As work began to wind down on the production phase, the post-production process – including editing (Harry Hitner is the editor), scoring and sound design – was in full swing. During this phase, John Powell’s (“Shrek,” “Robots”) rich musical score was fully integrated with Randy Thom’s (“War of the Worlds”) sound design.
Thom, who works at Skywalker Sound, says his biggest challenge was maintaining a level of menace throughout the film. He elaborates: “In the story, there’s a gradually melting ice dam that threatens to flood the valley and its creatures. I had to evoke the sound of the dam’s gradual disintegration throughout the film, even though the glacier is mostly off-screen most of the time.”
Thom created a theme for the melting dam by merging two distinct sounds: one he created by cracking and twisting ice in pans, then treating that electronically to make an even bigger sound. Thom combined that with recordings of frozen rivers and lakes breaking up.
“Frozen lakes leave a strange kind of ‘pinging’ sound when they begin to crack – kind of like a sonar blip noise,” he explains. “It’s a familiar sound to those who spend time around frozen lakes, but to others it could sound ‘science fiction-y’. So we combined the ‘sonar’ sound with the more familiar ice pan-cracking sound to create our melting-dam theme.”
Thom’s sound design for Cretaceous and Maelstrom broke new ground in creature sounds. Thom used whale sounds, which he crafted and combined with sounds of tigers on the attack, as well as a sinister human-voice element. “The human voice sounds provided us with dramatic and emotional controls over the sound that would not be possible had we been restricted to animal sounds.”
ICE AGE: THE MELTDOWN represents the work of hundreds of filmmakers, artists, scientists, technicians, and crafts people. Under the direction of Carlos Saldanha, and guidance from producer Lori Forte and executive producers Christopher Meledandri and Chris Wedge, they have created a film they hope will not only re-introduce audiences to the beloved heroes from “Ice Age,” but bring to them an even more fun, exciting and bigger world. “We wanted to create an experience that is more than a continuation of the story we began in ‘Ice Age’,” says Saldanha. “So we took our characters in new directions, upped the emotional stakes and comedy, and set our story against an even more dramatic backdrop.”
Movie Database
In Theaters
