Audio for animation: these audio pros are working in film and television, and many find the line between live-action sound and animation blurring

Post, August, 2004 by Christine Bunish

Animation has always had unique audio requirements. Unlike live action, animation has no source audio, and yet audio--characters' voices, zany sound effects, otherworldly ambiance, music--plays a key role in the experience. Audio appears primed to play an even greater role in animation as it takes on many aspects once reserved for live-action productions.

A FRESH ADVANTAGE

Before Bill Koepnick and Jim Hodson founded Advantage Audio (www.advantageaudio.com) in Burbank 14 years ago, they teamed on a lot of animation work for DIC Entertainment, which develops, produces, distributes and mercandises animated content for children and families. While the company has been diversifying its client base (the partners do The Jeff Corwin Experience for Animal Planet), the bulk of its work remains animation. Recent credits include Spawn for HBO, The Mummy and Earthworm Jim for Universal Cartoons, and Jackie Chan for Columbia/Tri-Star. Current work includes Dave the Barbarian and Kim Possible for Disney TV Animation, plus Danny Phantom and Fairly Odd Parents for Nickelodeon.

"In our business, animation bears the stigma of being the poor relation of sound," says Advantage sound designer Paca Thomas. "The irony is that a 22-minute sitcom may have 50 to 60 sound effects, while 22 minutes of animation may have 2,500 to 3,000 sound effects, not including Foley. The challenge is to deliver what amounts to a mini-movie on almost a daily basis, and it requires people with the versatility to go from something light and cartoony to a flat-out Raiders of the Lost Ark adventure."

"It takes some months to build the soundtrack for a feature film, but we get a week if we're lucky," adds Koepnick. "You have to deliver work as high quality as any movie but finish in two or three days. Sound for animation used to be almost a throwaway, except for dialogue it was a secondary or tertiary concern. Now clients want to massage the background sound in the mix to just where they want it."

Advantage has long been a proponent of adding backgrounds to animation and, increasingly, clients have been taking the company up on the process. "Action/adventure/drama shows usually want film ambiance," Koepnick explains. "Shows with silly comedy usually don't need it if it gets in the way of dialogue or music."

Advantage's overall approach to sound for animation is to "treat it as another character in the show, whether in a lead role or a supporting role," says Thomas. Although Advantage has a huge stock sound effects library, plus its own collection, "virtually everything we do is custom," he points out. "You rarely hear a stock sound in an Advantage Audio show."

That's because Advantage values fresh, innovative sound for each and every project. "Some people in the industry have become too complacent--it's so easy to go to a CD, pull a Hanna-Barbera sound and drop it into a Pro Tools session instead of creating some new sound that's evocative and original," says Koepnick. Advantage clients often want "full Foley coverage: footsteps, crowds, cloth depending on their requirements for realism. They want cinematic Foley" and the firm's Foley artists and full Foley stage can deliver it.

Foley "takes over from hard effects when it's more efficient and productive," Koepnick explains. "In many instances doing something live in Foley yields much better results than cutting a library effect in Pro Tools."

Advantage was among the first to use Digidesign Pro Tools in the post environment, and now a battery of 20 form the backbone of the company's editorial and sound transfer systems. Music, Foley, sound effects and dialogue editorial departments work to hard drives, then tote them to one of the company's two stages, outfitted with Pro Tools and Studer Vista 7 boards, for the mix.

ADR FOR FILMS

ADR is a process people don't ordinarily associate with animation. David Boulton, ADR mixer at New York's Sound One (www.soundone.com), is a favorite of New York-based feature directors, such as Mike Nichols, Martin Scorsese, the Coen brothers and Frank Oz. He has amassed hundreds of live-action feature credits, most recently The Stepford Wives, The Manchurian Candidate, Alien vs. Predator and The Aviator. But Boulton has also done ADR for animated fare like Ants and Monsters Inc., the recent Garfield movie and the upcoming Happy Feet with Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman.

"ADR is still unusual for animation to the extent we did it for Garfield," he concedes. "For the most part you go with the original voice recordings which can be tweaked in an ADR session. But we had three six-hour sessions with Bill Murray [the voice of Garfield]. Maybe Bill's status had something to do with the extent of the work: a lot of the changes were ones he wanted to make."

Boulton has known Murray since 1988; they've worked together on ADR for What About Bob?, Quick Change, Scrooged and Mad Dog & Glory. The ADR process for Garfield was quite similar to what Murray experienced before at Sound One. He made himself at home in Studio K where Boulton deployed a Neumann U87 mic and various shotguns to match the list of mics from the original voice recording sessions in Los Angeles. Boulton recorded Murray into Pro Tools with DAT back-ups.