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Audio for Animation created their voices by recording himself talking very slowly, and then speeding up the sound. In one scene, the Dassies are chanting and keeping rhythm by striking rocks together. Rhodes, who has a strong musical background, created the chanting as well as the rhythm track. He went into his backyard and found the most "musical" rocks he could and recorded himself hitting them against the stone threshold to his house. He then loaded those sounds into a sampler to create a set of stone bongos. "The whole scene is quite complex because all the Dassies are hitting these resonating stones, almost gong-like stones, and it was about building up the rhythms and voices and then working with the composer to get it all to be a homogenous track." Rhodes also created the voice of a wise, old praying mantis that has a Buddhist monk-type personality. His inspiration came from a 70's kung-fu style TV series called The Water Margin. "I started with that voice from The Water Margin in my mind, and then I did that voice in slow motion. I avoided using any real words and avoided any consonants. There aren't any Feral's story is completely reliant on the visuals, music and sound design. The only dialogue is the vocalizations the main character makes. 36 Khumba will be in theaters later this year. Rhodes will also handle the film's 5.1 mix. FERAL Dan Golden is the supervising sound editor/composer on Feral, a 13- minute animated short film that premiered in the Shorts Competition program at the Sundance Film festival and will be in several other animation film festivals this year. Golden worked with director Daniel Sousa on several previous films, including Windmill and Drift, both of which had an influence on Feral's sound. The two have been good friends since the early '90s. We've worked together on all his noncommercial films," he says. Feral tells the story of a wild boy who is found in the woods and brought back to civilization. The boy tries to adapt to his strange new surroundings by using the same strategies that kept him safe in the forest. This is the first film that Golden has done for Sousa that is more than just "a labor of love," as he puts it. Sousa, using a grant from Creative Capital, was able to hire Golden was easy to see what needed to change, what didn't seem to fit, and what sounded anomalous to the film. I had to stay on top of that the most." The sound design is comprised mainly of field recordings Golden captured using a TASCAM DR-100 MKII recorder with an AKG 414 mic, or sounds created in the studio on his EMS VCS3 vintage analog synthesizer. "I'm a huge fan of the old '70s analog modular synthesizers, so I try to get them in there somehow, but I had to be very careful on Feral not to have anything that sounded dated. The film has a timeless quality to it so I can't have overtly electronic sounds." Golden also creates his own wind sounds using a noise generator. "I try to create much of the sounds, either with gear or recording them myself. I try not to use canned sounds, but in some cases I have to. If there is an animal sound I need that I couldn't record myself, typically I'll use a library sound in conjunction with other sounds I created. I like to use layers, so there is never any one pure sound." For Feral, Golden was asked to create the real words but it sounds like it might be a Shaolin monk." Like the Dassies' vocals, Rhodes recorded the mantis while speaking slowly, and then changed the speed and pitch. Rhodes used the E-mu E4 sampler with a MIDI keyboard to manipulate the sound of the mantis and Dassie vocalizations. He also used the Serato Pitch 'n Time plug-in, though he prefers the E4. "I like to be able to control things with my fingers. I like to play the sounds and bend them with the wheel and pitch them. I get a more immediate sense of the pitch when I play it." Using the E4 and a MIDI keyboard, Rhodes was able to experiment with the pitch of other sounds, too. This, he says, brings a whole new range to the possibility of the sound. "If you take a cricket and slow it down, you end up with a whole new tapestry. A lot of it is just seeing how far you can go with one sound and pushing it in all extreme directions." full-time to work on the audio. Golden spent two and a half months creating the sound design, writing the music, and completing the final mix. Since Windmill and Drift had the same look and similar themes as Feral, Golden was able to re-use the environmental textures he created for those films. "When Sousa and I start a film, we talk about the kind of environments we are trying to create, and what the feel of the scenes will be. It was great to come into Feral with an already established sound for the environments." According to Golden, Feral is very complicated visually. The storytelling is completely reliant on the visuals, music and sound design. There is no dialogue, only a few vocalizations the main character makes. Golden's biggest challenge was keeping the soundtrack cohesive while still communicating all the emotion of the story. Once he started to establish the different parts of the soundtrack, he says, "It sound of dust. What does dust sound like? Golden recorded the light crackly sound of crumpling paper, and then manipulated the time and pitch, and finally removed little hits and transients. The word "tension" was also used often, Golden says, so he recorded the sound of slow, stretching leather. He also created a "shimmering" effect for when the main character touched something. He then used wind chimes, in combination with other sounds, to create the shimmer. "I don't like the way wind chimes sound because it's so obvious that it's a wind chime. So, I bought a wind chime and removed half the chimes, then I recorded about 15 minutes of that. I spent a couple of days editing every single chime, moving them farther and farther apart and switching them around to create this other worldly shimmery, chimey sound." In the film, there is a minute-and-a-half- Post • May 2013 Post0513_032-37-audioRAV3finalread.indd 36 www.postmagazine.com 5/3/13 4:46 PM