Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1401019
32 I m ps e . o rg EM: Are there any standout moments for how sound integrates into bringing back a fan-favorite character in these shows? TF: For Pike, the signature sound was his wheelchair—that big, metal iron lung that comes to haunt him in episode 212. That was the most specific character sound that we had to try to recreate from a sound effects perspective. NM: Just curious, were you fans before you worked on the series? MT: Oh yeah. TF: I'm a fan. I've always enjoyed Star Trek. I've never gone to a convention level of fandom, but I always watched all the movies and would watch the shows. I just enjoy it. EM: Going back to 1966, the original series, and where we were with science fiction television at that point compared to where we are now—there's so much more science fiction content now! NM: They were repurposing the same shot who knows how many times on TOS. Now, when you do it, there's so much more stuˆ going on. It's so much more crowded. TF: Yeah, we aren't able to reuse a lot of sounds! [laughs] We keep having to redo it every time because they keep changing the animations! For me, I've been on it for four years, and it's an intense amount of creation in a very fast period of time. There's so much that gets created every week that it's hard to remember what I did two weeks ago! I have all the episodes referenced in a super session, so I can look things up when I need to, but it's just a constant state of creation. It all comes from the writing and the visual effects—each episode is just so rich, and it's just a total sound designer's dream and playground to have, but it's on a TV schedule, so you just go and go and go, and you churn and you crank and get it out as quick as you can. I always love interviews where people are like, "Oh, this is this sound and this is that sound", and I'm just sitting there like, "How do you know that?" [laughs] To be fair, when prompted, it all kind of floods back, but I can never really be sure unless I open up my session! MT: For Season 3, Tim, what's the fast transporter? That was a really cool thing that you made, that was something in spotting that they talked about. You came up with a really cool sound for it. TF: They had talked about having there be a pre echo like, you could hear it coming in, especially in 301 when they're out in the plains. I found a bunch of weird source material, echoed it out and pitched it and warped it until it fell apart and then did it again. I don't remember everything since I just kept making new sounds and then feeding those new sounds back into my chain. With the personal transporter, they press the badge and you have a short whine up. That's the sound of a coin being flipped. The ping—I compressed it, used iZotope RX to pull out the tonality, and then I pitched it so it would kind of ramp up. That was fun. [Grabs and shows a pin art toy] Have you ever seen these things? Pin art? That's the sound of the programmable matter moving and shuffling. If you move it real slow [slowly moves the pin toy around] you get all these great granular movement sounds. I have one made of metal and one made out of plastic. I recorded a bunch of different movements from it, ran them through a processing chain and added a few other elements, and that became programmable matter. –Matthew Taylor We get the turnovers for the show fairly early. It's not necessarily always the case that we have the budgetary resources to start that early, but we get a cut. Depending on the content on the episode, we could have a decent amount of VFX or close to none.