NEW YORK CITY — Apple TV+’s new animated series Duck & Goose premiered on July 8th as part of the streaming platform’s kids’ series lineup. Inspired by the bestselling books by Tad Hills, the preschool series celebrates the unique friendship of Duck and Goose, two feathered friends that don’t always see beak to beak.
Supervising sound editor Justin Kaupp, along with audio post producer Bob Pomann of the Emmy-winning audio post house Pomann Sound (https://pomannsound.com), completed the sound design and mix for all 20-plus episodes of Season 1. Eliott Taylor at PostWorks handled the Dolby Atmos mix, while Titmouse served as the series’ animation production company.
Photo: Justin Kaupp
Taking into consideration that the target audience — pre-K/kindergarten — can easily become distracted, the Pomann team’s approach to the sound was both streamlined and purposeful. The show takes place outdoors, in a meadow by a stream. The creative intention was to keep the environment peaceful and serene. Rising to the challenge, Kaupp created a lush ambience with character, designing a palette of all-natural sounds that he could draw from.
“For example, the animals are always interacting with their surroundings, and finding branches and sticks,” he explains. “So, we spent a lot of time recording all sorts of textures that we could use. Does anyone know what a very soft flower petal sounds like? Have you ever heard fluffy pollen? We [created sound for] objects that have no sound. This adds weight and dimension to the picture.”
Reformer Pro from Krotos (www.krotosaudio.com) became the go-to plug-in for the design process. The fun and intuitive program allowed Kaupp to cut in sounds very quickly, without a lot of manual editing.
“You can load in a long file of grass rustling and leaf crunching and then perform the actions with your voice using a microphone,” he explains. “Instead of manually editing in long passages of grass impacts, I would watch a scene and record gibberish that followed the action on-screen. Reformer Pro would then use my voice as a guide to trigger the grass-rustling file.”
Pomann Sound has decades of experience using creative sound solutions to enhance storytelling. The studio is known for their original sound design for Nickelodeon/Disney’s Emmy-award winning animated series Doug, and created Foley from mouth sounds with Fred Newman. They’ve sound designed and mixed multiple animated series, including Little Einsteins, Stanley, Jo-Jo’s Circus and Codename: Kids Next Door. Their audio post credits also include thousands of radio and TV spots, as well feature films.