A Look inside the Software: TMB and Pibox

This is an excerpt from a blog post created by PiBox titled How The Merry Beggars Uses Pibox to Supercharge Its Audio Storytelling Capacity. You can read the entire article here.

PiBox: From an audio production perspective, what do your episodes sound like? What am I going to encounter as a listener?

Kevin Conroy: We have a naturalistic approach. It starts with picturing what the world sounds like. I have a sound vision meeting with the director who's directing the actors in the room. We meet together and go over the entire series. I wouldn't say there's one way you can expect one series to sound because we're dealing with so many worlds here. There are a lot of new environments, there's different storytelling, there are different plots. We have six assistant sound designers, two music designers, an audio reviewer, and an audio assembler. I think what the series offers is variety while maintaining great storytelling.

Peter Atkinson: In our current series called the Saints’ Adventures of Faith and Courage we feature different saints from history. And every week you'll have one from ancient Rome, then next week will be Scotland and the next ancient England. So, every time we're doing the sound design, we have sort of an overarching style, which is wanting the stories to be cinematic. We design all of it in stereo so that if you listen to it in headphones, it's like you're there in the world. But then we're really careful in asking what technology did they have in this era? Are there metal chairs? Are there wooden chairs? Do they have wagons, and would there be dogs in this geographical location? What clothing did they wear?

We try to get really detailed around the sound design so that it just comes to life. Because what I found is that audio is really visual, which is weird. You don't think of it that way, but if you, if you work in audio correctly, Kevin and his team are able to evoke really specific images for the audience. We'll add in things like if characters hug the sounds of fabric rubbing against each other.

PiBox: Can you talk about how you collaborate with music supervisors, actors, and other audio professionals for this process of creating your stories?

Kevin Conroy: We collaborate when we're in the room and have a note taking process we use throughout the whole day where we run the scripts from start to finish. With that marking system we're able to identify and remember the takes we want to use and the takes we don't want, it's a pretty tedious job. It requires skill and attention. With our DAW [digital audio workstation], which is Adobe Audition, we narrow everything down to the best takes, and line those up so we have consistent sessions of the scripts from start to finish. At that point, I meet with the director who's in the room and we have what's called a sound vision meeting, where they will go over their vision, what they're picturing for the entire series. I'll meet with them and then we'll discuss how we can make that achievable through sound.

We generally don't even start going through it from top to bottom. We start with, OK, what are the questions you have? You've read it. I assume it makes sense to you. But what are the things that you don't know how to do, you need more clarity on, or just any general questions? So we'll go over that, at which point our sound designers have a first draft assignment. They have two weeks to complete the first draft, which is five 12-20 minute long episodes, and then Pibox comes in, which is what we use for giving and receiving notes. We then have an audio reviewer who is also tied in on the series that will listen and they'll give a first round of general notes, at which point the sound designers have one week to turn around a second draft.

Once the team starts working on the second draft, our music designers come into the process. Based on the sound vision, they compose and select about three to four generally leveled scoring options per scoring section to choose from. After one week for the second draft, it comes to me and I have two weeks to do my final pass, which includes final edits, scoring, packaging, mixing the final master, and then we hand it over to publishing and they'll ship it out.

Learn more about PiBox here!