Interview: Sound Designer Jeff Shiffman on Breaking New Ground with Season Two of ‘Invincible’

When Jeff Shiffman founded Boom Box Post alongside his business partner Kate Finan, the duo knew that they wanted to mix and edit sound for animation exclusively.

“When you think about filming something on a set, there’s audio that is recorded. Animation doesn’t have any of that. It’s just drawing and computer animations and things that are created entirely in a vacuum,” says Shiffman. “So the cool thing about being on the sound side of things is we have the dialogue that’s recorded, and we have the music coming from the composers, but everything else is entirely created by us.”

A longtime fan of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Shiffman cut his teeth in the film industry working on several TMNT-related projects. His most recent work, Netflix’s Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie, was recognized with a Golden Reel award for Outstanding Achievement in Sound Editing, as well as a nomination at the Children’s & Family Creative Arts Emmys.

Boom Box Post was represented elsewhere at the Children’s & Family Creative Arts Emmys, with nominations for their work on both Santiago of the Seas and Waffles and Mochi’s Restaurant.

But Shiffman and his team are not limited to family entertainment. Perhaps their most high-profile project is Amazon Prime’s Invincible, about as violent and mature as an animated series can get.

“Invincible is kind of its own special beast. It’s serialized storytelling at the greatest level,” says Shiffman. He joined the show in its second season, building off of the established soundscape of the show while also evolving the world with their own unique flair. “We’ve kind of hit this inflection point where we’re moving forward with the sounds now and we’re expanding, even on the mix side of things, the treatment that we have to make sure the storytelling is really shining through in a new way.”

Shiffman arrived at the project with a preexisting reverence for its narrative and worldbuilding. The superhero series has garnered a mass following through its clever interrogation of classic superhero tropes, and Shiffman could not have been more excited to participate in that tradition.

“The cool thing about Invincible is not just the blood and gore and guns and all the fun stuff that we get to design and build, but also the fact that there’s this really rich story that has all these moments to really push in the sound design.”

Shiffman and Boom Box Post were fortunate enough to first work on the one-off Invincible: Atom Eve episode, which allowed the team to flex their sound design muscles in a completely independent environment. And now, as Shiffman looks ahead to Invincible‘s third season, he is brimming with ideas that can further push the storytelling forward.

“There are times where it’s way, way over-the-top, and then there also times where we want it to sound super-realistic, which is almost more brutal,” suggests Shiffman. “Being the mixer of the show myself, that’s my chance to play around with those things.”

Invincible is streaming now on Amazon Prime, while Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie is streaming on Netflix.

Listen to my full discussion with Shiffman below.