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AUDIO FOR ANIMATION he best part of sound design is getting lost in the process of experimentation. With animation, there's freedom to explore different tones and textures because you're not restricted to working with existing production sound. The soundscape is built to taste, from the ground up. Here we explore the creative sound process on animated feature films The Boss Baby and Smurfs: The Lost Village, and on animat- ed series Star Wars Rebels and Mickey and the Roadster Racers. THE BOSS BABY Supervising sound editor/sound designer/re-re- cording mixer Paul Ottosson has won Oscars for sound editing Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker (on the latter Ottosson also earned an Oscar for sound mixing), so it may seem surprising to find him adding "sweetness" to the sound of DreamWorks Animation's The Boss Baby. An ani- mated kids' film is pretty much the polar opposite of a modern-combat thriller, but Ottosson says it's not such a radical jump. "At the end of the day, it's all about supporting the story with sound," he says. The Boss Baby examines family dynamics and how an infant can change that existing structure. Ottosson elaborates, "It's about the love between two brothers. Director Tom McGrath wanted the sound to be very sweet. We had to sell the action with a sweet sound, and if we could, to make things sound sweeter. That was a big mantra for the movie." He added extra sweetness by augmenting main sounds with secondary resonant tones. He explains that if you hit a wooden box, there's the initial impact sound but then there is a tone af- terwards. "If you hit something plastic, it will give you a different resonating tone than what you would get if you hit something metal. So I use a lot of these secondary sounds, the resonating sound of an object and added those to the main sound," he says. For example, in a backyard sequence the older brother squares off with his new little brother and his infant cronies. They're involved in an ac- tion-packed car chase sequence complete with slow-mo car jumps, suction cup gun fights and an explosion. To make the big, realistic sounds of crash- es and impacts feel less brutal, Ottosson added sweetness "by adding a secondary sound, to make it sound resonating and hollow on the impact." Director McGrath wanted the sound to feel era-appropriate. For Ottosson, that meant track- ing down a slew of toys from the 1970s in order to record them. The trouble is, many of the toys aren't made anymore and have long since been thrown away. So Ottosson and his sound team scoured the Internet in search of specific old toys. "Tonka trucks from back in the day are made of metal, while today they're made of plastic and metal. There are these old cameras in the movie that have cube flashes. Those cameras aren't real- ly made anymore. After searching for six months, I found some in Hong Kong," says Ottosson, whose sound studio at Sony Pictures Post (http:// www.sonypictures.com) in Culver City, CA, is now home to a huge collection of old toys. Ottosson recorded the real toys' sounds but admits that their actual sound sometimes felt too weak or wasn't funny enough. The solution, he says, was to give "the sound of these toys a little something extra. It still sounds like an old toy, but with a little charm that makes you smile." In the film, the villain's storybook comes to life, endlessly folding to create different scenes to explain his origin. Ottosson wanted the sound to be papery, so he shot the scene with Foley in sync to picture. "There wasn't enough definition when we tried shooting it in sync. There were too many small, delicate elements we needed for the folding and paper things popping up," says Ottosson. He re-recorded the elements singularly, T The Boss Baby Paul Ottosson premixed in Pro Tools. Sony Pictures Post hosted the Dolby Atmos mix.