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audio for Animation visual design, created by Steven Noble Illustra- tions with animation by Adam Gault Studio, uses hand-drawn illustrations reminiscent of old woodcut engravings. Composer Chris Villepigue, owner of Song Loft in Brooklyn, NY, created the music and sound design. Song Loft (www.songloft. com) is a boutique music company that cre- ates original music and sound design for TV, film and videogames. Villepigue came onto the project a few months after the artwork had begun and at a point when the client was concerned the spots were starting to look too sad. In an effort to lift the tone of the melancholy, monochromatic visuals, Villepigue was asked to create something dramatic and intense that would bring some excitement back into the spots. "I decided that doing film trailer/ orchestral-dramatic music would help. Also, since there is humor to the ads, if we went too far in the direction of trying to make the music amusing, the spot wouldn't come Weston Woods gave The Red Hen its sound design. across correctly. So we wanted to take a real deadpan serious approach to it, hoping that the end result is that it's so serious it's amus- ing. It sounds like a very serious ad, but then you look at it, with the dialogue and every- thing, it's very ridiculous at the same time." Villepigue chose a few drum loop patterns from the East West Stormdrum collection to begin building the music track. After he created a rhythm, he then built the strings and played additional tom parts using Kontakt 4. "We were trying to do a ramp up and release, and then have a tag at the end. I ended up doing a hybrid mix of pre-recorded drum hits and strings, and then I played parts around it to add in musical layers. I really like using actual recordings of string orchestras. There is a richness there that I find a little lacking in the virtual instruments." To draw inspiration from the visuals, Vil- lepigue likes to have the picture up on screen while he works. For the Kraken spots, he felt the detail in the animation inspired him to make more tones and layers in the music. "I may not even be focusing on the visual, but if it's up, looping in front of me the whole time, it's influencing what my decisions are sonically." Once the music was in a good place, Vil- lepigue moved onto the sound design by first looking for holes in the dialogue where he could punctuate the movements of the Kraken. In addition, he also recorded Foley for the characters that are in the spot. "The creative director, Mikal Reich, got on the mic and did a bunch of faux British character voices of people jumping out of a ship, and that ended up making it into the mix." The ad campaign is very dialogue-centric, since it is telling the story of the Kraken. One challenge Villepigue faced was to keep up the drama while also keeping the dialogue clear. "When I started out, there were many, many tracks happening and it was competing with the dialogue, so the client wanted to pull it back. The challenge was trying to figure out the puzzle of how to sonically not step over the dialogue but still keeping the music and sound design loud and present." The end result was a well designed sound PostAd-2a_Post Ad 3/7/12 2:40 PM Page 1 Music Zero Fee 40 Post • May 2012 MEANS For Details CALL or CLICK www.ZeroFeeMusic.com 800-468-6874 www.postmagazine.com track that, even with a lot of dialogue and a big orchestral music track, was still dynamic, with pauses and breaks to allow the listener to absorb what was going on. "The anima- tion really inspired me to add a lot of detail to the sound design and the music, to just kind of match what was going on with the picture. Little by little we took things away to get to the point where the dialogue was full and present in the front of the mix." NO Cost to YOU THE RED HEN Weston Woods Studios for Your TV Show or Feature Film Music NO Master Use, Sync or DVD fees (http://westonwoods.scho- lastic.com) creates audiovi- sual adaptations of children's picture books in conjunction with Scholastic books. They release 12 to 14 titles every year for the school, library, and home markets. Their lat- est book adaptation, The Red Hen, was animated by Soup- 2Nuts, with voice narration by Walter Mayes. For every animated release, Weston Woods' mission is to stay true to the original illus- trated book. Steve Syarto, In creating the sound for The Red Hen, sound/video engineer at Weston Woods, wanted to capture the fren- zied character of Red Hen. In the original illustration, created by Rebecca Emberley, Red Hen has big buggy eyes and spastic movements. Exaggerating the sound effects helped him to enhance the look of the ani- mation. "I thought I could go a little crazy with the sound effects, in how she bumps things out of the way and slams ingredients down on the table as she's cooking. Some- times if you just hear the actual sound of something along with the picture, it's just not enough. You can put a spoon in a bowl and stir something but it doesn't sound like much, so I took some cartoony mud glops and just kind of manipulated them to add another layer to the stirring. When Red Hen is frost- ing the cake, she inadvertently frosts right over one of the chickens and the chicken squawks. I have a nice gloopy mud sound over that. Sometimes you have to add some- thing else that's not that specific sound to make it believable." He used a lot of layers of effects to score every movement that Red Hen made. "Even if it was just a slide whistle, or a little zip or something to enhance her movement, I felt it really needed that because of the quick action and also the sound of narrator. It was labor intensive just trying to come up with different sounds for basically every move that she makes." Syarto records Foley as well as uses sound effects libraries, depending on what he needs. For more of the cartoony library sounds, he likes using Sound Ideas. "Often times you'll hear some engineers say, 'I don't like using sound libraries, I want to make up my own,' but I don't have a problem using the sound effects. I also do a lot of Foley work here in the studio for our productions, especially for The Red Hen. I have a vocal booth with a Foley floor with several different surfaces for footsteps and what not. I also like to record a lot of different voices to provide the walla, the background sounds, instead of just using the crowd sounds from a CD, which tend to be really stale and very canned." Syarto likes to record VO into Avid Pro Tools using either a Neumann TLM 170 or an AKG 414 paired with an Avalon 2022 pre- amp. On The Red Hen, Syarto needed the sound of chickens clucking, so he enlisted the help of fellow co-workers. "I had two women continued on page 44