177 – The Sound of Dune

Continued From previous page.

Tim – How did you go about hearing what the other half of the equation was doing, like how are you sharing your sessions?

Dave – Well, from from when I was designing bits and pieces, because I’m working in individual predubs, so Predub “A” through, you know, “P” or whatever it is, or design predubs and FX predubs. I would just crash out seven point ones of each of those elements. So let’s say spaceship, you know, or, you know, Ornithopter engines different tech landing gear, that sort of thing, impact. So 7.1 of those sorts of things. So that Mark can quickly assess and Theo can assess what’s been done. They can give notes and then we back and forth that way, you know, rather than sending all the elements which you’re going to probably rework after getting notes and that sort of thing.

Mark – I guess maybe to answer your question in a different way, Tim, what we did not do was a granular set of reviews with Dave, and we never did really live reviews in that sense. Theo and I would decide upon, OK, let’s give this to Dave as a task. We we trust Dave enough to go off and do it and then send it. And this is when he’d send the crash down. So there was no need for maybe, you know, a live, ever cast kind of high fidelity back and forth. It was just here’s some notes and back came some really great stuff.

Dave – But vice versa. I’d also loved getting stuff from Theo and Mark and hearing things that I hadn’t heard and being really blown away by several times with, you know, that’s what I love about this process of not being in the same building. Sometimes it’s just those surprises that you get from everyone.

Theo – While it might have been novel to have Dave working remotely from us at first when we started working, you know, later part of 2019 by the early part of 2020, all of the people who we’ve been working with in one space were all working from home and everything was virtual anyway. So, you know, we’d already got something of that system set up and working with Dave. And then as soon as the pandemic hit and lockdown started and people….. Mark and I moved our studios back home and we still had a couple of sound editors working for us, working from home, so that we had to come up with a slightly revised version of how we were going to distribute everything. But otherwise, it seemed like a actually a very good way of working. I kind of want to continue work.

Mark – I agree

Dave – Ditto.

Mark – Out of an abundance of caution. And I’m curious to hear it from Dave specifically, because we were doing so much remote work. I recorded all the briefs that we did with Denis and Joe, something I never do. But I thought that there might be some kind of filter in a Zoom relationship versus that in-person kind of I can run into Theo’s room and say something or hear something. So I would record our briefs, which would often last two or three hours, and then I would carve them up based on responsibilities. And I would send Dave kits of here’s what Denis just said about the worm or here’s what Denis just said about the Ornithopters. And I felt like, you know, I’m always worried that, you know, my brain has its own filter and I hear things a certain way and I get it wrong. So I misinterpret what a director says often. And I felt like, well, hear it from the director himself.

Dave – That’s so funny. It really is. Different Humans interpret things different ways. And I do the same thing. I misinterpret things them, you know. So getting those notes from Denis was crucial. It’s just really you can hear something in the inflection of the way something’s received. You know, is there a bit of trepidation, a bit of joy in their voice? And those things are the keys that you go from, when you have a director in the back of your room and you know, you’ve played something 50 times. And as soon as they’re at the back of the room and they’re not even talking, you feel them and you edit your own sounds based on the feel of the room. It’s a really weird thing, but it’s true.

Theo – That’s true, Denis Villeneuve is so passionate about sound, and when he’s talking to us about what he wants or what he’s just heard, you know, you can really feel his excitement or lack of excitement. You know, sometimes you win. Yeah, maybe. Interesting. And then something. That’s it. I deeply love it. That sound so. Yeah. It was a really crucial way of communicating, communicating to the team. And uh, and Denis also has this, you know, real passion for, giving specific ideas for us to work to run with. Sometimes he would imitate the sound, you know, like if you’re not there in the room with him hearing that imitation or having a good recording of it, you really miss something, which is a very direct intention that he’s communicated.

Dave – I think there are a couple of times that there were he was imitating sounds, and we used that as the basis. I can’t remember what it was, but there was definitely something that I was working on. A sound based on his mimicking.

Theo – Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, it’s it’s really cool.

Dave – It’s really cool.

Mark – I did that once on Fury Road, one of the rare times I became very frustrated with George or George with I. And we ran a section at the very end of the movie where we’ve forgotten the rictus rips the engine out of the war rig as it’s about to crash. And none of the sounds that we made actually worked for him. And I said, George, what should that sound like? And somebody was rolling tape or a video camera, and he made this really silly sound. And we just put it in the movie and it stayed in,

Dave – classic

Tim – So Theo, I believe, on Blade Runner. You are on board really early in the picture editing process. Was that the same for Dune? Did you head over to Budapest while production was still happening?

Theo – I did, yes. Although, you know, this time Mark and I and Dave all knew that we’d be working together. So even though I went out there to Budapest, I think it was, you know, three months or something before Mark and I sat down together and started working. I sent all of those initial sketches of things that I was doing to Mark so that he could start getting his ear in and knowing what sort of resources we were going to need and start finding sounds. And so we were kind of already working together, even though I was out there and Mark was in L.A..But I think the thing that was really useful for both Denis and Joe Walker, his editor. Is that when you’re working on a sci fi movie? Well, I wouldn’t like to call this movie exactly a sci fi, but a movie that has elements that don’t exist on the world that we live in. An Editor can’t just grab, you know, sound of bus passing by or whatever. He needs a spaceship passing by. And if he grabs that from some sound library, it’s going to be, you know, it’s going to be a trope. And if he’s then communicating that to us. We’re going to be influenced by that trope, and that’s not a good thing, so he always likes to start. It’s the same thing with, you know, temp music. If someone puts a temp track in and then hands that to a composer, you’re already limiting his parameters. You’re already kind of giving a suggestion that might actually not be a good path. So same same thing with sound designs, whereas, sure, if it’s something based in the real world, I think an editor can kind of, you know, quickly grab a bunch of stuff from his sound library and give a director an idea of where he’s going with it. But the second that you’ve got an Ornithopter taking off, a worm bursting out of the sand, whatever it is, shields, he needs to both communicate the tone and the idea to the director and also informs what he’s doing in his cut, you know, the timing of the cut. And, you know, we also have the VFX team out there who were just doing their very first iterations of things like the shield, the worm. And Mark and I were getting to see those very, very early iterations and then quickly, you know, once Dave started up passing them on to him. That enabled us to start designing things like shields Ornithopters things that had rhythm, and those rhythms inform not only the cut, but what the VFX guys were doing. So especially in the case of The Shield, where I think we’ve just seen a few frames of maybe this kind of thing, you know, but it certainly wasn’t a developed effect. We then started spotting the areas where we thought the shield should activate and make a sound. And by passing that to Joe, getting Denis’ feedback and then passing those early ideas to VFX, the VFX team were able to start animating a much more refined version of The Shield, using the rhythm of the sounds that we’ve given them. And indeed, on everything, whether it’s the voice, the worm, the shield, the Ornithopters, as there has always been some kind of insight, that Denis has then had some way of enhancing the meaning of something, some way of adding extra meaning or extra explanation using the sound. And that’s just the kind of stuff that you can only do when sound team comes on that early and works alongside the editor. The VFX, otherwise we’re just kind of coming in late in applying a layer of plaster to everything. Whereas in this case, we’re genuinely interacting on a story level with helping to tell the story. We’re helping the director explain things without at without the need for scenes of exposition, people standing around talking about, oh, how the shield works by this. You know, you’ve got to get this blade in slowly and then. So it’s it’s it’s a storytelling tool, but it only really works that way when we are allowed in at the level where they’re still figuring the story out.

Dave – I think that’s awesome, too, because it means that you’re actually you’re on the playing field. You actually have Someone from sound in there helping to give creative, you know, ideas into how things can be solved. And and it’s it’s a real gift. I mean, it’s so often it’s not happening. And a lot of films nowadays where the production will have sound on that early.

Theo – Absolutely. And indeed, I think, you know, even at the script stage, you know, Mark and I were reading before they even started to film. And Mark, I know you can speak to some of the ideas that you had for, you know, getting a linguistics specialist involved in coming up with languages.

Mark – And he had done this on several films, having after having read the script, I realized that Freman needed to the Freman language to Chakobsa should be something interesting and something that was not made up on the spot or a last minute sort of, you know, writer taps it out the night before on his laptop. It wanted to have all the rich history that’s embodied in the book. And I remembered David Peterson, I remembered admiring his work on Game of Thrones, and he had also worked with me on one other film And I when I had my first meeting with Denis, it was my first suggestion or question, what are we doing with the Freman language? It’s not represented in the script. It’s simply a bracket. And you know what the English would be. And we all felt and I encouraged him to let’s write this language, let’s put it in the script and let’s have the actors speak it, because it will make those interactions that much more authentic. David went crazy with this. I mean, not only inventing a language, but providing to the production team and the talent phonetic pronunciation lists and a number of other assets and audio captures of his voice of that those pronunciations. So there it would be very clear that whenever somebody said the words Croesus Haddara, it would always be said in a uniform fashion, you know, making you know, making sure every little nuance of that was consistent, as if, yes, we speak this language. And Denis was really taken with this this kind of idea that in preproduction, not that he didn’t recognize it, we could be sound, could be having this interaction with the production and improving. I’m following up on you and Dave, that this idea of this back and forth that we’re having with Joe and Denis and having a real symbiosis of sound and image, I think, Denis, we must give Denis some credit for being quite intelligent in the in structuring this way of working, because he said two nights ago in a Q&A that we did that what he finds valuable in that process is that by the time he gets to the final mix, these sounds are what he called old friends. What we can read into that, and I hope the film community reads into that is the how that empowers a director. The last thing he wants from his experiences as a filmmaker is to show up at a final mix and be making granular decisions about, no, I don’t like the sound of the ornathopters. You know, the worm voice isn’t quite right. What the director should be doing in the final mix is making the big overarching decisions of dialog versus music versus effects and being a director in every sense of the word instead of like a technician determining, you know, I don’t there’s too much rumble here I don’t like that squeaky thing. And this is a method by which we can empower directors to be their best when they need to be. It’s a very, very clever system that I think has efficiencies built into it.

Theo -By the time we got to the mix, we’d already been working with him on the sounds, all three of us, for a year and a half, right?

Dave – Yeah. Yep.

Tim – That’s something that we talked with Wiley statement about, that he’s very passionate about doing the sound that way. And I think that the idea that someone brought up earlier the shield. So if anyone is not familiar with this element of the story, there’s a shield that is like a personal armor, but it’s an invisible power shield that people can turn on and off throughout the film. And when it first appears within the film, I instinctively knew that something had been done because that there’s no way that sound and visual could have matched that well. If the sound team came on at the end of the project, like the sound, the way it flickers is exactly how that sound works,

Mark – because it was animated to it.

Tim – That’s what exactly like, you know, that it feels different. It feels more real because of what you guys must have done, because it would have been impossible to just be given those graphics at the end and come up with something that worked that well. And also, I think it was Theo that mentioned earlier the way that it’s used to do storytelling, because part of the plot is that with enough pressure, you can get through that shield. But that’s never explained in the actual film. It’s just shown. And the way the sound changes as the blades are penetrating, the shield tells us all that. And it’s a really impressive use of sound for storytelling. And I’m really glad that you told me that, because I was one of my questions for you is how the hell did that work out so perfectly?

Mark – Theo, can I cut in for one second? I want you to tell this whole story, but I want to get back to Tim talking about the piece we did on Tropes. I was in the middle or we were in the middle of working on The Shield when I added the one about Force Fields, which is one of the tropes that I talked about, because it was one of the rules that we set for ourselves of a sound we wouldn’t do. You know, you see this cocoon, this glowing cocoon that surrounds something that protects them. We were going to do the traditional buzz humping. Theo, please take it away.

Theo – Yeah, well, I mean, the function of the shield is, first of all, it explains the whole kind of Dune universe in some ways, why they don’t have guns and why they’re still fighting with swords in the future. It’s like there is this reason they’ve they’ve come up with a shield that can protect them against bullets, against any fast moving objects. The one thing it can’t do is protect against us, slowly slipped in blade that could prove lethal. And, you know, it’s one of those things which in the in a different type of movie, someone would have explained it. in a Denny Vilna movie, things are very experiential. You you don’t ever have those scenes of exposition of someone explaining the world. You just dropped into it and you have to figure it out. And Sound is definitely one of those very strong tools where you can do that. So, you know, and I’ll come back to some of the details of the shield, if you like. But the the thing that really impressed me was that once we come up with a basic sound, Denis was still like, OK, but you know, they’re in a training. There’s Paul training with Gurney. How do we kind of how do we communicate that the shield has been breached? I tried all kinds of various sounds. Dave was working on various sounds that would be like the sound of Knife cutting through the shield and you know, every time we come up with some great sounds, but it was still, Denise, like I need to make it clearer. And it was he came up with the idea we perhaps this is a training version of the shield. Right. So it has some kind of built in alarm. We should have like a dee dee dee dee dee. And that’s just to help the user as they’re learning how to use it. Also, he came up with the idea of perhaps at that moment the shield flashes red. So, you know, there’s one of those things where having the material from us in the sound team enabled him to develop further ideas past those back to us, past those to the VFX team, et cetera, et cetera. So, yeah, that’s why I think Denis, Villeneuve films are so great at world building. He’s able to pack all of this information into a scene like that without you ever feeling that you’ve had a whole bunch of technology Explained to you, which is always the most boring part of a movie.

But yeah, so a little bit about the the shields. I, I might even just I don’t know how easy it is for me to play you something back as we talk aloud something up in Pro Tools and just see if I can give you an example. We basically had I started off OK. So I love this technique of of putting sounds into a granular synthesizer, something which is able to, you know, split the sound up into tiny little pieces effectively. And I kind of think of it a lot like the sound equivalent of what they do in VFX with the particle engine any time they want kind of, you know, dust particles or something. They don’t go rendering each little piece because it would take forever. But if you can shatter a sound into a thousand little pieces and still have some kind of control over how many pieces, how much they’re spinning around, etc., it’s a super useful way to create that idea of a cloud of particles. It’s something it’s a technique I’d used in Blade Runner 2049 for kind of holograms appearing and Elvis glitching and various things like that, because it has that feeling of something. Assembling or particles, you know, it’s a very easy effect to achieve with a granular synthesizer. So starting off with actually it was a recording of of a submachine gun where I just filtered everything out. And so you didn’t hear anything except for this sort of throb. And I put that into the Granular synth, and it was making it kind of like thousands of little purring kind of thing. And it had like a nice it it felt like the air was throbbing around the user. And that was one of those things that kind of got a semi warm, lukewarm response from Denis, like, I like it. It’s the right direction. It’s not quite it’s not quite dangerous weapon like enough. You know, this is something that’s kind of…. it’s not a perfect technology. It’s something which it feels like, you know, you could. You could break it at any minute, it’s something which is kind of doing its best to repel. But it’s not by any means perfect. And I guess just I always try and think of how the physics of something works is the same with how how does the physics of a worm traveling under sound work. And we’ll come to that later, I’m sure. But how does a virtual thing around your body have the power to repel, you know, a sword or bullet? And to me, the idea was it’s thousands of little particles. It’s as if it’s sort of making the atoms around you kind of coalesce into a hard patch when something’s coming at you. So working with that granular synth thing, I was just sort of messing around, there was a certain moment where you know how when you cut a waveform right in the middle, it clicks. Right. I mean, when you put something back and it’s not been has not a nice little fade on it, just click. So the same thing is going on in a granular synthesizer, it’s basically taking a little slice of audio. And if you don’t say it correctly, then the clicks just go off the scale, especially if it’s like a bassy sound. And so it was an accident at some point. I recorded a version of it where it was just like a shower of little clicks. And even though, like, technically speaking, that’s something you normally want to avoid. I did play it to Denis kind of half, you know, not sure about this, but have a listen. And he’s like that. Yeah, that has the danger. That has the kind of you know, it feels like something’s straining to push something away. So that was the that’s kind of the the main clicky sound that you hear with the shields. And we kind of made different versions of that to go with different uses of the shield. Like you will see a shield around the entire spaceships in the scene where the base is destroyed by the Harkonnens. But that’s an example of something where I, I passed that very basic clicky layer to Dave Whitehead, who was then able to kind of help with shaping help with, you know, adding additional layers that gave it more force. And so these things are always kind of a layer cake, an assemblage of of different things. But that I love the fact that an accident and error kind of crept in as as a defining feature of the shield.

Dave – It was a cool error, though, and it’s really great to respond to something like that.

Theo – I love glitches. Yeah. You know,

Dave – so it was cool. It worked perfectly.

Tim – It’s interesting. We’ve all working in sound had that moment where you’re playing with the director and they’d suddenly like something when Theo was telling that story. The other three of us all started smiling. I don’t know if we were even conscious of it, but we can all relate to that feeling when the director goes, that’s it. That’s it. You know, it’s such a great feeling when you get that,

Theo – especially when you kind of like, I’m not sure if this is terrible or good, but yeah, it’s nice.

Tim – Yeah, it’s always makes your day when that happens.

Dave – It actually really helps to. And there’s such great choreography. And I think that was so well choreographed, the fight. And it makes it easier to make it sound good.

Theo – And that brings me to another point. I mean, the choreography was so sharp and precise. One of our first pass is working with, you know, additional sound editing, sound editors as well was, you know, we want to put the whooshes on the swords. We want to put the kind of the impacts on every move. But it was Denis who was like, you know it. We hear these big swords moving and clanging, it’s got less dangerous somehow if you take those away and we just have the tiniest little whisp as it goes past and that when they when the actually touched just the tiniest tink, it’s not you know, the heavier you make, it doesn’t necessarily make it more dangerous. So we started focusing on different things, not so much on the traditional moves and clings and clangs and sort of shining stuff. We started going into what it sounds like real close up to someone when they’re making an effort, you know, so we recorded certain efforts very, very close up and made little cuts of and just try to try to respond to that tight choreography, basically. And yeah, became much more dangerous as a result.

Mark – As I remember, Theo, we the approved version, it was our 14th iteration, and I remember that. And I believe the voice where our longest runs of taking a stab at something and finding success. And, you know, to Denis’ credit, what we discovered and apropos of what Theo just said, our you know, V1 was what you might expect, It was very tropey in a sense. Every move had a sound and everything had power and and blade and ring. And by 14, it was a constant process of removal and focus. What’s the most important sound here? Let’s find out which one that is. Let’s just let’s just hear that. So we’re constantly thinning and refining those sounds until we got to version 14.

Tim – Mark, you just mentioned “The Voice”, we are going to have to talk about that. For those not fluent in Dune lore, this is when a specially trained person uses their voice in a very specific way to make others involuntarily follow their commands. This technique in this world has some kind of ancient pseudo religious connection. Can you take me down the road to how you got to what is in the final film? What you all have come up with is really cool, definitely not in the realm of the tropes that we’ve all heard before for this type of thing. It’s an interesting new addition to the sonic world.

Mark – Well, that’s great. And trope is a great way to start the discussion. I’m going to start it and hand it off to Theo, who really did the heavy lifting on the voice. But it started with a discussion between Theo and I, again, of what we didn’t want to do. What we pretty much knew we weren’t going to do was what sound editors knee jerk response would be, which is let’s filter it somehow, put it, put some plug ins on it. Let’s find a clever cocktail of plug ins. Let let’s do the pitch shift, the the you know, the time stretch the the equalization. There’s a hundred things you can do with a plug in that ultimately makes it sound electronic. So as we struggled, though, we did go down those roads and endeavor to process the voice thinking, OK, if he’s deploying this weapon, what quality would the voice have? And we’d try a variety of processes to achieve it. And I think in our first demo with Denis, he didn’t respond to any of them. None of them felt human or powerful. And in that sound design review session, I had a flash of an idea that the answer was not going to be in process, The answer was going to be in performance. And I pitched this idea of what if we re-voiced Paul not with Paul’s voice, but we re-voiced him with a woman of great stature and power and authority, who spoke for Paul as if he summoned an ancestor, because, in fact, when you deploy the voice, you are, in fact, enacting an ancient ritual that your aunt, your Benni Jesuit ancestors have been using for millennia. So I thought, let’s bring in the Benni Jesuit here. Let’s bring in the ancient voices and let them bring the power to Paul’s voice. And that’s that’s my kind of big contribution to it, which is a conceptual one that then led to some other really useful narrative tools later on in the film that we discovered after embracing that idea. So Theo and I embarked upon this process and we pitched that to Denis. He loved that idea. And he said, go do it. Theo and I made ourselves casting directors. We literally, you know, we called the agents, we brought in the actors, we we we directed the actors, and we picked two or three really gifted women who would be our our ancient voice, primarily leaning heavily on a woman by the name of Jean Gilpin, who was really the the embodiment of our ancient voice. But then it had a long way to go from there to get it to a place that sat with Paul and the dialog. And that’s where I’ll hand off to Theo, because he he brought he just made it an amazing thing.

Theo – So, yeah, so we we started off with our recordings of an ancient Benni Jesuit ancestor and that kind of we it worked to have it coming out of the user’s voice. But we also needed to convey just how much impact and power that voice can have on an individual. And so there’s kind of three parts to the voice. I’d say there’s the there’s the sort of ancestral voice that comes out of a user’s mouth when they when they use it. Sometimes morphed with the original voice of of the actor. But to create the base impact layer, I mean, the first thing I tried was, you know, pitching it down a couple of octaves, just keeping the sub layer and then actually a kind of a world-izing trick of playing it through a subwoofer in a room and recording that so that we kind of got the whole room resonating and give an idea that when you use this voice, it impacts the space that you’re in as well. And that leads us to like the third part of it, which is really you hear the atmosphere kind of sucked out of the room when someone’s about to use that voice. So, yeah, I mean, it’s it’s it’s the uncanny sensation of the atmosphere disappears. And that sort of also puts you inside the head of someone. I think, you know, when you when the air disappears from the room, it’s the the base impact that’s generated. When someone use that, that gives you the sensation of this is some kind of irresistible force. And it’s the the the sort of ancient voice of an ancestor that communicates that this is the channeling of some sort of ancient skill.
But then there was again, here you go. There’s another layer that really Denis added when he was sat with Joe Walker. And this really only came in right towards the end a couple of weeks before we mixed or even into the mix. And that was how proficient a user of the voices that we hadn’t really developed a way of communicating that there is a difference that Paul’s learning to use it right at the start. We see his mother trying to train him, and we we haven’t quite resolved what a weak use of the voice would sound like. You know, we tried just making that base layer a bit less. And, yeah, it didn’t really it didn’t really communicate what we needed, which was that it can sort of work. You have you have Lady Jessica played by Rebecca Ferguson in the early scene. You see her kind of in her mind, passing the glass of water and then she realizes that she hasn’t actually done it and she hasn’t quite been tricked. But it’s quite a long sequence that that plays over. So it was Joe and Denis who came up with this brilliant idea of sort of slipping the sync of those different elements so that actually you see Paul say, give me the water, and you hear just the bass coming out of his voice and then you hear the the ancestral voices in her head later. The whole thing is all about sort of slipping the sync. So that became the language of. That became the language of someone trying to figure out how to use the voice. And then, of course, in the hostage sequence where Paul and his mother have been taken hostage by the Harkonnen, it’s down to him to save the day by using the voice correctly. Finally, he tries. It doesn’t quite make it the first time in his. Mothers shaking her head and saying, you’re got to get the pitch right. He then sort of it all comes together. He uses it correctly and it has the desired effect.

But before that, we’ve had it demonstrated by the Reverend Mother Mohiam, who uses it on Paul. And it’s, you know, an absolutely weaponized version, thunderous, completely in sync. But again, you know, it’s it’s one of those things where Joe Walker, as an editor is able to come up with a visual equivalent, where he showed in that sequence where the reverend mother commands Paul to come and kneel. And she does the paintbox test with him, the gom jabbar. You see before Paul walks towards her, you see a flash forward of his feet walking. And then you see him standing about you realize there’s something about time itself being shifted around. And that’s that’s a whole area. The whole department that Joe Walker is brilliant at is his time and it’s manipulation. But I don’t think that would necessarily have been an obvious solution unless he was working with those separate elements of sound and being able to play around with them and build his own language visually and with our audio passes back to us and have us kind of do the final refinements. So, you know, again, I think it speaks to just how important it is to have a constant communication between the sound team, the editorial team, the VFX and the director.

Mark – I remember Joe very specifically in that gom jabbar sequence, Theo, making sure that, well, one of the utilizations of the ancient voice was to create this after effect, we would create a cloud of ancient voices that might follow something that Paul or Jessica would utter and that would have varying lengths of tales. And Joe, because he’s smart with sound, would send these sequences back as the voice developed. He would be altering his cut so that he knew he couldn’t come back in with whether it’s Ravelo or a lady Jessica’s response until we had cleared or tapered out with the length that we thought was the correct finish for the audio moment. And there’s that interplay of picture and sound must work together to find the optimal result.

Tim – Yeah, I was really captivated by the approach to the voice in the film. It was really fun. I guess now I’d like to talk about the ornathopter. This is a really interesting puzzle that you guys had to solve. Visually, it looks kind of like a giant dragonfly, almost organic, but it also looks like a military vehicle. And when I first heard it, I recognized some sounds as kind of point towards the family of a helicopter sonically, and that made it feel realistic and heavy. But then at the same time, it’s filled out with lots of other sounds. Tell me the story of how you came up with the ornathopter. Dave, do you want to take this one?

Dave – First of all, I’d say Theo gave me a sound of a beetle and it was this this really cool sound that Denis had responded to actually, Theo, You talk about that sound first. I can talk about the rest afterwards.

Theo – Well, yeah. I mean, I think, you know, having read the book and refresh my memory about the descriptions of how these technologies were supposed to work, it, it describes an ornathopter as b eing a genetically engineered sort of dragon giant dragonfly. But then looking at the way that Denis had treated it, it very much it looks like a large piece of serious military hardware and. Even though I think that first of bugging type of sound that I came up with was useful as a temporary guide of the sort of direction it was Denis who said, yes, but we
don’t want this to be, you know, a fantasy thing. We don’t want it to get more and more like an insect. It has to get more and more like. You know, frankly, a real thing that we relate to, and that’s a kind of guiding aesthetic that runs all the way through this movie and other movies of Denis’ that we’re not in fantasy land. We’re trying to bring people, we’re trying to ground things, we’re trying to bring people into the movie by using things that they can relate to rather than trying to impress them with how otherworldly everything is. So in a sense, he was like, don’t make it too different from a helicopter. Sure. It’s its wings, a beating rather than revolving. So that’s going to give it a different rhythm. But, you know, we want to feel that these are serious pieces of military hardware and we want people to not be too distracted by their presence. They just accept them. You know, if it’s something that’s relatively familiar and the only other guidance he gave us was try to create a different sound for each of the different types of ornathopters. So it’s, you know, the the equivalent of a bell and a Sikorsky. And, you know, you’ve got the different sounds of an Harkonnen ornathopter because they are a, you know, a slightly different form of human right. So, you know, we wanted something that sounded a little bit more sinister, an insectoid. And there are small ornathopters that, like an escape pod one. And then there the big sort of imperial ornathopters of the house are treaties. So he did say try and develop different genres of the same sound. But that’s the point where I think I should hand over to David Mark, because that’s that’s really where I left those initial sketches of ornathopters and they took over.

Mark – I bow in your presence, Mr. Whitehead. Dave did the real heavy lifting in this department and delivered some extraordinary materials. My contributions were a lot of the mechanics and a good deal of the Harkonnen ornathopters, but they only have a very brief presence in the film. Dave really has to take the baton here and talk about the building of the imperial Atreides ornathopters in the materials that he used. One of the joys of working with Dave is, is that he works much in the way that Theo and I work, which is we go and build a palette first. We go off and feverishly record new acoustic sounds, then bring it back to the studio and try to figure out, well, how do we use this? And Dave was constantly feeding me his raw elements and some of his processed elements, even before he designed the finished idea of the ornathopters. And I would use those four of the pieces that I would work on. But Dave really gets gets the award here.

Dave – I mean, really, my process is something like that is to sit and just develop as many textures, taking that initial sound and then thinking, okay, how can emulate that? How can I how can I speak of a helicopter without being a helicopter? You know, so. So you’ve obviously got wing flops. You’ve got you’ve got to get that sound. How can you get there best? And it really was recording as many things that spoke of that. I bought a giant fan that’s still in my shed and stripped it bare. Can we put microphones in the back of that? And we recorded thwaps at different speeds. It went right down to slow speeds. I took the fans off and connected other things to it. So it was thwapping around. I recorded Didgeridoo and also Theo had some didgeridoo and also some bullroarer. And I had what we call them Pūrerehua it is a Mauri instrument as well. But we recorded some of them as well. But if you get right on the wingtips, it just it’s really quite cool. So you take little pieces of that, take little pieces of my cat purring, an old cat that I had that died. And it just gave a beautiful sort of a sound. We put with attached a whole lot of tinte straps and a whole strapping. You tie your low down on your trailer outside of Wellington here in 120, 140 K wind and put them really close together. And they vibrated with a real real in the wind. So recorded that….

Mark – those were my favorites. I stole those constantly for the ornathopter.

Dave – Yeah.

Theo – Interestingly, that was something which it was one of the very first descriptions that I remember Denis giving of what he wanted. It sounded like that something very tight flapping in the wind.

Dave – Amazing. I didn’t get that note, but that’s really cool. And then from there, Mark had some Bee recordings that he had, which was for the Harkonnen stuff that he passed over to me. And then Tools wise, for this, I really leaned heavily on GRM Tools Freeze to actually get little pieces of of these sounds and had them loop back with backwards and forwards and and, you know, create and you can change the pitch to them and that sort of thing, and then run it through a whole lot of other processes. But it was a great way to be able to get really good loops of modulating sort of wing flaps and flutters and drones. And really what that developed in were the wing flaps for the outside, for the for the different species of, you know, ornathopter if you want to call them species. And then the drones for the inside as well, say, inside the Harkonnen vehicles, We really went heavy on the wasps and bees and those sorts of things in order to give that sort of dark vibe. I mean, the lighting was green in the thing. They look more alien than humans. So, you know, you go there and it really speaks of them.

And then with the Atreides ones, it was really about really trying to capture that sound. We needed a lot of range with that particular one, ornathopter because of the amount of scenes and the important scenes that it was then flying off into the distance, approaching from the distance. And then so I was using traveler. I was using IOSONO AnyMix to get proximity to get that kind of distance. And then lots of, you know, Slapper by Cargo Cult and then also from them as well, I was using another plug in for the soundies that are listening to this Envy, which is an amazing plugin, which, you know, you’ve got a wing flapping and all of a sudden I can grab some wind and make it flapping in exactly the same way by stealing the amplitude of another sound.
So that was an absolute amazing thing.

Mark – Dave, what did you use for Doppler shift? Sorry, I don’t mean to interrupt.

Dave – I use several different things. I used Tonsturm traveler. Yeah. And I used waves and I also used sound particles. So I used all three. And the thing is, all of them did something very different. And the thing is, like when you’re trying to create the sounds of and also just EQ, you know, just EQ and using, you know, volume and recording out things. And yeah. So it really was a real fun exercise. And I kept listening because we got an airport that’s you know, our house is really quiet here, but the airport is about one and a half, two kilometers away. And you can’t at night. It’s completely silent here. Nothing. But I can open the window and you just hear that distant modulating planes and things. And every now and then when I was trying to really think about how the the if the pad for the ornathopter sounded, I’d just open my window and have a good old listening. Okay. What am I hearing? Okay. You know, slaps in the distance, things modulate. You see a plane, but you can’t hear it. And then the wind blows and all of a sudden it blows off in the wind and it kind of wafts on the breeze. And, you know, that’s that’s the sort of thing you want to try and emulate when you’re trying to create a landing pad sort of thing.

Mark – Those were some of the most my favorite recordings of yours were the distant, you know, as if there were an awning copter base two kilometers away and they were running exercises. And not only is Dave constructing individual ornathopters out of tens and hundreds of components, but now he’s building many ornathopters into a distant field, as if you were near a military base. And those were gorgeous, the way they wafted in and out.

Dave – And the best one was really during Elysium, another film, I, I bought a couple of vibrators and was using them to record guitars on my old dobro and that sort of thing for the ship in that. And then so I went and went to the old vibrator drawer in the shed.

Mark – everybody has one!

Dave – and got out. The Koto had a Koto and a cello and used them for those. The cello was the one that really got those distant ornathopter. But it’s just it’s texture. And the thing is, like, it’s it’s nowhere near the close wing flaps that you hear when it’s really close. But with a helicopter, you know, when you’re inside it, you can’t hear the wings, the rotors flapping at all. All you hear is errrrrrr. You know, it’s it’s a different sound altogether. But you get outside and it flows over it. You hear high pitched sound. It’s like it changes constantly. So that was it was a real Pleasure to do do that stuff. It was such a cool…. my favorite sound, though, was with I’ve got an old sort of radio transmitter. World War II thing sitting in my shed and I bought that out and put a transducer speaker on top of it with my Lyra eight orgasmic synth, which is it’s a really cool synthesizer and Russian one, and just used it to help create the Servo sounds and the inner keening sounds for the ornathopters. Yeah. Real, real beautiful tones and drones. And I put a couple of DPA microphones and contact mic on top of that. And it just gave us a real interesting worldized metallic textures for that sort of thing. And they were very useful for computer noises, for that sort of thing as well, and for and for Servos, which Mark also did Servos and impacts for the adopters as well. But that’s all part of the fondue….

Mark – Lyra recordings were great. They were so different. We we that’s another trope. You know, we sound editors love servo motors and we have libraries of them from the motors that move the seats in our cars to, you know, car windows and lift gates. And yet but we’ve heard all of those sounds. No, we could go out and record them fresh again, but they would still sound like something we had heard in another science fiction film, when the spaceship doors opened or something like that. So Dave provided these really elegant, non-traditional servo components for wings adjusting and, you know, legs retracting and things like that for the ornathopters.

Dave – But they sound grounded because they’ve got that metal. They’re vibrating in the metal. And it was it’s yeah, I think that’s one of the most fun part of doing this, this job, that sort of thing. It’s the discovery.

Mark – I’ll never forget, Dave. I don’t I don’t think I told you this, but when we first played back reel 4, when the Atreides ornathopter lifts off from Arrakis to go go to the palace. There’s a moment where they they’re just leaving frame and they retract the the landing gear. And one of those sounds was there. And Denis, you know, shrieked in joy. I deeply love that sound. Doug Hempel raised it studiously.

Tim – Well, I’m learning that Dave’s shed is a magical place. It’s got a drawer full of dodos. It’s got old fans….

Dave – You have no idea.

Tim – Russian keyboards!.

Dave – I must say, the other thing we did, these guys went out to the desert and recorded an incredible desert, which you should talk about as well. But I didn’t have a desert. My son and I, who was the assistant at the time, my assistant, who we went up and recorded a beach when it was blowing about a hundred k wind on the beach. And I destroyed one of my Roland M10s getting sand blowing over the top of it. And it was it was really great stuff. But I set up a mini Dune in my shed. I bought a giant paddling pool from the the hardware store and took it in there and a whole lot of sacks of sand. And I’ve still got sand bags all in the shed I’ve got to get rid of. And then was sort of throwing sand around the room and. Yeah, so yeah, the shed, it’s still about the pool and a lot to get rid of it.

Tim – Well, let’s talk about the sand, because sand is a really hard thing to record because it can just turn into white noise really easily. How did you all tackle the sand for the film?

Theo – I wanted to just bring up one thing, because I remember that the movie pretty much opens with a shot of the sand shifting and moving and wind moving and the spice kind of granules are sort of floating around out of the sand. And that we used one of Dave’s recordings of the sand shifting and blowing in the wind. But to give the idea of spice particles, that was one of the very, very, very few, if not the only things that I think went into the film that came straight out of a synthesizer. I had these just tiny little square wave particles, you know, you know, at a square wave. Sounds like an it’s this. I mean, literally like a grain of sand is a cube. It’s somehow kind of conveyed little crystals floating around in that sand without even having to really have it noticeable at all. Just very, very low in level. It kind of colored the recording of the sand and gave it just an extra little texture. And one of the great things that, you know, Doug Hemphill our re-recording mixer, rather, did was to bring those little particles into the ATMOS system and have them literally floating around the theater. And that was one of the things that kind of distinguishes the presence of spice. But yes, the the whole kind of, you know, what a sand dune sounds like was an amazing starting point, because because we we heard Doug Hemphill’s recordings of sand dunes groaning, Not all of us were aware that a sand dune can sing, but as they move naturally, there are sort of banks of sand move around in the wind? They emit these deep, groaning, moaning songs. So we knew that we had to get out to a desert and record on real sand dunes because clearly instead of just being like the regular earth that we generally tread on. A sand dune is a resonant body. It’s like a musical instruments, like a drum skin or a guitar body or something, you know, you just need to trigger it. And it’s got this whole. It’s got this whole sound of its own, so. Yeah. Mark, myself, two sound recordist, Eric Basta and Charlie Campagna headed off to Death Valley and started burying microphones in the sand, hydrophones as well, and recording above sand at the same time. And walking, doing body falls rolling. Actually, I chickened out of the body falls and rolling Mark was the one who risked injury…..

Mark – I gave my pound of flesh for this film I can tell you!

Theo – I’ll record a record for you. But yeah, I mean, and one of the one of the best things that we tried, I mean, we are dragging things around to give the idea of, you know, the motion of a sand worm. But we have this technology in the movie that the Freman used to lure the worms and it’s like a sand thumper, they call it. And we thought, okay, this is the perfect way to record that resonance of the underground of the sand. They also have the concept of drumsand they talk about in the film that, you know, at a at a certain moment of the film, when Paul and his mother are being chased by a worm, we hear that they’ve accidentally kind of called the worm by treading on this super resonant sand that sounds like they’ve treading on a drum skin. So we’re like, okay, well, this is something one of the few things that’s supposed to be on an alien planet that we can go out and record on Earth. So, uh, we had one of those people to come out with us, Eric Bastar took a giant sledgehammer to the sand, and we had a hydrophones and protected microphones buried underneath the sand, varying distances from from the impacts. And pretty much that is the recording that you hear when that sand thumper goes off. And also, some of those impacts are used to give the idea of treading on and running on drum sand. So, yeah, it was an extraordinary discovery, really, that sand dunes are a completely, uh, have a world of their own that you can hear both above ground and underneath. But I’d never stood on a sand dune before. And, you know, as reading the script and thinking, I need it, I need to know what that feels like. And, of course, going out to Death Valley and standing on a sand dune, you kind of get the experience of being on an alien planet as well. So we kind of came back from that with all kinds of, you know, personal experiences that we were able to translate to what the atmosphere of a sand dune would be like. And also, you know, we took it pretty seriously that, you can’t just do Foley on a sandbox for someone climbing up a deep powdery sand dune, it’s just not going to sound right. It’s always going to be like crisp crunch crunch. And instead, what we heard when we were climbing up the sand dunes was almost inaudible, is very, very deep powder really just didn’t sound like crisp sand at all.

Mark – It was very powdery in fact, yeah, very unlike anything I’d ever heard on a foley stage or in a sandbox at a playground. It had a very, very different texture.

Theo – And whilst we had, you know, a wonderful Foley team go and record sand as well, I mean, what we sent them in the way of our research, we informed what they did, and that enabled us to blend their recordings with what we were doing. But, yeah, we we kind of went method and did the whole sort of sand walk like the Freman do and recorded it. And a lot of those recordings ended up in those sort of those sequences where Paul and his mother are lost in the sand dunes.

Mark – We have some rather comic video and photographs from the desert trip that would show Theo or I or Erik or Charlie walking and mic-ing ourselves, you know, with a microphone down by our feet as we’re endeavoring to just put together a small library of what we thought the really authentic walking in deep, deep sand would sound like

Tim – I like the idea that like doing a recording session out in the sand, you got to carry all your recorders, all your microphones and everything, and then you guys are all arguing over who has to carry the sledge hammer.

I’m not carrying the Sledgehammer! One thing that along the idea of sand in the film is the idea of the ambiances of the different planets. And even within one of the main planet that we’re on for the whole film, we go into different parts of it from like a city to the desert. But the ambiances are telling a lot of the story as well, because when we go to the Harkonnen planet, it’s very clear that it’s a different type of world just based on the ambiances. How did you come up with the sounds of each planet?

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Mark – Well, I can tell you at least for Arrakis. I spent most of my efforts on making the sounds of the desert, building wind and atmospheres and airs up from recordings we had made in the desert and as well as recordings I had made on my own, and to and endeavouring to give them some kind of personality that wasn’t just white noise and wind. Theo, however, made some very memorable and disturbing sounds that we would all have a laugh about for the Harkonnen world, because he had.

Theo – Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Mark – Some tortured children or something?

Theo – No, I just I lay down a track of just horrible torture sounds. And I remember editing it together very quickly and then just making it completely wet reverb of it so that you really couldn’t distinguish what it was. But it was just some distant. Really, though, I don’t want to know kind of thing going on in the background. And that was, you know, that’s the Harkonnen world. We that we we assume that they get their kicks out of torturing and, you know, all kinds of other horrible stuff. We don’t necessarily have to watch what they’re doing. But lovely to know that that’s what’s going on behind the scenes. And also, you know, just industrial sounds. I remember, you know, putting in sort of the squeal of the brakes of an underground train and various other things that just sounded like kind of mechanical industrial world gone wrong. You know, that was that was very much the idea behind the Harkonnen world.

Mark – The sand played a big role in the the Arrakis environment. I remember. Somebody from production telling me about how insidious sand was and that it just got into cameras and lenses and microphones and everything just ruined everything. And we we came up with this notion that let’s embrace that as best we can and embellish small sounds to give this impression that if a door opened, there was a little bit of sand in the in the hinge. If if if a hatch opened a light light, light dusting of sand might trickle off the edge. And these are some of the really delicate textures that Andy Malcolm and his team at Footstep Studios contributed in foley, though we had recorded some elements like that in in the desert. Andy really brought it to life by, you know, custom manipulating it to picture whenever it was appropriate. And so that, of course, creates a sonic differentiation between the Harkonnen world, which has no place in the desert.

Tim – OK, we got to talk about the worm. OK, the worm is it doesn’t have a huge presence in the film. It’s two or three scenes that it’s in. But it leaves a mark on the viewer for sure. It’s it’s something that we haven’t seen before too often. You want to talk about the voice of the worm and how did that come up?

Dave – Well, firstly, Denis really didn’t want to have a monster. Your classic roar didn’t really want to have something that comes up and lets you know, he just didn’t want it. So it really was such a such a massive, massive thing, such a massive creature that, you know, it’s almost the sort of thing where if it opened its mouth, it almost in some way the system inside. I mean, you know, sort of so, you know, we kind of went down that path of where opens its mouths like wind giant wind coming through. You have sand falling off it because it’s you know, and also it’s Bailing has this giant bailing, like a whale, bearing sort of teeth and sand sort of coming off them and then knocking together. I think I explored the sounds that Marc and Theo recorded with the the moaning sand. So there was definitely some of that going into there. And also the dragging sand that they did, the dragging material on the sand that in the desert. My son Adobe also did some similar stuff. And and some of the elements that I made with that, these guys made bits and pieces, too, but like were just those just pushing through sand, sand, you know, moving in a fast race and being sort of being sort of, you know, rippling. You know, you imagine a giant hill appearing in front of you. I mean, if you look out, you can see people don’t have holes at the window, but like it’s been like a bench in a hill racing towards you. And what the earth was sound like, it was moving towards you at a fast rate and it was trying to make sand sound interesting. And not just like white noise kind of ripping and rippling and that sort of thing, that sort of thing.

But then the vocal got really quite really lucky with that one. And actually, it was kind of just an accident. I just kind of Mark said to play with a vocal of sorts and come up with. And I played with the idea of a while because it was quite massive and vocoder’d a little piece of whale. So it sounded more like clicks, clicks, and then pitched him down almost 98 percent. It’s like, well, I like massively like I don’t know a whole hell of a lot in soundminer Three or four octaves or something, then treated that heavily and they came up with this, sort of the sound of the gunk gunk that is what these guys called it the any way…..

Mark – That’s that’s what we named it….

Dave – but the thing is, I only made like two or three because I just didn’t even think anything of it. I thought, oh, it’s just the sound. And it’s like the first time. The biggest rule when you’re working in sound is if you make something, make keep your chain and make 50 or 100 of them, because if someone likes it, they’re going to want to be able to choose one and that sort of thing. This was one of those ones where I put something in it that made about five or ten. And luckily, I kept my chain and went back and made made a bunch more. Yeah. Not that it vocalizes a lot,

Mark – no, only once at the end of the movie.

Dave – And it was just like, how does it make a vocal? You know, what’s in its body, what what’s the cavity is it’s just some sort of shift of air inside it that’s sort of pushing out or, you know, does it have a vocal cord? Not sure does. But, you know, it’s sort of like it just has to feel attached to that to its body. You know, we have to make it feel attached to it felt kind of right.

Theo – And crucially, it was a dry sounding. Yeah, it wasn’t like a gurgling, wet, gross monster. Another thing which we really, really wanted to avoid, because this is the driest animal on the driest planet ever.

Mark – So that had been in the brief, in fact, from Denis about the dryness. And in fact, that was why he threw out some of our earliest tests, because we started instinctively with the gargly sound like lions and tigers and elephants and anything that suggested moisture that was that was not going to work.

Theo – One of the great things about the gunk gunk is we realized, hold on, this is how they would communicate with each other in the same way that a whale has, you know, a way of communicating over vast distances. Of course, a sandworm must also be able to call another sandworm or and then, you know, it was the fact that we’d already laid down the idea of the sand thumper as a way of attracting sandworms. And it’s like, oh, that’s why it attracts them. Of course, it’s like the the the Freman have designed something that mimics the sound of the sandworm .

Mark – It is our duck call.

Theo – Wow. Exactly.

Mark – It’s our duck call in space.

Theo – They have something which just sort of, again, explains something without words about the whole planet and the ecosystem. So that was just like one of those moments where a sound absolutely nailed it and absolutely tied in with everything else that we’d been building.

Dave – It’s really funny because I heard your thumping sound that you’d done. And I don’t think we’d actually talked about this. And that was why I was looking to make a gunk gunk. And so, you know, that kind of happened serendipitously. Yeah, it was good. A happy accident.

Mark – That was an early win that I didn’t think we would ever get that, that literally happened within the first few months of sound design, a sound that I imagined and had massive anxiety over that we would be on for for years. But it it was so successful. And I’ll never forget, Denis’ reaction to that. We got an “I deeply love this”, that it was so good and the worm had not been fully animated. They animated the throat, and the the larynx or whatever those, you know, things are at the back of the worms throat and animated to Dave’s gunk gunks.

Tim – That’s awesome. Mark, when you were on on another episode, you talked about getting “the attaboy” from people and there you go. Go on there.

Mark – He certainly did. You know, I hate to say it, but Theo and I were experimenting with lots of things and we had made several presentations and were leading to success. And I remember, Dave, you sending the gunk gunks at the last minute on a Tuesday morning that we were going to do have our demo session. And I had played through Theo’s my various iterations to to to note with no success and remembered. Oh, Denis wait one more thing. Not sure about this one. It’s a little different. What do you think? And of course, I was he just. “Yeah, I deeply love this’ going into the movie.

Dave – Classic.

Tim – That’s awesome.

Mark – Maybe we could talk about, we we touched on this a little bit, but maybe there’s a few more words to have on it. Theo mentioned this earlier, Denis’ aesthetic that is pretty consistent in in this film and in in Blade Runner 2049, We need to build a universe that is new. These these are things we were making sound for, things that don’t exist, but they have to feel recognizable. They have to they have to represent a world that we could believe actually exists, an acoustic universe that actually exists. And Denis has exhorted us many times to eschew synthesized sound where possible, because acoustic sound carries does a lot of the heavy lifting for us, albeit processed, clearly, to create these fantastic sounds. And I think that’s an important element of of the success of this soundtrack and what the aesthetic was. Make sound the don’t draw attention to themselves. In fact, Denis would often say to us, I want this to sound boring. What he means is boring because it’s boring. Because it’s recognizable. It’s a sound we can relate to. You know, if I were to think of the 180 degree opposite of the brief, it would be, and it’s one of my favorite movies of all time, Forbidden Planet. We don’t want a theriman going. Oh, those are the things we don’t want in this kind of film. So how do we achieve its polar opposite? How do we create a universe of sound? We we think we recognize but don’t actually exist.

Theo – I’d say it’s also like, you know, the tendency of any sound designer is to make to want to make what you’re looking at in a sci fi especially – cool. You know, you want it to be the first instinct you have is I want to make this thick and heavy and sweetened and hyped and, you know, a fantasy effectively. And we’ve seen this in so many, you know, science fiction movies, even films that have sort of drawn inspiration from Frank Herbert’s Dune, like Star Wars. And this is a very, very, very different approach in Dune, very, very different aesthetic. And one of the notes, you know, like a Post-it note that Mark and I had on a computer screens, that we also would sort of give to the sound editors who were working with us, as a as a sort of shortcut to remember Denis’ aesthetic. We were we were saying, “imagine that you’ve got to fake someone out, that this is actually a documentary”. You know, you want it. We want it to be almost to convince people that we were really there with cameras on planet Arrakis with microphones. And therefore, if you are trying to fake someone out into thinking this was real, a real documentary, you don’t put quite so many sweeteners in. You don’t hype the sounds quite so much. You really try to build a believable world.
And our shortcut, we we called it fake documentary realism. So we just FDR was was the shortcut to everyone. But I think that’s really helpful because, you know, a lot of the people working with us had been just been working on, let’s say, a Marvel movie or something, where the aesthetics are very different. And it’s it’s the most important thing, I think, when you’re working with a visionary director like Denis, who has a very singular vision of how the sound should be, that the whole team understands that they’re not trying to hype the sound, they’re not trying to make it sound as cool as possible. They’re just trying to make it as believable as lived in as real as possible. Yeah.

Mark – It’s a difficult reflex to fight against because we spend our lives certainly here in Hollywood, I don’t know, Dave, what the aesthetic might be in New Zealand or what it might be like in London. But here in L.A., the aesthetic is hype everything up. Guns have to be sound like cannons and cannons have to sound like atomic bombs and atomic bombs have to sound like so. And we’re caught. And we were besieged by directors to make it bigger, make it stronger, make it flashier. And that’s driven into us over the, you know, the duration of our careers. It’s it’s the rare filmmaker like Denis Villeneuve who wants us to do just the opposite. Pare it down. Strip it back. Don’t draw attention to yourself. Make me believe I’m in this place. And that. And so we encouraged our our sound editors who were also empowered to design to create many of the elements that we just the three of us didn’t have time to create. And as they present elements, we would ask them to use this filter. Does it does it meet the criteria? Does it sound like a documentary film?

Dave – I think adding to that is, you know, you need to find the rules of your world. You know, you need to find out, OK, what is the science behind this thing that I’m working on and then knowing your own science to the science fiction, you get to understand it deeper and you get to create a sound that is is is wrapped around that conceptually its sound in your mind. So it’s easy to make a sound to something that you understand the concept of. For example, the ornathopters or the “voice”, you know, you created a mythology for that voice which you believed in. So you created a sound for it, Mark and then and Theo, and said, therefore, it’s easier for you to understand how to achieve it. And so it’s the same with the worlds. Once you understand the rules of the world and all the technology, then your job becomes fun. And this sort of film allows that space and that experimentation to discover depth to those sounds.

Mark – Theo and I spent a fair amount of time crafting the sound of the desert mouse, the Muad’Dib, and as as would be an instinct. We were looking at thing, you know, like anthropomorphize, you know, hamsters and guinea pigs and mice and things of that nature, and attempting to mold those sounds to create something that felt like the desert mouse and Denis seemed to be relatively happy with one of the things we had come up with, I think it was the guinea pig material initially that was kind of cute and squeaky until one weekend after one weekend when Joe Walker, our film editor, had been perusing YouTube a little too much. And he stumbled across a really lovely video made by Dani Conner, a zoologist who I believe lives in Scotland. I hope I don’t get this wrong. She’s a nature photographer as well and videographer, and she had stumbled across an abandoned family of baby red squirrels in the forest. And she captured a very brief snippet of them on video making the just the cutest of of noises. And, you know, just something we hadn’t heard before and Joe rang me Monday morning saying, you got to look at this video. What do you think? And I was like, I’ve never heard anything like that. And I got permission to chase her down. And we licensed the sounds and it’s right out of the box, I think. Theo, did you do anything? I know you ended up editing those bits. Did you do anything to the red squirrel?

Theo – Just cleaning. Just cleaning it up, because it was it was a real world recording. But and, you know, in the desert, everything was silent around it. But otherwise, it’s verbatim, that recording.

Tim – Well, all the work you did paid off on this film because it’s it’s really fun to watch. I, I read in the trades that we’re not sure when or if two is going to be taking place, but my fingers are really crossed that that comes soon because I want I want this story to conclude.

Mark – The only thing I can add to that is having spoken to many of the significant players in that process. They have all said the same thing. If this version does well at the box office, there will be a version to the part two. And all indicators are that European box office exceeded expectations. I presume of U.S. box office exceeds expectations. We can look forward to that.

Tim – So people listening to this, if you haven’t seen it yet, go out and see it, because I want to see part two.

Mark – No, no, no, no, no. Go out and hear it.

Tim – Yes, exactly. Go out and hear it.

Mark – Go hear a movie this weekend.

Tim – Thanks a lot, everybody. This has been a great talk. I really appreciate it.

Mark – Pleasure.

Dave – Thank you.

Theo – Thanks so much. Thank you.

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