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Behind-the-Scenes with the Fighting Words team - Sound Effects





What do you get when you take a bunch of amazingly talented kids, an awesome creative writing camp, an award-winning animation studio, and put them all together?

An animated extravaganza of course!

This is the story behind the collaborative tradition between Fighting Words creative writing camp and Brown Bag Films, now in its third consecutive year.

It's a simple idea – take the unbound imaginations of a group of creative kids and get them to pool together in thinking up the most amazing story they can.  The only rules? Use any kind of character, prop or location they can possibly imagine, and draw as many images in the process! The results are anything but simple…

What comes out is tale that’s so quirky, so funny, and thoroughly extraordinary that it must be destined for animation!

With the help of professional artists who have worked on some of today’s biggest TV shows, the wonderful volunteers of Fighting Words, and a whole gang of amazing people, we are proud to present a series of blog posts dedicated to the latest Fighting Words/Brown Bag Films animation collaboration – the aptly titled:

THE STORY WILL BE REVEALED IN THE MOVIE*

Be sure to tune in each week to see how our artists tackled this mammoth task – from the script, modelling and animating, to storyboarding, editing, rendering and beyond! It’s been an incredible few months, and we are delighted to be finally able to start sharing the tales of the kids of Fighting Words.

Milkshaaaaake!!!**

*No, that’s not a teaser, it’s the actual name of the short!

**All will be explained in later posts!

First up our Assistant Audio Engineer Kieran Sheridan gives a run-through of how the sound recording process went:

When I first heard about the Brown Bag Films collaboration with Fighting Words, I thought it would be a fun and interesting project to work on.

Once I read through the script and saw how off-the-wall the characters and storyline were I was more than eager to be involved! It was great to read a script that was clearly the Frankenstein-esque brainchild of the kids that took part.

I decided to set up a Foley studio in which the kids would make and record various sounds that I had marked out in the script. This allowed each kid a chance to create original sounds for his/her animation.

Our Foley studio was kitted out with sand, buckets of water, slimy seaweed, shells, percussion, skipping ropes and singing bowls amongst many other bits and bobs. With a bit of encouragement, it wasn’t long until the kids had come out of their shells and were splashing, shaking, twisting and learning that sometimes to get the sound you need for an animation, it’s not always the obvious way you might presume.

Some of the sound effects that they enjoyed the most were using a violin bow on a Japanese singing bowl to produce Octocorn’s glowing unicorn horn sound and the movement of seaweed in water for Octocorn’s tentacles.

For the sounds of the “Kevin’s”, “Tornado” and “Fish”, we group-recorded multiple layers of the kids ranting, squeaking and general craziness to add a fun, personal touch to the story.

We then moved on to the main characters dialogue which fellow Brown Baggers Chris O’Carroll, Craig Kane and Caoimhe Maguire looked after; it was their job to get the best takes and performances from the kids. A few kids brought in guitars and with the use of some percussion from the Foley studio, we composed some suitable music for a few of the key scenes. We were limited on time to come up with something, but between the three of us we pulled something together for the intro, fight scenes and even a mournful piece for a key scene in the movie. I wanted to teach the kids about how to naturally balance volume levels/mixing when you don’t have the option to adjust things after it’s recorded. We did this by placing the louder instruments further away from the microphone and the quieter ones closer. While all this was going on, there was another team of Brown Baggers and kids drawing up the backgrounds and character ideas that would be sent to the animators to start their creativity flowing.

After a full-on 5 hours, which flew by, we had recorded everything that we needed and the kids really enjoyed their day in the studio!

WATCH THIS SPACE for more updates on this year's short!

Fighting Words is a creative writing centre for children and teenagers, established by Roddy Doyle and Sean Love, and writing for an animated film is one of the numerous creative writing workshops they offer! 

Check out their website for details on events and how to get involved!


Anahita Tabarsi

Anahita is Brown Bag Films' Marketing Director, Digital & Social and drinks more than five coffees a day...

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