Everyone's Bee is Important: bee-hind the noises
As Mila puts it in this interview, “Daddy draws the (un-intelligible) and his friend made the noises.” Ha!
This project came about when 3 year-old Mila Shane improvised a song about the Importance of Everyone’s Bee. (We all know everyone has a bee, so I won’t get into that here.) Then her fantastic filmmaking father Giga Shane animated it, and brought me on board to sound design. As you might imagine, I had a lot of fun with this project.
Giga and I chatted about the approach on the phone and he basically told me “go nuts!” (while of course leaving Mila’s song as the focus.) I think this is the best sort of collaboration- where there are a few guidelines and boundaries but plenty of room for experimentation and fun.
Despite the fact that this was one of those start-friday-finish-saturday turnarounds, I decided it would be a good challenge to not use any pre-existing sounds (i.e. commercial SFX libraries) since:
1) I like how constraints often lead to more interesting results. Given the amount of personality in Mila & Giga’s contributions, I wanted to put as much character into this thing as possible!
2) To paraphrase Alice Waters, if you want a great meal, start with delicious ingredients. I love applying this idea to music and sound, hence using homemade sound effects instead of “canned”. For this same reason, most projects I do these days involve at least a few live musicians :)
Here’s a list of how I made every sound effect in this thing!
sound effects
- 0:00 waves/water = bathtub/bucket sloshing
- 0:03 shooom = mouth sound
- 0:03 birds = the sound right outside my front door in the morning (featuring my neighbor’s birds)
- 0:08 logo disappearing = bathtub draining
- 0:10 title card = B’s played on the chromaharp
- 0:15 branches extending out = opening my blue umbrella
- 0:16 bears = me growling
- 0:18 bees = me buzzing
- 0:19 bee body pump up = accordion air release
- 0:19 bee’s wings sprouting up = umbrella
- 0:19 hammer hitting flask = tapping trumpet with harmon mute
- 0:21 honeycomb filling in = lips/finger noise with delay
- 0:25 grey transition = removing disc from led zeppelin boxed set
- 0:24 factory ambiance = bike wheel spinning + me saying “tikatikatikatikatika”
- 0:25 flask falls = me meowing
- 0:29 close-up flask bubbling = water boiling on gas stove
- 0:31 psychedelic tongue warp = mouth/tongue noises + whistling with effects
- 0:33 teeth flying in = trumpet valves rattling
- 0:33 lips/faces appear = me “taking a bite” sound
- 0:33 lips/faces pulled apart = me saying “whoa!” as grandpa
- 0:35 teeth fly out = more trumpet valve rattling
- 0:36 jar appears = catching a pickle jar
- 0:36 house appears = snare brush in jar
- 0:37 garden fall = oven opening
- 0:37 shutters/walls appear = paper
- 0:37 curtains up = my curtains
- 0:38 plants grow = vocalizations
- 0:39 volcano / green ocean = vent hood rumbling (cheap piece of metal from home depot)
- 0:41 it’s like, the universe, man = bunch of vocalizations
- 0:42 honey men vocalizations = “say ahh” vocalization
- 0:47 cosmic honey color swirl = vocalization
- 0:48 eating cosmic honey = me saying “bwlowllowllowllowlow”
- 0:50 bee quick entrance = me quick buzz
- 0:52 start honey button = me saying “blerp”
- 0:53 honey machine = chromaharp and accordion ascending glissando + vocalizations
- 0:53 honey machine slams = plosive P’s (me saying “puh!” really close to the mic)
- 0:58 team hands = leg slaps
- 0:59 space cats = me meowing
- 1:02 bees fly by = me buzzing
- 1:17 bees exit = more grandpa whoas
Check out Giga’s write-up for even more Bee-hind-the-scenes goodness including storyboards and photos of him and Mila on their way to the Lower East Side Film Festival premiere.