A bowling ball plummets to earth, whistling and whooshing through the air. When the ball smacks concrete, the cracks spread fractal-like across the pavement. Can you hear the splintered iconic image of Ed McMahon? If so, you are listening to Clatter & Din.
For the past five years, Seattle-based sound design and audio post house Clatter & Din has been creating innovative sound for spots such as the one described above. The commercial, Bowling Ball, for American Family Publishers was done via McCann-Erickson Seattle and directed by Charles Wittenmeier, then of bicoastal and Minneapolis-based A Band Apart Commercials. (Wittenmeier recently joined bicoastal/ international Propaganda Films. See story p. 1.) Peter Barnes and Vince Werner, co-owners/sound designers, have lately been working in what might loosely be called hyperreality. Whether its the grunts of soccer players in Powerades Steel Trap, also for McCann-Erickson Seattle, which won a Gold EFFIE from the New York American Marketing Association, or the swish of a silk scarf falling onto the floor in the Seattle International Film Festivals Woman via Cole & Weber, Seattle, Clatter & Dins hyperreal sound design answers a question Werner says he asks himself everyday: What would what Im looking at sound like if it were under a microscope?
Werner, a grad of Evergreen State College, Olympia, Wash, started his career in music as a part-time dub-room boy at audio post house Bad Animals in Seattle. Barnes, after a stint playing with his band, The Enemy, and producing records, took a staff engineer position at Music Source, another Seattle audio post shop. Over the next decade, the future partners were competitors, developing new and creative solutions for their own sound design needs. Barnes, for example, snagged audio digital recording (ADR) work for the seven-year run of television series Northern Exposure by offering essentially a money-back guarantee on the first episode, and thenain the absence of traditional ADR technologyahe rigged custom equipment to do the job.
Barnes, who became Music Sources general manager, eventually met with Werner, then Bad Animals studio manager, for a beer and mentioned he might be starting his own shop. Coincidentally, Werner was considering doing the same. Within two hours, Barnes says, we had a handshake deal on a partnership. That afternoon they were looking at studio space.
Four Rooms
The space they found that fateful afternoon four years ago is the very space they occupy today. It consists of four rooms, presently containing the Avid AudioVision and the Yamaha O2R consoleaas well as an original Pong video game and, according to marketing director Kris Dangla, lots of candy.
The Internet has become an integral part of the way in which the shop does business, enabling Jigsaw Editorial, for instance, to cut Bowling Ball at its facility in Santa Monica while Werner remains in Seattle. They left me alone, basically, to move through the process, he explains. And what I would do is send them rough mixes as I progressed, which I would FTP [file-transfer protocol] as Avid documents, and they could put them right in their Avid Media Composer and look at them against picture, call me with feedback, send me the latest picture and what not, and we did the final mix and layback up here in Seattle.
That setup wouldnt have been possible maybe even a year ago, explains Barnes. Part of what drives FTP and this no-client scenario is that clients these days are just busier than they ever have been, because agencies dont have a lot of time to have people sitting around in the early stages of the project; they need them to be back at the office working on something. With agencies paring down a little bit and trying to get the most bang for their buck, they are looking for people they can trust.
Clatter & Din projects include McDonalds Pocket via Elgin DDB, Seattle; Washington Mutuals Electricity Man through McCann-Erickson, Seattle; and the Miami Heats ThoughtsaZo and the Seattle SuperSonics local TV campaign via WongDoody, Seattle. The latter campaign won honors from The One Show and the London International Advertising Awards, and Gold Lions at Cannes, among other trophies. Clatter & Dins resident tone bender, a.k.a. sound designer, Eric Johnson, recently worked on two theatrical trailers for IMAX and Cinemark, pushing the companys brand of hyperreality into the wide-open ranges of Surround Sound.
Barnes foresees a spot track future with composers and designers working far afield from clients, as well as from the Clatter & Din facility itself. He says he imagines being able to click Asend, and jump in your car, and while youre commuting all of your files and your mix are coming down via the Internet … so you walk in the door and its all down here ready to be mixed for clients.
Werner looks forward to the day when he can work on a nice, high-profile, excellent-creative, big-budget kind of thingaand be doing it in my log house. And his dream project? Ive always wanted, he says, to sound design Green Eggs & Ham.k
