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AUDIO FOR ANIMATION www.postmagazine.com 31 POST APRIL 2016 Cooke (dialogue/music) and Mark Zsifkovits (sound effects/Foley), is an action-packed feature, with chase scenes, laser gun fights and battles in every reel. Fountain feels his biggest challenge was the sheer amount of sound design. "It's hands-down the busiest film I've ever done," says Fountain. Before this feature, Fountain was used to flying solo, but Ratchet & Clank required collaboration. "I had to learn fast to lean heavily on Dashen [Naidoo] as it was just the two of us cre- ating all of the sound design." KUNG FU PANDA 3 Supervising sound editors/sound design- ers Erik Aadahl and Ethan Van der Ryn, of E² Sound in Los Angeles (www.e2sound. com) have ventured into the world of DreamWorks Animation's Kung Fu Panda for a third time. Kung Fu Panda 3, which premiered in US theaters January 29th shares the same whimsical, rhythmic approach to kung fu as the first two films. "There is a musical approach to it. Rather than treating the sounds as standard sound effects, we treat them like musical instruments. The rhythms of the battle scenes we think of more as like a drum solo," shares Aadahl. To help the sound effects and music stay in step, composer Hans Zimmer and the music team come up with musical concepts very early on, which they share with Aadahl and Van der Ryn as they're creating early concepts for sound design. "We often try to dovetail the music and the sound design so that it's a cohesive thing. We want the rhythms working together, the tempos working together and the pitch and key elements working together," says Aadahl. This was particularly important on Kung Fu Panda 3 since one of the main story points involves Chi — a spiritual en- ergy found in living things, which Aadahl and Van der Ryn represent in a musical way. "Chi is a reflection of a person's soul so the idea was to find out what is the sound of a person's soul. We exper- imented quite a lot and the final sound is a combination of chimes, ringing bells, ringing metals and ringing glass, that we then pitch to be in key with the music." Ultimately Aadahl and Van der Ryn were searching for the purest and cleanest sound they could create for Chi. "The more layers it has the muddier it gets, the more brown it gets. We wanted it to be golden and shiny." There are many iterations of Chi. For good Chi, as when Shifu (voiced by Dustin Hoffman) brings a flower back to life, the E² Sound team incorporated the shimmery sound of a bell tree. Chi can also be used in a darker way, as demonstrated by the villain Kai (voiced by J.K. Simmons) who steals others' Chi to harness their power for his own. For bad Chi, Aadahl and Van der Ryn manipulated the Chi sounds to give them a more dissonant, dark flavor. "When Kai steals others' Chi, we wanted there to be this feeling of energy being pulled or sucked into a vacuum. Part of that was creating a Doppler feeling. There is a movement within that sound as the energy is being pulled away," says Aadahl. When Kai steals Chi, visually, the charac- ter's Chi spins through the air and slowly concentrates into a little jade amulet. "We created this tremolo flutter to match that movement and feeling as it coalesces." Chi can also be combined into a larger pool of energy. For that key moment, Aadahl and Van der Ryn layered Chi sounds together, with each character's Chi represented by a different note. "Together they create this harmony and that is kind of the central message of the film — when we work together with family and friends Aadahl and Van der Ryn (photo, bottom right) completed sound once again for Kung Fu Panda's third installment.