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Reader SurveyThe Sampler — January 25, 2006
Jan 25, 2006 12:13 PM
SFX Libraries Round Out Kong Game Sound
One of the best-selling video games of the fall shopping season was Peter Jackson's King Kong, which is based on his hit film. Production of the game, including the sound, was handled by giant Ubisoft's French affiliate, which is based in the city of Montpellier. In a recent interview, sound designer Yoan Fanise revealed that the SFX for the game are a combination of original elements recorded by him in the field with a Tascam DA-P1 stereo DAT recorder, a pair of Audio-Technica 4041 mics, and several libraries, including Sound Ideas, BBC, and WWA (Wild World of Animals).
In the case of King Kong's frightening roar, for example, Fanise says, "It is a mix of 12 elements, [with some animals] but the main one being human—it's a female horror scream pitched down a lot and saturated. It gives this tonal aspect that brings a strange emotion, a mix between sadness and anger. Peter [Jackson] described Kong as a really old monkey, alone for a long time on his island, so I wanted to add that aspect [of loneliness] to his basic angry roar. In the last month [of production] we received a temp version of Kong's roars [from the film] and sound editor Olivier Ranquet included them as an element of the edit. They have a really great presence."
Fanise and his team did all of the FX and ambience mixing in Nuendo. "[There was] a total of 1,242 sessions for the 1,885 SFX," he says. For some of the other creature sounds—Skull Island, where the game mostly takes place, is filled with creepy, oversized, crawling things—Fanise took original and library elements and altered them. He says, "[I used] lots of plug-ins, principally the Delaydots Spectral Suite and the PSP MixPack [of analog sounds]. And for all the atmospheres sessions, I used the great freeware SIR [Super Impulse Reverb] convolution plug-in to re-create exterior acoustics. All of it was mixed in my DAW with my little [CM Labs] MotorMix [control surface]."
The popular gaming website gamezone.com recently gave its Best Sound Award for 2005 to King Kong.
For more on the game, go to: www.kingkonggame.com/us
EastWest Tackles Vocal Music
It's seems only natural that EastWest, whose symphonic sample library we profiled recently, would take the bold step of creating a vocal sample library: The EastWest/Quantum Leap Symphonic Choir.
Unlike other available programs that use synthesized elements to approximate human voices, EastWest's offering derives from actual recordings of a choir singing in a concert hall environment. The choir and all its different vocal parts were captured singing every manner of vowel and consonant combinations imaginable—these then become the building blocks that allow users of the sample library to create actual vocal parts. Using a custom program called Word Builder, the user can create choral lines in a phonetic language known as Votox, which contains a dictionary of about 100,000 words, but can also be customized. Also a graphic representation of the words can also be minutely tailored and shaped.
All in all, it sounds like quite a tool, and no doubt it will quickly find a loyal and passionate following, just as earlier EastWest sample libraries have.
For more, go to www.eastwestsounds.com
DeWolfe Music Still Hooked on the Classics
Yes, it's important for any comprehensive music library to stay up to date by offering plenty of tracks featuring aggressive, screaming guitars, ambient chill-out music, and whatever this month's hip-hop flava of the month happens to be. But the bedrock of most collections is still more traditional musical elements, so it's no surprise that giant DeWolfe Music continues to refine its offering and go back to "old reliables," such as classical music.
One of the company's latest products is the DW RPO Series, which is a new collection of classical music pieces made in conjunction with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Spread out over a dozen CDs and broken out by style and mood ("Whimsical," "Uplifting," "Pastoral," "Romantic," etc.) are newly recorded excerpts from a wide range of classical greats, including Mozart, Beethoven, Debussy, Handel, and Tchaikovsky. Disc 11 is devoted to opera and Disc 12 is dances.
For more, check out www.dewolfemusic.com/classical_moods/default.asp
Smart Loops Expands Its Drum Library
Waltham, Mass.-based company Smart Loops has just released Pro Drum Works Volume Two, which it bills as the "largest collection of shuffle-feel drum grooves available today." The new DVD-based collection, like its popular predecessor, the straight-feel Pro Drum Works Volume One, was recorded by top professional drummers, and is designed to be used in any application where natural-sounding drum rhythms are required, whether it's to augment existing music or used in combination with other loop and sample elements to create original music from scratch. Volume Two boasts some 9,000 loops and samples recorded live on three kinds of kits. The collection could be, needless to say, quite a boon to composers of production music working in their own studios.
For more, go to www.smartloops.com
The New World Was Full of Birds
If you've seen director Terrence Malick's artful and elegiac telling of the John Smith-Pocohantas story, The New World, you know that much of the film is dominated by natural sounds: winds, water, birds, insects, etc. What you might not know, though, is that Malick is a very serious "birder," and he went to great lengths to make sure that all the bird sounds in the film were accurate to the time and setting of the film (Virginia and England in the early 1600s).
And so, with Malick's blessing, the sound team for the film got in touch with the Macaulay Library at Cornell University's Lab of Ornithology, which contains over 160,000 recordings, including 67 percent of the world's birds—it's the largest collection of animal sounds anywhere.
As Tom Kenny writes in the February issue of our sister publication, Mix, "In the end, the library provided cues for roughly 75 species of birds, frogs, insects, and mammals that were appropriate for the story's time and place. Those sounds were then wrangled by effects editor Erik Aadahl, who says, 'In the first hour of meeting Terry, he listed about 20 bird calls that he wanted us to use. One of his best friends is an ornithologist, and he wanted every bird call and frog croak to be accurate for time of day, season and habitat. For the love story, he especially liked antiphonal singers, pairs of birds that sing and respond to each other, like wrens, titmice, and cardinals. His favorite call is the hermit thrush.
'I made a spreadsheet organized by the time of day, season and habitat—Lawn & Field, Shrub/Scrub, Upland Forest, Forest Wetland, Emergent Wetland, and Wetland Shrub—to make sure no balls were dropped. I then had the complete list of birds fact-checked by the picture department's resident naturalist, Carey Russell. On the stage, Terry would ask, "Hang on, what species is that?" and we could confidently reply, "Oh, that's a summer tanager."'"
For more on SFX used in this remarkable film, keep an eye out for the full article at mixonline.com around the first of February.
