Earlier this year, Jada Pinkett Smith and Martin Short visited the Glendale campus of DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc. to lend their distinct voices to the studio’s upcoming feature “Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted,” about zoo animals trying to make their way back to New York from Africa.

Movie stars going to work at a studio sounds like a given, but until recently, Smith, who voices Gloria the Hippo, and Short, who voices a new sea lion character named Stefano, wouldn’t have come to the studio to record. DreamWorks has historically rented pricey studio time elsewhere.

That’s changing now that the animation house has invested millions to build its own sophisticated sound-recording, editing and mixing studio, which executives think will not only result in better movies but help lower production expenses.

“The cost of making soundtracks has to come down,” said Jim Beshears, head of postproduction at the studio. “With the demise of the DVD business, everybody has to figure out how to shave costs. This is a way we can focus on that.”

The new sound studio is located deep below ground in the basement of DreamWorks’ main production building. The project was wrapped up this year, when about $6 million of sound recording and postproduction technology was installed.

Though just a fraction of “Madagascar 3’s” voiceovers and sound mixing took place there, the sound studio is factoring more heavily in the making of the November release, “Rise of the Guardians.” The film is about a band of legendary characters, including the Tooth Fairy and Jack Frost, who join up to protect the dreams of kids around the world from a villain.

Beshears said the facility is preferable to the previous arrangement of renting studio space, which not only rang up a sizable tab but made scheduling busy stars more challenging. By doing the recordings and sound mixing on premises, the studio is ultimately hoping to shorten production time.

Tom McGrath, a co-director of the “Madagascar” movies and the voice of a penguin named Skipper in the films, said the facility also should help movies get made more efficiently as meetings with studio executives and other collaborators can be arranged more easily.

“An in-house recording booth saves so much time and it really helps quite a bit,” McGrath said. “Time saved is a dollar earned. As far as productivity, it really helps.”

Turning it up

Recording and sound mixing used to take place at facilities owned by Warner Bros. or 20th Century Fox Studios, for example. Now, it will occur about 25 feet below ground, where outside noises aren’t audible.

The high-tech facility has a main recording room with an 18-foot-high ceiling where several dozen actors can record at a time. There’s also a mixing room with a 16-foot-wide screen and seats for showing unfinished cuts to executives. In addition, there are several other smaller editing rooms, where engineers can add effects, such as playing a keyboard rigged with different car horns to mimic a busy intersection.

DreamWorks began making animated features a little more than a decade ago and the sound effects started relatively simply. In 2001’s “Shrek,” for example, Beshears noted dialogue between Shrek and Donkey was accompanied by sounds such as the whooshing of crops as they passed through a field. Then, and now, many of the effects are handmade with customized devices.

The facility will enable the creation of far more nuanced and textured sounds in upcoming releases, such as “Guardians.” In the movie, Jack Frost makes his entrance by bursting out of a frozen lake, with the frozen fissures cracking before finally crashing to the ground.

Beshears said the ambition to move toward more complexity is part of an effort to help DreamWorks better compete with rivals, such as Walt Disney Co.’s Pixar and Universal Studios’ Illumination Entertainment, the studio behind this year’s hit “The Lorax.”

“It’s a whole different thing. Ten years ago there were fewer animated and family movies,” he said. “Now there are many more, so we have to find ways to distinguish ourselves in a crowded marketplace.”

The studio also wanted to make voice actors more comfortable. McGrath, who has worked as a voice actor in all the “Madagascar” movies, said the layout of the recording room is preferable because the director can be seen in the control room through a large pane of glass. By comparison, many of the other studios he’s used were built for bands.

“The thing I learned is how vulnerable you are behind the microphone,” he said. “It’s a leap of imagination. It helps (actors) feel out the scenes.”

Bloated budgets

Beshears had long wanted to build such a studio and had talked to DreamWorks Chief Executive Jeffrey Katzenberg on and off about it. But while the studio chief entertained the idea, an opportunity only presented itself a few years ago when a decision was made to build a main production building for lighting, motion-capture and other effects. Katzenberg, who declined comment for this story, OK’d the plans to dig below ground for the sound studio.

One issue that may have been decisive is cost. Analysts have criticized the animation house’s bloated movie budgets and DreamWorks has been looking for ways to cut them.

In February, Goldman Sachs analysts reduced this year’s earnings outlook for the studio, noting that “Madagascar 3” and “Rise of the Guardians” have stayed in production longer than expected and driven up expenses. Coupled with the studio’s slow DVD sales, analysts downgraded the stock.

The studio now wants to reduce its average budgets from about $145 million for this year’s two releases, to about $130 million for next year’s. Beshears said renting a competitor’s sound studio or an independent facility costs as much as $1,400 per hour, and with engineers poring over soundtracks for nine hours a day for weeks and months, a soundtrack can add well over $1 million to the cost of a movie.

Dan Hansen, a former animator at Disney and a director of the character animation program at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, said given such large movie budgets, the savings from a new sound studio will be nominal.

“It’s really hard to see that it’s a huge costs savings to do something like that,” Hansen said.

Still, Beshears said he’d like to cut the costs of creating a final mix by half, though he’s not yet sure if that is possible. At the very least, though, he believes the studio will pay for itself.

“It’s here, and it’s available,” he said. “We expect we will recoup this.”