The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn (2011.)
The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn was released in 2011 and is based on the Tintin short stories by French writer and cartoonist Herge. In the film we follow the hero Tintin and his dog snowy after he buys a model ship called the Unicorn he is kidnapped and thrown into a world of enigma and violence. The foley department was essential in the film due to the fact that all diegetic and non-diegetic sound has to be made artificially as no sound occurs naturally in an animation. Therefore, in an animated film or TV show all sound that goes into the overall diegesis. The main foley artist for the film was John Simpson. Equipment used in order to record the sound they included a variety of microphones. They decided to use the condenser microphones for recording clear sound up close. When recording sound effects that relied on them being outside or not up close they used boom microphones on boom poles. The sounds had to be recorded in a variety of indoor and outdoor locations to emulate the sudden changes of location in the film. The majority of scenes were recorded in spacious echoey spaces/studios this was done to match the diegesis of the dominant locations in the film such as the library, the boat/Karebujan, and Marlin Spike Hall.
Because of the settings in the film being mainly echoey indoor locations (The Library, The Karebujan, and Marlin Spike Hall) the sounds were mostly recorded in indoor echoey studios. In order to create the sounds for the row boat that Captain Haddock and Tintin use to escape the foley team used old wooden furniture. When the decoy boat ends up getting smashed in half by the Karebujan the foley department had to use a variety of old wooden furniture including chairs and the back of a wardrobe in order to mimic the snapping and bending of the boat. They used a boom mic in order to record the effect from a distance because the camera starts off at a distance to the boat and therefore the sound needs to be muted. When the camera and the boat are close-up they used a shotgun condenser microphone to capture more detailed sound. The use of far away to close-up created a cross-fade of sound in editing; connoting enigma, and suspense as to which boat is getting crushed and if the protagonists will survive. The variety of sizes and shapes of the wooden objects they used could all be converged into one sound clip in order to synergise with the different parts of the boat that would be snapped and therefore makes the scene create verisimilitude and therefore appear immersive. In order to emulate the sound of gun shots particularly of Tintin's pistol was also a foley effect. The smaller rounds of the pistol were created by layering the sounds of a screwdriver being stabbed through a metal bucket and a plastic tarpaulin being pulled both ways and 'snapping'. The sounds were crossfaded and edited to appear lighter for Tintin's pistol and other 'heavier' gun sounds were slowed down or increased in volume.
The main Foley artist for The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn was John Simpson. He is a successful Foley artist who has worked on many projects including Mad Max: Fury Road, The Grandmaster, The Lego Batman Movie, and The Hobbit trilogy. John Simpson puts simply that 'we make noise here, basically, we get paid to make noise.' This vastly diminishes his talent, with having more films under his belt than most in the industry The Adventures of Tintin directed by Steven Spielberg was just one more to add to an already impressive repertoire. He and his team make every sound effect imaginable except from the voices you here of course, that is left to the voice actors. In front of a microphone he will replicate any and every sound needed to be added to the diegesis before meticulously editing it to fit the action on screen. Some are more conventional such as having to make the cow hoof sounds in the dock scene of Tintin. For this he used coconuts wrapped with tape. Whilst for something less conventional such as a nose or finger being broken during a fight scene is actually created by snapping vegetables such as a stick of celery. The use of violent sound effects like these helps create tension because it shows there is a real chance of injury and death for the protagonists we are routing for.
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