SoundWorks Collection has published a new video about the imagineers team of Walt Disney, including a visit through the amazing sound creations of sound effects artist Jimmy MacDonald. A must-watch for any of us.

The vision and showmanship of Walt Disney has touched more corners of the world and hearts through his many films and theme parks. Since opening his first park “Disneyland” on July 18, 1955, Walt and his team of dream makers known as “Imagineers” have created many theme parks around the world.

The SoundWorks Collection pulls back the curtain on the talented Imagineers who are responsible for the sounds and music of the Walt Disney theme park properties. In our exclusive video profile we explore the history and role of the audio team as they share their stories and creative challenges. We also take a visit through the original John James “Jimmy” MacDonald sound effects collection, which explores some of the classic Disney sound effects.

Mix Online has published an article about the relationship between music and effects in “TRON: Legacy” and how was the approach to blend them together in the film.

The hit film Tron: Legacy features a unique blend of electronic and symphonic score elements from the French techno duo Daft Punk (Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter) and futuristic sound effects. We asked supervising sound editor/sound designer Addison Teague (Avatar, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End) a few questions about this interesting marriage.

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SoundWorks Collection has released a new profile featuring the creators of the sound of “TRON Legacy”.

Explore the world of TRON: LEGACY, a high-tech adventure set in a digital world that’s unlike anything ever seen or heard.

In this exclusive sound for film profile we talk with Sound Re-Recording Mixer Gary Rizzo, Supervising Sound Editor Gwen Yates Whittle, and Sound Designer Steve Boeddeker.

Modern Mechanix re-published an article from 1937 on their blog , featuring fascinating stories about the use of sound in Mickey Mouse cartoons.

MUSIC and noises in the animated cartoon interpret the action of the story. The narrative theme of the music and what is called the “sound effects” punctuates and emphasizes the story.

By playing on the aural nerves with symbolic sounds and noises the psychological reaction of the audience is controlled and varied according to the dramatic and emotional needs of the cartoon story.

If Donald Duck falls, for example, it is not enough for the sound man to hit a drum for the noise, but an additional sound characteristic must be added to convey a certain kind of fall. There are dozens of different “sound effects” for cartoon character falls which vary according to the story. When a sympathetic attitude is desired, the “fall” sound is hollow and devoid of jarring characteristics, while a harsh sound which shocks the aural nerves is created for that effect.

The associative value of sounds is widely used for humor, such as a tearing noise which accompanies the falling of a character. For humorous responses the “sound effect” is often caricatured and distorted. An example of this was the tire skidding noise used in “The Tortoise and the Hare” when the fast moving rabbit slid to a stop.

Through study and experimentation Walt Disney and his engineers have found that by introducing music or various sounds and noise frequencies into the cartoon, the response of the audience is varied and controlled. By combining noises of certain pitches or tempos the psychological values of the cartoon music is emphasized in keeping with the story requirements.

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Via: U.S.O Project.

Supervising sound editors Kevin O’Connell and Kami Asgar talked to Variety about the sounds for Disney’s Secretariat.

Disney’s “Secretariat,” set for Oct. 8 release, makes striking use of sound to bring the audience into the experience of horse racing.
In the racing scenes — which deftly balance music and sound effects — the sound helps viewers who’ve never sat in a saddle feel the intensity of a race and the subtle communication between animal and rider.

Supervising sound mixer Kevin O’Connell explains that helmer Randall Wallace spelled out early what he wanted. “He said, ‘We’re going to hear (Secretariat’s) hooves, then we’re going to hear the jockey in the saddle and then we’re going to hear (the horse’s) breath and hear his heart beating in there, too, because he had such a big heart.’?”

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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.

Last friday I watched “Alice in Wonderland“. Personally I like the way Tim Burton focused this “version” of Alice. A lot of detail, really beautiful art and a fantastic new adventure, with all kind of places and creatures in a great 3D experience. The sound was also great. The sound team did an excellent job creating the fantastic soundscape of “Wonderland”.

SoundWorks Collection has published a new video featuring Sound Re-recording Mixers Tom Johnson and Michael Semanick who talk about the sound of the film, the mixing, dialogue and the challenges they found.

Visionary Director Tim Burton returns with an all star cast including Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, the queens Helena Bonham Carter and Anne Hathaway, and Alan Rickman as the caterpillar bringing to life the magical return of “Alice in Wonderland”.

More info about the sound of “Alice in Wonderland” soon. Stay tuned!

SoundWorks Collection strikes back with the last animated film of Walt Disney Animation Studios, returning to the fantastic world of handdrawn 2D animation. A sound for film profile of “The Princess and the Frog”, directed by Ron Clements and John Musker of “The Little Mermaid”, “Aladdin”, and “Hercules”.

In this profile we talk with Sound Re-Recording Mixer David Fluhr, Sound Re-Recording Mixer Dean Zupancic, Original Dialogue Mixer Doc Kane, Original Dialogue Mixer Gabe Guy, and Supervising Sound Editor Odin Benitez.

SoundWorks Collection

“WALL•E” Sound for Film Profile with Ben Burtt from Michael Coleman on Vimeo.

When nobody thought that Ben Burtt could return with his robots and laserguns, He strikes back (and even stronger) with WALL-E, an amazing animation film with the perfect dose of sound design that groups all the incredible knowledge, experience and talent of Ben Burtt in one place.

Is well as I did with Star Wars, I’m gonna divide the WALL-E Special in three parts:

1. The Definitive Interview
2. Sound Design – Making Of
3. Animation Sound Design Revolution.

I called this “The Definitive Interview” because I made a mixture of the best videos, interviews, questions and information out there about WALL-E, all in one place. Below each part, you will find all references and links to all the complete interviews

Wait! Another film of robots!?

“I went to this meeting and said, ‘What is the movie about?’ ‘Robots!’ ” Burtt says. “At first I was a little frightened. I thought, ‘Is there another new voice that I could come up with, much less the half-dozen robot voices?’ ”
But he appreciated the fact that the Pixar filmmakers wanted him involved very early in development – much like George Lucas had done with “Star Wars.” Burtt became an employee of Pixar, working on a movie with more sound than any he had completed before. By the time it was over, he would also provide the voices for WALL-E and M-O, a cleaning robot who arrives later in the film. (Vía)

How long did you work on WALL•E? That’s a lot more sound work than you normally do.

For about nine months out of the year I spent time trying to create. I started creating the WALL•E voice, the EVE voice, the AutoPilot, MO and the others. What were the humans going to sound like in their gelatinous condition? Originally they were almost completely Jell-O. We made Jell-O voices that had shimmering, funny, shaking in the voices and stuff. That concept of the voices for the humans was eventually dropped as the sounds developed.

Out of these improvisations of taking sounds from both the real world and some synthesizations, I will fashion what you will hear in the movie. There are like 2600 sound files made for WALL•E, which is a lot; more than I made for any other movie. A Star Wars movie, which is huge, usually takes about 1,000 new sounds. Indiana Jones movies, maybe 700 or 800. So this was gigantic, partly because it just needed so much detail in the sound. Obviously nothing is recorded while you are making the movie. Everything has to be added after the fact. (Vía)

How did you come up with the sounds for WALL•E? I mean, he doesn’t speak, so you have to sort of make him sound unique.

Sometimes, most often, good sounds are just discovered when you are looking for one sound and you suddenly discover another. The sound we used for his treads, that is an army tank. Obvious choice; just go out and record something with treads. But it has been sped up so that it sounds a little tinnier. He does lots of movements in the film; lots of little driving this way, driving that way. We try to put a sound with everything and convince the audience that this character really exists; this illusion.

I needed some soft motors, something we could tailor to shape WALL•E’s movements. I was watching on Turner Classic Movies an old John Wayne movie and there was this army private cranking a generator. I said, “That is a great sound for WALL•E. How can I get one of those WW2 generators?” Well I got this on eBay. That’s what we used. (Vía)

How did you come up with WALL·E’s voice?

Well honestly I’m guided by Andrew, being the director. I would audition things for him, sets of sounds that might have initially just been motors and beeps and tones. Something I’ve never told him in fact, and now it relates to musical theatre, when he first showed me maybe 10 minutes or so of the storyboards cut together, and the opening of the movie, it had some music and some sound effects in it. That was kind of a way of enticing me into understanding the project. It was that opening song, the vocal in that song that appealed to me in a way that I sort of connected that with the WALL·E character.

There’s a feeling about that, so to some extent maybe the pitch of the voice started out that way, that kind of innocent feeling, that was a thread that I picked up on in that. As you know we went through lots of experiments trying WALL·E as just motor sounds only, some that were beeps and whistles, a little bit more in the R2D2 realm. Although We extracted bits from all of those experiments, when it came down to some of the more expressive vocals it was a little bit in that tone, from that singing voice. I’m not sure why, there was obviously something very charming and appealing about that song. I couldn’t quite pin it down. (Vía)

What are some of the sources of the sounds?

Well there are thousands of sounds. There were more sound files in Wall-E then any single feature film I’ve ever worked on, about 2500, because every character has a set of sounds and there are lots of movement and lots of dense activity. Stories of sounds, well let’s see – Wall-E’s treads, he drives around, he goes different speeds. When he’s going slowly, he makes a little whirring sound and that is the sound I heard it actually in a John Wayne movie called Island in the Sky on Turner Classic Movies. There was a guy turning a little generator, a soldier generating power. I said I like that generator sound, that is cool, and so where can I get one? I found one on eBay. I bought it. It came in its original 1949 box so we could take that into the studio and perform with it to tailor it to the speed of Wall-E. But that’s only good for when Wall-E is going slow.

When Wall-E is going fast, he needed something higher pitched and more energetic. Once again, I went back through my memory of things. I had recorded bi-planes a long time ago for Raiders of the Lost Ark. The old 1930s bi-planes have an inertia starter. It’s a mechanical crank that cranks the engine up. You do it by hand and then clutch – you connect it and it makes a wonderful whirring sound. So I thought I want to get that and do more with it. I couldn’t bring a bi-plane into the studio but on eBay I found an inertia starter, bought that again, and brought it in. So we built these props for many things. You know, it’s a tradition in animation to have sound effects machines. This goes back to the earliest days of Disney cartoons — like wind machines and blowing machines and things like that. We actually built several things so we could perform Wall-E sounds that way.(Vía)

Did you have a favorite robot or a favorite sound in WALL•E?

My favorite sound in WALL•E? Well I don’t know. I don’t know. I kind of fell in love with this character. [sound] Moe. I don’t know why. Someone I identify with Moe. Not that I am a good cleaner or anything, but I think that sort of feisty sort of sidekick character that he was appealing to me, and the fact that he has a big character change in the movie. He goes from a robot governed by his duties to a free thinker. That was part of the theme of the movie. (Vía)

Were Eve’s sounds more modern then?

Well, Eve is a very high-tech robot and so, unlike the motors and squeaks and metallic sounds you’ve got with Wall-E, Eve is held together with some sort of force fields and magnetism. A great deal of her sound is purely synthesized musical type of tones that I could make in a music synthesizer and treat it various ways, because her whole character was supposed to be graceful and ethereal, so she always has an electronic noise associated with her floating around. Sometimes she sounds angry if it’s a scene where she needs to be aggressive. Sometimes she’s very enchanting if it’s a more romantic moment. (Vía)

What about the interplay between the animators? Typically the voices are recorded before and the sound bytes are afterwards. How did it work with this?

You’re right. Normally in animation the dialogue is recorded and locked down, takes are selected, and the animators then use those as references for timing and performance. We did actually kind of the same thing here. I started working three years ago on the dialogue for this film and auditioning voices. At first I would make up sets of sounds as auditions for Andrew. I would play a voice and some motors and I’d say, “What do you think of this? Could this be Wall-E?” He might pick out the things he likes the most and we would keep that collection aside and I would string together little montages and then we started giving them to animators and animators would just freely animate to the sounds. Wall-E could come in and play with a ball, slip and fall, or do something, and we had numerous tests, and I could see immediately of course the huge input in a performance that the animation had.

In fact, you would think I would know better, but I was really surprised. They could do amazing things with just a pose, a little movement of the head and the sound seemed so much more authentic when it was sunc up so perfectly. So we went back and forth and developed a sound and picture together and so therefore we ended up with these little character studies. You could play it like a little audition tape. The character would come in, introduce himself and talk and show off their functions so you would hear it and see it. We got confident after awhile that this is what Eve should be and this is what Wall-E should be and then they could move ahead and start animating the movie itself and put it in the story so it was a back and forth process. (Vía)

How important is it to go back to the original sources of the sounds? I would imagine there is high tech equipment now that can be used to recreate those sounds.

Well, people think in this age of computers and digitization that we can now do anything, the way we see how visual effects have leaped to a much higher quantum level and it isn’t quite the same with sound. Sound is a really different creative dimension. The digital technology allows us to manipulate things and you can work quicker and you can practically do the sound for a movie on your laptop computer with a few additional pieces of equipment, whereas 25 years ago it required a huge studio with all kinds of engineers and many people. So, it’s a very personal tool now to do sound because it is digital.

The films that I worked on so much you’re always trying to create this illusion that in a fantasy world things are real, and the style I’ve always followed is to go out into the real world, get real sounds, and impose them into this fantasy world to convince people that these fantasy objects are credible. That has been successful to go out and gather real sounds.

I also love the history of sound effects and there is a great opportunity working for Pixar and Disney because you’re in touch there with a legacy of sound effects creativity that goes back into the 1930s. They used to build all kinds of machines. There is a machine that does flying insects, there is a machine that does a talking clock spring. They’ve got an archive of these machines out there in Burbank and I love that and I look at what a sound effects man does and I love the table top props and things like that. It’s the style.(Vía)

What’s your favourite moment from the film?

What’s the biggest explosion in the film? I really love the scene where they’re out in space together with the fire extinguisher, I think it’s the lyrical nature of that, the calm in the middle of the storm. That moment, there’s something about putting those two characters out there dancing in space that really takes me back to Peter Pan when I was a kid. I love that film, I think I was five years old when I saw it. I made my mother take me two or three times in one week which was unheard of in those days. It’s that wonderful ability to be transported to a wonderful place where you feel warm and completely secure. Where it occurs in the movie it feels that way to me, it’s great. (Vía)

When you talk about bringing the reality to the fantasy, do you find that as films have become more reliant on CG effects and things that aren’t actually there in camera your job has become much more important to ground us in terms of what we are seeing?

Certainly. As I said, in a fantasy film the sound is usually the thing – sound acts on people more invisibly because we are not asking you to be so aware of the process. I still think you can be a bit more of a magician being a sound person because people just aren’t aware of what you can do. It is a compliment when people look at a film and they stop and think “I guess that’s just what it sounded like.” Like there’s a mike hanging out there in the scene and they got it when in fact every sound, every footstep, every explosion – somebody had to decide what it was going to be and create it. (Vía)

That’s all folks! I hope you like it!

WALL-E Official Website
WALL-E at IMDB

Treasure Planet, an animated film produced by Walt Disney Pictures released on November 27, 2002. Dane A. Davis was the sound designer, sound editor and creator of Morph‘s (character) amazing voice.

Mix Magazine has an interesting article with the information about the sound process of Treasure Planet. Here is some info about sound design:

A major challenge was melding elements of the classic seagoing story with a large dose of futuristic action-adventure. “Throughout the project,” says Academy Award-winning sound designer Dane Davis (Danetracks owner, The Matrix, 8 Mile, Bound), “the directors maintained the concept of a 70/30 split — 70 percent familiar, traditional sounds and 30 percent exciting, fantasy-based sounds. We constantly strove for a balance between them to create an ‘antique future.’”

For example, pirate Long John Silver’s ship — a creaky, old Spanish galleon with masts, sails, rigging and rope — floats through space powered by solar sails that crackle and glisten with electrical energy as they absorb light to power the plasma rocket engines. “It creaks like a traditional tall ship when it turns or lists,” Davis says, “but it’s floating through a vast space ocean. It couldn’t sound like water, but it required the emotion and energy of wind and surf. Familiar and exotic at the same time.”
To create the sound for Silver, a cyborg with a mechanical prosthetic arm, Davis’ team scoured hobby shops and junk stores for antique windup toys and old spinning mechanisms. “We were able to manipulate those sounds to achieve the sophisticated end result we wanted,” adds Danetracks’ sound designer Rich Adrian, “but we purposely used unsophisticated sources to avoid sounding slick or sci-fi.”

Silver’s shape-shifting pet, Morph, got an even more organic treatment: “His molecules are constantly moving and rearranging,” Davis explains. “I used Jell-O in my hands to create movements, then digitally stretched and particalized the sounds to take it a bit out of our world. To integrate his movement and voice, we created vocal components using my voice through a mouthful of Jell-O.

Morph had to sound believable as an otherworldly creature, without coming across synthetic.”

For most of the other dialog, a traditional approach prevailed, with clarity being the goal. “We did some experimentation,” notes Porter, “especially with Ben the robot, a comic-relief character voiced by Martin Short. But everything we tried affected his comedy. Sometimes, when you start altering voices you lose emotion, and the last thing you want to do in a story like this is affect performances.

Treasure Planet Official Site

Treasure Planet at IMDB