As we dissolve from one phase of his life to another, long exhaling breaths emphasise his new take on life, and the sound of the desert gets deeper and deeper and deeper, and finally it goes into the windstorm that completely takes over the screen. We went for a much more surgical sort of scariness where things are extremely quiet and lurking around in the shadows. There was a certain amount of clashing going on. These were the things that were less static, whereas the things that were static did not fly because of all of the elements of the music, which included a lot of strong woodwind instruments and also some synthesiser pads that were very heavy. At Soundelux, with Bender and Stateman in their complementary roles as sound designer and supervisor, the audio postproduction team consisted of two dialogue-ADR supervisors, eight sound editors, assistant sound editor, Foley supervisor, Foley mixer, a pair of Foley walkers, Foley recordist and to people taking care of any additional audio.
Animated mixes are more complex for that reason.
Andy Nelson spent a couple of months mixing 24 channels of dialogue on an Otari Premier console that also assigned 30 channels to the music and 64 channels to the effects. The bad thing is that you've got to start creating an environment for these voices to live in, because, obviously, if you just play them the way that they're recorded straight off the microphone it's going to sound like a radio show. The thing that was interesting to me was that, right from the beginning when they discussed the style of the soundtrack and the way that we would go about the mix, it was very clear that they wanted to create a soundtrack that would be more inclined towards a live action film than a traditional animated feature. You see, it was dealing with a serious subject instead of the usual light-hearted ones that cartoons usually revolve around. From my point of view with the dialogue, what I really strove hard to achieve was a way of creating an environment for the voices to live in, to get a sense of realistic ambience rather than just slinging a lot of echo on things and making them big and broad in the way that animated films are generally treated.