BEN AND DOPEY: SOUND + MUSIC CONSULTING

Lately I’ve been serving as a sound and music consultant on the feature film “Ben and Dopey” by animator John Akre. It’s a lot of fun listening to the original songs John’s been writing and making arrangement recommendations, plus suggesting areas where his homespun sound effects work might come in handy. I’m enjoying helping an artist realize an aesthetic through sound and music, using his own visual sensibility as a style guide.

The film tells the 1987 story of a Minneapolis street musician and his relationship with an animated duck created by his mother, an underground animator who seems to have disappeared. The movie takes place in the neighborhood that used to be where the Minneapolis Convention Center is now, as well as the original Nicollet Mall.

More work by Mike Hallenbeck for animation

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FX EDIT + MIX FOR FILM: "RELENTLESS" DOORKNOB CUE

Above: A layer-by-layer exploration of my sound design depicting a single action from the feature film “Relentless”, directed by Barry Andersson and starring Rachel Weber.

The film follows the psychological journey of a woman who winds up trapped in her basement during a thunderstorm that turns into a flood. The event depicted here turns out to be pivotal, since it cuts her off from a means of conventional escape.

I’ve broken down the sequence to isolate various sonic elements that come together to form the final mix.

The “dripping water” layer should be self-explanatory; water is seeping into the basement from the storm outside. The “production audio” segment depicts what was actually documented live on location, while the camera was rolling. The “Cut FX” pass features sound effects that I assembled from audio library assets, dropping them into the timeline in sync with the action onscreen to complement what had been recorded on set. And “final mix”, of course, demonstrates all of this as I blended it together, with a smidge of Andrew Joslyn’s wonderful score taking us out.

PIANO THEME: NOWHERE LEFT TO RUN

An excerpt from my original score on Felipe Mafasoli’s experimental film “Nowhere Left to Run”-- an abstract, associative vision of a post-apocalyptic dream world. If you’re in the Twin Cities, you can see it this weekend. The film-- which, in its final form, may or may not include this scene--  screens this coming Friday at Cellular Cinema’s Cave 4 Festival, 9 pm.

Readers may recognize the melody of this piece, which appears in different arrangements throughout the film. I’ve posted about the other versions here and here. I did my best to channel the Flaming Lips on this version, which accompanied a tableaux that evoked equal parts beauty and decay. In case anyone was curious, I dug back through the session to see what toys I used to create it.

All of the signals originate from virtual instruments. The piano is a sampled, out-of-tune “honky tonk” instrument, apparently treated only with compression and no other processing. The drone is a mandolin voice through a fuzz module, bitcrusher, another fuzz module with different settings than the first one, a whole ton of reverb, a filter to foreground some overtones, and some EQ rounding off the high and low end. The distorted  bass line that comes in is a sampled standup bass through compressor, fuzz, reverb, and then another compressor.

Enjoy!

More original music by Mike Hallenbeck