Daniel Pellerin is a Toronto-based Genie and Gemini Award-winning sound supervisor, rerecording mixer, music supervisor and contractor. Daniel Pellerin Digital Sound Productions recently sound designed and mixed the HD live-action and CGI documentary The Exodus Decoded for executive producers Simcha Jacobovici of Associated Producers and James Cameron.

When a project calls for a sound design that defies convention, both creatively and technically, you welcome it with open arms.

Director/writer/producer Simcha Jacobovici of Toronto’s Associated Producers (The Naked Archaeologist) and his coproducer Felix Golubev offered us this opportunity two years ago. We spoke of exploring the trek to the Promised Land through picture and sound, incorporating contemporary research and discoveries, and, it is hoped, shedding new light on theories about this crucial part of biblical history.

When I started working on the original sound design concept with James Mark Stewart, we decided, based on Simcha’s wishes, to create a contemporary palette of sounds, placing us in a truly three-dimensional space. After reading the account of the Exodus, we had a better understanding of the complicity of nature in its cataclysmic events. Earth, wind, fire, water, rocks and sand became our currency as we created a comprehensive library of original sounds.

After combining, processing and layering, we transformed these sounds into an articulate language that was totally contemporary – cool and calculated on the surface – but essentially mystical, ancient, supernatural and primal at its very core.

The sound places the audience in a position that allows them to experience the Exodus from the perspective of the people of that period, when extreme events – earthquakes, a column of fire, hail – were understood as manifestations of a higher being speaking to them and intervening on their behalf. We can even begin to hear the mysterious inner voices that must have guided them throughout their perilous journey as they followed Moses through the desert to the Promised Land.

This was a tremendously positive experience for us, especially because of the film’s highly engaging HD/CGI component. The CGI, which is integral to the storytelling, was created and rendered by Toronto-based Gravity Visual Effects. Imarion took care of the picture edit, integrating the rendered CGI into the final online picture, color correcting and titling.

Our two on-camera hosts, Simcha and James Cameron, were recorded on HD in front of a green screen for the ‘virtual museum’ CGI sequences that are the centerpiece of the whole concept.

Technically, we were completely supported by Spence-Thomas Audio Post, where we recorded the voice-overs to match the original recordings on set. Richard Spence-Thomas selected the microphones with our recordist for the initial recordings on set and was able to match them perfectly at his facility.

We then premixed the dialogue, interviews and location sound (effects and dialogue), the effects and backgrounds design, and the original sound design together as one session. It was all cleaned, balanced in levels, matched in E.Q.s and panned and placed in 5.1, 24-bit/48K with proper high-end reverb plug-ins (ReVibe), in Pro Tools Version 7.

We then sent a mixdown of the premix to composer John Welsman, to allow him to work with the sound design as a template for tuning and textures in his arrangements.

We conformed the sound (files and mix automation) to the final CGI and recorded the final voice-over to the final picture.

Andy Malcolm and his crew at Footsteps Studios provided foley, which was quite extensive and detailed, including some magical walking on glass that anchored the ‘real’ elements into the imaginary sound design.

We then brought everything together for the final mix pass at Theatre D Digital with an HD downconvert to DigiBeta, using M&K speakers near field monitors to hear the mix fold down. Everything opened up exactly as premixed, and the mix went flawlessly.