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38 Post • April 2014 www.postmagazine.com Parker admits to performing some of them himself, especially when there is a very pre- cise envelope or emotion he wants to cap- ture. He also has the on-camera actors per- form vocalizations for their own characters. In the beginning of Season 3A, the cast of werewolves dramatically increased. Parker and his audio team knew early on that the voices of the werewolves needed to be dis- tinct so that, during a large fight scene, the vocalizations wouldn't turn into a mush of sound. Each actor performed vocalizations for delivering punches, pain, screams, wails, and other reactions. "Then based on each character's voice, I paired them up with various animal sounds that contributed something to the character- istics of the actor's voice," notes Parker. There is a tendency to go as big as possible with every werewolf, but keeping the synergy between picture and sound is the main goal. You should believe the sound is really coming out of the character on screen. Parker tried different audio tools, like vocoders and other software, to streamline the process of com- bining the actor's vocalizations and the ani- mal sounds into one. The most effective way, he finds, is to manually fine-tune pitch, and most importantly, to get the timing right. How the sound starts, and how it ends, are the most important things when syncing it to picture, says Parker. "The animal sounds and the actor's vocalizations have to line up in such a way so it all seems like one sound." One of Parker's favorite scenes to sound design was Season 3: Episode 12 "Lunar Ellipse." The scene involves character Jennifer Blake, a dark druid who has been committing murders to regain power. She levitates bro- ken glass from the ground and the pieces twinkle and spin before they all come together. Then they are hurled at alpha were- wolf Kali. To build the sound for the scene, Parker star ted with the gritty sound of the glass against the ground, then added singing wine- glasses as the pieces rise and spin in the air. The shards of glass resonate in different frequencies. Parker pitch shifted the wine glasses so they were all in tune with each other. Then he reversed the sound files and drew pitch envelopes in the Waves Sound- Shifter plug-in. He drew a different pitch envelope for each of the eight layers of sound, so that they were all going away from the same pitch. Parker processed the files, then reversed them again, so that the sounds all star t at different pitches but end up at the same pitch. There was also a twin- kling glass layer playing underneath the wine glasses. "It conveys a sor t of dissonance and chaos that comes together into one pitch before the glass shards shoot forward in the attack," he explains. When scheduling permits, Parker prefers to cut the dialog himself, so he knows each episode down to the shot, making it easier to communicate with the director and the pic- ture editor. "The story is in the dialogue," he says. "Everything you do has to be a function of the story. It's important to be really familiar with the dialogue." As he's doing the dia- logue, the Foley team and sound effects edi- tor are using Parker's notes from the spotting session to do their work. They have two days per episode. Once sound editorial and Foley are complete, they send everything back to Parker, who checks that the sounds line up with the spotting notes, and that they achieve the sound goals for the show. "I'm the point person between the pro- duction side and the sound editorial side," says Parker. "I design sounds and send them off to picture editorial. The files I create have a distinct filename, so when they come back in the OMF from the edit, my sound effects editor, John Warren, recognizes them as sounds I created." Since Parker's sounds go through picture editorial and are already approved, Warren simply builds around them. He pulls his effects from the custom library they created for Teen Wolf prior to the start of the season. Working this way allows Parker and his audio team to deliver consistently-creative sounds even with a tight schedule. "When we're in our turnaround, which gets shorter as the season goes on, we don't have to feel rushed and reach for something that isn't custom to the show. The hero moments that feature the creatures or vil- lains all have custom sounds that reflect the theme of each season." Helix David Ger tsman, at Premium Sound in Montreal (http://www.premiumsound.ca), is the super vising sound editor for Helix. According to Ger tsman, Premium Sound is a niche audio post facility, since they mainly provide services for English original content in a French city. Premium Sound has nine sound editing suites, two mix rooms, two ADR/Foley stages, and two multi-functioning rooms that can be used for recording and mixing. All the mixing and editing suites are setup with 5.1 surround systems and equipped with Pro Tools 10. They provide audio post services for the film and televi- sion industries. Helix recently completed its first season on the Syfy network. The season finale aired at the end of March. Helix follows the story of researchers at an Arctic bioresearch sta- tion. A viral outbreak leads to most of the researchers being quarantined. Some of the infected researchers transform into vectors — violent zombie-like hosts capable of spreading the infection to others. A month before Gertsman saw the first episode, he began work on the sound for the vectors. Though the show is about an infec- tion, the show's creators didn't want to have typical drooling zombies. They had two Levels Audio's Bryan Parker and the studio's ADR/Foley stage. Supernatural Sound