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Creating audio for non-real characters gives these pros a certain amount of leeway. By Ron DiCesare The animation industry has made incredible ad- vancements over the past decade or two.The popularity of ani- mated TV shows and movies show no sign of declining anytime soon. But with all the wonderful technical and creative achieve- ments of animation, it is still reliant on sound to complete the picture.The animated world can only truly come to life with the help of audio professionals. TOY STORY 3 Disney/Pixar’s Toy Story 3 continues to raise the bar of audio for animation.Tom Myers, re-recording mixer/sound de- signer at Skywalker Sound (www.skysound.com) located in Marin County,CA, has seen many changes in the animation in- dustry since the first Toy Story in 1995.“For Toy Story 3, the ac- tors were located in all different places, like Lon- don, Atlanta, New York and LA, and were done years in advance,” ex- plains Myers. “So, once we got the various recordings back here at Skywalker, those record- ings ranged from being very sophisti- cated to some that were less so.Then all of the dialogue needed to be evened out and made to sound natural, like everyone was in the same environment scene to scene. Michael Semanick,my re-recording mixer, and Michael Silvers,my co-supervi- sor and dialogue editor, both did a fantas- tic job with that.” With the groundbreaking success of the previous Toy Story films, Myers was faced with the task of staying true to the characters that moviegoers have become so familiar with. At the same time, he needed to make new ideas and new sounds work within the established framework. “Director Lee Unkrich really wanted the three movies to exist in the same universe. Even though Toy Story 3 is visually more sophisticated than the first two, he wanted all the characters to be consistent,” says Myers. “Each character had a palette of sounds consistent with who they were in previous movies that we could pull from. In fact, they used some of those sounds while they were cutting picture in their Avid track, in the same way that they would use the voices to cut to. Beyond that, Lee wanted to use some ambiences that were familiar from the first two movies. So, he had been living with those sounds for a number of years, long before the final mix.A good example is how we already established what Buzz Lightyear sounds like in the previous movies. But in this movie, Buzz goes through a transformation that we have never seen before.We tried to keep it true to the sounds we know from Buzz, but as he changes and goes through these different character permutations, we needed to adapt those sounds to the changes in his character.” They also had Gary Rydstrom, who did the sound design for the first two Toy Story movies, and who is now working at Pixar.“He was my mentor and I was his assistant for a number of years, including on the firstToy Story,” explains Pixar’s Toy Story 3: Talent was recorded around the country, with varying levels of sophistication, leaving Skywalker to make it all sound seamless. Myers.“He was with us on this one, advising us all the way through.He would give us the logic of the character’s worlds and there was a library of sounds built for the characters that already existed. So, we knew what they were going to sound like. And from that point, we did all the new characters and created the new environments such as the new world of the day care center. All that stuff needed to be done from the ground up, but the idea was that it all has to exist in the same universe.So we were always conscious that the di- rector did not want this movie to sound different from the other two.” Even though many toys in the movie do not exist in real life, the entire audio team wanted the sounds to be believable.To accomplish that, Myers re- lied on everyday types of materials to create the toy sounds.“What’s different about this movie, compared to other sound design jobs that require creature voices or other-worldly sounds, is that it’s all real-world sounds,” he says.“The toys are very much home appliance types of sounds. For example, there is a new character who is a rubbery and stretchy octopus.We used a rubber bath mat with suction cups on it that we could twist and turn and make it sound like movement.” Despite the fun of making toys sounds, the team applied some serious ex- pertise behind their ideas.“One of the things that we were very careful of, which stemmed from Gary Rydstrom, is not using the same frequencies for all the toys,” he explains.“For instance, the middle range around 1kHz and 2kHz is where things like squeaks and creaks are for the toys. Many toys, based on their size, all exist in that common middle range, which can build up very quickly.We had to be careful when there are eight, 10, or 12 characters in a scene and they are all moving around. If they are all at the same frequency, they end up canceling each other out. So,we varied the frequencies, like using more low-end stuff whenever we could.” Toy Story 3 was released in select theaters as a 7.1 surround sound mix, rather than the more common 5.1 format.This version of 7.1 is not to be confused with SDDS, which uses five front channels and two rear channels.“The movie was mixed in 7.1 with three channels in the front, two rear channels and the LFE like regular 5.1,” says Myers.“But the difference is the additional two side channels with this format. It came out of the Blu-ray 7.1 that Disney was experimenting with after they re-did Toy Story 1 and 2.The concept was to make a new sound www.postmagazine.com July 2010 • Post 33