Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/491542
C M Y CM MY CY CMY K NUGEN_POST_3rd_vert_OL.pdf 1 3/6/15 5:43 PM ideas and presented a demo to Loter and executive producer John Las- seter. "After that presentation, Steve walked up to me and shook my hand and said, 'Congratulations, you're doing the main character in the film.'" Gruff exhibits an interesting mix of animal characteristics. He can be as fierce as a lion, and other times, as kooky as a possum. This worked to Toon's benefit by allowing him to draw on a wide variety of animal sounds to build Gruff's sonic palette. For example, dog sounds worked best for Gruff in emotional situations. Toon says, "Most of the dog sounds were recorded by my sound effects recordist Charlie Campagna. His dog was very talkative and we could real- ly manipulate and mold those sounds into something suitable." For Gruff's angry, terse, and matter-of-fact mo- ments, camel sounds worked best. Campagna recorded his cat purring to help sell the happy and content scenes. They used llama bleets for the extremely sad scenes towards the end. And when Gruff is really angry, they used hyena growls that Campagna recorded. "Gruff is very expressive, and no two sounds are the same. That's by design. Whatever animals they had modeled Gruff after visually, we could use those for his voice," notes Toon. Toon narrowed down the innumer- able animal sound options by choos- ing only animals recorded close-up. All the dialogue in an animated film is recorded in a studio, and since Gruff is a main character, he needed to sound like he was recorded in the studio, too. Toon weeded out mate- rial that was too thin, or recorded off axis, to create a toolbox of sounds that became Gruff. Toon states that honing Gruff's sound library hap- pened in collaboration with director Loter, the producer Makul Wigert, and Margaret Hou the editor. Toon created Gruff's voice mainly by editing, layering and pitch shifting the raw sounds in Pro Tools 11. For Gruff's angry vocalizations, Toon turned to Krotos' Dehumaniser plug- in. "Most of the sounds are unpro- cessed," says Toon. "For pitch shifting I used Serato's Pitch 'n Time Pro. It's like my best friend after this film." As Toon busily crafted Gruff's voice, he assigned sound designer Zub the task of building the electri- cal storm for the culmination of the film. "Apart from Gruff, the electri- cal storm was on the top of [Steve Loter's] priority list. The storm is effectively a character that needed to have its own voice," explains Toon. The challenge was to create an electrical storm with supernatural overtones that gradually built in intensity. Zub notes, "When you create those sounds you want to be as bold as possible so you know how far you can go, and then pull it back in some areas. Since this is a G-rated film we didn't want it to be too scary." Zub pulled storm and electrical elements, supplied by Toon, into Native Instru- ments' Kontakt 5 and manipulated them using NI's Maschine interface. Zub also created a layer using his own voice that he processed with delays and pitch shifting to give it a creepy sound. In Pro Tools 11, he used a harmonic generator plug-in called Clarisonix by Plug and Mix to create low-end sounds. That processing was done via AudioSuite. "Clarisonix creates more weight to the sound but doesn't adversely add anything over the top. It's fun to discover new toys like Plug and Mix because it's fun to find new ways to discover new sounds. That's the beauty of a company like ours, we are always up to try new things," says Zub. www.postmagazine.com FOR MORE AUDIO FOR ANIMATION, VISIT US AT: Audio post for Tinker Bell and the Legend of the NeverBeast was completed at Formosa Group.