YAY! Tonight at the Film Festival is a screening of New Zealand animation – Homegrown Animation and amongst the short films is a stop motion short called METAMUTT TO MARS created by a dear friend of mine Ian Powell. This film was a labour of love & although it is only 11 minutes long it took Ian over six years of his spare time to shoot it frame by frame. He shot it on 35mm film on a beautiful old camera purpose built for single frame shooting and the quality of image, focus and Ians framing & lighting is exceptional!
For me the soundtrack presented a serious challenge for two reasons: it was the first film I have ever done both sound design AND music for… and being animation the attention to detail was right up there with the most complex feature films I have ever done. Its only when you step through an animated film frame by frame that you realise how much work goes into its creation and its also when you realise how much detail & character needs to go into the soundtrack to fully bring it to life.
Foley was a lot of fun – I ‘performed’ most of it wild & cut it in, as it was layered with mechanical sounds that I had already developed. Dialogue-wise we recorded a few different people performing character vocals & I then processed it through various plugins including a Pluggo frequency shifter that gave the cats vocal a great metallic resonance.
Music-wise Ian & I were both keen to pursue an approach based on 1950s scifi B grade movies & we used a number of classic movies as reference. We also figured a metal robot dog really couldn’t go to Mars without the help of a theremin, so I roped in local musician & producer Dave Long who performed some great sounds for us on his theremin routed through a number of FX pedals….
Mixwise we were lucky enough to spend a day & a half at Park Road Post with Gilbert Lake, who did a fantastic job of working through the multitude of tracks & gave the soundtrack great shape, clarifying story elements & ideas & pacing up the film a great deal. Heres a shot of Gilbert mixing while MetaMutt & Spike check out a Dolby Cat
Heres a screenshot one of my sessions from the mix, top tracks are Dialogue, middle two groups are Atmospheres & the lower group is Music:
& heres a screenshot of my FX & Foley session from the mix:
The other good news is Ian recently was given a Creative New Zealand grant for his next stop motion short film – I can’t wait! And Ian swears it won’t be six years in the shooting this time!
