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The unique look of the spot played a major part in how the sound was crafted. Since the scenes were all hand-drawn in the sand, the creatives wanted the sound design to accentuate that aspect."When the creatives came in they said to try and handcraft the sound as much as possible," says sound designer Jack Sedgwick."So we spent a lot of time in my voice-record booth with various different contraptions and buckets of sand.We wanted it to feel organic. It fits a lot nicer with the picture when you can hear human el- ements and you can hear real sounds in there." Even for the water sounds, the element of sand was a huge factor."The creatives asked that we try to make the wave sounds out of sand because in the picture, it's all crafted in sand," explains Sedgwick."They wanted it to feel like what you're hearing is coming from the moving of the sand; to make the sand feel like it is part of the story as well." While they did use a bit of water in the mix, the majority of the waves were recorded with an Audio-Technica AT897 shotgun mic and a bucket of sand."I would move my hand around in this bucket of wet sand and try to just give it the same shape that waves would have," he describes."I spent a processing," says Sedgwick."It's so easy to stick a plug-in on something. I get more of a sense of achievement when I can look at something and think we did that all ourselves.We used a bit of reverb when they're in the belly of the big fish, and a little bit of chorusing and EQ, but for processing, that was it. It was just to give it a little bit of depth in the mix." Currently, the Nokia Gulp spot has over one million hits on YouTube alone. Says Grove-White,"The interesting thing is now companies are doing more quirky things like this. I think that's great. In a way that sort of feeds more general creativity.And this reflects well on Nokia. It's good that people are doing more interesting adverts, or using advertising in more interesting ways these days.With things like the Internet, they can do a longer film that can just be up there for ages.The idea is that people email it around to their friends, send them the link. It's a clever way to get people to interact more with advertising." MCDONALD'S EARTH TREASURE LA's PrimalScream Music & Sound (www.primalscreammusic.com) worked with ad agency Moroch to create the sound for the McDonald's Earth's Treasure 30-second TV spot, which promotes not only the restaurant but their fountain drinks as well.The piece opens on a group of aliens created PrimalScream created sound design and alien voices for this McDonald's spot. George Kallis was tasked with creating an epic score. VFX are via The Mission. good bit of time in the voiceover booth with different buckets of sand and water, with different tools and kitchen gloves, just trying to see what works best.The biggest challenge was getting it to feel like you're in this world, but at the same time feel like it is all being crafted by hand." The fisherman's vocalizations were performed by the actor who played the fisherman."This was the guy who spent 24 hours laying on a beach and being moved around shot to shot," says Sedgwick."He was actually dressed up in his fisherman outfit for the voice record, just to get him in character.We did a few hours of him running quite a few takes." All the vocals were recorded using a Neumann U87, which he says is a "superb" mic for vocal recording. When it came to music, the idea was to have a track that the fisherman might be listening to on the radio on his boat. Music composer Will Grove- White says,"The direction was to make it sound like Woody Guthrie, but a little more sea worthy. I gave the creatives several options and they went with a simple little track, very home spun really.There were four elements to the track: a harmonica, a tenor guitar, a little off beat on the ukulele and a foot tapping. I sent all the parts as separate elements so they could play around with them in the mix. I think in the end, they just used the tenor gui- tar." Grove-White has a home studio set-up using Avid Pro Tools 8 on a Mac with an MBox audio interface."The beauty of the Pro Tools system is that even though I had to go away during the recording period, I was able to take all my recording gear with me in a small bag to make further tweaks to the tune. It's a really brilliant portable system," he says. Across the board, simplicity was the key to creating the sound for Gulp. Ef- fects processing was minimal to maintain the hand-crafted feeling of the sound."It's quite nice to have something that's so hand crafted, with minimal by character designer Tully Summers (Avatar, Green Lantern,Tron).The spot not only looks like a big-budget Hollywood film, but it has the sound design and music to match."The creatives on this spot were really innovative," says Nicole Dionne, creative director for PrimalScream."For us,we didn't want to just accomplish what their ideas were, we want to impress them and go be- yond their expectations.These guys were already at a very high level with their concepts, so it was a fun challenge for us." Stuart Brawley, sound designer at PrimalScream, created the sound design and alien voices.The agency creatives relied on Brawley to create original sounding aliens, complete with their own language and vocal quality."They wanted something that was its own dialect and that sounded very fluid, not too choppy, and not too scary, but definitely not like English," he explains."We directed many different voice talents to basically forget about talking in any one language necessarily and just start talking in a stream of consciousness of vowels and consonants that sounded foreign, like it was from another planet. If you watch the spot you can hear that it's a very lyrical language, and yet it feels very universal. It could be from a civilization from 50,000 years ago on Earth as much as it could be another alien language.There are elements and bits of Latin or Spanish overtones to some of the consonants and vowels." The voiceover was recorded into Pro Tools using a Neumann U67 with the Steven Paul modification, in combination with an API 3124 pre-amp.This signal chain allowed Brawley to get a clear recording that could then be ma- nipulated well digitally without degrading the quality of the original content to much."The U67 allows the human voice to be recorded so cleanly and so full that it can handle a bunch of levels of processing without starting to sound thin and degraded, like it was recorded at 3-bits." Once the sound of the language was established, Brawley then started editing chunks of dialogue together to find the perfect combination of sounds that would work to picture. "We wanted the subtitles on screen to make sense with the inflection of the voice," says Brawley. "As the alien moves his hand and it's gesturing at the box and you read the subtitles, there had to be a lilt to the voice.To me that's where it's important for it to be al- www.postmagazine.com September 2011 • Post 37