Hammer & Coop – Behind the Scenes

Broadcast Newsroom has an article up about the mixing of the sound for Hammer & Coop, including some information on how the voice of Coop was done.  Here’s an excerpt:

The audio tracks for all of the work are robust and contribute much to the storytelling and the humor. The 5.1 mix for the cinema trailer rivals a film soundtrack with its rich blend of music, sound design, dialogue and narration. “The mix is more than 70 tracks wide,” noted Rincon. “We wanted it to feel huge to make people think we’re advertising a movie.” The soundtrack for the web and DVD series has similarly high production value with the mix for each episode requiring multiple ProTools and Audiofile sessions.

Rincon put considerable effort into honing the voice of “Coop” the car. For one thing, the voice needed to sync with an LED display on the car’s dashboard that generates a bar pattern as it speaks. He also modified the voice to make it sound as though it is coming through the car’s speakers.

“We used EQ and high-pass filters,” Rincon observed. “We wanted the voice to have a tinny quality, but not too tinny, or it would sound like a phone. We used another process to distort it and give it the quality of something coming from a dashboard speaker. And we added a tasty bit of reverb to suggest the cubicle environment of the car.”

Coop’s voice had to be further modified to fit the context of individual scenes. “In some of the chase scenes, the car is screaming at the top of its lungs,” Rincon said. “That required a change in the distortion of the reverb. The voice had to be tweaked a bit for each scene.”

Also, here’s a preview of things to come with the Hammer & Coop music video set to debut on MotoringFile early next week.

In the final step, Rincon prepared a master of a music video. The video, featuring footage from the Hammer & Coop series, is set to the 1982 hit Heat of the Moment by prog rockers Asia.