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JULY 2011

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Animation workflows require audio Cars for Good professionals to push boundaries, both creatively and technically. Using ISDN between their two studios, South Music and Sound De- sign extends the physical boundaries of their creative teams. For Tom Myers of Skywalker Sound, starting in 7.1 allows him to push the spa- tial boundaries of his mix.When television episodes turned into a feature-length production, Phineas and Ferb composer Danny Jacob pushed his short character themes into a fully orchestrated theatrical score. For television animation, the switch to 5.1 is changing the way animators and mixers approach sound. Increasing the spatial limits of a mix has significantly increased the amount of tracks in a session. At Margarita Mix in Hollywood, the increase in track count has meant an increase in processing power.These audio pros use both technology and creativity to go beyond audience expectations and further push the boundaries of audio for animation. CARS 2 Being the sound designer and re-recording mixer on Disney Pixar’s original Cars film, Sky- walker Sound’s Tom Myers (www.skysound.com), has a deep understanding of what Cars 2 needed. “Working on Cars really helped me understand how it all has to work together,” says Myers. “There were rules we had originally set up for the car sounds. For example, we can’t have cars idling all the time.You have to judiciously use engine sounds, because you get two or three characters together at once and it can all pile up quickly.” Picking up the sounds for the original characters allowed more time and focus for the new material, he shares.“For all the returning characters we picked up elements from the original, which was helpful, because there are a lot of new characters.And this film has a whole different nature to it. It’s a big spy/action movie. So aside from the new car sounds, and the new characters and race sounds, there is also this other component of it being like a Bond movie.” One weapon in the spy arsenal was a special high-powered ma- chine gun.To record that, Myers went out into the Arizona desert, armed with an array of recording devices. “We recorded this gun they had on the Discovery Channel show MythBusters.We set up ply- wood, sheet metal and old cars, to not only get the recordings of the gun but really cool impacts and ric- ochets.We used a Sound Devices 702 portable digital recorder. I had a Zoom H4 with separate mic. The recorders were small so we could place them out behind a screen in the desert. It took us about two hours to set up all the mics around the target range.We not only got the impacts but the fly-bys. It was pretty spectacular.We used a Nagra IVS-TC analog tape recorder close by because the sound of this gun was as loud as anything I’d ever heard.The Nagra gave us that good, fat, saturated tape sound.We recorded it six ways from Sunday, just so we would have a wide variety of sounds.” To give the spy characters a unique and original sound,Myers and his crew blanketed the area near Skywalker Sound to find as many different sources to record as possible.“We did a ton of recording at labs here in the Bay Area, at robotics firms, and even just finding material here at the studio.We wanted the spies to have a different character and quality.The new spy, Holley Shiftwell, is softer, more electronic and tonal, and the old spy, Finn McMissile, is more me- chanical, with a little more vintage quality to the spy gadgetry. For his character we used some older high-end Leica cameras.” South’s Jon Darling: The studio created music and sound design for this Toyota Web video. Having enough sonic differentiation between the characters is crucial to making a complex mix work. “It’s about trying to find a unique sound for each character and then offsetting it from another character,” says Myers.“A big rivalry in the film is between Lightning McQueen, and the new character, Francesco Bernoulli, which is a Formula One car.The Formula One car has more high-end sounds and is very high revving, and the Lightning McQueen NASCAR has more low-end, and is throatier. It’s about setting up these acoustic dynamics so they can live together and offset each other, and then also serve as story points as well.” For most of his sound design work,Myers uses a Synclavier, which is a RAM-based sampler and design system created by New England Digital.“I’m still using a Synclavier, which is pretty old now, but it’s still very facile in terms of design for me. It’s very tactile and has this kind of intuitive quality where you can bang on the keys and combine things quickly and sample quickly. It’s an old piece of gear, but for me, it’s still my primary sound design tool. I use it more as a sketch pad, to put things together and combine them and dump them into Pro Tools so I can work them further.” With a wealth of material to work with during the mix, Myers’s biggest challenge was making it all fit together. “With all the Pixar movies, and with this one in particular, you have this wealth of mate- rial that you have funnel down into the final mix and make it all sound seamless.There are multiple characters with a lot of interac- tion, and then you have this terrific score done by Michael Gi- acchino. It’s a process where you hand off from one thing to another — the dialogue,music and sound effects — you give them each an opportunity to do their thing and shine.That was a tribute to (direc- tor) John Lasseter, who was there through every step of the final mix.We were literally going through it shot by shot and figuring out acoustically what the important element was that we needed to hear. Is it that line of dialogue? Is it that car pass-by? Do we need to hear that line in the music for the emotional context? Going through it shot by shot and sorting it all out, I have to say, was as invigorating www.postmagazine.com July 2011 • Post 39

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