Monsters University

An Adventure into the World of Sound Design

For my role as Sound Designer for our 2015 class short film, I read the article "Watch a Complete Sound Design Breakdown for a Scene from Pixar's Monsters University" by Joe Marine on nofilmschool.com. Now it wasn't so much an "article" as it was an explanatory video, but it was still beneficial to me in explaining somewhat what a sound designer might do and how the different elements of the designs work cohesively in the final product. 

It was particularly interesting hearing the sound design process for Monsters University from Tom Myers, the actual sound designer for the film, because it, being an animated film, provided a sort of extreme instance in which sound must be handled. The entire Monsters University world had to be created from the ground up in terms of sound. There is no reference in the real world as to what that world sounds like, other than Monsters Inc., which Monsters University is a prequel to and which had to be taken into account when considering technology.

Tom Myers talks about trips that were taken to college campuses early in the process to record sounds and get a clearer idea of what the film needed to sound like to be an accurate representation of a college, as well as the energy in the atmosphere that needed to relate between the animation and the sound to make it realistic.

He also broke down a scene from the film into the different types of audio that were added one by one to create the complex, "bulky" scene. He started with the voice audio, playing just that to the animation, then switched to just the crowds, then the music, and sound effects, and finally foley. He than put all these elements together, after describing which speakers each would be set to to create certain effects (such as playing the crowd noises on the overheads because of the crowds' position above and around the main characters, and to make the voices on screen clearer), and played the final mix of the scene. It was interesting being able to pick out individual noises in the scene after knowing they were there instead of just hearing it all as just one big noise.

So the process of creating/editing the sounds was tedious and bulky (referring to the shear amount of different sounds and effects that had to be worked into each scene), but the attention to detail that went into the film made it that much better. 

The article, while not containing much content text-wise, was very interesting and provided me with a better idea of what I need to do to make our class film sound amazing.

Here's the link to the article: http://nofilmschool.com/2013/07/monsters-university-soundworks-collection