Imagine a moment on set, when an actor is standing in front of a green screen that is supposed to be the inside of a giant whale. But there is no whale, there is no water. There is only a wooden structure with no ceiling, some concept art pinned up somewhere, and a Director asking for a performance that has to feel completely real.
That is the gap Sound Design previz is built to close, and it is the gap we were asked to close for the second season of One Piece, using Sound Design.
What Is Previz, Anyway?
Previsualization, previz, for short, is usually a visual exercise. Long before a scene is shot for real, the team runs through the sequence, cameras test their angles, and the crew works out where everything will sit on the day. It lets a Director see a scene before it exists, so nothing is left to chance once the cameras are actually rolling.
What a previz doesn’t usually include, is Sound Design.
One Piece Season 2 leans heavily on CGI, green screens, and sets built for creatures and environments that simply are not there on the day. The whale, Laboon, does not turn up to set. Neither does Reverse Mountain, the churning, ship-swallowing wall of water the story needed the actors to react to as though their lives depended on it. For a cast working against nothing, that is a hard place to perform from authentically.
“We were asked to create a soundscape for some characters in the show,” says Kyle Koekemoer, our Head of Audio at Pressure Cooker Studios. “The show is quite action-based and very reliant on CGI and stuff that is not going to be on set on the day. What they wanted us to do was create a sound palette of different scenarios, characters, and scenes that weren’t physically going to be there, to try and help the actors and the extras get into that head space.”
It is, in Kyle’s words, similar to ADR in reverse. Where ADR puts an actor back into a scene’s headspace after the fact, this was about building that headspace on set.
The team’s sound was played back on set, either during or before a shot, giving the cast something real to perform against, like the low groan of a whale the size of a ship, or the chaos of a mountain made of water, instead of just a green wall and a Director’s guidance.
Why Wasn't Sound Design Part of Previz Before?
This was the first Sound Design previz job Pressure Cooker Studios had ever taken on. Camera and VFX previz is common practice. Animators build early versions of characters so Directors can find the tone before production properly begins. Sound designed in a previz, specifically to be played back on set, for the cast, is not such common practice. But it was an exciting project for the team.
“It seems to be sort of standard for the camera team and the VFX and animation people to do a previz,” says Denys Marcel, one of our sound designers on the project. “It seems to be not standard practice at all for sound. They got in touch because they’d created a lot of stuff for the whale, for Laboon, and it wasn’t just animation stuff. I think they were keen to hear what it sounds like, because they built an entire set for the inside of the whale.”
Getting the call at all came down to timing. “I think they had started shooting, but not properly, they were still doing tests,” Denys explains. “I did a bit of research and found some old season one previz of the sequences, and there wasn’t much on sound, which was interesting.”
How Do You Build a Whale's Voice From Lions, Alpacas, and a Tupperware Lid?
The brief for episodes one and two of the second season centred on three characters: Laboon, the whale; Smoker, whose ability turns him to smoke; and Alvida, who slips and slides as though she were made of rubber. Reverse Mountain (the sequence of ships being dragged up a wall of water into chaos) needed its own soundscape entirely.
The team started with the scripts. “I read the two scripts from the first two episodes, and based on the scripts, made a spreadsheet: an asset list of everything, every sound these characters would possibly make,” says Denys.
In a meeting at Cape Town Film Studios with the director, Emma Sullivan, producer Stephen Welke, and the show’s supervising sound editor, Paul Lucian Col, joining remotely from Canada, that spreadsheet grew further, character by character.
“They were like, okay, what does it sound like when this guy turns into smoke? What does it sound like when the boat gets swallowed by the whale? We were writing it all down.”
For Laboon, that meant building an enormous, layered creature voice out of things that were not whales at all.
"We ended up using a strange mix of lions, elephants, alpacas, and some other things, then we'd stretch it and pitch it and process it, layer after layer."
That one came together through experimentation, built around a recording made by collaborator Paul Lucian Col, the supervising sound editor in Canada working across the whole season. He dragged his fingers across a Tupperware lid, captured using an ultrasonic microphone able to record up to 100 kilohertz. Stretched down into the human hearing range, the squeak became something closer to a dolphin’s click, deep and bassy. Layered with breath and a little alpaca, it became the sound of a baby whale the size of a ship.
Alvida’s ability presented the opposite problem: not size, but texture. “They were like, what does it sound like to be made out of slippery rubber, where everything just slips off her?” says Denys. The answer took a fair amount of trial and error. Think rubber gloves, bicycle tires, balloons, an orange inside an inflated balloon for a strange rubbery bounce etc, before landing on a mix of rubber friction and skin against tire, organic enough to feel human, textured enough to feel slippery. It’s the same layering instinct that drives our Foley Stage work, building texture out of the physical world rather than a plugin.
Where the manga could be referenced, it was, including, at one point, an onomatopoeia for the whale’s sound spelled out on the page, used as a jumping-off point. (The anime series itself was off limits, for reasons of licensing rather than taste.)
Why Does Being on Set Early Matter for Sound?
None of this happened in isolation. Pressure Cooker Studios worked alongside the show’s sound team in Canada throughout, trading recordings and ideas back and forth, with the Canadian team supervising the direction while our team built the assets on the ground in Cape Town. “It was a great collaboration, rather than competing against each other,” Kyle says. “They were busy on other projects and didn’t have the capacity to run the previz themselves, so there’s the benefit of us being based here and able to go on set.”
That early involvement is exactly the kind of role Pressure Cooker Studios looks for. Long before a project reaches the studio for final mix, there is a pre-production window where sound can still shape how a story is told, rather than simply finishing it. Being in the room with the Director and Producers while the world is still being built, hearing what they are picturing before it exists, means the work is not just supporting the story, it is helping shape it.
It clearly worked. Some of the sounds built for that first previz session made it all the way into the final mix. “It was really cool watching the episode and recognising the Laboon sounds that we created,” says Denys. Kyle agrees: “We’re proud, because some of the assets we gave on set were actually used in the final mix. The Directors and Producers were hearing that throughout the whole process, and a lot of what we created ended up making it into the final elements.”
It is a small thing, in the scale of a series this size, and it is exactly the thing Pressure Cooker Studios keeps building its reputation on: get in early, help everyone in the room hear the story before it is finished, and leave enough of the work behind that some of it never has to be redone.
What Is Sound Design, Exactly?
Sound Design is the craft of building every sound in a story that was not simply captured by a microphone pointed at the real thing, because, sometimes, the real thing does not exist. A whale does not walk into a recording booth. A man does not actually turn into smoke. Sound Design is the process of finding, recording, shaping, and layering real-world sound (animal recordings, everyday objects, human performance, field recordings) into something that convinces an audience it is hearing a world that was never really there.
It sits apart from dialogue and music, though it works alongside both. Where dialogue carries the words and music carries the emotion, Sound Design carries the world itself: the texture of a creature’s skin, the weight of a footstep, the specific chaos of water dragging ships up a mountain. Done well, it is never noticed on its own. It simply makes the impossible feel real.
FAQS
What is sound design previz?
Sound design previz is the process of creating sound assets, such as creature voices, environmental sounds, and character sound effects, before or during production. These sounds are played back on set to help actors react naturally to elements that are not physically there yet, such as CGI creatures or digital environments.
What's the difference between previz sound design and ADR?
ADR (Automated Dialogue Replacement) re-records an actor’s dialogue after a scene has been shot, to fix or enhance performance. Previz sound design works in the opposite direction: it builds the soundscape before the scene is shot, so the actor has something real to react to on the day.
How is creature sound designed?
Creature sounds are often created by layering recordings of real animals and everyday objects, then pitching, stretching, and processing them into something entirely new. For Laboon, the whale in One Piece Season 2, the team combined recordings of lions, elephants, alpacas, and even a Tupperware lid captured with an ultrasonic microphone.
Why bring in a sound studio before production starts?
Bringing sound into pre-production, rather than waiting until the final mix, allows it to shape performances and creative decisions from the start. Sound assets created early can also carry through to the final mix, reducing rework later in the process.