Swimming in Sound

Low-Tech Audio for Late-Night TV

Adult Swim, Cartoon Network’s nocturnal block of animation, including Aqua Teen Hunger Force; Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law; Venture Bros.; Sealab 2021; Robot Chicken and others, has achieved cult status with a talking milkshake, a winged attorney and some Hanna-Barbera retreads — and a whole lot of audio attitude.

For instance, at Atlanta’s Soapbox Studios, Michael Kohler does sound for Harvey Birdman and three new shows, 12-Ounce Mouse, Perfect Hair Forever and Stroker & Hoop. Birdman’s theme is a surprisingly sophisticated-sounding jazzy track with a slightly sinister Sinatra-esque vocal that sounds like it was cut with a live combo. The track is actually a library cut sped up to twice-normal speed and sung on a lark by Eric Richter, one of the show’s creator/writers. The working relationship between producer, writers, animators and audio is not unlike that of an ensemble comedy troupe, like Saturday Night Live in its early days. "We laugh a lot making the shows," he says.

Birdman pays homage to 1960s and 1970s television sound. A standard scene-transition effect is a two-syllable nonsense phrase ("Look-AH!") atop an Adam West-era Batman horn-section sting from a library. Kohler says he trolls the shows frame by frame, looking for opportunities to match sound effects to the show’s ironic gag humor. "It’s 75 percent homemade Foley," he says, gesturing to a live studio room filled with an assortment of items ranging from dead branches to his motorcycle. "In film, Foley is there to support what’s being acted out on screen. In animation, Foley is about creating sound in unexpected ways that exaggerate the action."

Meanwhile, there’s an unhinged, seat-of-your pants quality to the whole Adult Swim enterprise. "I’m still not really sure who Master Shake is," says Roy Clements, referring to the narcissistic dairy delight from Aqua Teen Hunger Force, a show he’s done sound for since its inception four seasons ago. "[Voice talent Dana Snuyder’s] voice was discovered by the ex-girlfriend of one of the producers. They follow him around everywhere. I get tracks from all over the country. I have no idea what he does. It’s part of the charm."

Not Your Average Toons

A cartoon where a talking milkshake plays a lead role isn’t your ordinary kiddie show. An article in Fast Company magazine explained the economics of Adult Swim well: because the shows are produced inexpensively, the creators are allowed to take more risks. If a single show bombs, well, the investment to get it on the air in the first place was negligible anyway.

Most of the shows are products of Williams Street Productions, a collection of young media-culture subversives based in a decrepit warehouse in downtown Atlanta, to whom Turner’s Cartoon Network has given creative carte blanche. Clements started with one of Adult Swim’s anchor shows, Space Ghost Coast to Coast, which debuted in 1994. It resurrected a’60s cartoon hero as a befuddled talk-show host verbally sparring with interstellar monsters and human guests like William Shatner appearing on video monitors. Working initially at Crawford Post in Atlanta and later in-house at Turner Studios, Clements assembles the various voice elements that usually arrive via AIFF files from an FTP site as Pro Tools sessions. Clements and other Adult Swim audio gurus used to work on Avids, but switched several years ago to Apple’s Final Cut Pro because many of the shows are animated with Macromedia Flash, and Clements says Final Cut offers a more Flash-friendly workflow. "It cut out the OMF stage," he says. "We used to do a conventional auto-conform and replace the sound elements from an EDL. Now, the elements come in from all over. As a result, the sonics are often inconsistent— but that’s easy to fix with Pro Tools and EQ."

On Sealab 2021, which features the voices of former CHiPs star Erik Estrada and Newsday columnist Ellis Hennican and which Clements mixes, he is generally presented with an array of mono sound effects which he makes stereo using a TC Electronic TC-5000 processor. The constant gurgling audio backdrop acts as ad hoc sound design and is created using little more than a needle-drop selection and a digital reverb. That’s typical of Adult Swim’s anti-Hollywood, slacker-esque approach to post, in which kitschy cool beats high science any day of the week. (Clements is no slacker, though. "We have sound design, but it’s not like Georgia is a union state," he says. "One guy tends to do most of the audio on the shows.")

Sometimes sound design is a bit more complicated. " Space Ghost’s producer wanted a spacey drone in the background, but one that never repeated itself," says Clements. "We took three different library‘space’ sounds and loaded them into a Synclavier, one key each, and modulated them at constantly varying [rates] for 15 minutes. It sounds like a constant drone, but if you go to edit it you’d notice that it’s not a loop."

Space Ghost’s approach to sound effects further reflects Adult Swim’s approach. Instead of layering an explosive effect over the rest of the tracks, Clements says he edits "a hole" in the entire track on Pro Tools and drops the effect in when needed. A two- to three-second fade-up brings the tail of the effect back to a 0 VU level, where Clements consistently likes to keep the show’s volume, with ambient sounds set at— 1 VU and dialog slightly hotter than that.

Editing for Comedy

On Adult Swim, sound editing can determine what’s funny. On Birdman, Kohler often extends pregnant pauses to draw out the laughs. "Sometimes it’s cutting a sentence off in mid-word or some other interruption," he explains. "All of the voices are recorded individually [such as Stephen Colbert’s voicing of the Reducto character], one at a time, not like The Simpsons’ live ensemble approach. So you don’t really know if something’s actually funny until you put the pieces all together."

Tailoring sound design to a Flash-based character’s personality produces a particular result, with stark, exaggerated sounds. "Reducto is obviously a very paranoid and self-conscious individual obsessed with making things very small, so I wanted to accent that every way possible with his noises," Kohler says. "Every time he moves or spins with his gun drawn, there is a small squeak sound from a library accenting how fast he moves, a very-sharp-tap footstep sound that I’ve compressed, truncated and pitched to give the impression of very quick-moving, small, hard-sole shoes. Lastly, I wanted to emphasize the fact that his weapon was not just a gun, but gear that he wears, and I wanted it to sound somewhat cheap. So I found a small plastic bubble-blowing toy that had the right density to it, and a small screwdriver that I shake, hit, or just move it with to create a junky toy-like rattle every time he motions."

Kohler’s workflow is conventional. Audio elements come in as.WAV or AIFF files, generally on 16-bit/48-kHz CDs or the occasional DVD, which he’ll work on to create prebuilds from a working script on a Pro Tools HD3 system and then send to animation, which returns the audio as OMF files accompanied by a DigiBeta with the picture. "By then, the audio is a bit degraded, so I realign the audio using the OMF and start putting it back together using the original audio sources," he says.

Fans of the show will notice regular visits from Hanna-Barbera characters like Magilla Gorilla and Dr. Quest. Their vocalizations are mimicked, not sampled, says Kohler. When there is legal vetting of sound, it usually comes as a result of theme music that parodies real shows. "I did the opening theme to the Dabba Don, a take off on The Sopranos," he says. "I recreated their opening theme and legal sent it back two or three times before they were satisfied it wasn’t a problem."

Sounds Like Chicken

Robot Chicken sets a new standard for stop-action animation. Audio mixer Scott Hinkley, who shares duties with Jerry Gilbert, says the hardest part of his job is "staying on top of what’s coming next. We had one segment— a monkey sticking a plastic fork into an electrical outlet — that clocked in one-and-a-half seconds long. They write so many comic beats into 11 minutes that part of my job is to create some kind of space between the segments." Not least of all Hinkley’s concerns is letting viewers know that a segment has ended and isn’t just Act One of a longer skit. A clip of radio static sound is inserted between segments as a subliminal cue. "That carries over from the opening mad-doctor motif," he says.

Most of Robot Chicken’s audio comes from sound libraries; Foley is a luxury. But that lends itself nicely to the vibe, says Hinkley. "We wanted the sounds to be over-the-top cinematically, but also be small and silly and poke fun at themselves," he says. "For instance, we’ll scale back the explosions so they have a distant, comic effect. It’s also funny to hear the celebrity voices"— which have included Macauley Culkin, Hollywood Insider host Pat O’Brien, Conan O’Brien and Ashton Kutcher — "being so completely different than you’re used to hearing them."

According to Hinkley, the show is cut and then mixed on a dub stage like traditional television, with a fiber-based workflow. "I mix using a fiber network of drives, which the editors communicate with through a [central] server," he explains. "I connect directly via Ethernet to edit stations in order to pull fixes and additions throughout the mix. When the show is mixed, I run a print master and M&E [tracks] and put it on a CD. It couldn’t be much easier on me."

If the mix tends to be simple, Chicken’s burlesque has its own peculiarities. "I use pretty standard mixing techniques for the dialog and music, but the effects require a more complicated mixing approach," Hinkley says. "Many of the gags depend on sound— vomit, punching, robots, tanks— and the gags are so close together, that making room for each effect can be tricky. The extreme changes in location— a playground, a volcano, outer-space, and so on— add even more time." But that’s part of the show’s magic. "It’s not supposed to feel real," he says. "It’s thrown together, very lo-fi. In a sense, the whole thing is sound design."

That, Roy Clements agrees, is the underlying sensibility pervading Adult Swim. "We use pitch-change and odd sounds, and we’ll play the sounds like instruments," he says. "It’s like being in a band."

Clements likes the low-budget environs, since they give him a chance to be involved with the audio from top to bottom, rather than at just one level of specialty. "There’s a lot of consistency," he says. "For instance, I’m mixing as I go along. In Hollywood, there’ll be one guy doing nothing but mixing." Working in Pro Tools, he’ll have standard signal paths set up, using three or four plug-ins, including two- and four-band EQs, as well as compressors and de-essers. "The two-band EQ is for imaging," he explains. "As characters walk away on screen, there’s not only a reduction in volume but a change in pitch," a variation on the Doppler effect. "So I use a low-pass filter to reduce the frequency on the steps as they walk away."

It’s the little things that make the show work— even budget post-modernism requires thoughtful audio. "You have to know where and how long to make the pauses," says Kohler. "Irony’s not easy, but then, this isn’t Saturday morning, either."