Tim Prebble has announce the release of SEAL VOCALS, a new great sound effects library for HISS and a ROAR, this time featuring lovely Seals talking to a microphone.

My primary goal was to isolate the seal vocals from the ambience, for use in creature vocal design, so this library was recorded using a Sennheiser MKH70 microphone due to its “excellent directivity… particularly suited to applications undertaken in difficult conditions, such as high background noise & distance microphone positioning. Its frequency-independent directivity prevents sound colouration from off-axis sound sources.”

The adult fur seal vocalisations include gutteral growls and roars, heavy snorts, strange rhythmic shrieks, bites and sudden jaw snaps, all of which have the scale and tonality of a large mammal. The adolescent seals have an almost dog-like growl, very sharp snapping jaws and a piercing shriek, which is incredibly evocative from a distance but up close is seriously disturbing.

These recordings were all made in an exterior location (Cape Palliser) as per the video, to differentiate from the recordings I have heard in other libraries that were obviously recorded in an enclosed/reverbant zoo environment.

There are three species of seals which visit New Zealand’s coastline but it is the fur seal (Kekeno) which is the easiest to find, with three colonies relatively close to Wellington. But if you really want to get close to them, there is always the option of travelling to the South Island and swimming with seals!

Me? I prefer to keep my distance – apart from the smell, fur seals can grow to a size of 160kg and are fearsome sounding creatures. Accordingly I made these recordings using the longest mic boom that I could find – I wanted close up recordings for use as components of creature vocals, but I sure didn’t want to get bitten (my Rycote survived at least a dozen bites though!)

The library is available in four different options with different qualities, and also there is a free version available for download. All libraries are provided as a collection of .WAV files, carefully labelled & tagged with Metadata compatible with the ProTools workspace, SoundMiner, Basehead, Snapper and AudioFinder sound library software.

Q&A WITH TIM

Designing Sound: Was it dangerous recording the seals?

Tim Prebble: I definitely had to be careful – I think their oral hygene isn’t so great, so I can only imagine how infectious a bite would be! But despite being very wary they were generally more afraid of me than I of them. Some of the larger males were protecting the baby seals and as I crept closer they would not back off at all. So I was happy to be on the end of a boom! The seals also blend very well into the landscape, so I had to be constantly vigilant not to surprise one – with headphones on, they can sound like they are right beside you….

DS: Any new techniques you used recording?

TP: I wanted to isolate the vocals as much as possible from the ambience & the ocean, so I put a lot of thought into how to achieve this. First was getting the weather, tides & swell right. I used the excellent swell map site which predicts swell and managed to get a weekend immediately after a big storm, so by being out recording at 7am I managed to record a lot when the tide was right out and the swell was very low.

I also used a Sennheiser MKH70 microphone which is very directional, and monitoring using headphones I was very aware of minimising the ambience by the angle I was recording from ie if the mic was pointed at a seal I made sure the rear of the mic was not pointed towards the sea. But the best recordings were in amongst the rocks – the area I was recording in is a huge outcrop of rock, with many crevices which lead out to the sea. So I climbed all over that outcrop and I found that the sea was very muffled when I was down inside these crevices.

DS: Any anecdotes from your recording?

TP: After spending most of a weekend with the seals I felt like I had been to an alien planet or a very foreign country, where I couldn’t speak the language and didnt know how to behave. And the locals were not very friendly…

At one point when recording I heard this deep throbbing sound and both myself and the seals looked up as a rescue helicopter approached and flew over, and I remember wondering what the seals made of this strange sound from the sky!

In this video, Jim shows how he made monster voices using a Roland V-Synth GT and recordings.

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.

New Avatar Sound Profile, this time by SoundWorks Collection, with great information about the sound of the film, given by Chris Boyes from Skywalker Sound.

The groundbreaking technical and directorial abilities of Director James Cameron can be experienced in his breathtaking visual world of Pandora in “Avatar”. This never before seen world is filled with landscapes, creatures, and civilizations that have also never been heard before by audiences.

Bringing to life the sounds of Pandora include the talent of Skywalker Sound’s Supervising Sound Editor, Sound Re-recording Mixer, and Sound Designer Chris Boyes in this SoundWorks Collection sound for film.

Avatar @ Designing Sound

New sound for film profile at SoundWorks Collection!

Explore Director Spike Jonze’s heartfelt adaptation of the classic children’s book “Where the Wild Things Are” with Sound Re-Recording Mixer and Supervising Editor Ren Klyce. Learn about the unique approach they created for capturing the voices of the actors and other stories about bringing the wild creatures to life.

SoundWorks Collection

Avatar is one of the most impressive films I’ve seen. Amazing use of technology and a great story. Fantastic combination. The 3D experience there is totally amazing. The sound is really great… A good challenge with animals, sci-fi stuff and of course: create a new world.

The January’s Issue of Mix Magazine contain a fantastic article featuring Chris Boyes talking about the sound of “Avatar”. Let’s read:

If you’ve seen James Cameron’s epic 3-D fi lm, Avatar, or even just the trailers and commercials, you know that the director has gone to incredible lengths to create a visually and aurally sumptuous adventure set in a fantasy world unlike any that we have ever seen before. There are bizarre creatures, fi erce and friendly, that walk the planet Pandora or soar its skies.

There are futuristic machines and aircraft straight out of Cameron’s vivid imagination. And then there is the Na’vi, a peaceful race of tall, blue-skinned, long-tailed, humanoid tree dwellers who have their own customs and language and are now being threatened by an incursion to Pandora by people from Earth bent on exploiting the planet’s valuable natural resources. It’s a rich and very complex story I won’t recount here, but suffi ce it to say, it involved incredible feats of technical wizardry to bring it realistically to the screen, including improved motion-capture technology, next-gen visual FX supplied by the best digital artists, and newly designed 3-D cameras that allowed Cameron to see approximations of the story’s virtual world in the camera as the fi lm was shot. No wonder it took three years to make.

Not surprisingly, Avatar also required tremendous imagination and dedication from Cameron’s sound crew, which was spearheaded by supervising sound editor/sound designer/re-recording mixer Christopher Boyes (pictured on this month’s cover), who earned his first sound Oscar for Cameron’s Titanic in 1998, and subsequent trophies for Pearl Harbor (2001), The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) and King Kong (2005). He’s also had fi ve other nominations, the latest last year for Iron Man. In fact, when I caught up with Boyes in early December, he’d just started work on the sequel to Iron Man down at Fox in L.A.—this after a mere one-day break following the nearly 80-day fifi nal mix on Avatar (also at Fox).

Avatar was not your typical film where the “post” crew gets heavily involved once principal photography has been completed. Rather, Cameron brought in Boyes, who in turn called on sound editor Addison Teague to start working on sound design from the beginning of the shoot. “When Jim and I sat down in the summer of ’06,” Boyes recounts,” he said, ‘This is what I want to do: I’m going to shoot, then I’m going to go in and edit, and while I edit I want to be cutting sound eff ects that you’ve made, and then I’m going to go back to shooting’; and back and forth like that. And true to form, that’s exactly what he did. What we didn’t expect him to do was keep shooting as long as he did, but then all these big fi lms tend to do that so it wasn’t exactly surprising.”

Teague, who shares a supervising sound editor credit on the film with Boyes and dialog specialist Gwen Whittle, says, “Jim wanted to have a sound editor working in the picture department during editing, and I had done that before for Chris on the fi rst Pirates of the Caribbean fi lm. Avatar was going to be a multi-year commitment and involve relocating from Skywlker Sound to L.A. to work alongside Jim. It was quite a commitment for a sound editor, but seemed like an amazing challenge and experience so I jumped at it.

“In a way, working like that is a dream job for a sound editor,” he continues. “You want to be involved as early as possible because oftentimes as sound editors, we’re fi ghting what a director and a picture editor have been listening to for months, and in some cases, years as crude temp FX, and you want to get your own fingerprint on it. So for us, this was perfect. There were so many creative sound possibilities, and we were able to get in right from the beginning and work with Jim and try to get our ideas in there right away. But it also provided some interesting challenges, because since we were doing it as we went, the turnaround on these sound eff ects requests was actually much faster than it would be in a traditional sound schedule because we would need to provide something almost immediately for some scene he was shooting.

“Jim wanted the sound and picture editing always moving forward together so he could make creative choices that traditionally might be left for post-production at any point in the process. There was never a clear production and post phase on this movie; one was always informing the other. So his goal was to never have to start over building what he’d already worked out, but rather do it for real as he went—so a decision that he might make in 2007 was done and in place for the final mix two years later. Obviously there were changes along the way, but he really did keep some things that long.”Boyes recalls that the first design work he did on the film— based on memory of the script at that point—was on two of the flying creatures that inhabit Pandora: Banshees are similar to pterodactyls (and have a special function in the story because Na’vi warriors can psychically bond with the creatures and then ride them through the air), and the Leonoptryx is a bird-like sub-species of the Banshees.

Continue reading…

Another great video via thesoundguys at YouTube, this time about the sound design of Jurassic Park with comments by Gary Rydstrom, Steven Spielberg, and Chris Boyes. Additionally, don’t forget to read the article about Jurassic Park sound on the Gary Rydstrom Special.