t he Dol by At mos 3D audi o f or mat .

The gr een dot s i n t he bot t om r i ght c or ner s how whi c h s peak er t he s ound wi l l c ome out of i f i t i s pl ay ed i n a mov i e t heat er . I mage pr ovi ded by Kor ey Per ei r a.

Tech Track 32

whole set of sounds emerge. I can then move around that space. So you have a lot of control as a mixer.?

Atmos may put you in the world of the movie, but the effect isn?t truly felt unless foleys are used. Foleys are recorded live sound effects that are put in sync with the picture.

Foleys are used to enhance pre-existing sound or fill up dead space. They liven up the scene and make it seem more life-like. Foleys are needed even when you aren?t working in Atmos. ?Foley is generally a little more exaggerated than what really is happening in life,? Fitz-Simon said, ?For instance, if someone takes up some cash out of a billfold you don't hear that in real life. Cash doesn't make sound. But in the foley world, we make everything make sound and create sound for pretty much every single thing that an actor touches, moves, shifts, we do all their footsteps, we do a whole cloth pass.

It's pretty elaborate.?

As new t ec hnol ogy get s mor e popul ar , ol der audi o f or mat s need t o be c onv er t ed i nt o audi o f i l es . Thi s mac hi ne c onv er t s r eel t o r eel audi o t o a us abl e audi o f i l e, I mage pr ovi ded by Jacob Wei ss, UT Aust i n

to run on an old computer. This can cause files to get lost, and replacing the technology can get expensive.

There are ways to convert old files, but the process is difficult and time consuming.

?Professional computers can cost anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000.

You want them to last for at least five years, if not longer, because Bell describes foley as an art form that whenever you switch them out, there might be other ramifications,? Weiss is almost like a dance. Foley artists said. work with mixers to make sure that their recordings fit in with the rest of This is an expensive task, and it often the audio. requires additional upgrades. The ?Susan [Fitz-Simon] is in a room with the microphone dancing this stuff while whoever is mixing it is in the next room listening to make sure that it sounds right. Foley is very much a performance,? Bell said.

upgrade to MacOS Catalina made Macs be able to process audio in 64-bit. While 64-bit is faster and has more abilities, older software that ran in 32-bit wasn?t compatible with the new update. Business owners have to= decide when the new technology outweighs the price and time that it costs.

come with their own audio software, and recording devices are getting cheaper and easier to use.

The result of this is a boom of creativity, and our ears are filled with it every time we consume media. If Bell, Eanes, Fitz-Simon, Pereira and Weiss could give any advice it would be to get out and record. There is no better time than now to mess with sound. ?For all of the things that you could say are good and bad about technology, I think that [the younger generations] are more familiar with it.

You have the opportunity,? Weiss said.

Technology is more accessible than ever, and there is nothing stopping you from being behind the next big movie with the immersive sound.

While advances in technology are normally a good thing, there are some drawbacks. A new computer might not be able to run old software, As technology advances, it also gets more accessible. Many computers and new software might not be able

Tech Track 33

Thank You f or Readi ng

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