Diego Peralta
Avatar: The Last Airbender introduced audiences to an entirely different universe when it premiered on Netflix earlier this year. The Netflix adaptation of the classic Nickelodeon animated series followed the story of Aang (Gordon Cormier) and the training he had to go through in order to become the hero the world needs to take down Fire Lord Ozai (Daniel Dae Kim).
Awards Radar had the opportunity to interview co-supervising sound editor, Tim Kimmel, and co-supervising sound editor/sound designer, Luke Gibleon. The duo had the task of bringing the world of Avatar: The Last Airbender to life through the sounds that could heard across the Fire Nation, the Water Tribes, the Earth Kingdom and all the other locations visited by Aang and his friends during the first season of the series.
Awards Radar: What sound element were you excited to work on when you joined Avatar: The Last Airbender?
Tim Kimmel: It was the overall experience, with all of it. The different types of bending and trying to see what taking the animated series and turning into a live-action story. Having a lot of freedom and a lot more to do with it.
Luke Gibleon: The animated show is a beloved classic, that was exciting about this. Getting a chance to bring it into a live-action space. Bring an additional dimension via sound for it. How we could use sound to enhance that whole story.
AR: How did you create the sound effects for earth-bending? Did you capture nature elements and then enhance them digitally?
LG: That was actually one of the easier bending disciplines to do. That’s because, in previous projects and shows I’ve worked on I had rock and stone material I could use as a starting place. It’s also an element that’s more straightforward than some of the other elements when it comes to how things impact and move. I still did a lot of designs with those elements. You have to create all these kinds of movements and impacts for the elements. There’s so many things of different scales and sizes. There’s plenty of design work. It was a lot of fun because earth is huge, beefy and massive.
AR: If earth-bending was easy, which elements were complicated to work with when it comes to the sound design?
TK: Luke was the one designing them. I would think that fire was probably one of the more difficult ones because it doesn’t make an impact sound. That was one of the things that was discussed with Jabbar (Raisani), one of the executives from the show. He said that, even though fire doesn’t make a sound upon impact, we needed to create something that was believable. I thought that was one of the most interesting ones to be working with.
AR: What was the process for creating the sound design for the fight sequences in Avatar: The Last Airbender?
LG: When we talked about bending from the beginning, we knew it was a martial art form. Bending and the martial arts go hand-in.hand. If you think about the energy that comes from bending, that’s chi. We used more influence from the Western disciplines, such as Tai Chi and Kung Fu. That was the starting place. You’re really stylizing bending as if it was a martial arts form.
I’ve done a lot of martial arts films and fight sequences. I have a martial arts background. It’s a bit more like second nature, when I’m designing fight sequences. The bending part is what made it even more fun. Because I wasn’t doing only a fight. I was doing a fight using internal energy that has manifested into elements.
TK: Between every bending discipline, there is a constant energy that Luke designed in these fight sequences. There’s a sound that goes along the chi he was talking about.
LG: And it pre-lapsed all the elements that we hear. As they’re fighting, we hear this energy element that we call the bending energy. It’s to tie the bender to the element itself. It operates as a glue and every bender has it.
AR: Luke, you mentioned that you had a martial arts background that influences your work for media?
LG: Yeah, I did Kung Fu for quite a few years and I mixed that in with Tai Chi and Kickboxing. There’s a lot of similarities with the choreographies that they used in Avatar: The Last Airbender. It’s very Wushu based, that’s a northern Kung Fu style.
AR: What were the inspirations for Appa’s sound design?
LG: With Appa, as well as many of the other characters from Avatar: The Last Airbender, it’s right in the name. Appa is a sky bison. We have ostrich horses and badger moles. We’re always looking to use as much as we can from the actual elements. For Appa, we made sure to get bison and buffalo sounds incorporated into his voice. I used more animal voices for the breathing and for the grunts. We also wanted a soothing presence for when he’s with Aang.
For that, we used a pitched and slowed-down cat purr. It created a soothing presence for Aang. Beyond that, Appa’s voice turned out to be my voice. We had a really fantastic voice actor come in (who also does the voice of Momo). He came on before the visual effects were established. He was looking pretty much at nothing while trying to get the sounds right. But the executives still weren’t happy with where Appa was going.
We gave them different versions in order to know what they thought. They liked the version that featured my voice. The difference was that development on the visuals was further along and we could see the character interacting with Aang before recording the sounds. We mixed those elements together and they became Appa’s voice. We did keep the actor for Appa’s roar.
AR: Would it be more comfortable for you to work before or after the visual effects are finished?
LG: It depends on many things, including time and budget. This was kind of a best-case-scenario in many ways. I got to do sound design on elements before they were realized. Later down the road, we got more concrete visuals. Then we adjusted that design to those visuals. We don’t always get that, and it worked out in our favor.
TK: They had us early on for Appa and Momo. It was very rough visual effects. We did our work on it and sent it to post-production and to the visual effects team. They began to shape the effects based on what we had worked on when it came to our design. Once that had a more realized shape, Luke stepped in to make it all match.
AR: Will you be returning for season two?
TK: We sure are!
AR: Is there anything you wished you had done differently in season one that you will implement in upcoming episodes?
LG: I don’t know if there’s anything left to do differently, but I’m looking forward to expanding upon what we have done. The (original series) has metal-bending, blood-bending. And the first season was incredibly daunting. In other projects, you get to design stuff and use it for different purposes throughout production. It ends up being similar and thematic.
There wasn’t a lot of that with Avatar: The Last Airbender. The bending was different and we always had new creatures. It was a constant sprint to come up with something new. For season two, we’re going to have some of those battles out of the way. Now we know what some of these elements sound like.
This interview was edited for length and clarity purposes. Avatar: The Last Airbender is currently streaming on Netflix.
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