Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/130212
Audio for Animation For the hooves in Khumba, Goldcrest's Adrian Rhodes used the sounds of real horse hooves in combination with Foley. 34 "From a kid's perspective, this is awesome, because you can imagine making these things yourself, and anyone can be a hero. For example, there is a grappling gun that the producers described as having a pin that hits a CO2 cartridge that knocks out the grappling hook that's on a spool that ratchets. It's like, 'Ok, I can work with that.' It's a fun challenge to take those homemade things and make them really sell." Another larger example is the shell-razor, a vehicle the Turtles drive around in. It's an abandoned subway car that has old CRT monitors, tube TVs and radar screens inside. Shiffman and his team had fun designing the sounds those objects would make if they were all hooked up together. "We created modem squelches, radio tuning, weird Soviet-era sounds, radar pings and weird telemetry. There is that DIY element. If you put it all together, you have this weird low-fi amalgam that you don't get to do in many television shows today. All those weird and off-beat sensibilities, that's really the DNA of the show." The show's sound is a combination of scifi, realism and big actions scenes interspersed with moments that are completely goofy. Shiffman has the challenge of making all those elements fit together seamlessly. "You can hear the gravel on the sidewalk and their weapons when they're moving. It's a very realistic approach, but then you have these emoticons that pop up over their heads. We have to balance the weight and the reality of the environments and also sell the big moments. Finding that balance ultimately makes the stakes higher, but it also keeps it really fun and adventurous." Shiffman and his team recorded all the Foley for the show at Warners. They wanted to create a custom library of sounds from scratch. For the Turtles' footsteps, they recorded large boots wrapped with denim to create a unique sound that would match Post • May 2013 Post0513_032-37-audioRAV3finalread.indd 34 the animation. They recorded a whistling football thrown down a hallway to create arrow whoosh-bys. For many of the weapon sounds, they recorded heavy chains and dowel rods from the hardware store. "We probably looked like a bunch of crazy people at the store, dropping things, like heavy gauge chain, and pipes and dowel rods, and all sorts of stuff onto the floor, trying to find out what sounds they would make, and really concentrating hard on it." To create the sci-fi sounds, Shiffman does a lot of design on his iPad. He used a softsynth called Sunrizer by BeepStreet, to create all the spaceship and laser work in the episodes. "The producers really wanted a '50s element to the sci-fi, especially on the lasers. It's interesting because we're using the tools they used back in the day; it's just a modern take on it because we have automation and so on. We basically make the lasers and spaceships and all the weird telemetry completely from scratch, just starting with a waveform and seeing what comes of it." Even though Shiffman and team are only 20 episodes into Season 1, they've already created thousands of original sound elements for the show. With Seasons 2 and 3 already given the green light, the library is expected to grow substantially. To keep track of the sounds, and to easily share them among the team, Shiffman says they absolutely couldn't work without Soundminer. "We have a server-based library that was created for us here specifically to share all our effects. It's a really collaborative show, so we needed a place to be able to do that. Sorting through that quickly, and having a way to share that easily is essential." Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is mixed in 5.1 at Warner Bros. on an Avid ICON using Pro Tools 10. Shiffman and his team have roughly two weeks to work on an episode. They're currently finishing up Season 1. KHUMBA Adrian Rhodes is a sound supervisor at Goldcrest Post London (www.goldcrestfilms. com/post_london). No stranger to audio for animation, his sound skills can be heard in films like Pirates! Band of Misfits, Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and The Gruffalo. His latest sound work is for the Triggerfish animated film Khumba, which is set in the Karoo, a vast arid area of South Africa. For Rhodes, the Karoo is a whole new sound world and something he didn't know much about at first. Director Anthony Silverston sent Rhodes a documentary on the Karoo so he could become familiar with the environment. "The presenter on the documentary stood in the middle of this wild, open, stony, rugged place and said, 'Listen....' Nothing. That was the brief," explains Rhodes. Two adjectives to describe the Karoo were empty and arid. The challenge for Rhodes, who at press time was still working on the sound design, was to create an interesting soundscape that reflects the drama, while keeping a desert-like quality to the sound, all without sounding boring. "If the emotion feels down a bit, I try to find some howling wind or sounds like that, just to make things feel sad. We used a lot of crickets, too." Since the Karoo environment is so quiet, the sound of the footsteps are very noticeable. The main character, Khumba, is a half-stripped zebra, and often there are herds of zebras on screen. Besides zebras, there are also oryx, a type of antelope, which also have hooves. Rhodes paid close attention to the detail of the hooves, varying the textures and dynamics so the audience could distinguish between different characters. He feels that if he used only Foley for the hooves then it would all end up sounding the same. For a more natural sound, he did field recordings of horses near his home in rural Kent using a Sennheiser MKH 416 www.postmagazine.com 5/3/13 4:46 PM