(Sung to the tune of Dancing Cheek to Cheek:)

TekWar. They’re in TekWar. And they’re makin’ sounds we luddites dare not tweak. And they seem to find the cyberspace they seekwhen they’re sound designin’ Shatner at his peak

Sound production and design has come a long way from the days when sound editors only had to match Fred Astaire’s vox and taps to his moving lips and flying feet. Today, the production industry boasts reams of digital wunder-boxes to make sounds, match sounds to picture, and then edit the lot; more importantly, the industry has encouraged the editors, sound effects specialists, mixers and composers to use the boon of technology as a starting point from which to become involved creatively in the final product as sound designers.

TekWar, an Atlantis Films series, is an excellent example. Because while the sound team from Toronto’s Soundmix Studios and Casablanca Sound edited and mixed TekWar ‘in the digital realm,’ Soundmix general manager Steve Mayhew maintains that a successful show ‘rests with the creative.’

In designing sound for the 21st century world of the recently cancelled TekWar – most of the team has done 18 tv episodes and the four earlier TekWar movies – they had to develop an aural world no one’s heard yet. From the blase bleeps of credit cards to turbine-powered jeeps, laser-oriented artillery and customs officials with artificial intelligence. One of TekWar’s two rerecording mixers, Lou Solakofski, says the team, and particularly effects editor Wayne Griffin, created ‘some kind of new texture’ to accompany the adventurous visuals.

Heavy computer use

The quartet relied heavily on computers, particularly those within its Sonic Solutions digital audio workstations. With help from digital audio tape input and an edit decision list from the picture edit, these machines line up picture and sound relatively quickly. Then the sound edit can begin.

Rerecording mixer Orest Sushko recalls TekWar episode 12, which features cyberspace ‘jockeys’ who ‘appear to be flying through computer worlds within an aura of visual energy,’ as particularly challenging.

Dialogue editor John Laing says he had to go far beyond adr on episode 12. He took the original dialogue and ‘applied time stretch and pitch shift to it.’ When the new dialogue was later mixed with the old by Sushko and Solakofski, it sounded as if it was bouncing back and forth with voices changing speed and pitch.

Soundmix is not alone in handling futuristic projects. At Airwaves Sound Design in Vancouver, designer Gael MacLean supervises a five-person team gearing up for work on the second season of the computer-animated series ReBoot.

Good interface

Airwaves president Alex Downie says his shop got the assignment this year on the Alliance Communications/BLT Productions series because the Airwaves team can create the required sounds and because its computers mesh nicely with blt’s.

And MacLean has begun specializing in creating sound for computer animation, a world where the creator has to make everything up. If sound design is all about arranging and shaping, then sound design for 3D animation set inside a computer may be the ultimate case study.

When a sound house says it has to create all the sounds and ambiance for a particular project, that doesn’t mean the sounds created all use only artificial elements. Just ask Bob Predovich at Master’s Workshop in Toronto, where an enthused team has the rare task – for a Canadian shop – of creating an entire soundtrack for a u.s. film.

The project is Screamers, a Columbia/TriStar movie set in the future and featuring little nasties which have little in common with humans; still, team members are creating screamer-sound using such day-to-day elements as shrieking babies, monkeys, elephants, drills, dentist drills, and buzz saws.

Rerecording engineer Tim Archer says the product is ‘like something you’ve never heard before.’ But the aim is to strip the futuristic film of some of its surrealism and help the audience ‘identify with the elements.’

Sound effects editor Anthony Lancett says the film offers ‘a dilapidated vision of (the year) 2089.’ War dominates the landscape and so, increasingly, do the screamers. Part human, part machine and part animal, they fly up from underground nests to decapitate humans and proceed to recycle the body parts to create new hybrid screamers, and so on.

Dolby SR/D

Master’s reckons it’s one of the first shops in Canada to be producing Dolby sr/d (discrete digital) sound. That means creating for three channels onscreen – right, center and left – as well as left and right surround channels and one sub-base channel.

Discrete tracks allow you to pinpoint sound more accurately around the theater, says Archer. By way of joysticks and other processing gear, the mixers can ‘position sound spatially around people (in the audience) and move it between channels, or pan from channel to channel.’

The challenge for the engineers, he says, is to produce a track which will fully exploit the new capabilities of discrete digital delivery formats.

Predovich reasons that Toronto facilities, including Master’s, have gained good experience in this type of sound work because Imax films are often mixed here and they require moving sound around on discrete tracks.

Effects specialist Lancett emphasizes the importance of sound in allowing viewers suspension of disbelief. He says the audio track includes ‘many sounds you’ll never see. But they help create the reality.’

A good effects person knows how to do all this without high-tech aids, but Lancett says they’re ‘a godsend. I can create a scene, listen to the cues and pull it apart completely. I can do it far more quickly. I can’t tell you how much of a godsend it is.’

Having said that, Lancett adds that the hiring for his type of work focuses on finding creative people who are free spirits, rather than technophiles. He looks for ‘someone who can let themself go and make a sound so that when they want to emulate it, they can.’

Judging from the steady flow of work most sound houses are reporting, the Canadian industry is maturing in time to take advantage of the upswing in international production. Add to that the growing recognition of ability by American producers (here Screamers is a good example), and industry peers, and you have the makings of a welcome trend.

According to Geoffrey Halton, director of creative and client services at Pinewood Sound in Vancouver, sound production and post ‘used to be completely centered in Hollywood. Now it’s moving outside. That’s a testament to the confidence and the skill which we are now perceived to have.’

Pinewood can point to its own examples of being entrusted with high-gloss projects: Halton says it recently did some adr for the feature Judge Dredd, including Sly himself and Diane Lane, and also adr for The Scarlett Letter. Halton notes that today’s digital rhetoric tends to obscure the fact that in Hollywood, analog rerecording is still common.

Back in Canada, he says, Pinewood is creating ‘a very distinctive soundscape’ for North of 60, where the goal is to provide ‘distinct, crisp’ sound to match how the show looks and is lit.

With North of 60 having a cbc network berth in Canada, it’s not as likely to be on as tight a budget as some of the other projects – for specialty nets, cable or smaller broadcasters – being handled by Pinewood or its competitors. And everyone interviewed for this article commented that when overall production budgets are tight, sound production and post are squeezed the hardest.

‘We get killed on it,’ says Halton. ‘We’re the last step in the process. Unless people plan very carefully, sound gets forgotten. People forget that before there was sound, movies weren’t talkies.’

Halton and his colleagues around the country say the advances in digital technology help to keep margins bearable on lower-budget jobs. Staff become proficient sooner, work gets finished more quickly.

So it’s intimidating out there for startups. Halton estimates that in addition to the millions of dollars a new facility would need to get gear and staff going, the hires have to know the craft, be able to help tell a story, and that’s not covered in the workstation manual.

‘You can buy the equipment, but it’s the (lack of) expertise that’s the problem. People rushing in, not really understanding the principles or (how to provide) good servicethey give the local industry a bad reputation.’

Multimedia

The new frontier in sound, as in production generally, is multimedia. ‘It’s just starting to break (in Vancouver),’ says Halton. ‘Nobody’s doing work of the (sound) caliber to bring us in yet,’ he adds, noting that he is talking to such video game-makers as Sanctuary Woods and Electronic Arts to persuade them games should allocate enough computer memory to allow for high-quality sound. For now, the video’s hogging most of the space.

That could change with younger game designers since they’ve been brought up on cd-quality sound. With so many new computers including multimedia capability these days, he predicts multimedia projects will start affecting Pinewood’s bottom line within six months.

Multimedia has already had a discernible impact on revenues at Pinewood rival Airwaves, but in this case it’s been in music production. Airwaves’ Downie says his staff have completed ’15 or 20′ cd-rom soundtracks along with a live-action game for Sega Genesis, last November.

Airwaves has spent a decade in music and sound production and post, but Downie says the new media production process is not alien. ‘It’s just like doing a movie. (The only difference) we have to be aware of is, what’s the final format we have to deliver to them? We can give it to them on a hard drive, we don’t need to give them tape.’

Downie says Airwaves could likely increase its percentage of multimedia projects, but he says the shop likes to balance its diet. And there may be more digitized sound in production, but Downie vehemently favors soundtracks with original scores over the pop-star album rock variety.

‘That’s a cop-out – although the title tune could be bought, most movies are scored completely. Except for pop-culture movies where the script is not as hot as it could be. For the big box office movies, they’re all scored. In Canada, the smaller budget films are also scored. We have a fabulous array of talent.’

He says music and sound producers are very busy. ‘I’m turning work down,’ he laments. ‘It’s very hard for a Scots person to say, ‘Please keep your money, we really don’t need it.’ ‘

That’s not to say Airwaves – or anyone else – is getting rich on huge margins. Whether working with well-known composer George Blondheim (91/2 Weeks, Bye Bye Blues) on bigger budget projects or, say, a Canadian film such as Phil Spink’s Once in a Blue Moon, Downie says the amount of work required and the attention to detail and quality given, are similar. He says there may be 100 tracks of sound, effects and music on a big picture, but the number doesn’t fall that much – perhaps to 80 – on a $5 million film.

So margins are compressed. The fragmenting market means ad dollars are targeted more narrowly, broadcast licences are lower and on and on. Production budgets for mows, telefilms and series are down and sound and music are at the end of the production chain.

Echoing fellow sound producers, Downie and many other music producers take advantage of computerization to help meet budgets and cut production time.

At Magnetic Music in Toronto, it’s David Greene’s job to bring composers, technology (or live players) together with producers and make sure the soul of the sound doesn’t get left in the machines. With sequencer-based boxes abounding, he makes sure the score fits where the producer wants it and ensures the music is used optimally to enhance the story.

‘Effects can only play the action. What music can play is the reaction,’ he says, noting that dialogue is the melody, effects the rhythm and music the emotional sweetener in the project.

‘On shows where we’re music supervisor, we have to ensure dialogue between effects and music people so that effects and music fit in together.’

Along with ongoing concert and live theater work, Magnetic Music continues its liaison role on the second season of Nelvana’s Free Willy, a fourth season of Kung Fu for Warner Bros. and on a new series, Traders, for Atlantis.

The pan-electronic trend plays off-key for live musicians; their advertising slogan may be ‘Live music is best,’ but the message is often lost on composers.

‘The trend is time and money,’ says Toronto composer/producer Marvin Dolgay of Tambre Productions, confessing he’d hate to be a violist. ‘Synthesizer and computerized midi technology is affordable. I have both digital tape and hard disk multitrack recording systems in my personal studio,’ he says, adding that to access the same capacity five years ago, he would have had to subcontract.

Besides, he argues, synthesizers can substitute for live players. And staff, for that matter. Where Tambre used to employ eight or nine, now there are three. However, the drop can be partly attributed to the fact that he’s doing fewer commercials and more long-form production, including an mow for abc called Courting Justice, cbc’s Royal Canadian Air Farce, and the third season of Groundling Marsh.

Which raises the issue of quality of service in the marketplace. If digital technology is easier to master for newcomers and certain producers looking to ‘basement’ synthesizer composers for bargain tracks, who needs the so-called professionals like Dolgay? He says experience counts. A basement startup might not be able to offer Air Farce, say, a classical takeoff on Pavarotti.

And Dolgay is set to expand his repertoire. ‘Expanding media means service organizations like composers have to be ready to change, too, for the new customer and market,’ he says, adding he expects the market for cd-roms will be huge. ‘This is the new economy,’ he says, noting that today, it’s more relevant to monitor sales of computer software than to follow sales of houses and cars.

Dolgay’s predictions of a huge market for new media push all the right buttons with composer Judith Henderson at music and sound production company Air Tango in Montreal. At her sound recording facility, the two midi facilities will likely figure prominently in her future plans: she expects to be spending a lot of time and effort on cd-rom assignments.

Historically, Air Tango has done oodles of commercial work. More recently, Henderson’s moved into music for such animated series as Smoggies and Robinson Sucroe for Cinar Animation and The Sea Dogs and Quasimodo for Cinegroupe.

This type of work continues. But ‘the studio is changing,’ Henderson says, ‘and looking at dealing directly with companies who are looking to promote themselves on cd-rom, say. The whole production of cd-rom is exploding and people are floundering around and looking at how they’re going to get into the market.’

Air Tango, she says, has the digital sound tools needed for new media work. She can create the required montages with sound in the way picture editors do with visuals. This, she is adamant, is the future, and she is planning to evolve from supplier to producer in that future. She wants to develop her own multimedia projects, although she gives few details beyond saying one is for children and one for adults.

‘No choice’

‘I just don’t think we have any choice. I feel like I’m pushed into it, but it’s exciting. You look at the wave of technology. I think the production of cd-rom will change the face of how people receive information. You’re either looking to produce for cd-rom or you’re out. Unless, of course, they move everything to the Internet.’

Dolgay says the whole unfurling world of sound distribution begins with the Internet, and he knows not where it will end. People laughed at the prospect of tv being a success. Dolgay says we know as little today about the capacity of the Internet to change our lives as people in the ’50s knew about the power of television.

But there remains a class of music producers much less concerned with the advent of new media. Richard Gregoire of Montreal and John Welsman of Toronto both have a respected body of work, but neither has ventured into multimedia scoring.

Gregoire’s list of composer credits includes episodes of the huge hit series Les Filles de Caleb and Blanche, along with feature composing for Yves Simoneau’s Pouvoir Intime, Jean Beaudin’s Being at Home With Claude and Pierre Falardeau’s Octobre.

Welsman counts more than 40 episodes of Road to Avonlea among his scores of scores, as well as tv movies for Sullivan Entertainment and others.

Ironically, he’s currently scoring an mow for Showtime called Robin of Locksley, which tells the story of a boy using the Internet to move money from corporations to a charity to help an injured friend.

Ongoing need

While Welsman has done electronic composing – for instance on some episodes of The Twilight Zone – and while he recognizes the ‘obvious trend to electronic scoring,’ he says he’s not worried about becoming a Victrola. He sees an ongoing need for live musicians.

On Avonlea, each episode boasted ‘an average 20-piece orchestra. The quality is so evident, when you see those shows. It sticks out because of that in a field of programs.’ Welsman says he will even travel to Prague or Ireland to record live music if budgets don’t permit him to stay home.

But he wouldn’t push live players on every project. ‘Sometimes electronic production is what a show wants. But in some cases, certain shows beg for that different approach which is live players interacting.’

Welsman has also seen budgets declining and turnaround times accelerating. As with his counterparts in sound production, he argues the need for music producers and composers to be brought in earlier during production to help shape the project and shape budgets. He says this can help save money: if the shoot is co-ordinated correctly, there can be less need for rerecording later.

Computers in a pinch

While Gregoire also concentrates on producing for traditional media, he does not hesitate to use synthesizers and computers when schedules or money are in short supply. He has just completed scoring L’enfant d’eau, Robert Menard’s latest theatrical feature, and had intended to use an orchestra ‘but we didn’t have enough time. It was not a budget problem this time, but the mixing date was fixed and we couldn’t miss it.’

A lone violoncellist was the sole human musician.

Gregoire isn’t sorry. He says the results pleased the producer and director. ‘New technology allows us to do certain things we couldn’t do before; synchronization with picture is easier when using modern techniques. Much easier because it’s easier to synchronize second by second. With real musicians in studio we can’t be so accurate.’

Once again, the trend to smaller budgets is noted and Gregoire also singles out tv production as the hardest hit. And, of course, smaller budgets mean those with experience tend to get more while those starting out find it a struggle. Gregoire worked his way to composer status after years contributing to the compositions of others. Now he finds international, and especially American, assignments more and more common. ‘They know Quebecers and they like us.’