Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1535806
AM: I get paid for my hobby! It's easier to go to work when you get to do this. How about you Ken? Ken Gombos: I'm Ken Gombos, and I record dialogue now, but I've also been an engineer, and I've done ADR and Foley. I think I have been in the business for 25 years now, at various places doing television, film, animation, and live action. And you, Richard? Richard Duarte: I've been in the business for about 30 years. I started in music and have a bachelor of science in film, though I switched over to Foley pretty quickly. It's been a good profession. It's provided me with a good living, and I've worked on a lot of good projects. So, it's been a good ride! So, how many of us started in music? [Unanimous show of hands.] Wow, that's great! So, Leff, is there a relationship between DreamWorks and Skywalker that I'm not familiar with? LL: Yeah, we've done a lot of DreamWorks projects over the years, but very specifically, this one was [director] Chris Sanders. Chris and Dean DeBlois worked with Christopher Boyes and Frank Eulner on Lilo & Stitch back in the day, and they asked Randy [Thom] to do the sound design on the first How to Train Your Dragon. And Chris had already started development on The Croods, [so] we did that with him. When it can time for The Wild Robot, he called us very early on, along with Kris [Bowers], the composer, which was a huge blessing. I think part of the experience from Dragon was learning to design sound to tell a story before the animators get a hold of it. It's something that a lot of the directors at DreamWorks have really taken to. That sounds like some Randy influence there. I hear he likes to start on the script. LL: And he's not wrong! It really does make a huge difference. Chris had a lot of interesting questions for us from the very beginning such as what Roz was going to sound like and what her story arc was going to be. Those conversations helped us, but also helped him, and we even got an opportunity to do some robot processing on Lupita [Nyong'o—the voice of Roz] during her records. We would send them back and he and Lupita would listen to different things we were doing, to the point where she would have three different phases of Roz. She would physically present herself differently and tighten different muscles to be more robotic or less robotic to the point where, as her voice goes, we did very little processing. Lupita's voice is futzed, but it's not really "robotic." There must have been an evolution to get where you landed. Did it take a long time to find a sweet spot? L-R: Richard Duarte, Gary A. Rizzo CAS, Leff Lefferts, and Ken Gombos