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October 2015

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C M Y CM MY CY CMY K Post_halo_third_vertical_OL.pdf 1 9/14/15 twisting, rubbing, deflating and striking them. He used different bal- loons, from water balloons to a gi- ant weather balloon. "The weather balloon is about 15 feet in diameter and we had it on a Foley stage so it was quiet to record it," says Rubay. "We ended up attaching micro- phones to the surface of it. Striking the surface gave us a weird, wobbly reverb tone." Unfortunately, it didn't yield nearly as many sounds as they hoped for. "The sounds are big and wobbly but it's almost liquid sounding. A couple of those hits we ended up using for a Blobby movement, but it wasn't really right for this film." Rubay turned to his extensive collection of Jell-O type movements he and sound design- er John Pospisil had recorded for Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. "We recorded a lot of different sounds for the Jell-O house in that film that didn't end up being used. You have to make 100 sounds to get one you really like and so there's this huge library of gloppy movements we are able to draw from for Blobby." Rubay recorded all his sounds at 192k, allowing him to significant- ly slow them down to 25 percent of their normal speed without noticeably diminishing the quality. "A sound that might not work at normal speed, that's too scratchy or too bright, you can slow way down and it ends up very cool," Rubay says. He uses Serato's Pitch 'n Time Pro, as well as the pitch shifting feature in Soundminer. "Ninety-five percent of the sound work I do for films uses all-natural sounds played forward or reverse, half speed — it's all pitch and direction manipula- tion. That will give you most things you need. They are familiar sounds played in an unfamiliar way." THE LAST WITCH HUNTER Supervising sound editor Peter Brown, at Formosa Group in West Hollywood (www.formosagroup. com) makes magic happen for director Breck Eisner's film The Last Witch Hunter, in theaters October 23rd. Using elemental forces — wind, water, earth and fire — Brown and sound designer Stephen Robinson crafted otherworldly sounds from tangible components. "For example, there is a monster that is very Earth-based. So a lot of his magic comes from the sound of bones, dirt, rocks and wood, also roots being ripped from the ground for the sound of tentacles growing," says Brown. The Last Witch Hunter follows witch hunter Kaulder (played by Vin Diesel) on his quest to save humanity from the most horrifying witches in history. For Kaulder's nemesis, the Witch Queen (played by Julie Engelbrecht), Brown notes they used the sound of a heart- beat to represent her power of immortality. "The heartbeat is one of those tricky sounds because, on one hand, it's such a standard type of sound, but then on the other hand, it's a key element. It's one of the last sounds we hear in the film," explains Brown. Their challenge was to invent a way to make it sound indisputably like a heartbeat yet different, fuller and more present. They relied on tools from iZotope, like Ozone, Nectar and Alloy. "We used Ozone for the pitch process- ing and some of the reverb. Nectar was the one that we really delved into a lot. It was very useful." Reverb processing played a key role for the Witch Queen's vocals and for the unique sound of the spells. Since the Witch Queen is an otherworldly character, Brown was tasked with making her voice sound fantastical, yet still intelligible. The vocal processing chain included adding in pitched layers, as well as using reverb in the front left and right balanced with different rear reverb layers in the surrounds. "Once we made it sound cool and supernatural, then we had to go back and reassess whether or not anyone could understand what she was saying," says Brown. Since the ADR wasn't finalized until very late in the game, Brown notes they had to repeat the vocal processing every time a word or a line would change. "We would have to process them six different ways and then mix all those processing layers together. All those layers balanced together would make up her voice." To create the spell vocal treat - ment, Brown used a process of reverse reverbing. "We would take a sound and flip it backwards and then give that a long reverb tail. Then we'd reverse that again, so instead of the reverb bleeding away from the sound, it would lead up to the sound," he says. "Anytime anyone does a spell, it will have that type of processing on it." Brown notes that the language of the spells is actually ancient Greek. "On the set in Pittsburgh, they contacted an ancient language linguist, Christina Hoenig, to translate the spells in the script into ancient Greek. Then the actors had to learn all of those lines with the correct pronunciation. They would listen to her doing them over and over again until they could finally perform them. There is a real air of authenticity to the way language is used in the film. Then we add our creepy sounds on top of it and I think it just sounds very legit." Brown (inset) relied on wind, water and fire to produce otherwordly sounds for The Last Witch Hunter.

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