Since its origin in the 1930′s, the Looney Tunes franchise has become an iconic staple in American culture. So, when Warner Bros. Animation decided to create new 3D cartoons based on 1950′s mono recordings of Mel Blanc, Audionamix was thrilled to be invited to participate in the project.
Photo Credit: © Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved
In the winter of 1951, Mel Blanc recorded I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat, a song written for the famous Looney Tunes icons Sylvester and Tweety. The recording was released as a single and quickly shot up the Billboard charts to No. 9, selling over 2 million copies. Daffy’s Rhapsody was recorded in the early 1950′s as well, but for a children’s album. Yet despite their success, neither of these songs was ever seen on the silver screen. Sixty years later, when Warner Bros. Animation decided the time had come to animate these classic titles in 3-D, they found out it was not as simple as it sounded.
A first challenge arose when trying to locate the original Mel Blanc recordings.
According to a recent article in the Los Angeles Times, the film’s executive producer and executive vice president of creative affairs for Warner Bros. Animation, Sam Register, said that an animator told him about the Blanc recording approximately three years ago. “The idea of being able to go back and use Mel Blanc, all of that sounded fantastic,” * Register said. He took the project to director Matthew O’Callaghan, who was working on the Coyote and Road Runner shorts and that is when the obstacle of locating the master presented itself. In fact, it took two years of searching before they were found at Capitol Records.
Once found, however, another challenge arose: “We discovered that the tracks only existed in mono,” O’Callaghan said. “We had to find a company that specialized in separating the tracks so you could have control over the volume and everything.” *
Photo Credit: © Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved
Having seen some of our previous work, Warner Bros. Animation entrusted Audionamix to do what we do best: reverse engineer the locked audio and “Undo to Create.” Using our proprietary Voice Isolation technology, our team of audio engineers separated Blanc’s voice from both original recordings and provided Warner Bros. Animation clean and enhanced versions of the actor’s voice with all of the original orchestration removed. The process allowed the production team at Warner Bros. Animation to record a new orchestration, in line with today’s exacting audio standards and bring the director’s creative vision to life.
I Tawt I Taw Puddy Tat was released as a brand new 3-D animated short on November 18 of last year, as the opening act to Happy Feet Two.
Daffy’s Rhapsody premiered on February 10th in tandem with the release of the Journey 2:The Mysterious Island.
* Quotes from The Los Angeles Times Article: “I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat”, November 17th 2011 Sylvester and Tweety
Members of the Audionamix research team attended the Latent Variable Analysis and Source Separation Conference (LVA/ICA 2012) in Tel Aviv. During the four days of the conference, there were engaging presentations on groundbreaking innovations and insightful keynote talks. You will not be surprised to find that the most interesting part for us was the entire day dedicated to Audio. Audionamix presented a snapshot of our latest research, and chaired a session about real-world constraints and opportunities in audio source separation. This year’s hot topic in audio source separation is online approaches, which will soon enable the ability to perform high-quality source separation in real-time. Audionamix is involved in the development of these approaches with the INRIA-IRISA within the Eurostars project i3DMusic.
