Audio for animation: the controlled environment of animation offers audio pros the opportunity to be as creative as they, or their clients, like

Post, July, 2003 by David John Farinella

"Animation is very similar to radio in a way, because you're totally telling the story through the sound," says Bob Pomann of Pomann Sound. "When I was doing radio I was always looking for the perfect effect and painting pictures on radio. That is similar to what you do with animation. When you put that kind of sound in it gives the picture weight."

Giving the picture weight, bringing a story to life, adding splash to characters and defining scenes through sound design are just some of the things that audio post houses are being called on for these days for the animation market It's an exciting field that pushes them beyond the confines of reality into a dream world where anything is possible.

ADVANTAGE SPIDER-MAN

Bill Koepnick, co-owner/sound designer/re-recording mixer at Burbank's Advantage Audio (www.advantageaudio.com), reports that the post house is currently busy working on a Spider-Man animation series for Sony/Colombial/Tri-Star that's being done in 3D and CGI before being flattened down to look like a two-dimensional rendering. "It's all done with motion capture and a lot of interesting CGI-type effects, so it's a very compelling picture for us to hang sounds on," he says. "We did the earlier Spider-Man two years back but the look of this one is pretty spectacular."

The enhanced look of the series offers the team more creative opportunities. "There's more detail in the picture, which calls for more detail in the sound," Koepnick explains. "The more real it looks, the more it's got to sound real."

The difference between working in animation versus live action is easy to see, Koepnick admits. Live action work requires much more work with dialogue and production sound. There's always a problem to solve, he says. "You're always trying to clean up noise and bad recordings," he explains. "The dialogue with animation is all done in a controlled environment, so there are very few problems. It's just a matter of some fairly simple editing to get it into sync. The flip side is that in animation there is no location recording, so you basically have to build the entire acoustic space that everyone is inhabiting and create detailed backgrounds."

Of course, that depends on the style of show Advantage is working on. Take the Spider-Man series, for instance. "They want everything to sound like it was recorded in one location. If you're in a school cafeteria, if you're outside the city, if you're in a big factory or wherever, they want the ambiance to be right," he says. The show is being mixed in 5.1 surround for a future DVD and stereo for standard broadcast. "The whole thing of building surrounds for an animation is just like doing surround sound for live action," he reports. "You have to come up with similar but slightly different audio tracks for the front left and right versus the rear left and right, and try to make a cohesive sound environment for every scene.

As for technology, Advantage made the digital commitment years ago. They are using Digidesign Pro Tools as an editorial workstation and a pair of Studer Vista 7 consoles for mixing. "The feedback the board gives the operators is second to none," Koepnick says of the new Studer boards. "The depth and power of the automation system, the routing abilities, and it's got some built-in DSP for some wonderful surround reverbs that are built into the console -- it's a real high-quality piece of gear." After everything is cut into Pro Tools, the sessions are transported via FireWire drives to the mixing stages, which feature Pro Tools/HD for playback. Those workstations are digitally connected to the Studer board, and that gives them the opportunity to perform sub mixes within ProTools if more than 80 tracks are needed.

The mixed sessions are then dumped to a RADAR 2 digital hard disk recorder. "That's our stem master recorder and we do break out the music and sound effects and dialogue as individual stems in either stereo or surround," Koepnick explains. "Then we have the Dolby Digital LTRT encoders in the rooms, so we can do the down mix into a Dolby box right into the same stereo left/right LTRT. Then when we have all that done we can either transfer it all back into Pro Tools for distribution to the clients as a DVD data disc with a Pro Tools session on it or we can transfer it to [TASCAM] DA-88 and give that to them in multitrack stems or a composite mix. We can also lay back to their Digi Beta master."

Having that flexibility, he adds, is important. "We can work in PAL and NTSC. That's become important. A lot of the animation work is being originated in the PAL format, because the transition from PAL to NTSC yields a higher quality copy than going from NTSC into PAL So, we have to do a lot of stuff at 25 frames here, and all of our editing systems have to be dual format for NTSC and PAL Our mix stages have video projectors that can show either format."

TIP: Koepnick offers: "Do your job the way you're supposed to. The one thing that we have heard when somebody leaves a competitor [and comes to us] is that they just don't take care of business. And, even though it sounds like fun and games to be building cartoons, it's a business and you're quite often dealing with large corporations with tight budgets. You've got to be paying attention and staying on top of things so that nothing gets overlooked."