Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/137897
Design Creating worlds with sound. By Jennifer Walden Putting in "Whoosh 24" and a cymbal swell doesn't make you a sound designer. In fact, sound design isn't always about what you put in. It's also knowing what to leave out. With dialog, Foley and music taking up the lion's share of available frequencies, finding room for the sound design can be a bit tricky. It's a delicate art. Then there are the sounds themselves. Sound design can be more than just making a project sound cool. It's about furthering the storyline, or expressing some emotion, and doing so in a way that is in harmony with the soundtrack, or is intentionally discordant with the existing sounds. It's about making conscious choices with the happy accidents you create along the way. Supervising sound editor Bob Kellough created the sound design on H+ The Digital Series, a Web series available on YouTube. H+ THe DIGITAL SeRIeS Supervising sound editor Bob Kellough (http://signaltonoiz. blogspot.com) spent four months creating the sound design on H+ The Digital Series, a Web series available on YouTube. He also did the final mix. In the series, H+ is a technology that allows users to access the Internet without needing an external device. The technology is embedded in the user. When a virus infects the H+ network, millions of users die. The unaffected population, including one of the creators of H+, is left to piece together what happened and clean the virus from the network. Each episode is between three to four minutes long, and the episodes were released two at a time. Kellough describes the sound of the H+ technology as organic meets digital. Since H+ is part of the person, embedded into their body, he wanted it to feel alive, and slightly dangerous. Stewart Hendler, the director on the series, offers a scene from Jurassic Park as an example of how H+ should make the audience feel. "There's a scene where one of the little dinosaurs is cooing right before it attacks, and then it goes crazy." There is an airport parking lot scene in Episode 1 where where viewers get their first taste of H+. A man and a woman are riding around the garage, and the woman is interacting with her H+ to help them find a parking spot and check the weather. The sounds are digital, yet mellow, with some sharper beeps. There is always an edge to the array of sounds. It's slightly menacing. Later in the series we learn that there is another technology similar to H+, called LPW. Kellough uses the analogy that if LPW was DOS, then H+ would be Apple. He was very mindful of the sounds he used for each technology. He wanted there to be a distinct differ- ence. "We wanted LPW to be kind of clunky, and H+ to be very stylish. H+ also needed to sound slightly dangerous. I had a lot of fun playing with that element of how to convey a story with a very small sound, a sound that lasts only a few frames." To create the design for the H+ technology, Kellough recorded a variety of sounds using a guitar pick-up. For example, he would record different sounds into his iPhone and then play those back as he moved the guitar pick-up into different positions and angles, around the phone. "That would greatly change the distortion or the sounds the guitar pick-up would capture." He then brought those sounds into Pro Tools 9 and further manipulated them using Avid's Structure sampler. He also ran the sounds through plug-ins from SoundToys and the Avid GRM Tools Classic. For the organic-meets-digital feel, Kellough chose bugs, like crickets, to be a base sound. "I would use a cricket or cicada and run it through a reverb and then record the sound that's printed from the reverb using my field recorder. I then played that back into Pro Tools. That's where I got the little accents and glitches that I could turn into the tones and beeps of the future tech, like for [main character] Kenneth's laptop, for example." Working outside the box, Kellough used the Roland Space Echo to help create ambient layers. In Episode 35, the H+ interface creator, Kenneth, sees Simona as a little girl in a town in Italy. To give the scene a dream-like feeling, and to help smooth out some dialog issues, Kellough created an ambience track by recording cymbals underwater using a hydrophone. He suspended a drum cymbal from a coat hanger and partially submerged it in a two-foot tank of water. He played the cymbal with a bow. "The trick is to not submerge the cymbal completely. In fact, the lower you submerge the cymbal, and the higher you submerge the cymbal, will change the frequency. Also, how close you bring it to one of the walls, or the mic, will change the sound because of how it reaches the hydrophone." Kellough then ran the underwater cymbal sound through the Roland Space Echo, an analog delay effects device. He put that sound back into Pro Tools and created a 5.0 track to further alter the delay. "Through the irregularities and happy accidents generated from that, I trimmed the sound to fit and used that for the ambiences." The sound design for H+ is a rich blend of low-frequency ambiences and high-frequency digital sounds. Kellough created the sound design to fit around the music and dialog, thereby providing the lis- www.postmagazine.com Post • June 2013 33