Standout Sounds with Ben Leeves

Ben Leeves has been working in sound for nearly 30 years now, but you’d never believe that when you meet him – and that’s nothing to do with how he looks. It’s all down to how even after all this time, he still thinks of his work as play. “Sometimes I think I’ll have to grow up someday and go get a real job,” he jokes when I ask him if he still loves what he does. “I feel like I’m playing all the time.” 

I recently popped round to Jungle Studios to catch up with Ben on some bits he’s been working on. Here are the highlights. 

Vitality 

Many of you will know Vitality as one of the UK's leading health insurance providers, distinguished by a hot pint logo, and quite a cute sausage dog -– his name is Stan. 

Ben’s been working on Vitality projects for the past seven years. For the most recent campaign however, the brief had changed. They were changing the entire outlook of the dog's personality. “The first thing was to find a new voice over. We tested lots of different people to try to find the voice of Stanley, the dog,” says Ben. He worked on the brand ad which launched the new character, followed by two 30 second TV ads intended to develop the character further. 

“From a technical point of view, the dog is lip-synced,” explains Ben. “When we recorded the artist, we need to use his mouth as lip sync. So for every session in the studio – we had to record his mouth too.” This meant the recordings had to be spot on in order to aid the 3D team. In previous ads featuring Stan, this wasn’t something that needed to be considered. “Before, the dog didn’t actually speak. Instead, it was his thoughts that we heard. This changes the entire performance, and the sound quite a lot,” Ben tells us.  “Changing from a thought voice to a diegetic voice means that when you record it you want it to have more bounce. It needs to sound like it’s in the actual environment it’s filmed in. If the scene is outside, the voice needs to sound outside. These are all considerations.” 

Deliveroo 

For this spot the initial brief worked around the concept that ‘anything goes at Christmas’ – Ben began his process by going through the different genres of food deliveries. “The sound design mirrored and became part of this madness where everything goes and everything was thrown in together. Think brussels sprouts on a pizza sort of thing,” he says. It was important that the sound reflected the chaos of the spot by being as full and fun and possible. 

“It's all about trial and error. We try everything we can on every frame. With Deliveroo, there are always three elements: music, voice and sound effects. All of these things are up at 11, effectively. There is a real rhythm to how the whole thing then grows together. Adaptations will be made to each of those elements in order to work with one of the others,” says Ben. 

The balance of sounds in these instances is something Ben says he fixates on. He has a real bugbear for loud sounds that are simply pulled down in volume to set behind and voiceover. “They just don’t fit.” Instead, he works to find sounds that sit underneath the voiceover, but are loud enough to pop.  

Jameson’s 

When Ben was first shown offline for the spot, he had to push his imagination to its limit. “There was so much 3D work that needed to be added in post production. The brief was to make it a big epic soundscape of everything that was going on,” – the difficulty being, some of these things hadn’t been added yet. “There were lot’s of discussions about what would be coming in post. We needed to get the sounds of the boat bouncing and splashes coming,” says Ben. 

He remembers being quite challenged by one particular scene. “It’s where someone is wobbling the boat. I needed to get the sounds of the splashes coming in and was trying to figure out how to do that. I ended up going through lots of boat sounds. I sampled the boat then used a pitch wheel,” he explains.

The second part of the campaign entitled ‘Julia’ came out recently and demanded a lot from Ben's foley skills. From jumping up and down on concrete in a pair of sandals to mimic the protagonist chasing a wayward bottle of Jameson’s down a rocky path. The bottle itself required a huge amount of work to get every click and clack right. “The crowd that you see at the party are actually the Jungle team," we're told.