Continued From previous page.
Nathan Robitaille 3:39
Yeah, sure. Um, yeah, the the movie definitely does take place in two different halves. And so you know, we did find ourselves trying to set a tone twice for this movie. And in the first half of the movie, all that grit. I associate that as being part of how, in sort of poverty, things are a bit looser, there’s a bit more play in reality, and they don’t fit quite so tightly together. The tents specifically, I remember early on when I was working, just putting scenes together for the AVID and Cam McLaughlin, the picture editor, he sent me this file and he said, man, you gotta listen to this. And I listened to it. They had recorded the tents that they were shooting in. And they sounded amazing. Like they sounded musical you could hear it sounded like you know, almost like masts pinging at a harbor. You know what I mean? Just like a lot of all the guidelines and things like this, as well as the this big heavy canvas tent, inflating with air and then deflating in the wind. It had so much life and it wasn’t even a character. And so we had to get in there and record and so actually Dashen Naidoo, who was one of the sound effects editors on the show came with me to set and we recorded the tents. Part of it was just like luck of the wind, and then other parts, we would grab sections of that canvas and start manipulating it or grab a pole and start shifting it around to get as much life out of the tents as we possibly could to sort of perform them a little bit. Yeah. And while we there, we picked up a whole bunch of other recordings of things like you know, the the carousel, the Ferris wheel, the bumper cars, and all these other things that had a lot of kind of rickety Carney loose fitting parts to them. That all added this level of disconnected detail, things just felt like they were shooting from the hip a little bit more. And that’ll kind of goes back to the this philosophy where you know, things that are less expensive or worn down are loose and soft and kind of broken. Once things become more expensive. They fit together more tightly, they’re more concise. As you mentioned, in the first half of the movie, things feel more mechanical and gritty. I think that’s that looseness that play within components, then when we get to the city, things get a bit more concise.
Teresa Morrow 6:05
What comes along with that, obviously, technically speaking is the challenge to dialogue was part of the reason for capturing some of those sounds related to how that was interacting with the production dialog.
Nathan Robitaille 6:18
In theory, part of it, I would defer to Jill on this one. But I know one of the other visits I had, I was given some access to go to set and sit with Greg the location recordist. And remember sitting there and hearing a lot of generators and a lot of fog machine and stuff like that I was just there to record the extras between takes because I wanted some authentic sounding crowds. We started recording things that would get laid up to kind of fill some of those holes and lift some of the the curses that Greg was fighting against, but you know, Jill’s kind of a magician who can make everything sound like it was recorded in a clean quiet environment. So I’ll I’ll toss it over to her and let her speak to whether or not we were successful in helping out
Unknown Speaker 7:00
yeah, definitely successful. But I mean, Greg, Greg dealt with, as you said, a lot of challenges and, and he was great and trying to record wild tracks and as much as much extra as possible, which came in handy because it wasn’t so much as as making everything sound clean as it was making everything sound consistent, because every time you know how to either a generator or not, or when machine or not, or sometimes it was raining really hard. And then it wasn’t. So it was more about that consistency. And I think anything that Nathan and Dash recorded was supplemented on their end probably in cutting it against production effects and that sort of thing and filling in those holes rather than anything they recorded. Sending in in the dialogue direction and having having us fill in the holes on the dialogue side of things. But there was definitely a lot of a lot of material to work with which made which made that piecing together of the scenes a lot easier….
Timothy Muirhead 7:54
was the tent ruffling and moving present in the production dialogue tracks?
Jill Purdy 7:57
the tent rustling, not so much anything that it was was more of the action scenes where they’re, you know, the tents going up or down. And there wasn’t a whole lot of dialogue that wasn’t supplemented by ADR efforts or breaths and call outs and that sort of thing. So that wasn’t too much of a of an issue. For me, it was more the exterior scenes in the snow were a bit of an issue in terms of machines, which actually cleaned up really, really well from from my standpoint, but there was some issue with lav mics, and wind in those scenes, there was an issue with Lilith’s lav in a couple of scenes that we had to deal with. But, you know, for the most part, anything that we the noise on set was kind of roped into the ambience for that scene and it worked in a way that was supplemental instead of detrimental which was good,
Nathan Robitaille 8:44
which actually made it kind of a cool proposition that we were given so much access to set and we could build a bit of a library to the same materials that were sort of hanging against each other flapping away in the wind behind any production dialogue because I think you know from from the effects and design side of things at least we felt like we were painting like from the same palette as the dialogue side so
Jill Purdy 9:08
I was jealous. I didn’t I didn’t go to that set, I should have gone on your coattails because that’s completely up my alley so to speak.
Nathan Robitaille 9:16
I feel that it’s not it’s not mine. I felt like I felt like a fish out of water on set.
Timothy Muirhead 9:20
Oh yeah. Why is that
Nathan Robitaille 9:22
I don’t often go to set I spend so much time you know locked in a dark room being left to my own toys and crazy thought patterns that I can I can subtract myself from that world. When I go it’s pretty exciting but it’s hard to know when you have that many moving parts and that that much chaos happening. I should say organized chaos because it is extremely organized. As a strictly post person. It’s foreign. So you don’t know if you’re stepping on toes you don’t know if you’re in the way I was constantly mindful and anytime I wanted to shift my position I had to look over at Greg, Greg and and get his cue to make sure that I wasn’t about to blow something up on somebody,
Teresa Morrow 10:02
can you talk a little bit about how you negotiate? When you’re on set? What can I touch? What can’t I touch? Like? Who are you talking to? How does that stuff get vetted?
Nathan Robitaille 10:13
Yeah, everyone was extremely welcoming. I mean, like it was it, you know, any any sort of worries I had about getting in the way or like, you know, tangling things up. For anyone else were quickly put at ease, I basically set up my I just wanted to hide a bunch of radio mics around set to record crowds while I was there. So it was a pretty limited thing. While I was on the active set, most of the other times I went to set they weren’t shooting. So they they were like maybe moving some, like some equipment around. But there were quiet moments where we could record tents and things like that, when I was there during the active shoot, honestly, really, my anchor point was Greg, once I had my radio frequencies set up, they conflicted with a few other radio frequencies. So the guys just came in, and they told me like, I’m getting some noise, can you guys sort out whether this channel is free or not, and I would just have to get off of that channel. But once we were set up, it was largely just a case of, I kind of sat there did my thing. Every now and then I’d run around to change batteries, I would make sure that the mics were placed, you know, if the mic wasn’t really getting anything, I could move it somewhere else to get a better track. But basically, before I did any of that, it was just look over at Greg, Greg would give me the nod. I’d hightail it out there, navigate a bunch of extras who were wearing face masks between between takes and deal with the mics. And you know, at one point, you know, he just said we’ve got talent coming here to get miked up, so you got to bounce. So I got out of the way, you know, but largely Yeah, he was there to sort of make sure I didn’t, I didn’t step on any toes are getting anyone’s way.
Timothy Muirhead 11:49
Speaking of there being lots of people around, that’s one of the other hallmarks of the first half of the film is that the carnivals full of people. So I’m imagining between those recordings that you made on set, there was also a lot of ADR recorded and loop group. How do you go about finding loop group that can get the right accents for this? I guess southern United States is it Kentucky or something like that? I’m not sure where the first half takes place is back half is in Buffalo. And also back in time going back to those accents from the 40s. How do you spot find those people
Jill Purdy 12:23
that comes through loop group casters, so Dan Fink and Bruce Winant, based in New York have scoped out talent for some shows I’ve been on for probably the past 10 or 12 years, I’ve known those guys. And I can say to them, Hey, you know, we need this many people when we need them all from Kentucky or from Louisiana, and we need all these people from Buffalo. And we need them in like an hour, they will find them. And they will do it exquisitely and they’ll give me the whole rundown of the backstory of where these these actors grew up and how cool they are and doing, you know, 40s voices. I mean, it was just it was just incredible. I mean, I That’s the least of my of my issues is casting.
Timothy Muirhead 13:04
Once you get all that material, it’s your problem, right?
Jill Purdy 13:06
Yeah,although in this case, it wasn’t it was, it was a blessing again, because we had kind of limited time, limited budgets. So we had ended up having 12 people. So we recorded seven people in the studio, five people remotely, but all at the same time. Bobby Johanson out of Harbour Post in New York recorded it. And he also knew the actors pretty well. And we situated the carnival people mostly in the studio because of the call out scenario and being able to control the variables in the studio more. And because of COVID. We also had some couples involved. So you know, actors that live together, that can be together in the studio. So we maximized it that way. I mean, it was just this whole grand scheme of things that work together really well. And Bobby would just know inherently who to record and what feed to record on. So he was he was recording Clean Feed from the remote actors and studio at the same time, on separate channels, although they were communicating with each other, so I had this incredible. I mean, yes, it was a lot of work. But the the ability to separate easier, like maybe normally you have, you know, four to 10 to 12 people in a studio. And you know, if everybody’s talking once everybody’s talking at once. And in this case, you know, we would have a couple in one room, studio wise because I think we had three different studios maybe at Harbor. And all of those could be separated. So if we didn’t if we wanted to thin it out, it was just a matter of you know, like muting one channel or you could have one couple talking to someone that wasn’t originally talking to them. I mean, it was incredible. It was it was the best session I’ve ever recorded. And I’ve been doing this, you know, I didn’t record it. I would have liked to take credit for that. But, you know, in the 25 or 26 years I’ve been doing this that was the most incredible experience. And it you know, it was so essential to to being a character on its own in this film that it was. It was amazing.
Jill Purdy 13:13
That’s so interesting to hear somebody finally talk about an upside to COVID, in terms of the the workflows that people have had to kind of twist themselves into knots to figure out in the past two years. So that’s really interesting.
Nathan Robitaille 15:05
It’s a weird flip like COVID definitely helped split the movie into two very different movies give two very different vibes between the first and back half of the movie. But it’s also kind of ironic that the second part of the movie that had a flood of extras and a flood of additional human beings who had to inhabit the same space was shot during the pandemic. Well, Buffalo, which is largely sort of like small scenes with few actors on screen was shot prior to the pandemic.
Timothy Muirhead 15:35
Oh, so it was shot in reverse order.
Nathan Robitaille 15:37
Yeah, totally.
Timothy Muirhead 15:37
Yeah, the back half was shot before the first half.
Nathan Robitaille 15:40
Yeah, we started receiving scenes for the back half of the movie. Back in yeah, 2019. is when we started working on things like the Copacabana and you know, I’m actually curious cuz Jill, that mean that we would have been working together on those scenes, I remember you breathing a lot of life into the Copa crowds in 2019. And I think that we were getting a lot of that sort of like, period authentic voice work done, then were we not?
Jill Purdy 16:09
Yeah, here and there. I mean, we did some auditions for the barkers and some of the specific call outs at that time. So we recorded those. And then at that time for you, I had pulled from previous groups that I had recorded that kind of fit the bill until we could get the actors in to replace that.
Teresa Morrow 16:27
How long was your hiatus?
Jill Purdy 16:29
I know, they stopped shooting for six months. But Nathan, you had you had a little more involvement, you didn’t have a full like six months,
Nathan Robitaille 16:34
It wasn’ta full six months off. So once once the lockdowns happened, it was pretty quick switching over to the sort of reviewing via Evercast process, that that got ironed out really quickly in the beginning. And, and it was important to Guillermo to keep a handful of us going because we had started so much in the back half of the movie, the Buffalo side of the movie. And he just got I think he just wanted to like cross t’s and dot eyes and make sure that those concepts were were wrapped up and sort of packaged together before we signed off. But we were all able to do that from isolation from our own, our own home studios and stuff like that. So it’s a bit more of a blurry line in terms of the length of the hiatus for me, because I also wound up coming back on a little bit early once we did get started up because I was going to set to record stuff and you know, I kind of picked up a little a little ahead of time there. As far as a rough answer, cuz I’d say probably about six months, give or take
Timothy Muirhead 17:32
the first like maybe eight to 10 minutes of the film, our main character doesn’t say a single word. I think the first time he talks is once he goes into the funhouse, looking for the geek, did you approach the soundtrack in any different way, given that we kind of had a mute main character up until that point,
Nathan Robitaille 17:49
the stuff that takes place in the in the early side of the early like the opening of the movie, you know, was meant to be as sort of in your face and visceral as possible, you know, him dragging a body across the floor. And you know that that’s pretty, that’s some pretty potent imagery. And so, you know, we’re really just there to complement that, to make sure that you know, we get that we really hammer that point across. Although there is one thing that I kind of really dig about what sound helps to accomplish in that early scene, which is that he drags his father into a hole in the floor, and buries him and burns the place down and walks away through a cornfield in the summertime, all the while you’ve got like summer backgrounds and summer ambiences. But in all of the dream sequences where he to me fantasizes about killing his father, he kills him with the cold of winter blizzard. And so to me, that helps to sort of reinforce Pete’s black rainbow in how Stan wants to kill his father, but didn’t necessarily kill his father. And I think sound like just presenting being so forward with the sort of summertime ambiences and cicadas and, you know, grasshoppers and things like that I thought it was, it was a cool opportunity to sort of give, give a lot of seasonal life. To those early scenes.
Teresa Morrow 19:12
It feels like the movie is structured kind of around seasons, right? There’s like definite, there’s a lot of sort of weather related stuff going on in terms of the sort of chapters of the film, so I had not tweaked to what you’re talking about. So that’s really interesting. I’m sure it was acting subconsciously. That’s interesting point.
Timothy Muirhead 19:31
One of the main characters in the film, Rooney Mara, in the first half of the film, her act in the Carnival is that she conducts electricity through her body. And electricity is one of those things that due to Hanna Barbera cartoons and stuff like that we all have a very ingrained version of what electrical sparking should be. But the way you approached it is a little bit different and I found to be really cool. Do you want to kind of go into how you came up with the sound The electricity
Nathan Robitaille 20:01
Yeah, I think that’s probably just one of those aversions to the the Hanna Barbera of it all, you know, when you have someone like you’re moaning with those discriminating tastes and you know, you get, he makes sure that we have the runway necessary to play around and make sure that each sound we choose is kind of unique. I wanted to make sure that it sounded dangerous because it had to it had to startle the audience. But you know, dangerous without being that sort of classic, zip, zap electronic, you know, jolt sound and fizzle really just hunting out interesting sounds and trying to find cool elements, you know, two main things that could, that could really, you know, advance the excitement of a scene more so actually, because like the first one, the first one of the Electra acts that, that I got to, you know, dig into was the second one that we see on screen where the the sheriff comes to the carnival. And, and major pulls the switch, and we get to see the big show the big show that Stan orchestrates. And that one, I just I wanted it to build and build and build and build and get more exciting and you know, I associate that with an ascending pitch and so the standout element in there was actually a gibbon, the monkey, how they just kind of go like “whoop”, and I just took one of those and I kept time compression/expanding it, and then time compression/expanding it and I just kept expanding it and letting it degrade in quality until it sounded like sort of a almost digital electronic. Yeah, like a sparks element. Yeah. And I just stretched that out until we had this ascending pitch underneath all the snapping crackly magic.
Timothy Muirhead 21:48
One of my favorite moments in the film is that scene where our main characters explaining the new setup that he’s built for Rooney, Mara’s character. And someone asked what the spinning wheel in the back is and just very quietly off handily, that is bullshit. is my favorite line. That’s bullshit. Ignore that.
Nathan Robitaille 22:06
And to tie the bullshit into later in the movie, because there’s a ton of symmetry in this movie, that spinning wheel that bullshit says they’re going tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. And it’s a kind of weirdly syncopated rhythm. So it’s identifiable in its rhythm or lack thereof, enough so that we take that sound and later on when Stan is being interrogated with the polygraph machine, we shrink it down and stuff it inside the polygraph machine. Because to Stan in that scene, it’s the polygraph machine. That’s bullshit.
Teresa Morrow 22:37
I was wondering, I was like, There’s something between I mean, obviously, the whole electrical aspect of those two set pieces, there’s like there’s a visual symmetry and all that stuff. That’s really cool to hear that you’re playing with those sound effects as well to tie those things together.
Nathan Robitaille 22:54
Yeah, I mean, then that’s a lot of gear, most influence he loves. He loves symmetry. He loves the callbacks. He likes to use something in the beginning that we use again in the end. That was actually one of the early notes. Jill, I’m sure you remember this, he wanted us to use the same elements, not just sound effects, but also ADR and dialogue elements in the train yard Chase at the end that we used in the geek chase in the beginning to draw a parallel between the geek and Stan.
Timothy Muirhead 23:21
It’s kind of interesting, because based on the title of the film, if you’re not aware of the original book, it sounds like it’s going to be a horror film Nightmare Alley. And it’s not a horror film at all. But you kind of almost play off of that, because that first time we go into the funhouse, it has a very kind of classic horror setup with a giant teeth opening up that the track goes through. How did you approach that scene? Were you thinking about the kind of horror films during that or no,
Nathan Robitaille 23:47
not really, that’s actually when we actually get the bill more than once. That’s, that’s one of those that were like, we tried it a few different ways. We tried to like my first take on it was like with all of the like all of the fun house gadgets and a carnival style Fun House. But that later got pared back like the fun house is not running. He’s just walking through an empty fun house that is off. funhouse Jack just basically flips a switch to get out of the door. But yeah, we went from like we’ve had we tried that with a full fleshed out design treatment, and we parsed it all the way back to almost nothing. And I think it landed in a nice middle ground. But yeah, as far as, as far as the nightmare elements, the bigger standout elements would have been the breathing tent, it was very important to keep the tent breathing. And I remember Guillermo saying he wanted that devil face that opens up that Stan walks through to be shocking.
Timothy Muirhead 24:43
It was mission accomplished. Yeah,
Nathan Robitaille 24:46
it really feels like a punch in the teeth. But then beyond that, it just kind of goes back to that opportunity that we had to go finding interesting, cool, fun, little ear candy sounds to sprinkle in here and there things that you’re not necessarily expecting to hear, like when he first walks through that devils face, you can hear that there’s like one of those velvet rope setups, they’re supposed to guide the carnival goers through the funhouse, you see, velvet rope setup will kind of front and center you see one of those brass poles that that you attach the velvet rope to, and it’s dripping in there. So I found this track of like rain, hitting bells like musical bells. And so we were able to place that there and Brad was able to sort of follow it through the room a little bit, just this nice little piece of musical texture for the space. And it was just little things like that, that we could tuck in here in there and find, find chances to play around
Timothy Muirhead 25:41
cool.
Teresa Morrow 25:41
Considering Guillermo del Toro’s previous films like this is what maybe the first one that’s doesn’t have a supernatural aspect to it. Specifically, though, you guys still managed to find those kind of like edgy, like on the Edge of Reality moments, to me, that’s what puts it in the nice half of like genre category of noir, something like it still has that kind of almost theatrical aspect to it, because of the sort of special stuff that you’re putting in, to kind of make it sort of hyper real or not quite real or something,
Nathan Robitaille 26:14
definitely fantastical, which is kind of our answer to the call of the imagery that Guillermo and Dan Laustsen, you know, pull in through the camera, there’s some beautiful images, and there’s always so much depth and richness to what shows up on the monitor. So he’s on us to do our best to complement that with sound.
Timothy Muirhead 26:35
We’ve talked a bit about the first half of the movie, let’s go into the second half of the movie where we enter the city life. And everything gets more sleek, as I mentioned earlier, but it also becomes more contained. The first half of the movie feels wide open in a way even though a lot of it’s inside tents, where the second half of the movie takes place inside rooms for the most part, when people are going in and out of the rooms, the sound from outside the room almost always kind of disappears.
Nathan Robitaille 27:00
100% part of the plan from day one, I would say that was one of the first notes that we got from Guillermo, which is that I mean the the sort of pared down way to phrase this, with the poverty of the Carnival comes freedom, that open air field where you know, there’s, you don’t have much, but you have freedom. But once you get to the city, you’ve got more wealth, but less freedom a lot more restrictive, you’re more isolated, and he wanted every room to feel like it was a sort of an airless tomb that was completely separated from the outside world to sort of isolate our characters as much as possible, which all just sort of feeds that sort of malignancy of greed, right? Because he’s really chasing, he’s Stan is chasing his greed. And you know, be careful what you wish for he gets what he was after, but along with it comes very little wiggle room in his life, he finds himself you know, living by the terms of, of these, you know, wealthy. You know, magnates, like Grendel and Lilith, and it just becomes more some more and more suffocating to him.
Timothy Muirhead 28:06
And so Jill, when you are working in the second half of the film, you’ve got a whole different problem with your loop group. Now you’re no longer in Kentucky now you’re in Buffalo, instead of people yelling and shouting at the carnival having a great time. It’s a much more restrained performances, I would think, how did you go about building those worlds?
Jill Purdy 28:26
“call outs” are a big thing with Guillermo He likes hearing, you know, he likes everything so specific and nuanced. And what speaker is going to play through and what level it’s going to be at and raising things by a dB. So the big thing was was trying to situate the call outs and getting everything covered. Because you know, you wanted someone selling papers and, you know, specific references to you know, shoe shining and, and that whole thing. So it was it was fun to play with those and just what piqued his interest or what he what he loved to hear and where he wanted to hear like, you’d be like, I love that call it let’s move at 10 frames earlier and bam, it would just make the scene all that more intentional, and motivate the scene more. So it was it was really interesting. I mean, I had a blast putting those layers together of the group. And then hearing it with you know, the sound design and how was moving through the room was quite amazing to behold it was it was a really fun end product to listen to.
Nathan Robitaille 29:18
You’ll have that one specific “call out” that we all hear on the stage it gets sold. We all know it’s there. It’s definitely there. And then it goes in and it sort of melts into the fabric of this world that Guillermo is intent on building it’s just incredible how like he’ll he will tune into that too. For in the mix. It’s placement frame accurate placement left and right. Playing with each “poke outs” line playback level. And it just builds this this sort of rich tapestry that in some cases, you know, that thing will poke out enough that you can distinguish one line from the rest of the wash. Where in other cases it just it just blends in so perfectly and makes this this world like it really does build a world cuz he’s, that’s that’s his thing man that’s his jam, he finds a way to, to place things around the room to really put you there and make you feel like you’re in the same space.
Jill Purdy 30:09
He’s so collaborative, that, you know, you can put your name and put his own design elements in there, I could put a call out or whatever in there. And it may have been something that Guillermo didn’t specifically ask for. But if he hears it, he’ll run with it and, you know, incorporate it in a way that supplements what he wants for the scene or for that specific moment. So it’s really cool to work with them that way.
Timothy Muirhead 30:31
Jill, earlier, you mentioned something about Cate Blanchett’s microphone. I didn’t want to go down that rabbit hole while we were still talking about the first half of the movie. But now that we’re into the second half of the movie, you mentioned there’s something wrong with one of her lavs, can you kind of dig into that and how you cleaned it up.
Jill Purdy 30:46
I just want to give a shout out to Greg Chapman because you couldn’t pay me enough to be a production mixer, there’s no way and I, I give kudos because I wouldn’t be able to deal with it. I would, I don’t know how they do it. I don’t know how Greg did it on this movie. But the tracks I had to work with were incredible. So I have to thank him for that. But I think there was just an issue with a couple of her takes where I don’t know, I don’t know if it was something slipped or, you know, I have no idea what the issue was. But it was a very, her lav ended up sounding a bit thin in a way that I haven’t actually heard, I haven’t had to work with quality in this particular respect before. So it’s just a matter of trying different things trying to D noise or trying to EQ it in a way so that it sounded a little more, a little more usable in conjunction with the boom. So there was a lot more work, trying to make the boom sound more full, or whatever to kind of take up the slack for when you would normally have the boom and the lav, aligned, phased and, and playing together. So we lost some of that elements that was either working with a boon to accommodate that difference, or making the lab and those specific spots, be usable enough to play with the boom in a way that you didn’t notice the quality difference. But I’m a big proponent of iZotope, but I like things to sound as organic as possible. I’m not a fan of over processing at all, I really dislike it. You know, I just I spent a lot of time trying to enhance the audio quality without sacrificing the quality of the voice.
Teresa Morrow 32:19
Yeah, I’ve, I’ve had a few conversations with Tim, when we see movies, and I’m definitely more dialogue focused. He’s obviously more sound design focused. And so we have conversations where I’m like, I noticed this Oh, I didn’t notice that. I noticed this. Well, I didn’t notice that I was paying attention to what was happening with the dialogue there. And my feeling about films in the last couple years is that dialogue is getting really scrubbed. And I don’t know if that’s just my impression. I don’t know if you have any opinions on like trends in dialog de-noising. And how things are sounding these days, in general, or what you’re being asked to do in terms of cleaning up stuff.
Jill Purdy 32:58
Yeah, I mean, I don’t know why I don’t know if it’s, you know, that article that came out recently on intelligible sound and whatever dialogue and I found that very interesting, because I agree with it. 1,000%. But again, that’s that’s a separate conversation, the majority of the tracks that I work with, are not anywhere near the quality that they used to be, like, you know, 20 years ago, 10 years ago, I find a lot of my time is spent surgically working with every single region, because it’s not consistent. It’s like literally there’s, you know, you know, crickets on one, and then they disappear. Every single shot is completely different sounding than the previous one, even though they’re in the same scene. So I find a lot of my work now is surgical, and not a lot of flow to it until you get to the end product. And then I can do a final pass on it and be a little more creative with with finding alts, or making things sound a little a little smoother than I’d like because there’s so there’s only so much time to work with and you have to get it sounding for something that’s usable, because there aren’t budgets, or the actors aren’t available to bring actors in to do ADR. And quite honestly, there are some TV episodes, some scenes of films where you could literally like script the entire thing for ADR just by virtue of the quality of those tracks. And it’s it’s unfortunate. And I don’t know where where the issue lies, because there are amazing production mixers out there. And I don’t think that they’re necessarily given the the time or the respect for the craft that there possibly could be.
Teresa Morrow 34:24
Yeah, and I think that the thrust of that article that you’re referencing was that if the directors and the camera crews in such we’re giving enough respect or listening enough to what the production sound crews are asking for that we could make a lot of progress with not a lot of changes. It’s just a question of having that dialogue open and giving the production team essentially a little more leeway in being able to implement what their suggestions are in terms of improving the location zone. Read the article is puts it in much better terms and I just rambled on.
Timothy Muirhead 35:03
We’ll definitely put a link to the article on the episode page for this one.
Teresa Morrow 35:07
Anyway, sorry, tangent.
Timothy Muirhead 35:09
It’s all good. That was interesting. Thanks. Throughout the course of the film, there’s kind of a theme that our main character played by Bradley Cooper doesn’t drink. And slowly or Cate Blanchett character lures him over to the other side and he does start drinking. But the actual crystal glassware is also kind of luring him in a weird way. There’s like, the glasses singing to him almost like the ring and Lord of the Rings or something like that. How did you come up with the idea to do that? And how did you actually come up with those sounds Nathan?
Nathan Robitaille 35:37
“throw thrown the chicken he’ll geek”. Yeah, the glassware that I mean, an early note from from Guillermo, he wanted to sound like real crystal much like so much of the back half of the movie was all about the the status symbols of of what we’re seeing in the props that are being used from you know, Lilith’s stilettos a huge she’s actually wearing kind of chunky heels. But he wanted her stilettos to sound like daggers on a on a marble floor he wanted. He just wanted things to sound very expensive, like that Royston touch tip lighter that she likes a cigarette with and things like that things needed to be very concise and very, very expensive sounding and the glasses were for Lilith, one of those statement pieces. That was one of the status symbols for her was to have this high end crystal glassware. We tried a few cracks with that one to get it right. But yeah, it was pretty important to Guillermo that we we got something that sounded like crystal and not glass. And in the end, it wound up being sort of a tag team effort between the the Foley crew up at Footsteps that’s Andy Malcolm and Goro Koyama. They got some beautiful sounding crystal tumblers and things. And that’s a lot of the handling sounds when they when they first interact with them, is the Foley being played up. But then thankfully, because of the sort of telescoping schedule on this movie, we were able to work pretty closely with them, like they would send us their full treatment on the on the reels, and I could listen to it and sweeten it to taste. And so a lot of that was the base element would be fully followed up by a little bit of love from us on the on the sound effects side. And I think the sound you’re talking about that singing tone is just me sitting there with a recorder some water and a wine glass and rimming the top of the wine glass and tilting it to get pitch changes and and follow around the movements that the various crystal ware pieces go through on screen. The sort of collaborative end result there wound up being pretty musical, which is exactly what we were aiming for.
Teresa Morrow 37:41
So it was like a little perfect moment. Or you just like Man, they they nailed that. That is like it sounds real. Like it’s that.
Nathan Robitaille 37:48
Yeah,
Teresa Morrow 37:48
That sound that is so hard to capture, right? Because it’s such a small and delicate sound. But it’s totally clear. And then it’s got it sort of like evolves into this kind of like, fun and magical extra thing going on. It’s just so perfect.
Nathan Robitaille 38:04
Yeah, thank you. Yeah. And I think that’s one of those byproducts of being given the, the leeway to play around to be given the space to work on these things, both by, you know, Guillermo’s insistence that we that we take time and have fun and dig in and play. But also by the fact that you know, this pandemic gave a lot of people a lot of free time to, to really scratch their head and dig in and figure out ways that they can make the mundane sound fantastical.
Timothy Muirhead 38:36
And you just happen to have wine glasses lying around.
Nathan Robitaille 38:38
I mean, I think everybody did during the pandemic.
Timothy Muirhead 38:46
for maybe a last question to wrap up. Guillermo del Toro, he’s kind of making himself known as a major presence in the world of film with his last many films. What did you learn from working with him on this film? Did he pass on any new ways of thinking about things that you or will take onto new projects?
Nathan Robitaille 39:05
For me personally, I think it’s more of a sort of calcification of a theory that most sound designers have and develop over time, which is that nothing is precious, you know, sometimes a great sound isn’t the right sound. And so this is one of those movies where we basically developed great sound from top to tail, from the top of the movie to the bottom. It was wallpapered and then when we got to the mix stage, it was just a matter of, you know, playing the winning hands. If you learn anything from working with Guillermo. It’s that nothing is precious, not even his own ideas. I’ve watched him take brilliant ideas of his own that came together and sounded beautiful and just hit the cutting room floor because they were not serving the purpose. You know, ego doesn’t get in the way. It’s just straight up. Sometimes a great sound isn’t the right sound nothing is precious.
Timothy Muirhead 39:59
Jill?
Jill Purdy 39:59
That was summed up perfectly. I mean, Guillermo is always moving creatively, like 1000 miles an hour. And it’s, it’s amazing to witness and it’s amazing, like I said before to collaborate with and what Nathan said is just bang on. And it’s, it’s, I think it’s the constantly full of ideas, trying things and trying different things and trying so many different things to try and get that one little moment that one tiny little piece of story that may have been like lacking or just not there enough to push through. And it it’s, it’s pretty amazing to witness I gotta say, and it’s intense, but it’s, it’s so creative. He’s probably the most creative being I think I’ve I’ve worked with, to be honest, and it’s in all these weird, wonderful ways that you’d expect. I had to write something talking about, you know, working with Guillermo, if I’ve described it as a metaphorical tornado, a creative train riding through a metaphorical tornado.
Nathan Robitaille 40:01
Yeah. And then the other side, you deal with the aftermath. And in the aftermath just happens to be art.
Jill Purdy 40:20
This this collaboration, this village that takes all these pieces of destruction and puts them together and makes it something more beautiful.
Timothy Muirhead 41:09
Well, thank you very much for joining us today. It was a really fun talk. And I’m glad that we got to talk about this film, because I think it’s a really fun film. I don’t know that it’s a fun film, but it’s a super enjoyable film. So yeah, thanks for joining us, and we’ll hopefully have you on again soon.
Nathan Robitaille 41:26
Thanks for having us.
Jill Purdy 41:27
Thanks.
Teresa Morrow 41:27
Bye bye.
Narrator 41:29
Tonebenders is produced by Timothy Muirhead, Rene Coronado and Teresa Morrow. Theme music is by Mark Strait. Send your emails to [email protected]. Follow us on Twitter via @thetonebenders and join TonebendersPodcast on Facebook. Support this podcast. You can use our links when you shop at Amazon or b&h or leave us a tip. Just go to Tonebenderspodcast.com and click the support button. Thanks for listening.
Timothy Muirhead 41:59
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