AUDIO FOR ANIMATION
How great sound makes for a great animated experience
Animation, for screens, big and small, poses unique challenges for sound designers and mixers. As fun or fantastic as the animated visuals may be, apart from the dialogue recording, which precedes the creation of the animation, the project typically lacks sound when it reaches their hands.
SEEING 5.1 MIGRATION
“When you create sound for animation there’s no production track to help guide you.” notes Jim Hodson, president of Burbank’s Advantage Audio, a full-service audio post facility with a long history of working with well-known animated products from Disney, Universal and Sony. “That can be very exciting for your creatives—making the animation come to life with input from the director. Often there’s no stock sound to pull out of a bag; you have to create something and make it work and flow. It’s not only a challenge. It’s fun!”
Advantage Audio offers dialogue editorial, sound effects creation and editorial in four digital suites, Foley, and mixing on two 5.1 stages; a third 5.1 mix stage opens this month. Digidesign Pro ToolsHD systems sport the newest software. Control Room A has been outfitted with a two-position Icon mixing console with over 300 tracks of audio, a Panasonic 1080i projector and a 16x9 Stewart screen.
Recent and current credits include Sony’s Boondocks series, Universal’s Curious George and Land Before Time; Disney’s Kim Possible, My Friends Tigger & Pooh and the Phineas & Ferb; and Nickelodeon’s Fairly Odd Parents.
“Our sound editors are really designers; they come up with great sounds for the shows we do” using the sampler-based Emulator E4 for designing and building sound effects, says Hodson. The company may move to Digidesign Structure systems once they’re out of beta testing, he reports.
The Foley stage is also kept constantly busy. “We Foley everything,” Hodson notes. “We feel very strongly about that. It’s hard to replace live Foley; there’s an element of liveliness there you can’t get with synthetic or electronic cuts.” Hodson observes that a number of mixes for animated shows that would have been stereo just last year are”finally migrating to 5.1. And the ones that haven’t done 5.1 mixes yet are talking about it. They say, “If not this one, maybe the next show.” And any project with a DVD shelf life wants a 5.1 soundtrack.”
ACCIDENTS AND LUCK
With a distinguished list of feature film credits that stretches back to Apocalypse Now, Randy Thom, director of sound design at Skywalker Sound (www.skysound.com) in Nicasio, CA, has a lot on his plate. The Academy Award-winner finished Ratatouille, which opened in June, and is working on Beowulf, Enchanted and The Simpsons movie.
“We’ve covered a lot of ground this year from Homer Simpson to Beowulf,” he laughs. “We let every project we do guide our work and the style of work we do. I like to think it’s a mark of a good sound designer to be versatile enough to adapt to a variety of styles.”
The Simpsons, a dialogue-driven comedy, brings its “well-established sound sensibility” from TV to theatre screens. “The people making the movie want it to be as cinematic as appropriate, but there’s always a danger that if you do anything too wild or crazy with sound effects they’ll distract you from what’s funny about the moment.” Though very different from each other stylistically, Ratatouille and Beowulf “are a little more prepared to use sound and sound effects in a broader; more diverse way.” He says.
Ratatouille, the story of a plucky little rat who channels the spirit of his hero, a French chef; and becomes one himself, “presented all kinds of interesting possibilities for sound.” Thom reports. When Remy and his colony are chased from a farm into a storm-surging river, they cling to floating objects and take a frightening ride through whitewater, over waterfalls and into whirlpools before reaching a sewer drain under Paris.
“When you record white-water rapids it sounds like noise—a constant roar. So you have to take artistic liberties and make sound vary more than it really would,” Thom points out. “And you have to make it sound as watery as possible—you expect to hear that. So we recorded sloshes and splashes in swimming pools and added them.”
Director Brad Bird wanted the impact of Remy sucked into a whirlpool and hitting a wall of water to be extreme, Thom recalls. “We used recordings of explosions for the moment he hits the wall and combined them with whirlpool sounds and easily-identifiable water sounds. When Remy is submerged we used more explosions made underwater. In the 5.1 channel space of the theatre, they’re pretty effective synched to his movements.”
Thom crafted the signature sound of the chef’s spirit and carefully exercised restraint when the chef hovers for a minute or two in sequences. “If you maintain his magic tinkly sound too long, it becomes distracting,” he says, “so we use it when he appears and disappears and gracefully lower the sound in between so the audience doesn’t notice it.”
Thom is armed with Pro ToolsHD and lots of plug-ins, including Altiverb from Audio Ease, an impulse response reverb, and Pitch-N-Time from Serato, which alters the pitch and duration of sound dynamically. He taps Skywalker Sound’s vast library of proprietary and commercial sound libraries and records on location with a Sound Devices 722 and Schoeps MS mic.
“There’s a huge amount of accident and serendipity involved in the work we do,” Thom notes. “You have to develop an ear open to the sounds around you and not think too literally.”
SOUNDS LIKE A HERO
In between radio and TV commercials, documentaries and independent films, San Francisco’s Polarity Post (www.polaritypost.com) has performed ongoing sound design and the final mix for Higglytown Heroes, a 3D-animated series from Wild Brain, which airs on The Disney Channel’s Playhouse Disney programming block.
The first series the audio post house has tackled, Higglytown Heroes has been at Polarity Post for the four years of its run. In each episode its Russian nesting dolls-style characters encounter problems they can’t solve so they seek out hometown heroes to save the day.
Since Polarity Post worked on the series since its inception, its first task was to craft signature sounds for the characters. “Nobody has legs or feet in Higglytown—they kind of hop, zip and scoot around—so we had to apply sound to their movements and to the attributes of their character,” says senior engineer/ sound designer Patrick Fitzgerald, who works in one of the company’s five Pro Tools Studios. He is assisted on the show by Eduardo Mendoza and Brad Semenoff.
The little girl character Twinkle, loves pink and anything that glitters. “We gave her sparkly chimes and bell sounds,” he says,” She hops with short, sharp, chirpy sounds, like a bulb horn.” Kip, the smallest boy rockets around Higglytown accompanied by a siren whistle. Fitzgerald recorded a dink-dink sound for his hops by striking a pencil with a pin stuck on it on a countertop. Wayne moves with loose and floppy actions created by balloon hits and flicking a ruler at the countertop. Eubie, the biggest boy, waddles along with resonant thumps on balloons and an empty five-gallon bottle.
Looking for woodsy, organic sounds for Fran the squirrel, the kids’ mentor, Fitzgerald selected a wooden temple block played like a percussion instrument.
“Recurring sounds were loaded in a Mach 5 sampler, a MOTU plug-in, and triggered from MIDI in ProToolsHD, “ Fitzgerald explains. “The characters’ movements were more cartoony than realistic. They added texture to organic, realistic sounds that made the 3D Higglytown seem like a real place.”
Situational sounds were different for every episode. One of the strangest ones involved chasing a bowling ball rolling down the street. “That’s not in a sound library,” Fitzgerald notes, “So we took to the street late at night with a bowling ball and chased it with a mic.”
In the show’s final episode of the season, the kids arrive late to a concert hall where They Might Be Giants, who sing the series’ opening and closing themes, are performing. “Usually, when the lights go out the crowd goes crazy, but the animation didn’t show this: It pulled out to a shot showing the crowd just sitting,” Fitzgerald recalls. “Sound had to bridge the gap and fill in the action that wasn’t there.” He buried a cheer heard when the lights went out, then added the sound of an announcer warming up a crowd so when the shot pulls out the crowd appears to be listening to him.
The stereo mix for Higglytown Heroes was fairly straightforward, a matter of “polishing things and making subtle changes so the dialogue came through clearly,” says Fitzgerald, who mixed in Pro Tools with a Euphonix CS2000 for monitoring. “It’s been a great project to work on; it gave us a chance to explore the show’s audio needs in depth.”
ANIME
With Japanese anime popping up all over cable, Bang Zoom! Studios’ decade-plus experience with the genre serves them well in the growing market. The audio post house for Burbank’s Bang Zoom! Entertainment (www.bangzoomentertainment.com), Bang Zoom! Studios typically handles the anime adaptation process, reworking M&E tracks, retooling scripts and revoicing characters, sometimes with celebrities cast in the roles.
“We ask for discrete music and effects tracks, but a lot of times we’re told that Japanese producers didn’t make them or didn’t have time to do them, but there’s still a lot we can do to the tracks,” says president Eric P. Sherman. “Often they’re not as dynamic as US tracks and the mix isn’t as cinematic and complex as American audiences are used to. We place sounds in the environment and add perspective, try to bring up the sound effects and add oomph to the music.”
The revoicing process is lengthy and painstaking and requires very precise ADR. “Our goal is to make the viewer forget the original was voiced in Japanese,” says Sherman. “We have to rewrite the script with care for the lipsync and not stray from the original meaning.”
The company boasts four ADR rooms outfitted with Neumann U87 mics, the latest Mac computers and Avid Mojo systems for video playback. New dialogue is slipped, slid, stretched and compressed via ProToolsHD. The stereo mix, performed in Pro Tools with a Control24 surface, is also a delicate balancing act. “We’re instructed not to play with the sound effects other than increasing their levels, adding reverb or processing.” Sherman explains. “But at the same time we’re asked to do a 5.1 conversion of the 2.0 M&E. When we record dialogue we convert the 2.0 to 5.1 and end up with a 5.1 mix so we can add enhanced sound effects to the environment when no one’s looking.”
Anime’s J Pop music is usually left alone. “Fans want original Japanese lyrics with subtitles,” notes Sherman. In fact, “the standard for anime on DVD gives viewers the option to put on Romanji, a phonetic transliteration of the Japanese, so they can sing along.”
Bang Zoom! Studios usually has 20 anime titles at a time—series, features, or videogames—in-house; anime comprises about 80 percent of the work. The company recently completed the much awaited first DVD for the number-one series in Japan, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, DVD releases for the Rozen Maiden and When They Cry series, and two seasons of the series IGPX for Cartoon Network with celebrity voice actors, including Haley Joel Osment, Lance Henriksen and Sponge Bob’s Tom Kenny. Bang Zoom! Studios is also known for its work on Witch Hunter Robin and Rurouni Kenshin on Cartoon Network, Lost Exile on G4, and Chobits on the Anime Network.
“Initially the idea behind bringing anime here was to completely change it to make it palatable to US audiences,” Sherman recalls, “Now the idea is to remain as faithful as you can to the original. The fans appreciate that about our work.”
LARGE & SUBTLE SOUNDS
“I love sound design and mixing for animation. It’s fun and freeing—I feel like a kid in a toy store,” says Gary Zacuto, president/creative director of Santa Monica’s Shoreline Studios (www.shorelinestudios.com) “Your mandate is to make it work, and there are usually no boundaries.”
An audio engineer and mixer by trade, Zacuto works in a large Studio Bauton-designed 5.1 space featuring ProToolsHD with a Pro Control surface and dual monitors. He maintains a terabyte of sound effects on hard drives managed by Soundminer.
Animation is a major component of Shoreline’s diversified clientele. Zacuto did the sound design and mix for Mike, Lou & Og on Cartoon Network and, with sound designer Chris Trent, did the sound design and mix for Blur Studio’s hilarious Academy Award-nominated animated short, Gopher Broke in which he gave voice to a righteously-indignant gopher.
Lately, Shoreline has re-teamed with Blur on game cinematics, one-to-two minute trailers used as marketing tools for video games. “Most game cinematics are war-based,” notes Zacuto. “Animated by Blur, they’re very refined by designed to replicate the game.”
The game cinematic for Empire Earth: 3 was delivered in May. Zacuto collaborated with composer Rob Cairns to give “a more cohesive feel” to the big music score and sound design. The piece opens in a thunderstorm with a huge warrior army ready to charge. Arrows fly and strike shields. The lead character sheds its armor and is revealed to be a female; time shifts and she’s suddenly in a gunfight in the American West. Time shifts again and she’s a metal-clad robot with built-in firepower.
“We transition through three totally different periods with muskets, ricochets, powerful footsteps, huge metal pieces clashing, explosions,” says Zacuto of the rich sound design opportunities. “We always try to make the sounds larger than life. It’s our signature.”
But Zacuto also knows the power of subtle sounds. “You might not really hear the sound of picking up a musket in the Old West sequence but we try to give it some detail,” he explains. “If the sound is there it gives a sense of realism and supports the action.”
For the weapons that shoot out of the woman warrior’s robotic arms Zacuto mixed machine gun sounds with low-end percussive hits and punchy sounds. “It’s so rapid fire that the decay of one shot masks the impact of the next,” he points out. Zacuto also performed the game cinematic’s stereo mix.
At press time, Shoreline was gearing up for 15 game cinmatics for a big name title. “They will be used within the game itself as game enrichment to take players to the next level,” says Zacuto. “There will be an economy of scale because we’ll be repeating sounds within the same game, but we’ll also be enhancing certain distinctive sounds.”
SPOTS, FILMS, GAMES, MORE
Diversity reigns at LA Studios (www.lastudios.com) in Hollywood where audio for animation ranges from M&M, Fruit Loops and Keebler Elves spots to videogames, Internet cartoons, Disney animated TV Series and promos, and the features Over The Hedge and Shrek The Third.
The company starts with voice recording, “even the casting process for features,” says mixer Larry Winer. “We bring in people to see how they work off other actors, perhaps the star and potential cast members. We have a very comfortable, relaxed atmosphere here, and we’re across the street from Universal and close to Warner Bros.”
LA Studios does dialogue editing on Pro ToolsHD for TV animation and creative editing of sound elements for features. “We did the Tarzan yell for the Chris Rock character in Madagascar,” reports Winer. “They wanted to emulate the yell without actually using it so Chris gave us a lot of yells and screams, we built the yell and handed it to the editors at Dreamworks.”
The company also handles ADR and foreign language dubbing. It mixes commercials and promos on Pro Tools; features are typically mixed on bigger stages.
Most recently LA Studios extended its history of dialogue recording and looping for Shrek. Senior mixer Carlos Sotolongo worked on the original feature, Winer did the Shrek 4D theme park experience at Universal Studios, and they both teamed on Shrek 2, Shrek 3 and Shrek The Halls, an upcoming ABC holiday special. Winer and Sotolongo used Pro Tools, Neumann U87 mics and Millennia mic preamps on the jobs.
The mixers also handle audio for animated promos for the series Kim Possible, Little Einsteins, American Dragon and others. “We use dialogue lifted from the shows along with background sound effects, which we enhance via sound design,” notes Winer. “Editors often edit the music but rely on us for sound design and layering sound effects.”
“We also take the music and re-edit it to accentuate effects in the spot,” says Sotolongo. “If the producers say they need effects here, here and here, sometimes we’re able to accomplish that with a music hit.”
The promo for American Dragon featured explosions, fight scenes and background and ambient effects, he points out. “My favourites are the hard effects, the slams and bangs we pull from our custom libraries.”
Winer often creates the sound design for promo end pages like the ribbon animation, which transforms into an outline of Mickey Mouse’s ears and closes the American Dragon promo. He crafted the ribbon sound by combining an ice skate scrape, a fuse burning down, wind and various other effects.
Video and Internet games require numerous sessions where talent records thousands of lines to represent all the possible permutations of game play. “You don’t want a lot of bottom for these games so we use Sennheiser 416 shotguns, which really cut through,” Sotolongo reports.
LA Studios will soon be joining its sister company Margarita Mix, which has locations in Hollywood and Santa Monica, in offering 5.1 recording and mixing capabilities. “Folks will be required to broadcast in HD soon so more of our promo clients will want to do 5.1 here.” Says Winer.
-- By Christine Bunish--
Source : Post Magazine July 2007
