Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/825852
www.postmagazine.com 29 POST MAY 2017 SOUND DESIGN tree falls in the forest, but no one hears it. Not to worry. That's what post sound is for. A sound designer can make that tree fall fast, fall super slow and even fall in reverse. A good sound designer can make that fall feel emotional, or sus- penseful or imbue that tree with a sense of good or evil intention. Effective sound design adds more dimension to what's on-screen. So unless that tree had on-camera dialogue (which would fall into the realm of the sound mixer, of course), then leave that tree to the sound designer. These talented supervising sound editors/sound designers share specifics on the story-enhancing designs they created for Spark: A Space Tail, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, The Circle and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. SPARK: A SPACE TAIL Supervising sound editor/sound design- er Paul Germann, at Tattersall Sound & Picture in Toronto, Canada (www.tat tersallsoundandpicture.com), worked with sound effects editor Brennan Mercer to design a retro-fu- turistic sound for director Aaron Woodley's animat- ed feature, Spark: A Space Tail, distributed by Open Road Films. The feature, which opened in theaters in April, follows a teenage monkey named Spark. He and his friends are determined to stop the evil General Zhong from destroying the universe as he did Spark's home, called Planet Beta. To create a steampunk vibe, Germann designed high-tech and sleek sounds, such as those for the film's landspeeders, spaceships, robots and weap- ons, and layered them with analog synth sounds generated by a 1970s semi-modular Korg synthe- sizer. "The analog synth sounds were amorphous and not of anything specific, but they give you a slightly musical feel. We layered that under the specific sound design — everything from a mystical space-whale called the Kraken to the spaceship sounds, to give it a retro-futuristic feel much like the movie Brazil (1985, directed by Terry Gilliam)," says Germann. For the deadly space Kraken, Germann sorted through a collection of humpback whale record- ings to find the most evocative and language-like sounds. Then, he and Mercer processed their picks with reverb, using Altiverb by Audio Ease and Digidesign's TL Space, and plug-ins by iZotope, like Iris 2, Trash and DDLY Dynamic Delay. With reverb, Germann likes to experiment with a reverse reverb process wherein he reverses a sound, applies reverb, and then reverses the re- verb-processed sound so that it plays forward. This allows the reverb tail to precede the original sound. Germann says, "We spent a lot of time creating new sounds, just experimenting without having a true direction. Once we had a library of processed whale sounds, we weeded through those to isolate the ones we liked best." Cutting creature vocalizations is one of the most challenging jobs, says Germann. "It's like you're cutting ADR from wild tracks that don't neces- sarily have anything to do with what is being said or what the character is supposed to be saying. You have to build up this huge library and look for sounds that convey some sort of emotional nuance so that you actually believe they're saying some- thing that's happy or sad or confused or whatever the emotion might be. It's challenging but I love doing that." Another interesting sound to design was Spark's landspeeder. It's a layered mix of Ducati motorcy- cle recordings, modular synth sounds and wind whooshes. In one sequence, Spark rides his land- speeder through a junkie tunnel. As he's zooming along, the pitch of the engine goes higher and higher. Germann notes, "As the pitch goes up, you Altiverb and TL Space plug-ins were used. Sound designers used a Korg keyboard to create analog synth sounds for Sparks' retro-futuristic feel. Germann and Mercer A