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www.postmagazine.com Post • May 2014 35 Miroslav Pilon Studio's Louis Molinas is a sound designer on Rabbids Invasion. performances as often as possible, the way they were performed. The key to a good vocalization is a good performance. Thom explains, "It's useful to think of these animals we recorded as if they were actors. The most important thing is to get a good perfor- mance from your actor. We do use some pitch shifting and other modulation on the animal recordings, but most of the drama or comedy is really inherent in the original per- formance of the animal." Thom often says to the young sound designers he works with, "Don't think that you're going to be able to turn a mediocre or boring animal vocalization into something wonderful by manipulating it digitally. You really need to spend the time going out and recording animals to make sure you capture really great performances." Hundreds of hours of animal vocalizations were recorded, and of those, only a small fraction made it into the film. Thom likens it to harvesting grapes for wine, you need a huge number of grapes to make a fairly small amount of wine. One of the best places they captured animal recordings was in an elephant sanctu- ary in Thailand. Though Thom didn't get to go himself, he says some of the elephants have been there for so long that they will actually vocalize on command. "That was like a treasure trove for us because if you try to record an elephant in the wild, you spend a lot of time just waiting around for the elephant to vocalize. You never know how close you're going to be able to get to a wild elephant, and anyway, I don't think you want to get too close to one," jokes Thom. When trying to evoke sympathy or express affection in the dragons, Thom often chooses dog sounds because, he explains, people have very deep-seated sympathetic feelings about dogs in general due to our long history together. He pitches the dog sounds down quite low, so they sound like they're coming from a larger creature. The dragons in the film are much larger than dogs. Thom's favorite pitch shifting plug-in is Serato's Pitch n' Time. It allows him to dynamically change the pitch of a vocaliza- tion. When combining animal vocalizations with human vocalizations, Thom uses Pitch n' Time to make them match each other. "So when you go from an animal vocaliza- tion to a human vocalization it will be more believable that you're hearing one continu- ous creature instead of two different spe- cies," he explains How to Train Your Dragon 2 is mixed in the Dolby Atmos and Barco Auro formats. With height speakers, and the ability to pinpoint sound effects anywhere around the room, both formats were helpful for certain scenes, such as when the dragons are flying over- head, or when a dragon is rising to the top of the screen. The goal is always to have the sound support the picture, and not to be distracting in any way. "Sometimes a sound that's off-screen, whether it's in the ceiling or in the rear sur- rounds, can be distracting in a bad way," Thom says. "The last thing you want to do is cause the audience to think about your pro- cess as a filmmaker or a storyteller, because then they're pulled out of the dream of the story. We decide on a case-by-case basis when to use those extra channels that Atmos and Auro afford us. We ask, 'Is that sound really helping us in this moment or is it distracting?'" One great advantage of animation, in regards to sound design, is that the creative process starts much earlier, as early as the pre-production stage. The filmmakers start with a basic script for a scene. After they record the actors' voices, the dialogue track is added to storyboards to create a visual representation of what's going to happen. Thom notes that experiments with the sound design are crucial in the early stage as it can help to shape the movie. "One thing we empha- size here at Skywalker Sound, is doing experiments very early on with sound, even before you star t ani- mating. In that very early stage, sound is really crucial in terms of figuring out whether a scene is going to work eventually. The film- makers really desperately need sound design and at least some form of tempo- rar y music to flesh out those storyboard cuts of the movie." As an example, Thom could present ideas for the dragon vocalizations that may eventually affect the way the dragons look. If there was a fluttery sound in one of the elephant record- ings he submits as a possible dragon vocal for the story- board, then that may give the animator an idea for how to draw part of the dragon's body, so it would vibrate to produce that flutter. "You have this great feedback set up between the sound people and the anima- tors, where we send them sounds that give them ideas and they send us more elaborate visuals which give us ideas, and we send more elaborate sounds back to them," says Thom. "I wish that kind of process would happen more often in live-action, though I think it's now beginning to." RABBIDS INVASION Louis Molinas is the sound designer on the animated TV series Rabbids Invasion. Moli- nas, Foley artist Jean Baptiste Cornier, and re-recording mixer Yoann Veyrat, work together on Rabbids Invasion at Miroslav Pilon Studio, located in Lyon, France (http:// www.miroslav-pilon.com). Miroslav Pilon Stu- dio is a full-service audio post facility that offers 5.1 mixing, music services, original sound design, Foley, casting, voiceover and ADR. Rabbids Invasion is created by Ubisoft Motion Pictures and was inspired by the Stormy Weather on Arri S35 – Red 5K – HD StormStock® The world's premier storm footage library. (817) 276-9500 www.stormstock.com continued on page 46