How Bluey nails the perfect playground sounds

Eight years after it first aired, Bluey has won over the world and been scientifically proven to teach kids resilience.

But the Australian animation- in which a family of four blue heelers “navigate the vicissitudes of life with good humour and love” – is much more than children’s entertainment, says its sound designer Dan Brumm.

“It’s for people of all ages. It teaches us about ourselves. It teaches us about the beauty of existence,” he tells RNZ’s Nights.

Dan Brumm is also a voice-over artist.

Sheona Beach

.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/audio/2018866289/bluey-the-kids-show-adults-love-and-the-kiwi-connection” class=”visited:text-foreground-secondary visited:decoration-stroke-link underline-brand-hover hover:visited:text-foreground-primary”>Rich Jeffery, have now made 154 episodes of the show.

When the funding first came through, Dan says he knew his “very talented” brother Joe would give it absolutely everything he had.

From the start, Joe was clear that Bluey couldn’t sound like any other kids’ television shows, he says.

“Typically, children’s animation, you fall back on the stereotypical ‘boings’ and ‘whoops’, those classic musical sound effects that were created by genius sound designers back before they had all the tools.

“Those sounds are so communicative and they’re so brilliant, but they’re conventions of children’s TV. You hear those ‘boings’ and ‘whoops’, and you’re like, ‘oh, this is a zany moment’, or ‘this is a funny kid show’.”

While he has access to many sound effects libraries, they don’t include ‘playground’ sounds or ‘Brisbane atmosphere’ sounds, he says.

“I had to figure out a way to make this show sound like a kid’s show and sort of light and beautiful and all that kind of thing, using only natural sounds.”

Really good directors like Joe know sound designers can enhance storytelling, Dan says.

“If you can act in the service of the story and make shit sound cool, it’s a total win. But if you have to really play it subtly and carefully to help tell the story.”

For him, the art of audio enrichment is exemplified by the “godfather of sound design”, Ben Burtt, who created Darth Vader’s breathing for Star Wars.

To achieve the exact sound effect he wanted for the masked Jedi, Burtt went to a diving shop, stuck a microphone into a dive mask and recorded himself breathing through it, Dan says.

“He could have just had breathing, and that would have been fine. You would have heard Darth Vader and gone ‘Oh, okay, he’s breathing heavily.

“But because [the sound] has this weird plastic resonance to it, you hear him, and you’re like, ‘Shit, this dude’s got something going on with his breathing’. It tells you so much – that he’s got major lung issues, and he’s half robot.

“A genius sound designer can just do so much in a sort of unnoticed way.”

Ben Burtt’s sound design credits include the Star Wars and Indiana Jones film series and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.

Johannes Fabrizius

Unnoticed is not always what Dan has been on his solo visits to Brisbane playgrounds to record audio for Bluey.

Because many of the show’s viewers are “intimately familiar” with the real-life sounds of playgrounds, he says that’s what they needed to deliver.

“Otherwise, a kid’s watching it going, ‘That’s not what a bloody slide sounds like!’ and then they’re out of the narrative.”

Dan’s presence at the playgrounds, carrying a large recording device, has led to “a few police callouts”, though.

“It actually kind of looks like a pistol, too, that’s the scary thing. It’s got a pistol grip, and a big long barrel… Yeah, I’m pretty careful about where I point that thing.”

After spawning a stage show this year, a movie version of Bluey is due out in 2027.

– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand