I chose ‘My Strange Grandfather’ because it appealed to my taste due to its indie feel and realistic animation style. I imagined the sound design as raw, with fewer manufactured sounds, like the short film ‘The Coin's sound design (Song, 2019), because the characters and set look like they are made with real objects. I chose the time frame 3.12-4.42 due to the scenes captivating nature of the Robot coming alive and the girl growing to love it and I had an outburst of ideas for foley work upon initially watching.

I noticed the importance of perspective changes so to achieve this I recorded the foley from different distances to the microphone and automated the levels and panning manually, e.g., when the shot is of the girl, I panned the robot stems halfway to the left to create a realistic stereo image.

In the first scene, I wanted to create an atmosphere that would set the scene for the rest of the film, by creating a ‘mild wind’, even though there are no signs of wind in the images. I did this to create tension later in the piece as the wind changes and gets stronger before the robot comes alive. I created gusts of wind by automation of the Cutoff % on the filter plugin.

I believed that the velocity of the footsteps in the sand would be key to differentiating the characters, so when recording the foley using salt and rice in a cardboard box, I tapped my fingers softly for the child, then harder for the grandfather and Robot. For the robot’s steps I also layered a more bass-y sound of my hand hitting a carpet floor to represent the weight difference between the characters. If I had access to a professional Foley studio, I may have been able to record real footsteps in sand.

When building tension for the robot coming to life, I layered multiple different sounds of objects, giving the overall feel of a mechanical unit made up of bottles and scraps, (e.g., by using rattling of metal, hangers, metal squeaks etc.) that gradually fill the sonic space that was previously spacious.

I wanted to mix elements of un-natural, electronic sounds, with pitched bottle-blowing sounds for the robot’s ‘voice’ to give light to the ‘fantasy’ element of the film, and sonically set the robot aside amongst the other natural sounding foley work for the other characters. Light clip distortion on the tuned bottles combined with a synth created through oscillating a rewinding tape FX on the plug-in Serum makes up the voice, which I aimed to sound friendly, almost like how Ben Burtt designed the robot character ‘Wall-E’ to sound like in ‘Wall-E’ (Burtt, 2008).

In the final scene, all characters perform a song which I felt was a wholesome moment, so I wanted that to be reflected in the sound elements. I flex-pitched all notes I recorded by filling a glass bottle up with water to create a scale, then put all recordings into a multi-sampler to create chords on a MIDI keyboard.

After careful consideration, I decided not to add any ADR vocalization as I felt that the characters presented were more suited to being mute and felt any ADR would take away from the aesthetic of my work.