Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/47583
AUDIO for Commercials most human, because he's explaining some- thing to the master alien." The next step for Brawley was to treat For this State Farm spot, Sound Lounge mixer Tom Jucarone says the mix had two essential but adversarial storytelling elements. First, the cacophony of destruction and mayhem from the alien robot, and second, softly-spoken dialogue that had to be heard above the noise. For Jucarone, it was a very delicate balance between the two to keep the excitement and humor of the spot intact. All this while adhering to the new CALM Act loudness standards. The producer and creatives were at Sound Lounge in NYC for the first mix, but for revisions, the Internet played an important role when the creatives returned to Chicago. Mixing was performed using a Pro Tools|HD system. Jucarone chalks up the success of the spot to a collaborative team who valued the sound, but were willing to experiment. the voices to make them sound alien.The goal was to make the aliens sound close enough to humans to be relatable, but obvi- ously not human. For processing he used the Digidesign Lo-fi plug-in, the Digidesign/ Bomb Factory MoogerFooger plug-in, the Serato Pitch n'Time Pro plug-in and also a signal generator to add a touch of pink noise. While several plug-ins were used, none of the processing was heavy handed. "There are various layers of processing and it wasn't drastic on any of them," he says. "If you listen to the voice it still has a very human quality to it.That was really impor- tant, but it also doesn't sound human and there are little things that each plug-in did to achieve that final product. Again, these aliens had to be relatable.The whole point of the commercial is that they are kind of like us. They like Dr. Pepper too.They like McDon- ald's too.The quality of their voices doesn't sound scary or too strange." Brawley had another challenge in the sound design. He had to create what was seemingly location sound for the alien craft. Since the ship contained a crowd of aliens, those elements had to be present for the mix. For the aliens in the background, that's all real people they recorded and edited to- gether."There was cheering and whispering and murmuring. Some things get buried under the music, but those elements are all there.The same processing treatments were applied to them to get their sound to be consistent with the ones that were speaking. It was important to try and create this space, so the group voices were recorded off-mic and in a larger room to make it more like location audio.We added a little reverb to help put them in the space.We used a combination of the Audio Ease Al- tiverb plug-in, and Avid's Reverb One in Pro Tools. For the cheer at the end we used the Altiverb plug-in to get a larger-than-life feel- ing because we wanted the reverb tail to extend over the cut of the store." The focus of the music was to achieve a cinematic score that balanced the sci-fi ele- ments and the non-menacing nature of the aliens."Since the aliens happened to be our protagonists, the score had to be mysterious but composed in a non-threatening manner so our audience can warm up to them im- State of Chaos