chapter 8

sound advice

chapter summary
		pre-production
		recording dialogue
		lip sync
		sound breakdown

In the late 1970s a new approach was used at the BBC in Bristol (England), when a series was produced by Colin Thomas called Animated Conversations. The whole soundtrack was created first. ‘Live’ dialogue was recorded in a natural setting, like an old folks’ home, a pub, or a dentist's surgery. Pete Lord and David Sproxton at Aardman Animations chose a Salvation Army hostel – they then developed characters from this dialogue, and animated to it. Their film Down and Out created a lot of interest and the idea was then taken up by Channel 4. Aardman directed a total often pieces: the Conversation Pieces and the Lip Sync series. It was for this series that their new animator, Nick Park, made one of his best films, Creature Comforts.

A film like Creature Comforts is much simpler to develop than Wallace and Gromit, because it all comes from the voice track. It all comes naturally from the person who isn't acting or isn't scripted. Because of that it has a certain naturalness that you can only do one thing with. As an animator you listen to the soundtrack again and again, you design the character to fit that voice, then you animate it, very much inspired by what that voice is about. The reason you've chosen that particular voice and that particular section is because it says something naturally to you about what it should be. A good example is the Brazilian jaguar in Creature Comforts. The interviewee was talking at the time about student accommodation and the food and the weather here in Britain, he was praising the positive side of living with ‘double glazing and things like that’. It suggested he could be a wild cat of some sort, and it fitted with him in a zoo as well. Every time he said ‘space’, because he kept repeating it, I thought why not use that and work it in as a comedy thing. The soundtrack worked on its own in that film, the characters were so strong that I felt I was just pointing them up really.

Nick Park

If one is searching for an idea this is a helpful way to get started, and can have wonderful results. It seems a simple exercise to try, but of course relies on the animator developing a good ear for dialogue, recognizing a story, and judicious editing.

pre-production

In chapter 4 we went into the preparation and planning of the visual part of the animation. The sound in animation is almost as important. As with the picture, you have to create the whole world around your characters. Although the majority of the sound design takes place after the animation, recording the dialogue is an essential part of the early production stages.

If you have your idea, your script and want to proceed down that track, you will need to record your dialogue. You know how your characters sound. At this stage, without going to the expense of a professional recording, record a ‘scratch’ track (a rough sound track of yourself or friends doing the dialogue), either direct onto your computer or onto a CD and edit it to your animatic on the computer. Using the dialogue as your timing, cut your animatic to the dialogue. When you are happy with the timings, you move on to record the actual dialogue.

Once you start to give your character a history, you give it depth and can start to think of the voice he or she would have. Voicing your character is another art. You may have given it a voice yourself, but hiring a professional voice-over is going to make a great difference to the quality of your film. Many actors do voice-overs, these jobs are generally more financially rewarding than most acting jobs, especially if it is for a commercial. They will send a voice reel (a demo tape of their styles), to a voice-over or actor's agency. These agencies can help you to narrow your search if you tell them the kind of thing you are looking for. They will send out demo tapes or CDs. You can also hear the demos on websites, although audio quality over the internet is not always an accurate way of assessing a voice. Most actors, unless they are personalities, will do a free audition, but hiring them for recording is negotiable. Expect to pay anything between £100–£400 for a 1–3 hour session. I can tell you it's worth it. Having heard hundreds of student films voiced by the directors and their friends, to hear one that has been voiced by a professional is a revelation.

Don't feel you have to go for a well-known actor, there are hundreds of actors who've been doing voice-overs for years, whose faces you may not even recognize but who can do the job wonderfully for you. Take note of radio actors especially, who use only their voice.

The actor will want to know as much as possible about your character. Make up a character profile to go with the V/O script, and if you are paying professional rates, make sure you have typed instructions clearly, so as not to waste a moment, but at the same time, don't rush rehearsals. A professional voice-over artist can help you by providing timings in their speech that you may not have thought of and inflections that may change your ideas about the dialogue and therefore the animation.

A good idea, if you've got an actor or actors in to do your voices, is to ask if they mind you filming them. As they are doing the recording they may act out the character and you can pick up a lot of mannerisms and facial actions that will add character to your puppet.

recording dialogue

Figure 8.1 Extract from script for a commercial. Courtesy Loose Moose Productions. © Brisk Tea/JWT

When booking a recording session, discuss your needs first with the company, so as to get the best out of your time.

If you really can't run to the expense of hiring a recording studio, you can do it at home. Try at least to get the best microphone you can afford, and deaden any extraneous noise. You don't want aeroplanes, doors slamming, phones ringing and ‘voices off’ that have nothing whatever to do with your story. A fridge will make too much of a hum, shoes and chairs squeak. You need a clean sound, so that you can bring in other effects that you want later. A ‘dead’ room can be created at home by making sure there's no echo. Clapping your hands in the room will show you how ‘live’ it is, you can hear how much it rings, the sound bouncing off all the hard surfaces. It's best if you have carpet and heavy curtains in your room. Cover up all hard surfaces with pillows and duvets, make sure there's no-one clumping about upstairs, lock the door, unplug the phone – and you will have somewhere to record your voice.

voice techniques

When recording dialogue have the mouth close to the microphone for a fuller and clearer sound; it helps to exclude the room ambience. Too close and you will get ‘popping’ particularly on the sounding of words beginning with Ps and Bs such as ‘presents’, ‘ping pong’ or ‘backwards’, ‘baseball’, although you can buy foam ‘pop’ shields to go on a mic to help prevent this. In fact you can make your own pop shield very effectively with a thick stocking stretched over a coat hanger and placed between the mouth and the mic. It helps diffuse the pops. Differentiating your voices will help: the higher in your throat you ‘place’ your voice, the more high, or childlike you'll sound; and the lower, the more bass, an older or more threatening character. Already these voices suggest different characters. An older person has more breath or air in their voice. Warm up your voice before recording, by running up and down the range of your voice a few times.

You can record on to your computer if you have a decent sound card, but you still need a good mic. Certain mics are better for dialogue than others, but to make your choice there are websites like www.shure.com to help you make your decision. One thing that is always useful to know is how to monitor your audio levels, both for recording and mixing. There are two varieties of meter: VU (volume unit) or PPM (peak program meters). Though both perform the same function, they accomplish the function in very different ways. A VU meter displays the average volume level of an audio signal. A PPM displays the peak volume level of an audio signal. A good analogy that Shure use is that the average height of the Himalayan mountains is 18,000ft (VU), but Mt. Everest's peak is 29,000+ ft (PPM).

If you are recording digitally it is important that you don't let the meter peak up as far as 0 db (decibels) on a PPM meter – as the resulting sound is horrible. Analogue (tape) recording is more forgiving.

Once you have the recording, you need to break down the sound on a bar chart with each word timed and broken down phonetically, frame by frame (see Figure 8.2).

Alternatively, introducing your dialogue into the computer, using software like MagPie, the sound breakdown process is made very easy. Computer audio packages will give you a waveform – a visual representation of the soundtrack so that you can track exactly, frame by frame, what the mouth movements will be. In the past, when one ran the sound roll back-wards and forwards over the magnetic head, it sometimes took a while to be sure of where the accents hit, but with a waveform you can see to the quarter frame where an accent, or a consonant hits. So as you hear each sound you write the phonetic sounds onto the dope sheet or bar chart.

Figure 8.2 Bar chart used in the making of a Bob the Builder episode. Courtesy HOT Animation. © 2003 HIT Entertainment PLC & Keith Chapman

Figure 8.3 Example of a Magpie Pro screen, showing sound breakdown as waveform, frames and a dope sheet. Choice of expressions can be created individually and added to. Courtesy Miguel Grinberg

lip sync

The decision as to how to deal with lip sync needs to be made early on, as part of the character design process. If your character is going to have moving mouth parts, you want to decide whether or to choose:

full Plasticine head

metal paddle as part of the head armature giving you an open or closed mouth

replacement mouth that slots into the head

whole replacement head.

Lip sync just means the movements the mouth makes when enunciating sounds. However, it is misleading to think that's all there is to dialogue. When someone is talking, the whole face is involved, and not just the face, the whole body is speaking – shoulders hunch, arms gesticulate, hands express. Eyebrows go up and down, cheeks inflate and deflate. Full facial animation is not always easy to take on board with model animation. The extreme movements a face can make when happy, hysterical, grief stricken, yawning are all very daunting to think of in terms of constantly re-sculpting a face – how much easier this is to achieve with the flexibility of a pencil.

Figure 8.4 Replacement heads. Pritt Stick photo © Mackinnon & Saunders. © Henkel Consumer Adhesives. BDHTBWA

This is when the skill of the model animator relies more on the tradition of puppeteering, as in the work of the early animators like Jiri Trnka. Use the body of the puppet to express the emotion: use timing to express the emotion. Make the face as simple as possible and rely on the mime of your animation to portray the emotion.

Dialogue and therefore lip sync is sometimes better left to a minimum. There are some series when, because of the tight budget, the animators are forced to stick to dialogue-heavy scenes that are low on animation, because the time taken simply to open and shut a paddle mouth is far less than the time taken to express the emotion through the character.

Once you have your character defined, the sort of gestures and mannerisms; how complex its communication will be, will start to emerge. Think through the essential characteristics and pare down, or simplify the range of gestures you will need to tell the story.

In favour of full animation, clay gives you the freedom to create the facial acting to go with the mouth movements. Will Vinton's clay animation on such classics as The California Raisins, The Great Cognito and the Adventures of Mark Twain is a tour de force. Barry Bruce, creative director at Vinton Studios, comments: ‘Now much of the animation is done with replacement mouths, it is much snappier, but when we animated with full clay – it was so much more subtle. It is very hard now to find sculptors that are good enough for full animation.’

Nick Park used full facial animation in the early Wallace and Gromit films, A Grand Day Out and The Wrong Trousers, with Wallace's mouth being gouged out, re-sculpted, and teeth being added or taken away, throughout the dialogue. After that, to speed things up, his characters’ faces became replacement from the nose down.

Nick's style works immensely well and relies on timing and emphasis. I don't think anyone could lip read Wallace – but the reason it works so well is because it's so emphatic. He tends not to soften things – he tends to jump to dramatic positions, more like old-fashioned drawn animation. When he says ‘cheese’ it's a huge E, when I say cheese, I bring the lips forward for the ‘ch’. Nick wouldn't do that. My best lip sync is ‘My Baby Just Cares For Me’ by Nina Simone (Aardman made a promotional film for the single in 1987). It wasn't very dramatic, but it was quite accurate. When Nina Simone sings she has a kind of a slur – it's very subtle, but I was pleased with that.

Pete Lord, Aardman Animations

Bob the Builder, a typical pre-school children's series character, is designed with practicality of filming in mind. HOT Animation, the studio that produce the series, would not, for instance, be able to produce the 12 seconds of animation a day that is required for a children's series schedule if they gave the characters ‘full’ lip sync. These puppets have moulded silicone heads over a resin skull with a mouth made with two hinged ‘paddles’ that can be simply opened or closed. This doesn't allow a range of facial emotions, but means the animators are reliant on their animation skills to make the most of the puppet's body language. The machines have expression change – blinks and eye movement and a range of body language that mean they can shrug and express emotion. Like most children's series work, their puppets have a range of movements suited to the style; some animation is fluid and some dynamic with key poses.

Figure 8.5 Promo for Nina Simone's My Baby Just Cares For Me. © Aardman Animations Ltd 1987

Figure 8.6 Bob the Builder. Courtesy HOT Animation. © 2003 HIT Entertainment PLC & Keith Chapman

Mackinnon & Saunders, the model makers who make the puppets for Bob the Builder, also made the armatures for The Wind in the Willows made by Cosgrove Hall Films. The lip sync for these puppets became more elaborate as the company developed more intricate forms of armature making. They built heads whose cheeks and brows could be articulated under the foam latex covering, allowing a variety of facial expressions. Peter Saunders recalls:

When they were doing the original puppets for Wind in the Willows they wanted the characters to be able to talk realistically. So we came up with the idea of making jointed heads with rubber skins on them, to do mini animatronics. Originally for the one hour special this was used well, but as the budgets progressively reduced for the series, the shots became tighter – they became like talking head shows, and to my mind that's not what animation's about. We created something that went against what we felt strongly about in animation.

Cosgrove Hall has another character, Rotten Ralph, employing another method for lip sync, used in a lot of children's series. Sticking on a drawn replacement mouth as a stylistic approach can work well (see Figure 8.7).

Figure 8.7 Rotten Ralph made at Cosgrove Hall Films. © Italtoons UK Ltd 1999 and Tooncan Productions Inc 1999

sound breakdown

The sound is broken down phonetically (how it actually sounds) rather than as it spells. This is so that you can understand what the mouth movement should be for each sound. If you were to break the sound down by the spelling, the resulting animation could well be unintelligible.

The mouth quite often slides from one phrase to the next without punctuating every letter, sometimes moving very little. So unlike much of the other advice you've had about exaggeration keep these moves simple.

a rough guide to mouth shapes: look in the mirror

The following are suggested mouth shapes, as are the images that appear on software packages. The ‘relaxed’ mouth shape also goes between words. The mouth doesn't close between words (or it would look like it was frantically chewing gum); it rests just open.

It depends on who's speaking, but a word like ‘Hello’ can look stupid with a ‘L’ shape put in, it may look better if you go from ‘he’ to ‘o’. Or in the phrase ‘I love you’, you could miss out the ‘v’ and go from ‘lah’ to ‘yoo’.

Another consideration: Are you going to show teeth? Look at your character, should the upper teeth show when the mouth is open, or the lower teeth – or all the teeth?

Figure 8.8 Mouth shapes

A word of warning: as with all studio work you don't always have control over the design of the character you're animating. In many cases you are working with a character designed by an illustrator or graphic designer, and have to work out a way round it. Ange Palethorpe, who animated Thunder Pig, a pilot for a series made at Loose Moose, discovered this: ‘It was a bit of a shock to begin with. Thunder Pig was drawn by 2D illustrators, the puppet had this huge, heavy snout, which looked terrific on paper, but how to handle the lip sync!? I couldn't change the design, so I had him throwing his head back a lot, so that you could see some movement, but then that seemed to suit his pompous character.’

Lip sync is a very small part of dialogue acting. In any character a lot more than the lips move to tell a story, and it is worth looking at other animated films to see just how important, or unimportant the lip sync is. And to see how much is achieved through body language and sound effects.

An animator is like being the actor of the film – we don't design the puppets, they were ready when we started working, the environment was already made, we bring the puppets to life. The dialogue already exists as well, so you have to place the existing dialogue into their mouths and make it theirs.

Guionne Leroy