Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1448505
54 I M PS E . O R G have a lot more latitude than in a reality based movie. So you can really put a lot of character into every moment and every sound that you use. PL: I love the expression you used, "sonic soul."• EA: Everybody has different terms when they're talking about sound. PL: And " hyper-expressive." That's another really good term. EA: Everybody has a different way of describing what they do in this business. So these key words are kind of important. It's hard to describe sound because it is kind of an abstract thing. And as you know, in sound design, you can use a completely unrelated sound and attach it to picture. And somehow there's an alchemy that happens between sound and picture. To me, in that way sound can be kind of an abstract art. And trying to describe sound with words can get really tricky and awkward, because it's like trying to describe something that's not physical, it's almost in the ether. I find that sometimes a little poetry in a way helps describe a better- than-scientific way to go. PL:• No one is going to argue with the poetry of sound, you know what I mean?• How do you deal with producers and directors? How do you deal with those expectations? EA: Well, every picture crew, every team of producers, every studio, and every project is different. There's no one way I can describe a team that you're working with. And the processes are often very different for them. Some filmmakers in animation that I've worked with don't give me any sort of spotting notes. They just say, "okay, just make "magic," do your thing." And then there's something to react to, then we can discuss a first pass. Whereas, other filmmakers will have maybe an hour's long spotting session frame by frame. And those are kind of the two different extremes. And both approaches can work. If filmmakers want to be really specific, that's great. If they don't, that's also great. I think one of the big differences may be between television and feature animation. Obviously in features, we have a lot more time. And oftentimes, most of that time is way before any mixing starts. So we have months of development and exploration. Part of our process is, as soon as we get a cut of the movie, we start designing scenes and shipping them to the picture department. What we'd like to do is have them put our tracks into the Avid and remove their temp effects. And then that becomes kind of the rolling sound conversation as we go. Then when we get a new version of a reel or a scene, we can see if they cut a little piece out of our stem that we sent, and replaced it with something else. And that almost becomes kind of how we get notes in a very physical way. The ultimate goal is, by the time we start mixing, the entire (sound) track has been vetted by the filmmakers. It's been living in their Avid for months. That's what they've been hearing so there are zero surprises when we hit the mixing stage, and then it can just be a creative process. We can be artistic and not be scrambling to match something that they've gotten us used to on the temp track for months and months, which is something you try to avoid. PL: I know on television you usually have like two weeks or so. Right?• EA: That's pretty much it. And then on a feature you have like three months, maybe four months, it depends on the budget. But I'd say on the very low end, we have three months. And some projects go on for years. The most recent development and then that animation keeps changing, keeps evolving. And, you know, the most recent film we did with DreamWorks, and now part of Universal, was Everest (Abominable), and which was just a delight. But I think, maybe from start to finish was over three years. We're not necessarily on the entire time, it's in blocks of months here and there. But the film changed kind of drastically from the beginning to the end. Sometimes there's this windy path that the filmmakers go through to find the essence of their movie and it's important to have sound along for that ride, especially on a film like Everest where the main character is performed. It's sound design, they're not speaking English, the main character is a Yeti. So that's part of our job to bring the soul to that character, the vocal performance. And with the help, obviously, of voice actors and creatures that we record, we try to weave them all together into a seamless kind of way. PL: Do you normally use voice actors for your creatures and adjust with plug-ins? EA: Yeah, so usually with a main character who's a creature. First of all, we kind of create a performance spine, so either with a voice actor or us doing vocalizations into a microphone. This gives us a template for what emotional beats we're hitting, what the behavior is, moment by moment. Sometimes it might be to a human voice and after we pitch shift and manipulate it. We also love going out recording animals. Animal trainers have different tricks for eliciting emotions in animals. In Everest we used a lot of European brown bear sounds. The trainer had this trick with this brown bear, his favorite food was Oreo cookies. All the trainer had to do is just hold up the package of Oreos, and he would just start going (making sounds). We also had a porcupine named Teddy flown out from Texas. He had been found on the side of the road, his mother was killed like roadkill, and he was just this little baby left there. He was rescued and he grew up with humans. We just kind of like talked through his whole life, which