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AUDIO FOR ANIMATION www.postmagazine.com 32 POST APRIL 2016 our combined power is greater than the sum of the parts. I thought that was a very profound and touching message. Sonically, it was a wonderful opportunity for us to reinforce that," says Aadahl. The team used Native Instruments Kontakt to perform and manipulate the Chi sounds in realtime to picture, and recorded all their takes in Pro Tools 11. "Native Instruments has a number of dif- ferent tools which are great because they are musical. We like to be able to put the sounds up on the keyboard and play with those sounds just like you would a musical instrument," says Aadahl. While the idea of Chi seems rather seri- ous, Kung Fu Panda 3 is actually full of fun. The hero-panda Po (voiced by Jack Black) has a signature belly-bump sound that was established on the first film. To create that sound, Van der Ryn built his very own gut-bucket — a jug band staple made from a metal washbasin, a string and a long broom handle. "You tension the string using the handle and you strum it. You can vary the pitch depending on how tight you make the string," says Van der Ryn. Once Po thought he was the last panda, but all that changes in Panda 3. "There is a whole community of pandas and they are all bouncing around, so this was the first time we really got to play with the belly boing more than just for Po." THE ANGRY BIRDS MOVIE On May 20th, it's birds versus pigs in the animated world of Angry Birds, brought to the big screen by Sony Pictures. Although the film was progenerated from the popular mobile game by Rovio Entertainment, the soundtrack wasn't pigeonholed to the game's sound. "I did manage to sneak in a few Easter eggs here and there from the game," reveals supervising sound editor/sound designer Tom Myers, at Skywalker Sound in Marin County, CA (www.skysound.com). For example, there's a cuckoo clock from the game that makes an appearance on- screen and Myers was able to pluck that sound directly from the game. Myers was given free-range to explore the soundscape for The Angry Birds Movie, with just one stipulation: He had to avoid birds chirping. "These birds are earthbound and not able to fly, and they don't make bird-like sounds," says Myers, who overcame the challenge by filling backgrounds with bugs and frogs — little sounds that could denote the lushness of Bird Island and still cut through the mix. After the initial design, built with literal, organic sounds, Myers and the team later chose to broaden their palette to include cartoony elements — like coconut hits for head bonks, and all manner of twangs, zips and whooshes. The directors even encouraged Myers to hit the camera moves, adding sounds for the swish pans and zoom-ins. "Often times on animated films, we aren't encouraged to go in a cartoony direction, but for this one the gloves came off at one point and we de- cided to go full-blown funny," he says. The birds might not fly, but they definitely get catapulted through the air. Myers held a 'whoosh and twang' record session to build up the extensive library he'd need to cover all the slingshot twangs, trampoline boings and various sized swishes and whooshes for the birds, fruit and other projectiles. There are also numerous explosions, but Myers says they didn't blow anything up in the record session. Instead, he crafted the unique explosions by pulling elements from Skywalker's sound effects library and editing them in Avid Pro Tools 12. "The pigs' TNT sounds very big and has a quali- ty that is different from Bomb, the bird character who explodes whenever he gets nervous or under stress. We wanted the explosions to have some weight but they couldn't be too threatening. We want kids to lean into this movie and enjoy it, and not be scared of it," says Myers. The sound design is a hybrid of literal and comedic elements, which works par- ticularly well for the rickety pig technol- ogy. For example, the pigs sail up to Bird Island on a cobbled together mechanical, steam-powered ship. The heavy, literal ship groans and creaks are offset by a steam engine, which incorporates pig vocals in the chugging sound. The moving mechanical parts sound arrhythmic, with a whimsical Willy Wonka/Chitty Chitty Bang Bang feel. "Their technology is funky and cobbled together, and it's not smooth. The planes that they fly are barely hanging together. They have jalopy cars. It all feels like it's going to fall apart at any second," says Myers. As a re-recording mixer on the film, Myers was able to take the sound design from creation through final mix. Joining him on Skywalker's Orson Welles dub stage was Oscar-winning re-recording mixer Gary Rizzo, who dealt with dialogue and music. Their two biggest challenges were carving out space for each aspect of the sound to shine, and to build in moments for the audience to breathe. "We had an embarrassment of riches from every department. We had Heitor Pereira's incredible score. We had all these different character performances. Brian Chumney, our dialogue editor, did an amazing job with the loop group. And then we had all of the sound effects. It's a process of weeding through all this good material and finding ways for everything to live together. We are proud of the way it has come together. The articulation the track has is really something special." Skywalker's Myers stayed away from bird chirps, using other elements for the soundscape of Bird Island.