In this free video Pro Tools user Marcelo Cyro reveals some of his sound design tricks in the soundtrack of the Oscar nominated animation - The Boy And The World. Watch as he shows how he created the ambiences for this scene.

Recently Pro Tools Expert interviewed Marcelo about how he and the team of 4 produced the soundtrack for this oscar nominated film that is up against blockbusters like Inside Out and the Shaun The Sheep Movie.

As part of a series Marcelo is unpacking and revealing some of the techniques the team used to create the soundtrack in Pro Tools. Over to you Marcelo...

Telling a story using film is about creating connections between characters, places, objects, emotions and feelings. The ambiences should be very effective to help tell the story and provide the appropriate connections when producing sound for film.

Today we are going to look at ambiences, and how create some appropriate and believable environments. The sound of this oscar nominated movie was created to be a special world - to be the boy's imaginative world and so it is a part of the imagination of the central character in 'The Boy And The World'.

Watch the video and you will see that there are a lot of layers in the atmosphere of this scene. You hopefully can hear that is a very sad and introspective scene, and a lot of this was the result of the way we structured the ambiences.

There are a lot of bird and animals but very little real sound, it was recorded and processed following the design brief from the director and alot of the sounds were created using musical instruments.

We like to use some layers to make the sound bigger, wider and richer, there are some music instruments playing the effects and also some very curious objects like the sound of scraping a plastic toy.
 
Our aim was to make all the sound convey the sense of sadness and loneliness. 

• First, a waterphone was used to give an emotional feeling.
• Different whistles was used to create some birds. 
• The crickets were achieved using a very small synth from Korg, the Monotron. We used a lot of cut off, to produce a very fast sound, with no sustain at all.
• Other animals were created by some very simple vocalizations by making some wind noises with the month.
• Flutes playing both short and longer notes, as well as some trills notes with some reverb give a variety of birds and a space for them to occupy. 
• The frogs are made with a very small plastic toy scraped with a finger.

Hopefully you can see that with some simple but very creative effects we can create the appropriate emotion for this movie.

Here are some pictures showing some of the items that we used to make this scene, as well as other items to give us a wide pallette of sounds and creative freedom.