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MillimeterThe Sampler
Mar 23, 2005 12:39 PM
Sean Garnhart, supervising sound editor for Robots.
Robot City: Everyday Sounds into SFX
I took my wife and kids (a teen and a 'tween) to see the hit animated film Robots the other night and we all came away very impressed. The look of the movie—an intricate sort of retro-future world of robots, with nary a human in sight—is unlike anything you've ever seen before, and it's certainly on a creative par with Finding Nemo, Shark Tale, or any of the other modern milestones of computer animation. It's got a funny and surprisingly sophisticated script, and the voice characterizations, by everyone from Robin Williams to Greg Kinnear, Mel Brooks, and teen comedian Amanda Bynes, are outstanding. Robots is also a sound effects extravaganza, as you might expect. I was sufficiently impressed by the sonic world in the film that I called up sound designer and supervising sound editor Sean Garnhart to find out a bit about the SFX job.
Garnhart is an enthusiastic fellow with a resumé that includes such films as There's Something About Mary, The X Files movie, Sleepy Hollow, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Men In Black 2, Intolerable Cruelty and, most to the point here, the animated smash Ice Age—which, like Robots, was directed by Chris Wedge and put out by Fox. These days, Garnhart works out of C5 Inc. in Manhattan, one of the major post facilities on the East Coast. However, the film was mixed at Fox Studios in Los Angeles by Paul Massey, Doug Hemphill (both of whom also worked on Ice Age), Garnhart, and others.
"This movie was the hardest thing I've ever done," Garnhart says. "It was extremely challenging. One of the things I like about animation in general is you get to start from scratch and you get to define the world you're working in [sound-wise]. This one definitely gave my brain a stretch ... there are a couple of library sounds in there and a few sounds from previous shows I've done, but I had to manipulate them to make them new or, mostly, I went out and recorded a lot of specific things I had in mind—like I used a lot of construction vehicles and pitched them down to get a lively rumble for the city, instead of just a city din. Then, on top of that I used a lot of amusement park sounds: roller coasters, pinball machines, shooting galleries, but used in interesting ways. So you might be hearing a pinball machine, and maybe your mind makes the connection that it's a sound that you know, and that says 'fun,' but then we combine it with something else and put the sound somewhere you don't expect it to pop up."
Garnhart, his trusted assistant Bill Orrico, and several other sound editors who worked on the film amassed quite a library of sounds for the film. Out in the field, Garnhart mainly records FX to stereo DAT, using a Beyerdynamic shotgun condenser microphone, but he also sometimes records directly to Digidesign's Pro Tools through his laptop computer.
"I went to all sorts of different places to record sounds for the film," he says. "One was a water bottling plant, because I wanted to get some factory/industrial sounds and rhythmic conveyer things for the chop shop scene [where our hero robots are menaced by evil, destructive foes]. I also went to a garbage-burning facility, which was really wild. I got some amazing steams and really cool blast furnace-type sounds there. Then I did a whole series [of recordings] on a street cleaner. The driver was cleaning the streets in my community and I was following him around on foot with my rig," Garnhart laughs. "Eventually he pulled over and said, 'What are you doing?' I told him and he was into it, so he let me ride around with him and I got some interiors that way, and I also got to ride on the outside to get some close-ups of the [sweeping] brush. I ended up manipulating those sounds quite a bit with a Waves plug-in because the brush sound was a little bit too white-noisy, too constant. But with a little modulation I got this great chugging sound." Another plug-in that Garnhart found particularly valuable was Serato's Pitch 'n Time, which allowed him to give more character and nuance to various metallic sounds.
Garnhart also made good use of C5's new foley facility in Northvale, N.J. "I did a ton of wild recording on the foley stage. We were throwing dumpsters around, humongous pieces of metal," he says.
"For the dominoes scene [a sequence with many thousands of digital dominoes falling in intricate patterns], we set up and knocked down hundreds and hundreds of dominoes over a period of several hours. I thought and thought about how to make that scene fun and I finally figured out that it was the surface they were falling on that might be interesting, rather than what they were made of, because we went through aluminum dominoes, ceramic dominoes and wood dominoes ... I finally decided that ceramic dominoes sounded the best, but let's set up 200 on this piece of metal and let's set up 200 on a steel crossbeam that has a ring to it, and let's set up 200 on a piece of wood, and 200 on a cement floor. The different surfaces gave us some variation, and of course we could loop the sound and manipulate it in ways that let you travel around the room with them as they fell."
Garnhart did his FX, foley, and background predubs in Pro Tools. He says, "I really pushed Pro Tools to the limit. I have an HD3 Accel [24-bit, 192K] and I did nine six-channel effects predubs which all had their own reverbs and EQs and compressors; I did seven five-channel BG predubs, which all had their own reverbs; and I also had a mess of foley predubs, as well. It was all playing off FireWire drives; it was amazing! I'd call Digi with a question and they'd say, 'You're not following our specs!'" he laughs. "It's a tribute to Pro Tools that it could handle all that.
"I definitely also need to credit Paul Massey and Doug Hemphill, the re-recording mixers," he continues. "I did some mixing myself, too. But I love getting a second opinion. I'm a big fan of the whole film sound food chain. I like seeing my work from beginning to end, but I also like getting some input, because it only makes the sound of film better. They had a fabulous contribution to the whole movie, but especially to reel five, which was the chop shop. Doug actually did the FX predub for that scene. It was a huge puzzle trying to figure out that scene and where we were going to sonically direct the audience's attention from second to second, because there was so much going on. There was a ton of searching through sounds and music and looking for what's important or what's funny, and in the end I think it came out really well."
SmartSound Turns 10 (And It's Still Growing)
We often talk about the importance of finding a niche in the highly competitive world of production music libraries. Well, SmartSound created its own niche by being the only company of its kind to offer a patented automatic soundtrack creation software. You see, not only does the Northridge, Calif., company offer many different styles and categories of production music, with titles such as Electronic Frontiers, Classical Masters, Power Surge, Nu Metal/Extreme, and American Spirit, but its Sonicfire Pro software allows users to create soundtrack elements of different lengths without complex editing.
How does it work? SmartSound's director of public relations, Richard Manfredi, explains: "Our entire music library is encoded with information with our patented technology and what that does is allow our software to read any track and actually tell that track to fit into a specific length. Say you need 42 seconds of soundtrack for a project, and you want it to come from a piece of music on one of our discs that's three minutes long. Now, our technology tools break each track into what we call SmartBlocks and each block is a two-, three-second part of the song; maybe a few measures. Those blocks are encoded with information that not only tells the software how long each of those blocks are, but also which blocks will make musical sense to other blocks within the piece. So going back to our example, if you tell it, 'I need 42 seconds of orchestral music and I need it to have a musical beginning and a musical ending,' the software will say, in effect, 'Okay, we know these are good musical beginning blocks and these are the ones that are good ending blocks,' and it will also give you as many options as possible for reconstructing the blocks along the timeline to get it to that 42 seconds. It will suggest an option, but you can also scroll through other variations in a pulldown box, and each time you do, you'll see three to seven variations; different ways to reconstruct it. Or, if you prefer, you can actually go through a track block by block and construct it yourself, if that's what you want to do. The software will still give you hints about what blocks fit with other blocks, but you can ignore them and do what you want, or bring in blocks from other songs even. It's very easy to use."
SmartSound was founded in 1995 by a trio of music biz pros: President and CEO Kevin Klingler was a Hollywood musician and composer; Chris and Geoff Hufford were arrangers, musicians and music editors. "They wanted to create something to give video editors more flexibility," Manfredi says, "because usually the editor has to reconstruct everything himself." Their first product, SmartSound Multimedia, was the forerunner to today's more sophisticated and versatile software.
The company has been growing by leaps and bounds recently, as it has successfully partnered with a number of different companies, including large library outfits such as Sound Ideas and Music Bakery. "We'll go through their collections and pick out some favorite songs and then encode those for use with the SmartSound technology," Manfredi says. (Expect an announcement very soon about another partnership opportunity for the company.) Additionally, SmartSound has widened its customer base by being bundled with certain Avid editing systems, as well as Adobe Premiere 6.0 and 6.5, Pinnacle Studio 8 and 9, CyberLink PowerDirector 4, and Ulead VideoStudio 8.
Meanwhile, the company's homegrown libraries continue to expand, and SmartSound also hires out composers for custom music jobs, making it a strong and active player in the production music market.
For more info go to smartsound.com.
An SFX History Detour: You Don't Know Jack!
No, that headline isn't an insult. I know that you've all been paying rapt attention to our micro-history of SFX, and that if I suddenly sprang a quiz on you, you'd all pass with flying colors—or at the very least hack into my computer system for the answers. Rather, the headline above is yet another feeble joke, this time relating to one of the most important names in SFX history, Jack Foley. Yes, he is the man whose name became synonymous with film sound effects and whose moniker is occasionally joined descriptively with words such as "pit," "stage," "walker," and "editor." But do you know who Jack Foley was? I didn't think so.
Jack Foley was born in Yorkville, N.Y., in 1891 and raised mostly in the Coney Island section of New York. He went to school with James Cagney and Burt Lahr, but after high school moved to California, working for a spell as a stuntman and double in silent films before eventually settling in rural Bishop, Calif., in the foothills of the Sierra, many miles northeast of Los Angeles. There, he raised his family and worked in a hardware store, while on the side writing film scripts. He also used his movie industry contacts to promote Bishop and the surrounding area as a great location for shooting westerns and other films; this led to his being employed as a location scout. A little later he held a number of odd jobs for Universal Studios in Los Angeles, and it was while working at their Stage 10 as a props assistant (among other things) that Foley got his first experience dabbling in the brand-new area of movie sound. Showboat was his first triumph, and it immediately made him an in-demand sound man.
The first sound pictures concentrated on dialogue and music, but there wasn't much attention paid to other sounds. Foley was not the first person to separately record footsteps and add them into a film—that was done by several directors using 78rpm records of footsteps (the first SFX discs). But it was Jack Foley's idea to have the film projected on a screen on a soundstage and then record sounds synchronized to the actors' movements. He was also the first to pay attention to the differing qualities of footsteps on film—varying the surfaces he walked on, using different shoes, etc.—and also mimicking the sound of rustling fabric and other FX.
"Jack's technique was to record all the effects for a reel at one time," said director George Pal many years ago. "Jack added the footsteps, the movement, the sound of various props, all on one track. He used a cane as an adjunct to his own footsteps. With that one cane he could make the footsteps of two or three people. He also kept a large cloth in his pocket which could be used to simulate movement."
Part of what Jack Foley brought to SFX recording, too, was a certain attitude. As his colleague Joe Sikorsky once noted, "Jack emphasized you have to act the scene. You have to be the actors and get into the spirit of the story the same as the actors did."
Most of Foley's work through the years went uncredited—there was no title in those days for "foley artist"—but he worked on many popular films through the years, from the original Dracula in 1931 to Stanley Kubrick's epic Spartacus in 1960. The latter film is the source of an oft-told tale of Foley's prowess. The story goes that Kubrick was unhappy with the sound of the Roman legions marching in one scene and was set to order a costly re-shoot involving hundreds of extras. When he heard about the problem with the sound, Foley went on to a soundstage with a few fellow "walkers" and a set of jingling keys to simulate the sound of clinking armor, and single-handedly saved the scene, eliminating the need for a re-shoot! Go, Jack!
Jack Foley died in 1967 after working on literally hundreds of films and walking, by his own estimate, 5,000 miles doing film footsteps. His name will live through sound history.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
