Ultimate Ice 2.5 HD Pro Sound Effects Library is a small 24-Bit 96kHz addition to Ultimate Ice 2.0 with some BIG ice cracks and impacts from a perfectly round lake in North Idaho. Also included are fast ripping ice cracks from another 800 acre lake a short distance from Round Lake and some special designed ice sounds from here in the studio.

The extreme low frequency nature of some of these ice recordings are perfect for LFE tracks and as additional elements layered in with higher pitch cracks.

The SFX Bible special offer is coming to its end.

The Sound Effects Bible Hard Drive is a collection of 5,000 sound effects recorded by Ric Viers and his team at the Detroit Chop Shop including close to 2,000 new and previously unreleased sound effects. All of the sounds were recorded at 24/96KHz, along with a small selection of unique 16/44.1KHz sounds that were pulled from the Detroit Chop Shop archives.

The sounds are delivered as 24/48 KHz broadcast .WAV files complete with metadata that is compatible with your favorite search engine and are neatly sorted into 25 category folders: Ambience, Animals, Cartoon, Emergency, Explosions, Fire, Foley, Food, Footsteps, Horror, Horror Production Elements, Household, Humans, Impacts, Industry, Multimedia, Office, Production Elements, Science Fiction, Sports, Technology, Vehicles, Warfare, Water and Weather.

Recordist and editor Gabriele Fasano from Italy launched Surround Ambiences, a library focused on surround recordings.The first collection is available now, called Autumn Wind HD 5.1

Autumn Wind HD 5.1 is a collection of High Definition ambience wind sound effects recorded at 24bit/96khz using a Soundfield SPS200 surround microphone. Included are recordings of strong and medium strong wind taken on a very breezy autumn day. The microphone was placed in the middle of the trees to get the best surround effect of waving leaves. It was also positioned at the centre of a field within a forest to obtain a surround sound perspective from a distance. Some recordings also include birds singing.

Affordable Audio 4 Everyone released Elements of Terror, including 200 sounds. All proceeds above $5 go to International Suicide Prevention.

Building an insane asylum? Perhaps a scene with a dark nightmare. The Elements of Terror has both subliminal, and dark sounds that helps bring fear into a scene. Help provide that extra element to a horror scene. To make the audience wonder about what might be behind that next door.

Click here to view the embedded video.

BOOM Library is now accepting pre-orders of their new Dogs library. Over 7 GB of sound recorded at 192 kHz, 24-bit.

This collection is your ultimate source for high quality dog sound effects. “Dogs” provides you with a huge variety of clean and crispy sounds of our four-legged friends. You get the full range from small to huge, from young to old, from tiny whining to aggressive barking. Look forward to tons of growls, snarls, moans, barks, scratching, drinking, eating and much more. Whether it’s the friendly Border Collie or the impressive Doberman, this library gives you the full flexibility for designing really authentic dog sound effects or some bad-ass creatures from another planet.

TONSTURM‘s first ambience library Mountain Air is available now at $99 (Introductory offer until Dec 24th. Regular price is $119)

This ambience sound pack features surround sound recordings which were captured during an extensive field recording trip in the beautiful Alps of Austria and Tyrol. You get 7.12 GB of clear and wide sounding mountain ambiences full of air, birds, brooks, crickets and cowbells in 5.0 Channel Surround HD Audio @ 24 Bit, 96 KHz.

Below is a q&a I had with Tilman Hahn, who runs TONSTURM with Emil Klotzsch.

What was your inspiration for the library?

Right from the beginning when we started Tonsturm, we had planned to create effects and ambience libraries. The ambience libraries just needed a little bit more of research as we definitely wanted to recorded them in surround. We both have a lot of ideas and try to gather more information and experiences until some of these ideas seem to materialize into a topic for a sound library. Our ideas are also influenced by our work as sound designers and sound editors. This year I was asked to work on a film that is set in the Alpine Mountains. I have been hiking and recording in Austria two times before but these recordings were all done in stereo and not for library purposes. So this seemed to be the perfect moment to start what we were already planing since last year. From what I have seen and recorded on my previous trips we knew that Austria and Tyrol would be a great place for recording our first ambience release.

How was the trip and what places were you looking for?

I went on this trip together with Bennie Diez, a good friend of mine, who is a director and vfx artist. He did the wonderful photo- and video documentation. The trip was a great experience and the perfect compensation for the daily work in front of the computer. We tested the weight of our equipment bags before but did not think about the fact that we where hiking uphill most of the time. We were reaching our physical limit every day as we are not very trained hikers. During the trip we gained more and more endurance which made everything more enjoyable.

Before we started the trip we checked the air routes above austria to find the places with less air traffic to avoid as much aircraft noise as possible. mid-September seemed to be a good time for recording in the alps as most of the cows were not on the paddock any more and the tourist season was over. During our trip we obviously searched for places far away from the bigger roads. These were mainly conservation areas. In these areas we were looking for places like high valleys which seemed to be the best isolation from any civilization noise.

I’m curious about the quietest places you found?

As we went recording in september the nature was very quiet in general. The birds do not tweet like in the spring time. Everything sounded very distant and wide. Occasionally we heard a bird fly by or a distant crow. The only time where you could hear more birds was during dawn. But it was not easy to find these quiet spots as we very often had to interrupt our recordings because of air traffic or the sound of a motor bike. In the mountains these sounds can travel pretty far and it takes a long time until they finally disappear. So the main challenge of this trip was to find the right spaces and time frames to record just the sound of nature and nothing else. We are are very happy that we have found these really quiet places and daytimes where you could listen only to the sound of nature.

How were the gear setups?

The rig consisted of four omnidirectional Sennheiser MKH 8020 microphones, four single mic stands and a Sound Devices 788T multichannel recorder. We wanted to capture this impressive landscape as open and wide sounding as possible. Through four individual mic stands we were able to realize a big distance between the individual microphones. This distance and the omnidirectional pattern of the MKH 8020 were the key to this very pleasingly diffuse, wide and open sound field of these ambience recordings. We also chose the MKH 8020 for their very low self noise as we had to be able to capture very quiet and subtle sounds.

Any favorite recordings/places from the package?

One night we were recording on top of a hill, it was very quiet. Suddenly we heard footsteps of several deer. They seemed to be curious and approached from both sides. On the headphones it sounded pretty scary. We got a bit afraid as we did not know if they could get dangerous. So we stood up and started to talk to show some presence.
Then suddenly there was this big evil sounding grunt of a roebuck and we ran away… but I guess we were not in danger at all.

Another great moment was when this single bird flew by as we were recording in this beautiful valley. It was very early in the morning.

HISS and a ROAR has released BEACHES, an ambience library recorded by sound designer Tim Prebble.

If you’ve ever had to sync waves to picture then you will appreciate the need for a collection of cleanly recorded waves of various scales; from gentle idyllic waterlaps to more turbulent surf. Each location in this new library was recorded to six tracks, capturing a narrow & coherent stereo image with a Sanken CSS5 microphone, a dynamic & exciting pointillistic image using a pair of Sennheiser MKH70s, and a more diffuse, brighter image using a pair of omni-directional DPA 6040 microphones.

Each ambience in the library contains a minimum of three minutes duration for each of the three sets of stereo mics, in all fourteen beach locations, along with a photo to clearly identify the setting, and GPS coordinates incase you’d like to visit on Google Earth. This library aims to provide sound editors with the ability to easily choose which location and recording/s best match the perspective and point of view of your footage. Alternatively if you need a micro-nap, hit play & transport yourself to a pristine Pacific beach, far far away….

Available now at $49 and delivered at 24-Bit/96kHz.

HISSandaROAR Beaches:

Click here to view the embedded video.

and TONSTURM Mountain Air:

Rabbit Ears Audio has an Animal Bells Library on the way, “for sheep, goats, cows, elephants, or sound designers”.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Chuck Russom FX has released Drones sound library, featuring 26 stereo drones, each is one minute in length. Delivered at 24-bit/96kHz. WAV.

Arrowhead Audio has released Swishes library, including 332 samples at 24-bit/96kHz. WAV.

Tim: First, backgrounds are the bed upon which all the other sounds must be built. It’s foundation work, and I love foundation work. And as the first thing I cut on a project, it’s really the first layers of paint so to speak. So I love that, the very initial layer. Second, the backgrounds have the most power to sell time and space. If done right, you plant the audience clearly in the scene, in the location, and in the world of the film. Third backgrounds have an amazing ability to evoke emotion. Tension, sadness, agitation, fear, love, all of these can be evoked in the backgrounds and in subtle ways. The same scene, cut different, could evoke safety and comfort, or tension and danger. Even the simplest choice of room tones can have an effect on the emotion of a scene. Fourth I just love the types of sounds, winds and rain especially. I love listening to them, I love to record them, and I love to cut and layer them.

DS: What is your preferred background element to play with and why?

Tim: Wind and water. These are both categories of sound that have almost limitless possibilities. Wind can be cold or hot, gentle or piercing, howling, singing, whistling. It can move things around, move through and over things. And water as well, of course. It flows, drips, pours. Just rain by itself could fill an entire library. Soft rain, rain on an infinite variety of surfaces, thick rain, thin rain.

Of these, wind is the base of all backgrounds, when you include room tone, or simple ‘airs’. And it’s wind that I find distracts me the most if done wrong. There are also a handful of library winds that get used over and over, and I can’t say I’m immune from using them as well. But such is the nature, that when a director calls for a ‘whistling wind’, most of us will find the same commercial sound that you know will always work and sell ‘whistling’. I keep hoping to find my own perfect whistling wind. It’s eluded me so far. I’ve made some things with some deer netting that are ‘close’ but not quite perfect yet.

On something like Prince of Persia, wind becomes a major element of the soundtrack, and we spent a lot of time trying to build a library of wind for  the film, especially wind and sand together. Scott Guitteau went to Death Valley for us and recorded as much sand as he could. The recordings yielded a lot of new sounds and textures. We recorded a lot on the Foley stage as well. While this is of course useful for the main cutting of the film, it’s crucial to have that library built for the final mix so you can quickly find the sounds you made for the film. On Persia I built a library of just wind and sand gusts, which proved really useful, as we’d see some more detail in the final picture, and say ‘oh we can throw in a small gust there, see the sand blowing on frame left?’

DS: You mentioned There Will Be Blood as one of your favorite films to work on – and you did the backgrounds. To me, this film had wonderfully gritty and textured images (and characters) – how did this influence the work with the backgrounds?

Tim: When I was asked to work on the film, I was living up in Vancouver supervising Journey to the Center of the Earth. I happened to be on a short hiatus when my friend Chris Scarabosio called. There had been another crew on There Will be Blood, and they had gone through one temp mix I believe. But, and I don’t know any specifics, the clients weren’t happy with the sound that they were getting. Chris asked if I had some time to work with the backgrounds.

I was given the tracks that the other crew had been working with, which is rare, but since I had a short amount of time to work on them, the plan was that I’d take over their tracks, adding or changing what I needed. But I quickly decided that even on the short schedule, I wanted to recut the tracks from scratch.

It wasn’t that the other work done was bad. But I suppose it just wasn’t ‘mine’ and seeing the film, I really wanted the backgrounds to be mine (at least until I turned them back over to Chris of course, after which point, it would all be out of my hands).

I had felt mainly that the original work was too clean. This was, as you mention, a gritty film. When I first watched it, I realized, that unlike probably any other film I had worked on, the backgrounds in this film could be dirty, gritty. The film has an almost documentary style to the shooting. The backgrounds were also crucial, and in many ways make up the bulk of the sound in the movie. There was to be little music in the film, and in fact the film opens I believe with about 10 or 15 minutes with no music, and no dialog. Some backgrounds and a bit of Foley is all we have for the entire opening of the movie.

We also have so many perspective changes, so many scenes in different locations, but all within the same geographic area, that the backgrounds were a real challenge. It certainly pushed my library to the max as I amassed any and all wind in grass that I could find! You need the continuity of geography, but the detail of shifting perspectives.

There were so many great scenes in There Will be Blood for backgrounds, and I’m very proud of the work we all did on that film.

One of the other joys in this track was in cutting mistakes. As I worked with the tracks, and I saw so many places where the camera work and editing was so raw, so gritty. Oil drops hitting the camera glass for instance. And I realized that I had the opportunity to match it with sound. So I actually spent quite a bit of time cutting in mic bumps, mild distortion, things of that nature, to match the nature of the picture. I loved that I could be putting in all the sounds that I would normally spend so much time cutting out. We think that things like mic bumps or distortion have no place, but in There Will be Blood, they fit perfectly.

DS: When working on something like There Will Be Blood which is linked to a special location and a special historical era, how much time do you spend on getting these ‘factual’ things right?

Tim: I know that many people go to great lengths to be factual about the sounds used in the backgrounds. I’ll be honest, that partly for practical reasons, and partly for purely creative ones, I don’t care much about getting the ‘facts’ right. The only fact I care about is this. Does it sound right? Does it do what’s needed there. Does it help the story, sell time and space, and sell the emotion of the scene. Now if a client cares and really wants us to be factual, of course we’ll invest the time. Things like the Cornell Library make finding birds specific to a location easy if the clients want us to spend the money to do so. And always an effort is made to find sounds that are natural to the location.

But I’ll give a real world example. I did a lot of recording and editing on Charlotte’s Web. Now we did source some birds from Maine, I found some nature recordists there that were kind enough to share some recordings. We had an assistant take a recorder back there to his family farm and record some sounds for us too. But I grew up in Minnesota, and had great connections there, so I spent a few weeks recording on some farms there. And the truth is, wind through Minnesota grass sounds like wind through Maine grass! Barns are barns, and crows are crows, and pigs are pigs. So most of the recording for Charlotte’s Web was done in Minnesota.

In Fellowship of the Ring, one of the things I was tasked with were cutting the backgrounds for the entire film. And being a fan of Tolkien, I knew that although Tolkien had built Middle Earth as a fantasy realm, he let it be inspired by real world locations. He had wanted it to feel familiar. With this in mind, I certainly set about to create and gather new sounds, especially the birds. But in addition to creating some background birds completely from scratch, or other animals, I didn’t shy away from using real world birds at all, although they were almost always affected in some way, usually pitched down, drawing them out, making them in my opinion a bit more lyrical. But I wanted that familiarity as well, of the birds sounding exotic but real. Chris Ward, who was then I think First Assistant and ADR Recordist went out several times recording birds, and while we were out, I picked up this blade of grass and started to make bird calls. He moved quite some distance, and we recorded a lot of ‘fake’ bird calls that would be used in the film. But there are also birds from the US, from England, Australia in the film. I don’t think this is a bad thing. I certainly didn’t put a Red-Wing Black bird in the film, but very possibly there are part of one.

I spent a lot of time taking a whole series of bird phrases, and re-editing them together, half of one phrase, half of another, to build a library that felt real, but that hopefully no-one singled out a particular bird.

But the short answer to your question is, I don’t much care. I know that will seem like a lazy answer to some, but the truth is, it’s the right sound if we all feel it is, if the director and clients are happy, then I’m happy.

The same applies to sound effects. I know of Supervising Sound Editors going to great lengths to record the ‘real’ sound of something, only to find that faking it with something much smaller and cheaper yielded a much better result than trying to get the real thing.

DS: When you’re the supervising sound editor of a film, how do you ’direct’ the effects editors when they are working on the backgrounds?

Tim: To be honest, I almost always cut a lot of the backgrounds myself, at least in Journey to the Center of the Earth, where I cut a lot of the FX for the entire film, and also Prince of Persia, I end up cutting, at least to establish, a lot of the backgrounds myself.

But the editors I have the pleasure of working with all have their own taste and style, and I have never found myself giving a lot of direction up front. After hearing what they’re working on, usually it entails me saying either ‘maybe we could do _______’, or else ‘I have a sound I’d love to use here.’ But I will have spotted some sounds, or ideally build a library of the sounds I’d like to use, and then let the editors make their own pass. I want.

And sometimes, I’ll have cut a reel or two of backgrounds, and any other editors can take that work and source from it. We do that a lot, whoever ends up establishing a location for instance will share those sounds and notes with the other editors.

DS: How much direction and which kind of direction do you prefer to get yourself, when you’re the sound effects editor?

Tim: I selfishly prefer to get almost no direction, and most of the supervising sound editors I’ve worked with have allowed me this freedom. Of all the Supervising Sound Editors I’ve worked with, almost none of them spot sound effects for me before starting, and I’m usually left on my own for the first pass at least. In some cases, it will be in the premix the first time the Supervising Sound Editor will hear everything. That level of trust is a real treasure.

Working with Ben Burtt and Gary Rydstrom, I’ll have a database of sounds spotted. In Ben’s case, he’s very particular about having chosen the sounds he wants to use, and his notes are very detailed. This doesn’t mean that we don’t go outside of those spotted sounds where necessary, but rarely is it necessary. In the case of Gary, on War Horse, a large database of new sounds was built, recorded, designed before I started. Detailed notes were available, mostly ideas like ‘Try this sound for incoming artillery’, or ‘I like this one the best’. Gary and I would spot the reel, and he’d give me his thoughts about overall direction the scene shoudl take. But then Gary gave me incredible leeway as well in cutting, letting me make my first pass on my own.

For the backgrounds in particular, Gary had spotted certain sounds that he thought would work well in the trenches, and really wanted to make sure we differentiated between the German and the English trenches. I had some sounds in my library as well that I thought worked, and so if I had something in my library that I thought would help, I would add it in.

DS: In your story on MS-recording you talked about delivering LCR ambiences to the mix stage. How do you build up your tracks for backgrounds – do you like to have a bed of sound that goes throughout the scenes or do you build up your backgrounds of a lot of small specific elements?

Tim: Both. These days I usually end up with six background predubs, usually calling them A1, A2, B1, B2, C1 and C2. So think of them really as three different predubs, each with two sub-predubs, done either for checker-boarding, or additional splitting out of elements.

Predubs A1 and A2 usually contain the really basic sounds, room-tone, light or basic wind, really generic city backgrounds, etc. In a scene of rain they might contain the constant rain that will run through the scene. As such, A1 and A2 are often the largest ‘blocks’ of sound.

B1 and B2 are usually the perspective cutting elements, be it wind, rain, traffic, etc. They usually have a lot of edits that follow the geography of the scene.

C1 and C2 usually contain the specific ambience sweeteners needed, be it individual rain gusts, wind gusts, etc. They could also be traffic sweeteners, or additional layers, for instance if someone in the scene were to open a window, the additional sound to enter the scene might be placed here.

DS: Do you ever use ‘musical’ elements as part of backgrounds – by which I mean abstract sounds or treated elements?

Tim: Absolutely! That’s a large part of the fun for me. An example I already mentioned is when the Ring Wraiths are entering Bree. That sound there is a very abstract sound that most people would think is a musical element, or part of the score, but it’s the metal bowl and razor sound I mentioned in the first interview.

There is always a place for musical elements, be it in the glass water sounds of Rivendell, in the winds in Lorien, which are layered with quite a few musical elements. Even in something like There Will be Blood there is room for these types of sounds, although they’re much more subtle.

The danger of course is that you have to be careful of what your sounds might do when played alongside music later.

In the case of Bree, that scene was originally scored. Early on, once we (David Farmer, Brent Burge and I) had cut that scene and thought it sounded great, we lobbied for Peter to hear it as it was, hoping that perhaps it wouldn’t be scored. We felt we had created tension and made something that really worked for the scene. I don’t believe that ever happened, Peter hearing it, since in fact the scene was scored. But in the final mix, hearing some of the sounds behind the music, Peter heard what we had all put together, and the decision was made to remove some of the music at that point to allow our sounds to play. I wish he had heard it early on, I do think he might not have scored the scene and we would have had even longer to establish our sounds and make the scene even creepier.

But yes, I love musical elements. It’s all sound, music included, and I certainly don’t shy away from exploring musical, tonal, magical sounds anywhere they might be applicable.

But certainly I’m careful that they’re not married to other sounds, knowing that until we all arrive at the final mix, I can’t be certain they’re going to survive.

DS: A couple of years ago Randy Thom commented at the yahoo sound design list that some of the directors he was working with had an inclination to minimize ambient sound. Do you feel the same trend (still) happening?

Tim: Interesting. I remember working on a film very early in my career set in the height of summer. We of course had birds cut for all the suburban scenes, and the picture editor had us remove almost every one, saying ‘the director doesn’t want to hear birds’. So I don’t think this is really a new trend, it’s a personal one from director to director

But certainly as films begin to use more and more music, the backgrounds are often first to go. I’ve noticed in some of the animated films I’ve seen lately rarely have much in the backgrounds. So he might be right. I’m not sure what the reason is. I suppose somehow the directors feel the backgrounds are getting in the way.

But other directors really still love sound, and love backgrounds. I think even though the Pirates films have a lot of music, there are a lot of backgrounds in there as well. Same for Rings, and people like Guillermo del Toro and James Cameron, their films, as big as they are, still have a lot of detailed work done in the backgrounds.

I think David Fincher’s films as well, with Ren Klyce at the helm, have amazing background work, even in something like The Social Network, a film that you might not normally think of backgrounds.

I hope it’s not a trend that is continuing. But he might be right.

DS: Which are your favorite films for backgrounds – which have inspired you throughout the years?

Tim: I remember some films that as I watched them I thought had great creative use of backgrounds, films like Full Metal Jacket and Doctor Zhivago. These aren’t necessarily films that have high-fidelity backgrounds, but I remember seeing the Vietnam sequences of Full Metal Jacket and feeling like I was really there. In the case of something Doctor Zhivago, and most of David Lean’s films, there is beautiful use of sound as transition.

I thought The Thin Red Line had beautiful backgrounds, very lyrical in line with the filmmaking. I think Fight Club has some amazing work in the ambiences, especially the ones relating to the decaying house. There is a realness in those sounds, they are perfect.

Castaway is a brilliant use of backgrounds as storytelling. Here you are on this island, and really you have two main elements, waves and wind through palm fronds. But it’s a fantastic use of backgrounds to mentally isolate you on this desert island. There could have been bugs, birds, it could have been lush sounding, but of course that would have been the wrong direction for the emotion of the movie.

DS: Anything Else?

Tim: I find backgrounds difficult to talk about. Of all the things I tend to do, I find working with the backgrounds the most instinctual. With the backgrounds, I simply know when the sound is right for me. Yes there is a lot of thinking that goes into it as well, but ultimately backgrounds are felt.

I wanted to write an entire article on backgrounds here for the site, but I’m still struggling with an angle, or a structure for it. Maybe this interview is enough. I know there’s more to say, and if I can find words to talk about it more, I’d like to continue this discussion.

Let’s start with talking not about choice of sounds but choice of words.

In the US, background ambiences are called backgrounds – or just BG’s. In Denmark, though, we call them atmospheres. For me, that’s actually a better word to describe this part of the soundtrack, as background sounds can add so much texture, feeling and – yes – atmosphere to a scene. It’s an amazing tool to shape a scene, not just mapping out the geography and time of day, but also setting the mood, creating a vibe and building an underlying rhythm. It’s one of my favorite sound design tools because it works quite subliminally and can be extremely effective, nevertheless.

I want to start out showing a commercial I did a couple of years ago, which I think showcases ambiences in an interesting way. It’s an IKEA commercial directed by a very visually and aurally imaginative Danish director, Martin de Thurah, who really created this commercial with sound in mind. Here it is (even though this youtube-link isn’t exactly the greatest quality, sorry):

Click here to view the embedded video.

First of all, I need to point out that the sound design of this commercial wasn’t just done by me but by two talented colleagues as well, sound designers Morten Green and Mads Heldtberg, the latter also being a very skilled composer. It took a lot of experimentation and building of sounds to establish the very different universes and small tales that unfold very, very fast in this commercial.

If you’re very strict in the way you describe the layers of the soundtrack, some would probably point out that several of the sounds you’re hearing in this commercial aren’t really background sounds but foley and effect sounds. But still several of the small scenes are utilizing these foley and effect sounds like they’re part of a background ambience track – like the typewriter on the boat, the radio program at the apartment buildings or my toothbrush rattling in a glass at the end. This is not the point for me, though. What I find interesting is how the sound sets up a world of each image that goes beyond what the eye sees. The backgrounds really set the tone and the background sounds are in that sense very much in the foreground.

Actually, when I build up background ambiences I pretty much always use effect or foley elements to make the backgrounds come alive in more specific ways. These sounds can add some cool additional elements and textures – all the way from wind in grass to rattling cutlery in a restaurant to the sound of an alarm going off in the distance. I use impulse reverbs all the time – especially Altiverb – it’s a great, easy way of making sounds seem like they come from the same acoustic environment, even though they are recorded close up or in several different rooms.

I want to be able to rearrange the backgrounds in the mix and that’s also why I use a lot of different elements. If suddenly a bird seems out of place I don’t want all birds to be included in just one sound file. Actually, talking about birds: I love building up bird tweets that are precisely fitted to each scene – like having a black bird coming in just after one specific line of dialogue.

Everything is orchestrated and layered and this means that you can control each specific sound and each specific emotion and even the frequencies in the sense I usually make sure that I’ve got some lo-frequency stuff, some mid frequency-stuff and a bit of hi-frequency stuff as well. You can even pan out elements, which I also love to do – have different things happening in the left and right speaker while also leaving space in the center for the dialogue. Another panning trick, which I heard Gary Rydstrom talk about in a lecture about Jurassic Park, is using quite different ambiences for left surround and right surround when you need the feeling of being in a big place, like in the jungle or something like that.

Getting back to the birds, a good example of these would be The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. In the film (and book), most of the action takes place at a fictional island in Sweden but me and the supervising sound editor, Peter Schultz, sat down with a map and found out where this island would be placed when following the directions mapped out in the book. Then I found out exactly which birds lived in this place and got hold of these, individually recorded. This may sound like restricting yourself but actually it was very inspiring because it gave me a specific palette of sounds to choose from and I used the bird sounds almost as musical instruments coming in at certain times – like early on in the movie when Mikael Blomkvist is introduced to the family living on the island and the bird sounds both underscore the uneasy mood and at the same time underline the tempo in the scene.

(A funny aside: The sound design for the upcoming US remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is done by Ren Klyce who is actually one of my biggest influences when it comes to utilizing background sounds. His mighty, mighty work in Se7en is a master class in ambiences (they even wrote a script for things happening off screen!) and one of my favorite sequences in recent films when it comes to ambiences is the factory interrogation scene in Zodiac. Zodiac, on the other hand, was a main inspiration for the director of the Swedish version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo – yes, it’s a small world, and it’s even smaller on film.)

I want to share a couple of examples from another film I worked on just last year, Nothing’s All Bad (in Danish: Smukke mennesker). The movie is the feature debut of director Mikkel Munch-Fals who is really into sound and always extremely open for input which is always wonderful – it inspires you to do better. It’s interesting ‘cause visually the film has very few wide shots and instead uses a lot of close-ups which usually means that sound-wise you’d like to focus on just the actor’s voices and not the locations surrounding them. But Munch-Fals is using this visual style to get as close to the characters as possible and be as subjective as possible, especially with the sound design. He wants the sound to mirror the interior landscape.

I was the re-recording mixer of the film while the sound designer was the immensely talented Thomas Jaeger. The two of us have collaborated on a lot of films by now and actually you couldn’t really say who’s doing what in the mix. We go back and forth, try lots of different approaches for scenes and often reshape the sound design quite significantly on the dubbing stage.

It’s a constantly creative process and ideas are bounced back and forth all the time. This upcoming clip is a good example of this, as this whole sequence was actually filled with sound all the way through but on the stage we got the idea of turning things down halfway throughs the sequence. There’s a lot of ambiences and background sounds in the first part, which makes the silence at the end way more effective and evocative, I think. Thomas and I collaborated on doing the abstract ambiences at the end, as well – there’s no music in this sequence, only sound design:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Whenever I work on school ambiences like those featured in this clip, I always think of Dead Poets Society, which had brilliant sound design by the late Alan Splet, another maestro of ambiences (check out Eraserhead and Never Cry Wolf, it doesn’t get much better). In Dead Poets Society the classrooms have tiny, small squeaks, creaks and movement all the time and whenever you’re in a hallway the sound of the pupils is everywhere – they did a lot of location foley and school recordings, apparently. It’s one of those subtle soundtracks that you don’t really notice first time around but nevertheless it’s been a significant inspiration to me.

A small sound joke: In Denmark, the schools are experiencing a lot of cutbacks and as I’m the son of two teachers I thought it was quite fun to include a bit of an in-joke here. What I did was putting a lot of old office equipment sounds in the background when the headmaster is talking to the teacher, like vintage matrix printers, to make it evident that this school desperately needs an all-around upgrade.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This second clip from the same film is very much a salute to train sounds. One could almost write a thesis on train sounds in film, as they’ve featured prominently in key sound sequences in milestones like The Godfather, American Graffiti and Rumble Fish. The train sounds in the above clip start out as background sounds and at the end they jump to the front of the mix and very much become the driving force of the climax. I love train sounds because there’s so many different textures to them, weird screeches, heavy rumbling and cool rhythms – and so much energy!

This was another sequence that changed a lot on the dubbing stage and there was actually a lot of discussion about the use of train sounds because you never ever see a train in the picture. I’d argue, though, that most of the people watching this scene in the film will never really think about something fishy going on with the train sounds. We tried lowering the trains in one of our mix passes and it really didn’t work – the scene lost a lot of its impact and power, not just sound-wise but emotionally, which is the absolute main thing.

I just recently heard about an interesting approach when it comes to backgrounds – when supervising sound editor/re-recording mixer Craig Henighan worked on the awesome Black Swan he would play all the design/fx for director Darren Aranofsky, without any music or dialogs – the two of them just listened to backgrounds/ambience/fx/design. They’d play through the reels, discuss vibe and mood, pick up on what was working and what wasn’t. On Danish films, this approach may prove difficult, as we’re often fighting very tight schedules and it really takes a very seasoned and open-minded director to listen to a film this way. But no matter what, I think it’s a fascinating way of letting backgrounds come to the foreground.

As they should.

I love the Fallout franchise. The gameplay style is fantastic, the technology is top notch and all the places and stories are really unique. After the success of Bethesda with the great Fallout 3, now the turn is for Obsidian, who released “Fallout: New Vegas”, a new installment of the game which bring us to a journey through the world of New Vegas, a post apocalyptic interpretation of Las Vegas.

Below you can read an interview with audio director Scott Lawlor, who tell us how the audio team created the amazing sound of New Vegas.

DS: How early you started to work on “Fallout: New Vegas”? How was your relationship with the different dev teams on pre, pro and post stages?

SL: Back in early 2009, only a few months after the release of Fallout 3, we started to get the first inclinations that we were going to be working on the next installment of the Fallout franchise. Needless to say, everyone was excited to have a chance to work on the game. From the many ex-Black Isle vets who worked on Fallout 1 and 2, to those who were new to the series, we all felt that this game was going to be something special.

Bethesda was very forthcoming with any information we needed, and helped all of us get up to speed on the new toolsets. From here we were able to help solidify the plans of how we hoped to move forward and what technologies we wanted to improve upon for this project. We set out four major goals for the project; realistic and open sounding weapon fire, dense and creepy ambiences, deep and well-acted dialogues, and reactive and adaptive music. In the preproduction phase, we laid the groundwork to make these things technically possible by updating aspects of the engine and planning out the systems.

For the music and dialogue in New Vegas, it was important that we begin working with our external partners as soon as possible. We started working with Inon Zur for the game’s music and with Blindlight for the voice over production. Early on, it was important to make sure we were defining the style of the music and dialogue that would best match the change in setting to the Mojave Wasteland. We drew heavily upon Southwestern and rural influences but always tried to keep an updated, sci-fi feel in mind. This is the Southwest of the future.

At Obsidian, the Audio department supports all projects simultaneously. Over the course of the development of New Vegas, we were also finalizing Alpha Protocol and beginning work on Dungeon Siege III. By February of 2010, New Vegas became the number one priority. It was at this time that I would say that we fully started production in earnest. At this point a lot of work had been done on the global systems – including creatures and weapons – but little work had been done on the locations in the game. Once we really started to dig in, the scope of the game started to become apparent. It was a real eye opener. No one in the Audio department had worked on a game of this scale before. To give some idea of the scope: there are over 55,000 lines of dialogue in one language (a quarter million in total with all translations included), hundreds of uniques locations, countless miles of open wasteland, hundreds of quests and unique NPCs and a ton of weapons and creatures to support.

The final stretch of the project came in July and August of 2010. At this point, all of the dialogue was being recorded, the music was mostly complete, and the majority of the global sound effects assets were created. It was time to make sure that we covered the huge expanse of the game. I can’t say enough about what an amazing job my Audio team did during this time. Andrew Dearing, Justin Bell, Mikey Dowling, and Jonathan Pendergrass gave their all to the project. It meant long hours and a good amount of stress, but in the end, we all felt that we accomplished all of the goals we had set out for on the project. So far, the reviews of the game have seemed to agree. We are extremely happy to see the positive reception that Audio has had on this project.

DS: In terms of sound… what are the new features and differences in Fallout: Vegas compared to Fallout 3?

SL: In Fallout: New Vegas, we set out to focus on a few specific features in the game; weapons, ambiences, music, and dialogue. Almost all of the changes we made to the engine were done to support these goals.

For weapon fire, we wanted to portray a strong sense of space and distance. We wanted to hear the sound of the weapons reflecting off of the distant rocks and reverberating through the open desert. We added functionality to have layered weapon sounds based on distance, and designed the weapon sounds with this in mind. This also meant going back to all the weapons from Fallout 3 and updating the sounds to reflect the new direction and add the distant sound layers.

For ambience, we mostly used the existing systems except for one key addition. We added the ability to attach sounds directly to the art objects that the designers would place in the game. For example, when we added a wood creak sound to the wooden telephone poles in the town of Goodsprings, that sound would automatically propagate to all of the telephone poles in the world. This was a key feature for us. We added subtle sounds to anything we could from broken down cars to piles of dirt. The more subtle sounds we added on the objects the more the ambience would come to life. Every fence, billboard, water tower and sign has sounds attached to it, and really pulls the player into the world. We also changed the physics system to respect the velocity of the objects and change the volume and pitch of them as they fell. This really helped the rooms where the player could interact with a lot of objects.

We completely redesigned the music system into a location based and layered system. The intention was to create a musical experience that sounded more intentional and composed as the player roamed the Wasteland. For more information on the music system, please see the article I wrote on the subject over at Gamasutra.

The game design team rewrote the dialogue tool with a hierarchical, tree-like structure that allowed them to create deeper dialogue structures.  This allowed the conversations to have a more natural flow, which ended up helping the actors’ performances. We also tried to make sure to increase the number of actors for the unique characters and the generic voice types.

DS: Players have a lot of freedom on this game, You can make many different choices in every moment. How this affect the way you design or implement the sounds in the game?

SL: Yes, the amount of choice the player has affects us directly! It is a real challenge to address this. I’m not sure there is any sort of “magic bullet” solution. Communication with the design team is key. We had to keep in direct contact with the designers about all of the quest details. We also needed to rely heavily on the QA department, both internally, and at Bethesda, to let us know if sounds were missing from certain portions of the game.

One thing we did to make dealing with such a large scope more manageable was to make templates for music and ambience that could be shared throughout some of the locations in the game. We then had to play through every location in the game taking notes on what type of ambience, music, reverb, and emitters we wanted in each location. Each location then had a template assigned to it. This was a good way to get a quick first pass of music and ambience. The next step was making sure the more important unique locations in the game had unique music and ambience set up. The Strip and the casinos are a perfect example of this. We relied heavily on walla and off screen one shots in these locations to give the impression of a living and breathing city that exists in the middle of this post-apocalyptic desert.

The use of the templates allowed us to cover the scope of the game relatively quickly. Playing through the critical path and focusing on the unique locations in the game is what gives the world its charm.

DS: How much field recording was needed? Could you tell us about the sources you recorded for the different sounds of the game?

SL: At Obsidian, we try to record as much of our own source material as we can, utilizing a Sound Devices 702 and a Sanken CS5. For New Vegas we went on a number of field recording trips:

• Anza Borrego State Park – We traveled out to the desert and camped out, getting all kinds of sounds: rocks slides, digging, brush footsteps and whatever we could find.
• Weapon Shoot in Piru, CA – We were able to tag along with a friend on a weapon shoot. We were able to capture the distant sound of the weapon fire which was a perfect for New Vegas, since our goal was to add an element of space to the weapons we created.
• Tumbleweed – We wanted a real tumbleweed for the physics object in the game. We ended up finding one on the side of the highway, bringing it back to our recording room and dismantling it. Authentic tumbleweed!
• The quest for the perfect wood footsteps – the wood footsteps in the game are from a number of sources:
  • Trip to Panamint City – a ghost town in Death Valley National Park. We found a bunch of abandoned structures and odd sounds along the way.
  • Trip to Paramount Ranch – an old Hollywood movie set out in the Santa Monica Mountains.
  • Multiple other attempts at finding just the right amount of creakiness.
• Physics sounds – Almost all of the physics objects in the game were recorded in the booth at Obsidian with objects found around the office or our homes.
• Walla – We wanted the walla in the Strip and the casinos to set just the right mood. This meant a bunch of searching for the right place to record walla.
  • Newport Beach bars last call – the bars at Newport Beach had the right type of environment for the type of walla we were after. The drunken screams reflecting off of the building were a huge part of the sound on the Strip in New Vegas.
  • The Outdoor Mall across from Obsidian – perfect for the daytime ambience of the Strip.
  • Various hotel lobbies – great for casinos.
  • Recording in the Obsidian Lobby – we got a group of 15 or so developers together in our lobby and directed their performance. This is a big part of the sound of the casinos in the game, especially the Gomorrah.

DS: In the tech diary we saw that the developers did a lot of work on the weapons, giving all kind of details, different performances, many different types of weapons, etc. How was this handled on the sound design side?

SL: In Fallout: New Vegas there are a ton of new weapons. Andrew Dearing worked with every single weapon sound in the game. All the old Fallout 3 weapons were reworked to account for our goals of making the guns sound more distant and “live.” Andrew would do a pass and I would review the results along with our Project Director, Josh Sawyer. Josh was focused on making sure the guns were represented as accurately as possible. He drew upon his extensive experience with the weapons to guide the sounds toward something that was appropriate for the caliber of the weapon as well as how powerful it is in the game. We also recorded the shell drops for each of the different calibers and made sure that the physics sounds for the shells hitting the ground were accurate to the gun.

One of the troubles we ran into with weapon sounds was a limitation of how the engine loads sounds for an open world game. New Vegas uses a loose file system. This means that sounds are loaded on an “as needed” basis. This means that the system gives priority to sounds that are already loaded and it meant that the weapon fire sounds would sometimes not sound as random as we would have liked.

DS: Being post-nuclear Vegas, with lot of desolated areas and desert wastelands… What kind of sources you recorded for recreate those places? What were your goals on the sound of backgrounds and different ambience of the game?

SL: The ambience, along with the music in Fallout: New Vegas is largely responsible for the atmosphere of the game. There were a large amount of locations in the game that relied on Audio to sell the experience to the player.

In the open Wasteland we put a lot of work into making sure the transitions between the times of day were fluid and seamless. In order to do this, we added two more times of day for the ambient loops, dusk and dawn. The background loops themselves ended up being fairly static, without a lot of motion. We did this to keep repetition to a minimum. The more noticeable and recognizable sounds are called through the one shot system. This also allowed us even more flexibility with the time of day. We could start to call the one shots of a single bird waking up before dawn and the one shots of the wind gusts could peak in frequency and intensity at different times throughout the day. It kept the entire ambient bed in the Wasteland feeling dynamic and fresh, no matter how long the player is listening for. The Wasteland also needed a sense of danger in its ambience so we added plenty sounds of distant screams, glass breaks, and muffled explosions.

In certain ways, we also treated the music as part of the ambient system. We never wanted them to be fighting each other. For this reason, there is a very minimal music layout in the open Wasteland. When the player is out in the middle of the desert without a town in sight, the music plays in a matter that is similar to the one shot system described above. Bits of music come and go in small bursts and blend with the sounds of the Wasteland itself. The music also builds upon itself as the player moves towards locations of interest in the Wasteland. Hopefully the experience is all very seamless and natural to the player and it just feels right.

DS: How was your approach on the mix? There are a lot of desert scenes and all kind of perspectives for the events… How you dealt with distance and perspectives in the interactive mix?

SL: The overall mix of the game is a very iterative process. It isn’t like a movie where you sit down after everything else is complete and mix the game. It is important to make sure you are setting up a baseline early in the process and mixing to it. Sometime back in the Spring of 2010 we sat down with a couple of other games and got a few reference levels to make sure were weren’t coming in too quiet or loud. We then set the main menu music of the game at a level that sounded appropriate since that is something we will be mixing against every time we launch the game. From here, ambience was next. We had to make sure the levels of the ambient beds were set just right. From there, the game largely mixed itself. The game’s engine doesn’t have a ton of bussing control or mix snapshots so we were mostly just focused on making sure we had one good solid mix. The guns should be loud and satisfying and you always need to hear the dialogue. It is a delicate process but it something that happens over many months as sounds are added to the game. Each one us on the Audio team was responsible for mixing our own assets as we added them and we would constantly adjust as we did our playthroughs and as we took notes on our experience.

Part of what helps make this process go smooth is that I stress that everyone at Obsidian does their sound design over video captures of the game. When we design to video, we are subconsciously making those mix decisions as we design the sound itself.  It is easy to make a sound that sounds good on its own, but to make it fit in with the environment as a whole; it is another issue all together. This is especially true when designing sounds that happen at a distance.  Perspective in this game is important because of the vast space that it covers. Altiverb was a huge part of how we were able to make sure that the distant sounds had the right perspective and designing this in relation to video was crucial.

Overall, the combination of setting strong reference levels, and working to video plus endless hours of playthroughs, and note taking made the process go fairly smooth. This project had its share of stresses, but in the end it is a complete soundscape that we are all proud of. We hope everyone enjoys it as much as we loved making it.

Tim Prebble has added a forum section to the HISS and a ROAR site, a place for collaboration between HISS and a ROAR customers and contributors of the crowdsource SFX libraries, which menas that this collaboration model is working really good. Tim talked on his blog about the reasons of the forum:

1. I figure it is a better long term means of discussing crowd source sound library projects such as THE DOORS and THE DOGS… and the others I have planned. I will still use this blog to announce projects and provide updates, but discussions here tend to get lost into the archives, whereas a forum means each discussion can stay live throughout the entire lifetime of each project…

2. For sound designers & sound editors who own HISSandaROAR libraries its also a means of providing feedback and ideas on current and future libraries…

Also, with the new forum, Tim is officially announcing four new crowdsource libraries, including Room Tones, Crowds, Ambiences Urban and Ambiences Rural.

Room Tones

This library would be interior ambiences and room tones, buzzes, hums, minimum duration: 2-3 minutes (which means recording 5+ minutes to avoid unwanted noises). Format: stereo or mono (mono is still useful for creating offset stereo ambiences and/or dialogue/centre channel)

Ambiences – Rural

The primary purpose of this library is to provide ambiences that are both unique & relatively common to a specific country. A simple example is when a film is shot in one country and post produced in another. I live in New Zealand but have worked on a few films shot & set in USA and in those situations I have had to call in favours from friends who are based there, to access authentic ambiences…

Ambiences – Urban

This library would be about the sound of cities and towns. General wide diffuse city ambience, traffic at various times of the day eg rush hour, midday, late at night, shopping streets & pedestrians, Transport mediums, Sirens, etc

Crowds

The goal here is to capture diffuse crowd ambiences eg bars, restaurants, cafes, train stations, airports etc…

If you are interested to participate in these libraries, feel free to register on the new forum, where you will find more information about recording specs, announcements of new libraries, and also you can ask about anithing related to the recording and management of the libraries.

Blaswave FX has recently released BUGS!, a new SFX library featuring 700 sound effects recorded from all kind of insects, forest ambiences, etc. In the video you can see Blastwave FX’s CEO Ric Viers talking about the library and how it was recorded.

Blastwave FX brings you Bugs!, a creepy crawling collection that will infest your productions!

With Bugs!, you get 700 sound effects that include ambiences, hives, hisses, and movements; from ants to hornets and worms to hissing cockroaches, Bugs is a comprehensive insect collection that every editor should have in their library.

Every sound was originally recorded at 24 bit 96k to ensure the highest quality for today’s production needs and are ready to be plugged in to any production demanding high definition sound.

Bugs! is embedded with Metadata that is compatible with Pro Tools, Soundminer, NetMix, iTunes and other popular sound library search engines.

Days ago I had the chance to interview Sound Designer, Supervising Sound Editor (and occasional Mixer and Composer) Steve Boeddeker, talking about his work as Sound Designer/Supervisor on Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland.

This interview is published at the same time of another at Filmsound Daily, there with Tom Johnson, Re-Recording Mixer of “Alice in Wonderland”. Don’t forget to check that one too!

Designing Sound: So, how do you get involved with “Alice in Wonderland”?

Steve Boeddeker: This is the fifth Tim Burton film I’ve worked on. As you might guess, Tim tends to turn to people that he has worked with before and who tend to “get it” when it comes to his creative sense. From Producers, to Actors to Composers to Sound…he has his usual cast of characters and doesn’t often seem to stray too far from the people he’s comfortable working with. He has an amazing sense for how all of the pieces of a film can come together and he’s really great at letting the team do their thing, so to speak. It frees him to always look at the big picture and make sure it all feels right in the end.

DS: How important is sound to Tim Burton in this film? How was your relationship with him?

SB: Tim is an incredible story teller and a very emotional film maker. He really relies on sound to not only help move the story and convey the emotion he’s looking for, but also to help give that Tim Burton feel. I feel like he wants his films to fit within the overall context of pop culture and film in general, so I really try to keep a realism and timeless funkiness to the sound and resist the temptation to create sounds or design scenes to be too over the top or distracting. If something about the sound calls too much attention to itself or seems gratuitously overdone it has to go. Story, character and emotion are what it’s about…so I try to make sure it all comes together in that way.

Tim usually likes me to just try things out and show him ideas and he’ll respond. So I try to get visual clues from the scene or character and figure out what he was going for when he shot it. Sometimes you can sense the influence of a certain film genre or an old TV show or something, but in this case there often wasn’t much to see other than green screen. So I started sending mixes of scenes and character sounds and we were able to focus in from there. I worked on the sound effects with the same London based crew we had for Sweeney Todd. David Evans, Steve Browell, Stefan Henrix and Andy Kennedy all were cutting in London and passing test mixes back and forth with me in San Francisco. We walked the Foley at Andy Malcolm’s facility and did the editing at Skywalker Sound with Jon Null, Brian Chumney and Pascal Garneau. Once we started mixing at Skywalker and Sony we got additional help from Dustin Cawood at Skywalker and at Sony we added effects editor Geoffrey Rubay. We were also fortunate enough to get Greg Russell to help out with the mixing. Truly an international crew.

DS: What were your first thoughts about the sound when you was looking at the script, artwork, storyboards, etc? Is there an influence from the previous “Alice in Wonderland” stories and films?

SB: Well, as I mentioned before, there wasn’t much to see in some of the scenes. We started working on scenes and character sounds, then we would load my mixes into the Avid and Tim would check them out and give feedback. Once a sequence or creature voice was working for him it was sent of to the VFX team to animate to. It was quite an amazing process actually. We ended up with a good bit of the Sound Design worked out early on but there were so many visual effects still to come and things were updating and changing right up to the very end. We could all tell right away that it was going to be a crazy mix with changes and updates coming in every day.

DS: What was the biggest challenge you found in the film?

SB: With any film, the first step in sound design is getting a feel for the film and deciding what you want it to sound like. For me it’s usually an emotional thing in that I’ll watch it and let ideas just come to me and I’ll jot them down or even dive right in and try them. Of course you need to try to adopt the creative style of the director as much as possible, but having worked with Tim Burton on 4 previous films, that wasn’t too difficult. What was a challenge however was that we were working with so much green screen and visual effects that were in varying states of completion. Initially some shots had rough animation and others were just actors in front of a green screen. So when I started it wasn’t really possible to “feel” what was the right direction. You imagine what it might look like and try ideas based on that but it was really hard to feel how well things were working. Chris Lebenzon, the Picture Editor, was really great about getting me early shots and scenes to work to and we were able to get a lot of the sound design figured out so that the VFX crew could actually animate to the sound.

DS: So, you have to create a new world, with fantastic creatures, places and a lot of fun with fantastic scenes… How do you get started to create this new palette of sounds?

SB: What David Evans and I decided to do was split the film into several pieces. The beginning and end take place in the English Countryside so it made sense for the London Crew to handle those scenes. Then we went through the film and split the sound work between the more realistic sounds and the more exotic. In other words they were able to focus on realistic sounds (like horses, dogs, Red Knight armor etc.) while I was concentrating on more exotic sounds like creature vocals (JubJub Bird, Bandersnatch, Jabberwocky, Hedgehog, etc) and surreal sounds (Cheshire Cat Appears, Exotic Backgrounds, etc.). Of course there was plenty of overlap between us but with some sounds it’s better to have options and see how things come together with the final visual effects and music score.

DS: Now let’s talk about the ambiences and all this different textures. You had to “carry” Alice in a lot of different places, from beautiful and clean to desolate and gloomy. What was the challenge for the sound there? How you make the audience feel like they’re in wonderland?

SB: Well, this was a pretty big challenge actually. Because you want the audience to wonder if Wonderland (or Underland) is real or just a dream, we wanted the sounds to do the same. Sometimes these locations are anchored in with sounds based in reality and other times they’re exotic and strange. But as I mentioned before, with Tim Burton you don’t really want the sound to jump out and proclaim “I’m a strange sound!!!”….rather it’s better to be supporting the reality that is being created visually and let the audience come to the conclusion themselves that “this is a strange place”. In the end you have to believe it.

As Alice first enters Underland there’s a mix of real and exotic sounds. Wind and insects with exotic birds and distant creature calls. Visually it looks like a real forest, all be it a strange one, so it needed to sound the same. And as she walks further in it gets “curiouser and curiouser”, as she says. I also really wanted to play up the difference between the White Queens’s Castle and the Red Queen’s Castle. The White Queen’s world is full of life and beauty so the sounds are rich with life and very comforting. But the Red Queen’s world is stark and cold. Animals and wildlife are terrified of her so there’s very little life. And Tim specifically suggested that the sound of the Red Queen’s Castle should be stark and cold as everyone inside is trying not to draw attention to themselves. A few animal sounds here and there to support the monkeys and pigs but much of the sound is her forceful walking and booming voice.

DS: And what about the creatures? both small such as the rabbits, mouses, insects and and big ones such as the Jabberwocky. I think you have a lot of stories about the creation of those characters…

SB: Yeah the creatures were a focus of Tim’s very early on. He really wanted to establish their voices as early as possible so they could animate to the sound (and then he could really “feel” how well things were coming together along the way). He had some very specific ideas about a few creatures (like the JubJub Bird should remind you of the giant bird-like calls of old movies or the cartoon Johnny Quest) and other creatures he just wanted me to start trying things. The Bandersnatch was pretty tough because he needed to be big and fierce at times but also calm and comforting at others…almost purring. He was a combination of several animals but mostly vocalizations from my Great Dane Otis and some bear roars to give him a chestier airier roar. The Hedgehog was really fun to do because he is the only character that talks to Alice but without being voiced by an actor. So he needed to have lots of expression and emotion in his calls (I used a bunch of pitched sounds of a French Bulldog puppy as well as some small bird chirps and calls). So again they animated to the sounds I cut but I also sent a library of “chatty hedgehog” sound that I made so Chris and Tim could play even more. It was a great way to work them through.

DS: We see Alice in a very small form, a bigger one, sometimes more in a “human size”. How you use sound to enhance this perspective and the Alice’s point of view?

SB: We did play with the idea of having her whole world change as she grows and shrinks. Sounds get bigger and heavier as she shrinks and smaller and thinner as she grows. But it seemed like it could get a bit distracting and call too much attention to itself as a concept. So we ended up focusing more on her growing and shrinking and kept everything else as “normal” as it could be. Basically let the audience believe that she’s big or small and that the camera just happened to be there to catch it. And keep in mind that all of this was shot with green screen, so often some of the most “normal” sounds ended up being the things that made it the most believable. For example, when Alice makes her way across the Red Queen’s moat, we see her hopping from head to head, bobbing up and down in a sea of bloody water filled with heads everywhere you look. But in reality she was jumping from one green box to another to another in a big green room. So her interactions with the virtual world all needed sound. And the more small sounds, foley and breathing we added the more believable it became.

DS: Alice in Wonderland has been for me one of the best 3D experiences. There are a lot of moments with things passing around you, landing on your face, and a beautiful 3D detail in each scene. We know the sound is in 3D many years ago, but… How the 3D experience in the film affects the sound decisions?

SB: It’s an interesting phenomenon. You can really get away with a lot of sound tricks in 3D. We did most of our work in 2D because the 3D process is the last thing to happen once the visual effects are all finalized. So as we all were making, editing and mixing the sound effects we tried to always keep in mind that things will be more extreme in 3D. The Cheshire Cat won’t just fly off he will fly right over your head, and the Red Knights will seem to march right into the theater. So we tried to push the surrounds as much as possible knowing it will be much more believable in 3D. But once we were able to finally `listen to the mix against the finished 3D picture it was still an amazing and exciting experience. Michael was able to push up a lot more of the backgrounds and we could play up the surrounds much more but still believe what we were seeing and hearing. Again you just go by what feels right and make sure that in the end, you believe it really happened.