Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/607566
THE PEANUTS MOVIE www.postmagazine.com 32 POST NOVEMBER 2015 you, and those were quite a challenge in some ways, very much like doing a live-action sequence." Did you draw on your library of sound effects, or did you record new elements? "We actually recorded quite a bit of new material for this film. It turns out that Craig Schulz, the son of Charles Schulz, has an old period plane very similar to that one, and we went out to an airport near Santa Rosa, CA, and recorded that plane and several other planes. That was great because even though we have planes of that period in our sound library already, we didn't have planes doing all of the maneuvers and moves that we needed for the film." Can you use those original sounds or do they need enhancing? "A lot of those elements are the actual plane sounds, and we are trying to do as little manipulation as possible because when you electronically manipulate a sound, if you are not very careful about it, you produce artificial aspects to it that make it sound unreal. We want the film to sound basically naturalistic, realistic and organic. We don't want it to sound like a science fiction film, so we pitch manipulated the planes a little bit and enhanced the Doppler shifts a little bit by manipulating them. But 95 percent of what you hear is an actual plane." How big was Skywalker's sound design team for The Peanuts Movie? It's basically four or five people, in addition to the people who perform and record the Foley for the film. I am sound design- ing and mixing also. Lora Hirschberg and I are mixing. Lora is the only woman to have ever won an Oscar (Inception, 2011) for 'Sound Mixing.' Lora and I have mixed almost all of the Blue Sky projects that we've worked on — the Ice Age movies for instance. It's a two-person mix. Lora is mix- ing the dialogue and the music, and I am mixing the sound effects and the Foley." How are you handling the 5.1, 7.1 and Dolby Atmos mixes? "[With] Atmos, there is a downmix capa- bility, but it's something you always want to check and sometimes you want to make adjustments, because what a box does to it automatically isn't necessarily exactly what you want to do to convert the Atmos to 5.1." Can you talk about panning within Atmos? "Certainly, the dialogue is mostly upfront, but the music is taking advantage of Atmos also. Some people think that Atmos enhances music even more than sound effects. "In some ways this film is sonically more simple than other films that we work on, but as I said, that in itself is a challenge. There certainly are sequences of the movie that have lots of sound, but there are also sequences that are very simple. You don't necessarily take less time in making those work. The audience is going to be listening to those sounds very carefully and you have to get them exactly right." Where does the sub come into play? "It doesn't come in very often. We have a tree falling over, and there are a few places to use it, but it's not a movie we are leaning on the bass frequencies very much." Are you working within a Pro Tools workflow? "We certainly design and edit in Pro Tools, and Pro Tools is our sound source in the mix. But on this film, that's being fed into an (AMS) DFC mixing console. Some of the mixing is also happening in Pro Tools. We use volume graphs in Pro Tools pretty liberally, so a lot of what you would have done exclusively in premixing, we've already done in the editing rooms inside Pro Tools by using volume graphs." Do you feel you had adequate time to create the soundtrack you had in mind? "We did, absolutely. It's always hard to let go of a project, whether you are the director or sound designer. You want to keep tweaking it forever...but at some point you run out of time and say, 'That's the way it's going to be.' I'm very happy with the way this turned out. It's such a sweet movie, and really funny. I'm proud of it." Sounds simple? The Skywalker team put equal effort into both quiet and more dynamic scenes.