Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1277927
C A S Q U A R T E R L Y I S U M M E R 2 0 2 0 55 American Dad FOR ANIMATION Approach One Let's start at the beginning with my "people yelling in the booth" scenario. They humorously represent, I hope, what we'll call the "traditional" style. I was lucky enough to speak with Jeremy Olsen on the subject. For many years now, he has been the production mixer for American Dad. What he described to me was a sort of best-case scenario for booth recording bordering on an organizational nightmare! But I digress. Jeremy told me their recording space is a very dead, a small-ish (around 12x7 feet) room with a single large diaphragm mic (not the exact one you're thinking of), in concert with a tried-and-true signal path developed over time, early in the show's run. In essence, they have come up with a sound that works to highlight the humor of the show and they are striving to stick with it. The best case, as I understand it, is that Jeremy has input on three full passes of each show during its creation. In essence, the whole production does. The first pass begins with a table read. It is recorded as a reference, but not in the booth. This reference is an important record of things that went well during the read that need to make it into the show audio-wise. Then the actors come to the booth, mostly one by one, and the performances are recorded and assembled. That product goes to an animatic editor to be timed to the proposed visuals. The producers then vet the animatic and contribute their notes. Then a quick temp mix of the show is made. Around the same time, Jeremy is back at the booth recording voices again, this time for any songs that will appear in the show. This output is sent to the music composition team and animatic is locked. Pass two is a bit of an accelerated version of pass one and the product of that is sent out to the overseas animation house. The last bit of this pass is waiting for months on end for that color animation to come back! Pass three begins with reception of said color animation and a cleaned-up OMF/AAF. Around this time, Jeremy is back in the booth recording ADR, walla, and adding additional efforts, sighs, and laughter. All of this is then sent to the post-production audio team. Read: the folks who build out the sound effects, edit music from the scoring stage, and re-record everything into a tidy mix. All of these steps are the best-case scenario of this process for American Dad. Jeremy went on to tell me he's very happy to work on a show that is afforded the time to get things right! And, the process is clearly working. The potential nightmarish part, to me at least, is that Jeremy can have a whole season of shows up in the air at the same time! He estimates that's around ten thousand lines a year that he has to keep straight!