Mecha Monster (for Animortal / E4)

9th October 2019

I composed, sound designed, foleyed and voiced the soundtrack for this beautiful piece of stop motion work from Animortal.

The music

The composition brief asked for cinematic Kaiju action music. We explored a couple of options, and settled on a choral/orchestral intro, switching to super-epic battle drums for the action.

I also had total fun writing some pumping Isaac Hayes-inspired disco (here’s a reference on Youtube) for the awesome stop-motion dancing at the end of the piece.

The sound

Animortal are fastidious when it comes to matching sound to picture, so I was careful to pick crowd sounds that fit the detail of who was on-screen at any time: if there’s 4 male engineers in shot, we made sure to use the right crowd FX.

My personal highlights were recording foley with an over-inflated space hopper, for the bouncing eyeballs; and voicing the monster itself, which took a couple of tries to get right, and did my throat in, but was well worth it.

I also loved fine-tuning the electric spark FX for the lightning at the end.

And I can’t remember if it made broadcast cut (because the edit got tighter in the final cut), but there might be a subtle layer of city ambience I’d recorded the previous summer in Toronto, just audible as the dust settles between the action and the disco. I know nobody’s likely to notice, but in the studio it gives me a little ear-refreshing ASMR tickle – plus, Toronto was a location for Pacific Rim in 2013, so…

Mix

I produced the broadcast stereo mix to E4’s (EBU R128) standard.