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MillimeterBoard Sounds
Feb 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
In sound designer Marshall Grupp's experience, few:30 commercials depend as heavily on Foley effects as a new Adidas spot dubbed “Improvisation.” The commercial features Detroit Pistons' basketball star Chauncey Billups doing battle with a wooden basketball court that literally comes alive and attempts to stop him from getting to the basket. Individual boards on the court become animated in living CG, courtesy of Digital Domain, but agency TBWA/Chiat/Day, San Francisco, had specific requirements about the sounds those boards should make as they crack, curl up, and go after Billups.
For an Adidas spot, Foley artists at C5's studio in New Jersey created a wooden accordion to mimic the sounds of a basketball court coming to life.
According to Grupp, the agency rejected his initial idea that the boards should sound “like a monster, with groans and breathing and weird stuff like that,” and instead, insisted they sound as realistic as possible.
“That made it an interesting creative exercise for me, because we had to come up with sounds that are not readily available in libraries,” says Grupp. “Almost none of it involved packaged sound effects except for a couple of crashes. It was all Foley and EQ effected.”
Grupp took the job to C5's Foley stage, Northvale, N.J., where Foley engineer George Lara and Foley artist Marko Costanzo built a variety of wooden contraptions from scratch to mimic the types of sounds the basketball floor boards might make, and they recorded the bumping, dropping, slapping, and smacking sounds of those boards on the studio's 30×60-square-foot stage.
Lara recorded this wooden cacophony to Pro Tools (version 5.1) using Neumann 416 and Shepp mics, a Yamaha 02R board, and Millennium HV-3D high-voltage microphone pre-amps. Their work gave Grupp enough elements for David Hughes to use while mixing the final version of the spot at Skywalker Sound, San Rafael, Calif.
