I love...and hate designing creature voices. They are, by far, the hardest and most challenging of tasks in the sound design universe. It is, in part, because humans have an evolutionarily keen sense for “sentience”, the quality of vocal utterances that implies intelligence. This affinity complicates our design choices because one must create a "voice" at odds with itself. The creature is not human…but must sound more intelligent than an animal but not quite as intelligent as a human.
Where do we find these sounds? Animal recordings are often my first and best go-to elements to undergird and inform creature voice design. Synthesizers just don’t do this very well.
My sound library is a treasure trove of raw elements for bringing to life the animal kingdom or Aliens, Monsters, Giants, Worms, and Trolls. Whether for actual animals we love or fear or mythical creatures created in the imagination, my library has a vast array of sounds recorded or created to bring movie animals and creatures to life.
I always knew that anytime I recorded a real living creature, even something as mundane as a cow, it would eventually turn into terrifying beast for our next horror or fantasy film. So I tried to record anything that roared, whinnied, cackled or groaned. The bigger beasts were always the most fun, yielding the most useful fodder for designed creatures while building up a useful library when we needed wild animals.
Capturing animal sounds, especially wild-animal sound is an exercise in patience and perseverance. In their natural state most wild animals, especially the big-game like Lions and Tigers, don’t make much sound unless they are threatened or their young are threatened (SPCA NOTE: no animals were ever harmed in the making of these sound effects!). And even then, it’s a waiting game till the goods are delivered. My sound library of animal sounds represents thousands of hours standing in corrals, pens, cages and habitats waiting for something…anything to happen. Where an acceptable shooting ratio for movies is 5 to 1 (for every five takes, one is good), the ratio in wild animal recordings is many multiples of that. By way of example, we needed Penguin sounds for Mr Poppers Penguins and, after recording constantly for three 8-hour shifts, the net result was 5 minutes of usable…albeit very usable…authentic sound. Thats a shooting ratio of 96 to 1!
The big game are the most memorable recordings. Elephants, Tigers, Lions and many others are awe inspiring in sight and sound. When a Lion lets loose a terrifying roar, something primal and instinctual bubbles up inside of the listener that can only be described as terror embedded from deep in our ancestral past.
Capturing quality sound when recording animals requires getting close. Sometimes closer than is comfortable. While recording exotic primates I stepped a little too close to a macaque who mistook my nose for food and took a swipe. This caused a pretty significant gash that required a quick trip to the hospital for shots.
Camels are rather ornery creatures and they have multiples stomachs, like cows, that process food for regurgitation. Standing in close proximity risks having them spit on you. If your skin is exposed, as mine was, the spit contains bleach and burns like an acid, leaching the pigments from your skin leaving white spots for days. Camels always made the most interesting creature sound because of the burbling/bubbling gurgles they made. Quite disgusting. We got really lucky on one trip to the trainers ranch when a female had just given birth and we captured not only the mama braying for her young but the baby camels early utterances. Very few have ever heard these sounds, let alone captured them for sound.
We had heard that pit-bulls (Staffordshire bull terriers) had a really great “vibra-growl” great useful for creature sounds. After much research, and finding the homes of these pets un-suitable for recording, we rented two for a weekend and brought them to the studio. Contrary, perhaps, to public opinion, Staffs are crazy friendly dogs and we had a heck of time with them, never once being bitten or even threatened. Over two days on a weekend we captured these incredible growls and gurgles and other wild expressions of hunger and playfulness and even danger.
Wanting to capture the really big sound, we went after elephants a lot. Their roars and growls can be thunderous. However, hanging around a zoo, waiting for them to make noise is a fools errand. Some of the best sounds in my library are from Gita, a massive Asian elephant that once resided at the L.A. Zoo. We made a generous contribution to the Zoo and in return got permission to get inside the cage with her (and a trainer). I was within inches of that giant maw and recorded incredible grumbles and wails and roars, not to mention trumpets galore. This recording session had myself on the boom mic (and Doug Hemphill) and, at one point, Gita charged us. Being tethered together with Doug made escaping quickly behind concrete barriers a frightening and death defying proposition.
We managed to record these noble beasts again at the San Diego Zoo. To eliminate all the crowd sounds from daytime patrons shouting at us in the pen, we agreed to meet at midnight, when the Zoo was empty, to capture the cleanest sounds. Unfortunately, the elephants had already eaten and it was too late for even them to be out. We waded, literally, in pools of elephant urine desperate for anything they might be willing to give us. Then one o f the trainers had an idea to motivate them. He scampered off to the tiger cage (elephants mortal enemy) and released one into the open pen not far away. Well, we got sound. Boy did we get sound, until daybreak and then it was a long drive back to LA in the car smelling of elephant piss.
One of the many benefits of having Richard Anderson as my partner for so many years was his love for raising pigs and chickens. Not only was I the grateful beneficiary over the years of the freshest eggs, pork and poultry but his constant contributions to the library of every utterance one of these animals could make…because they were in his back yard.
Being a field recordist means always keeping ones ears open for new opportunities. While focused on one thing, your ears should always be scanning for something else, while you’re doing it. This would happen repeatedly when capturing wild animals sounds at a game preserve, animal shelter or professional animal rental service. Out to capture a Cougar at one of Los Angeles’s most reputable animal training and rental facilities, I heard in the background the insidious cackle of what I knew was the most hideous of beasts, the spotted hyena. I wasn’t there to record it but it didn’t take much to convince the trainer we had hired to just let us “record for just a minute” to see what that sounded like.
For a film that featured Gentoo Penguins I spent months searching libraries for good, clean recordings but with no success. Hoping to do the recording myself, I quickly discovered that no Zoo would allow me close enough and their habitats were polluted with ambient sound and refrigeration hums (Penguins must live in an environment below 38 degrees F) I was running out of options. We found one trainer in the world who had a handful but he was on tour and had no idea how to use a sound recorder. He was, however, to be in NYC for a short stay but he said that he could only release them for recording in an environment cold enough for their comfort. No ADR stage could do this…so we built a Penguin ADR recording room in side a tractor trailer truck down at the docks where they came in. We sound proofed the interior and built penguin “runs” that led to the quite booth. And then we waited…and waited. Turns out you can’t actually train penguins. You can only get them move from where there isn’t fish, to where there is. And even more futile trying to train them to make sound. With an abundance of patience and time, we captured 5 minutes of really good sounds after recording solidly for three days, 8 hours a day.
Sometimes we just got lucky. Hoping to create the sound of a small creature “purring” one of our sound assistants brought home a microphone to capture their house cat. What made these purrs so distinct and useful for these creature sounds was the cat’s emphysema. This made for weird wheezy chortles that didn’t read as a cat but still had somewhat of that warm, fuzzy purring quality hiding in it somewhere.
And then, there are times when an animal just isn't the right fit. You need just that much more intelligence before it just sounds like an actor and for that, I often do the voices myself. For Jack the Giant Slayer, I did all the voices of all the giants EXCEPT for the ones portrayed by our cast. At a certain point, it was simply easier to belly up to a microphone and act like the giants I heard in my imagination...than explain it to another actor and hope the understood. I spent months doing this. Unlike in an ADR session where you feel the time pressure and, often, end up accepting a result that is only partially what you want, doing it yourself affords the luxury of getting exactly as you want.
Sometimes I would turn on the mic and do "kits" of things and not worry about sync to picture. So I might do a pass at grunts, then a pass at "heavy breathing" then a pass at "screams" etc. This allowed me to improvise without the exigency of sync and fitting a performance. I knew if I did enough variety, I would find one I could fit to picture while maintaining that immediacy of the performance.
Other times I would perform to picture to get a rhythm or gesture correct. These were much harder to do because one is not only using a great deal of ones creative energy in getting the performance right, it is further expended insuring the sounds are in sync with picture. No mean feat for those of us NOT trained in the dramatic arts!
One of the recording musts to capture the bigger voices (Giants, monsters, aliens etc.) is proximity to the mic. For these voices I use a large diaphragm condenser mic with a pop filter almost touching the body of the mic so that I can belly up to within millimeters of the capsule. This proximity to the capsule insures the mic captures the most amount of low frequency information and chest resonance you or your actor has to muster. All that low end is a critical component in adding size and girth to the larger monsters. It means you have to do that much less EQ'ing and pitch shifting to create the inevitable size needed for the big scary monsters or creatures. To get this technique right, one must wear headphones to hear how the proximity is working and where the sweet spot is.
After I've captured enough raw material, I'll develop a plugin "cocktail" that is my approach to processing of the voice (mine or another actor) for that project. The benefits are manifold. First, it allows you play around till you find a sound you like and be consistent with it for the entire project. If you need to go back with an actor (or yourself) to add new performances or sweeteners, you know exactly how to get back to the sound used to create the originals they must embed with. This "plugin cocktail" also creates a useful tool for other sound artists to use when imitating your work in the future which would include the many re-recording mixers in international territories that must process the voices in their local language to sound like the ones you processed for your version. In so doing, one can create presets within this cocktail to accommodate for variances within the performance or variety for other characters within that species of family of voices while staying true to the original processing.
There is an amazing universe of professional talent that can bring your creatures to life, however. I've spent decades recording gifted voice-over talent to bring movies to life. I've had the good fortune of working with some of the best including Mel Blanc, Frank Welker, Fred Tatasciore and others. I've used them for animals, creatures, aliens, monsters, witches, devils and more.
I had a unique challenge designing the "beast" voice for Disney's animated Beauty and the Beast. Robbie Benson had already been chosen and recorded for the film before I came on. Robbie, while a fine actor, was quite young at the time and his voice wouldn't be considered exactly deep or imposing or frightening, all qualities associated with brutish types, like the Beast. The solution was to not only do delicate pitch shifting (lower) and EQ'ing to bring out the depth in his voice... but to embellish his performance with beast-like animal growls, purrs and roars before, after and sometimes in the middle of his lines. This took some deft work on our part to manipulate the animal sounds to match his pitch coming in and out of a line as well as its EQ. Dogs, camels, bears, lions and tigers alike were all used as embellishments to his performance. The big beast roars, while attempted by Robbie, ended up as pure animal sound. As we progressed the concept, I asked to bring in Robbie to re-do some critical moments that I wanted particularly beastly but weren't and no sweetening was helping. To make this session go even more swimmingly, I sent Robbie copies of the animal sounds that we were using so that he could mimic or, at least, get in the spirit of for our upcoming ADR session to redo this handful of performances. It worked really well.
Gremlins was an monumental challenge to create creature voices for. I not only had two types of creatures to design, Mogwai (cute and cuddly) and Gremlin (nasty and evil) but characters within each set with distinct personality types. Complicating all of it was my insistence that they be sentient and speak. None of this was in the script. I developed a simple two and three syllable language that mimic'ed how infants speak to imbue them with child-like sing song simplicity and rhyming. So when hungry, Gremlins said "Yum Yum", when disgusted "Caca", when endangered "Light Bright" etc.
Many of the Mogwai and Gremlins were pure animal sound, made from Pit Bulls and Monkeys and Cats and Hyenas. But for the speaking roles, I brought in Frank Welker as Stripe and Howie Mandell as Gizmo. Not before I had gone through the entire voice-over community phone book to include the auditions with the voices of Wilma Flintstone, Tony the Tiger and the sound machine himself, Michael Winslow. Of particular interest to me were the experimental singers that included hyper vocalists Diamanda Galas and Joan Labarbara. Their insane vocal pyrotechnics were shocking and revolutionary but a little to outside for what was to be a family film.
As I had done on Beauty and the Beast, I sent sound samples of the animals to Frank Welker to get in the mood for his recording of Stripe.
This process of casting voices has been an ongoing love affair for me. I deeply love actors and their commitments to their craft and their characters. They have saved my hide innumerable times trying to craft, yet again, the sound of something never heard before. Perhaps the most fun was recreating all the iconic Looney Tunes characters for Joe Dante’s Looney Tunes back in action. Those actors had long since been doing their respective characters, Bugs/Daffy/Elmer/Taz etc but no seemed to have taken the time to research how they were recorded in the 1950s and 60s to get the most exact matches to Mel Blancs portrayals. All his recordings were done analog to a reel-to-reel tape recoder and then a selective amount of pitch variation was induced to create the final effect. We were now in the digital age and we developed a process that would take the digital recordings back to analog tape, then change the speed (usually between 5-9% sped up) while still on analog tape, then back to digital where the recordings went through an additional pitch only change before they were mastered and sent out for lip-sync animation.
