In our continuing series we have been featuring tips in audio post production in Pro Tools from Marcelo Cyro from the Oscar nominated animation - 'The Boy And The World' as well as other other films Marcelo and the team have been working on.  In this video Marcelo takes us through how to create evil voice effects for cartoons. Over to you Marcelo...

This is a Gemini 8 animation from TV Pinguim, and this cartoon was the first to be licensed from Disney in Brazil. 

As I have often said in these articles, we need to tell stories with the sound. In this scene we need to create a voice that scary, as the characters are afraid of the school inspector from another planet.  So how did we do this?
 
We used an instance of Waves Renaissance Compressor with just enough compression to manage the peaks and add some presence and character to the voice.  Next we added a low cut to clean the low end to avoid rumble that we don’t need to hear. Nothing out of the ordinary so far.
 
But here is the trick to give inspector's voice more power by using a distortion plugin and cutting all the highs, in this case using the Waves Manny Marroquin Distortion plug-in. It is nice to have different colour and versatility to have different kinds of distortion together with a very slow oscillating flanger giving more “bigness” to this voice.  watch the video and see how the voice get big and powerful with this two plugins together. And how we lose the power of the voice without them.