Like many people who work on the audio side of television and filmmaking, Ralph Kelsey of Sandblast Productions is heard and not usually seen.The Dot and Line caught up with him to talk about his work on animated properties for Sesame Street, directing voice actors, what Nickelodeon was like in its early days, and writing the opening theme for classic television block SNICK.
Tell us a bit about your background with Nickelodeon and the work you did there back in the 1990s.
What I did in the early 1990s was a lot of the Nickelodeon promotion. In 1993, I worked on Nick at Nite, which came on after 7 p.m. On Saturday nights, they did a little program called SNICK that was geared more to teens, older kids. All That, The Ren & Stimpy Show, shows like that. I wrote the opening for SNICK and any kind of promos that came along with that.
Yes, SNICK! That was essential viewing for me as a kid growing up. What were the main projects or most challenging things you worked on then?
SNICK was the really the big thing. The opening sequence for the program was something that was well thought-out, and they actually had me revise it in 1998. Before she got all “Come to My Window” and poppy, Melissa Etheridge had this album, Never Enough, and the cover was her with her back to the camera with a guitar and no shirt on. There was a piece on that album that had a great rhythm, and I just heard that and was in love with it, and it was in my head when I wrote the intro piece for SNICK. Each week, Nickelodeon wanted to feature what was going on in each episode so this whole rhythm track was customized each week, using the horns and percussion.
When you’re working on a project, do you have free rein over what you’re doing, or is it more controlled?
Very often you’re given the parameters of, “This is what we need it to be like,” as in orchestral or they will give you an artist and sound that they are looking for. You go in and figure out those sounds. Visuals always help me greatly. Seeing stuff helps me see what style I should go for, whether it be a jazz thing or a hip-hop thing.
So when it comes to live-action versus animated work, which is easier?
In sound, everything is clean when working with animation, so I find it easier. A lot of times, you can change the picture to work with the sound. With animation, you have a script to work from first, and from there you can get close to where it’s going to go. Animation is just cleaner and more fun.
I once worked on a mix for a stunt that was promoting other Nicktoons, and did this track that was completely cartoon sound effects. It was really fun, the crazy sounds that honed in on rhythms from percussion.
“Everything is clean when working with animation.”
There are many different components to working with audio, from mixing, editing, to re-recording. Is there any area you focus on?
I touch all those different hats. Some big shows, you’ll have a guy that’s a dialogue editor or just does the mixing. I’ve done bigger shows like the first season of 30 Rock that had teams of people. When you’re a dialogue guy, it’s mainly about making things clean. If the editor has cut things up or if there is an air conditioner in the background, you have to put it all together nicely. It’s like building a song with sound effects and dialogue. Each thing has its own place in this overall mix. You want everything to be heard and have its own place without overpowering the other sounds.
That’s one big difference between long form compared to short form work. In my career, I’ve been lucky enough to do both. People usually become specialists in one or the other. Longer form projects or work will have teams of people working on them. It’s tough because you’re in charge of a lot of different elements. That’s a lot to keep track of, you have to replace a lot of dialogue, every scene has its own ambient background sound that changes that you have to deal with. I dealt with those issues on projects like the beginning of The Adventures of Pete & Pete and work with VICE.
With that in mind, what are the major differences between working on a television show versus a film?
Shows are typically a half hour or hour long. You have a week, and then it has to go to air so you work show to show. Once you establish what things are like earlier on, it gets easier as the season progresses. With a film, you could be working on things for months, and if it doesn’t have a distributor, your work may change later on. Once a film gets picked up, you get a whole other set of chefs that want to change or influence the work their own way. For example, I finished mixing a film a year and a half ago and it’s just now coming out to premier.
What was it like at Nickelodeon in the 1990s? The culture, atmosphere, the crews you worked on?
It was great. That is one of the things I do remember. There were a lot of very creative people there. Maybe it was because cable was new and these networks were brand new but there was a lot of buzz about them. You can liken it to the way people perceive Google now a days. Work didn’t need to be formulaic and we didn’t have to be under the scrutiny of sponsors. We were able to try a lot of things and there were many good and creative people doing their best work.
“Children’s programming is the toughest.”
Sounds like a very start-up kind of environment.
Yes, it was! There was a buzz, an excitement to it all. People didn’t even have the perspective to judge it much. There was nothing like it before. An all day fucking kids network, there was nothing like it! No bar to compare it to. Nick at Nite was so much fun and just brand new. I did a lot of promos for them and we had the first campaign that actually made fun of the programming we had. The early stuff, I Love Lucy, Leave it to Beaver, etc. these shows went on and the whole concept of promoting was in a joking manner. It was brand new.
There really wasn’t another player in the early ’90s, Cartoon Network wasn’t there in the beginning. There were a few networks that tried and failed to do something similar, but Cartoon Network was the only one that came up and succeeded as well.
In terms of age group, what is harder to work on? Programs geared to young children, the teenagers, or adults?
Children’s programming is the toughest. Everyone at my current company has done work on things like Sesame Street. They were a huge client of ours. With the education element attached to it, Sesame Street was harder to work on. They had more liberties back in the 1970s but as time went on, it went under the microscope. You had to be careful about what you said and how you said it and all these educators from federal agencies had insights and restrictions on what was said. By the 1990s, every little thing was scrutinized. You can’t say that or you can’t make the kids feel that way. Probably the most restrictions I had in terms of work was on children’s programming. When you talk about kids, everyone goes nuts.
Are you doing any work currently that’s animation based?
A lot of my work now is online, which is the new frontier of programming and content. There’s a Swedish company that does a lot of interesting stuff called Toca Boca. It’s online games and programming and that’s something I’ve been working on animation-wise.
I did do animation work on Sesame Street for a muppets character named Abby Cadabby. They had this show, [Abby’s Flying Fairy School] an animation show in 10-minute segments, and we did about 12 episodes for that project. It was neat animation because they were animated characters but were made to look like puppets. We mixed all of those and did all the audio work there. After that part was done, I did the mixing and a few other guys did all the music and sound design. I was very proud of how that all turned out.
On something like that, whose job is it to get the dialogue and mouth movements in sync? How’s that work?
That’s the thing. It’s not on me, it’s all on the animators. I have to cut something for music or if the edit is screwed up, I have to make that work. In animation though, you have to put together what the movements are going to be by way of the script, then set and make the timing. Animators always kind of work on that side of things and by the time it goes to air it’s all synced up.
For more stories about your favorite Nickelodeon shows, check out our Nicktoons Month package.
Walk me through how an animated show would come together from start to finish.
First, the script is worked on. Writers and producers work on it and then they make the storyboards that are for the actors and the recording engineer as well as the animators down the line.
Then, you record the voices. For the project we did on Abby Cadabby, we recorded all adults. With adults it’s easier to do the recording as a group—four or five people in the studio. They run through the script and do a few pick-up lines. Then it’s my job to put all those scripts together and get this episode together so that it’s just dialogue. I’ll do something like put a place marker of a sound effect in the audio. Like a yip or a bang if there’s a ball hitting something so that someone down the line knows the timing for that audio.
The audio file is then shipped to the animator. My process with the audio takes a few weeks to do. The animator’s process could take a few months. Once it’s animated, it comes back, and it’s given to the composer and the sound designer. The music is written and the sound effects are put in. Sometimes a voice actor will come in and re-record a line to match the animation and the rest of the audio.
So you work directly with the voice actors?
Oh, all the time. We work directly with the voice actors. I like directing the actors. Directors like to work with engineers that can be a part of that process.
Sounds like the animation side of things takes quite a bit of work.
Animation takes a huge amount of work but the computer helps out a lot. Anime has that look now because of it’s frames per second but the early Disney stuff was just agonizing drawing all of it. It would take a year or year and half to make a film. Disney and his process, the early years were really quite amazing.
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