It’s well known that everyone, without exception, celebrates their anniversary of vegetarianism by eating eight or nine meat-packed feasts. This is an indisputable fact and the subject of Sarah Schmidt’s punchy animated short Vegeversary, where a bunny is dragged out on a bachelorette-style meat bender by her friends.
We were invited to create the squelchy, grosslicious, visceral sounds of the leporine crew chow down after Sarah explained “This project is really special to me; I would love to have a little bit more of a conversation around sound design… instead of doing a sloppy job of my own!”
And we relished every bit of it.
Visceral Sounds
Craving an intimate and succulent connection between the viewer and the film's meat content, we recorded a sonic smörgåsbord. Real sounds—sizzling bacon, slapping some chicken about etc—played a role, but ironically (or perhaps fittingly) vegetables were our strongest allies. Well known as staples of the horror-movie foley artist's diet—brilliantly captured in the film Berberian Sound Studio—these vegetables were mercilessly manipulated under the microphone before being chopped and warped into a tight, comedic rhythm in the edit to match Sarah's punchy animation style. To further amplify the hyper-real grotesquerie, we layered these sounds with evocative, non-literal sweeteners, bringing out the unique essence of each meal and story beat.
For instance, to capture the action of slicing, wrenching open, and extracting from the delectable three-bird turducken, we recorded the literal: recordings of knife meeting meat (or vegetables). But to evoke the feeling of our reluctant feaster, we layered in some hyper-real: unsettling creaks of leather, the ripping of a pumpkin, and the snap of foliage as well as an extra layer of ‘sweetening’ impact: pumpkin thumps, watermelon chomps, and feather cushion thwacks.
To this result…
Choppin Turducken
Our Jo even popped a microphone in her own mouth to capture the claustrophobic feeling of our heroine's reluctant overindulgence. Here she is barfing up the mic after a take:
Mouth Mic
“An awesome experience to see this come to life. You are truly top-notch”
~Sarah Schmidt, Director
Sarah must have been chuffed with the results, since she sent us a lovely goodie bag of her illustrated stickers and prints, including her insightful animation zine, Malt Adult.
When we last checked, Vegeversary had so far racked up more than two and a half million watches on YouTube, and more elsewhere. Not bad for an independent short.
