On a sunny day last week, Margot, Camille and I took a trip to Hackney City Farm. We were led through a cafe, back into the kitchen, past some crates of potatoes and down to the underground lair of Fonic, who created the sound for our Suwappu film.

Aside from being lovely people, Fonic were great collaborators for Suwappu, using their vast experience creating sounds for kids programming (like Peppa Pig) and embracing the bizarre, slightly dark imagination behind the film to make something that really augmented the Suwappu world we were building. They made the film sound like it looked, heightening the atmosphere of the Suwappu environments by painting sounds in collaboration with director Timo Arnall, partially taking inspiration from the bleeps of old computer games. They created the entire soundscape of the film, from the speech bubbles to the unique music in the second part of the film (which they made combining sounds from each character's environment).

Margot and Camille chatted with Jake Roberts, Marty O'Brien and foley artist Sue Harding about sound production, working on Suwappu and the challenges of creating sound effects for film.

The highlight of our visit was most definitely the foley room, which is basically a room full of stuff where they create all the incidental sounds for a piece of film; footsteps, glasses clinking, fairies twinkling. There's a working sink and mini-kitchen along with several different types of floors to walk on and hundreds of bits and bobs that might come in handy.

More photos here.

Thanks to the lovely folks at Fonic for sharing some of their audio secrets with us. And while we do love our spaceship, we're pretty jealous of the farm.

You can find the Making Future Magic Podcast on iTunes here.

Or you can download the MP3 here: Making Future Magic Podcast #3: Fonic.