Childline
First Steps
We created the original score and sound design for a piece by ChildLine, a UK confidential counseling service for children and young adults. Working with Buck, we created a piece intended to help children feel comfortable speaking with a ChildLine counsellor. The animation is deliberately bare, enabling the story to be told through sound, which needed to convey a realistic experience the viewer could identify with.
Structurally, we worked in tandem on the score and the foley. Our musical path was vague, but it was clear that the sound needed to follow the heavily textured animation – for example, by implementing significant musical shifts when the color scheme changes. The detail in the animation inspired us to record bespoke sounds and avoid using prerecorded libraries.
Storm Sequence
We had a lot of fun creating foley for the storm sequence at the beginning of the film. At the time of recording, our studio was in a loft at the top of an old 19th-century bookbinding factory. Thankfully, we were alone in the building when we recorded the bangs, echoes, and reverberations of dropped pieces of wood and trashcans in this huge, cavernous space. It was the perfect place to replicate the sounds of a storm.
Running Hands Through Hair
One of the most memorable tricks was using the sound of running our hands along the bristles of a broom to represent the sound of a child running their hands through their hair. This gave a much more delicate and hyper-realistic result than recording human hair attached to someone’s head.
Gloopy Textures
Several times throughout the video, we see text animated with a bubbly effect. To match the fluid, gloopy animations, we cracked eggs into a bowl and used a straw to blow into this thick, viscous liquid to make bubble noises. We also used the sound of the eggshells cracking elsewhere in the film when the animations/text fracture.
Footsteps
There’s a moment approximately halfway through that’s quite interesting. We hear some footsteps, beginning with a couple of tentative steps before the character breaks into a run. Although you can find library tracks of people running, you can’t find tracks with the transformation in intensity we needed. When running, you naturally exert more physical force and weight when you are treading lightly, and this is represented in the frequency spectrum of the sound. It’s not something you can modify – we needed to perform that.
Reflecting on the project nearly ten years after it was created, Composer & Sound Designer Spencer Casey notes:
I associate First Steps with Metamorphosis by Good Books, a fictionalised psychedelic journey through the mind of Hunter S Thompson. Whilst they have a very different vibe, they were made around a similar time, and both were animated by BUCK. Musically, what makes them both so special is that they combine foley with abstract musical sound design where we took instruments and synthesisers to create untraditional sound effects. This is one of the things that Antfood has traditionally succeeded in creating – a hybrid of music and sound design where the actual composition can act as sound design to a foley-driven piece.
