Supervising Sound Editor Craig Henighan, and sound editors Lee Gilmore, Angelo Palazzo and Katie Halliday take us behind the iconic sounds in Season 4 of Stranger Things. We dive deep into the the grandfather clock, Yuri’s plane and helicopter, the voices of the Demobats and vines and lots, lots more.
Check out Part One of our Stranger Things coverage, in episode 194 with the production mixer and dialog editors.
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The following is a lightly edited and repaired, A.I. generated transcript of Tonebenders episode 195 – The Sound Design of Stranger Things Season 4. Please excuse any typos or translation mistakes made by the algorithm. It is not meant to be read like a polished blog post.
Tim Muirhead/Host
Mark Kilborn/Host
Craig Henighan/Supervising Sound Editor
Lee Gilmore/Sound Editor,
Angelo Palazzo/Lead Sound Editor
Katie Halliday/Sound Editor
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Timothy Muirhead 0:37
Hello and welcome to Tonebendors. My name is Tim Muirhead and I will be your host for today, along with my co host, Mark Kilborn. Mark, we have a hell of a show for our listeners today.
Mark Kilborn 0:46
Yeah, we do. Tim today we have the sound team behind the latest season of Stranger Things. I think it’s fair at this point to call the show a cultural phenomenon. You can’t throw a rock without hitting an article about it. It’s a really fun show. It’s got amazing sound work. Great music. I mean, like Kate Bush and Metallica are in the charts. Again, because of this thing. It’s pretty wild. And it’s a lot of fun. So I’m looking forward to hearing what they have to say about it.
Timothy Muirhead 1:08
So I’ll introduce our guests. Today we have Craig Henighan who is a co supervising sound editor and re recording mixer. Welcome to the show, Craig, it’s great to have you back
Craig Henighan 1:17
on. Great. Thank you, Tim. Thanks, Mark. And yeah, happy to be here.
Timothy Muirhead 1:21
Also joining us our Lee Gilmore and Katie Halliday, who both served as Sound Editors on the season. It’s great to meet you both. Thanks for joining us.
Lee Gilmore 1:28
Hey, guys.
Katie Halliday 1:28
Thanks, guys.
Timothy Muirhead 1:29
And finally, we have Angelo Palazzo, who is the lead sound effects editor. It’s nice to meet you, Angelo. Thanks for joining us.
Angelo Palazzo 1:34
Thanks, Tim. Good to meet you. Thanks, Mark.
Timothy Muirhead 1:37
Okay, so let’s get down to it. This show is huge, both in its sound design. And in its scale. It’s a cliche that people come on the show and say, you know, we treated every episode as a little film. The show that’s actual literal, like each episode is a film length. One episode is almost two and a half hours, most of them clock in over an hour and 15 minutes. These are closer in range to a franchise of movies rather than a series of episodes. But I suspect you didn’t get the schedule that nine individual movies would get to do the work on this. So how do you tackle this impossible task? Craig, don’t take that first.
Craig Henighan 2:12
You know, I’m happy my crew didn’t revolt and rise up and say “Adios, amigo, you’re on your own?” Um, look, you know, I mean, Rand, our producer, and Dean, you know, while they were shooting, and I had the scripts, obviously, with COVID and stuff even a couple years ago, at least, and everyone kept saying, and you know, they’re gonna be big, it’s gonna be big, they’re gonna be long and yeah, okay, okay, okay, we can handle it. And you kind of just go for it, man, you know, I have an amazing team with me, every one of us works more sort of in the feature world than in the sort of streaming world, you know, so the chops are there, the speed is there. And the whole quality of work is all sort of maintained, right? You know, for me, since I’m sort of I started the series back in 2015. So I’ve been there since the beginning. And they’ve sort of naturally progressed, they’ve grown to what they are. So I feel that at about an hour 15, you know, when when you sort of start taking into account when it’s mixing, like if it’s a week away from hitting the stage, but you know, you just got to compartmentalize, you got to prioritize, and you just got to kind of work, Matt and Ross are really great at getting us early cuts. So one of our saving graces is actually we usually get a pretty good swing at the first two or three episodes. Before we even sort of get into the regular grind of like, up against a schedule, so to speak. Like Episode One, I think I probably saw the first chunk is episode one sort of August 2021 kind of thing. And we didn’t actually really start full on until sort of November, December, I think, you know, and then at that point, it was like full crew. But I won’t lie, you know, seven days a week for for months. And it’s just a testament, I think, to our crew and our team, and I’m just really proud of everybody’s work, and everyone stepped up and everyone that’s worked on the show, loves it. Like it’s really, it’s really a family atmosphere, and people just want to work hard on it, you know, so the framework that’s been set up since season one, season two, and I’m bringing Angelo and Katie in on season three, and in this year, Lee helped out on a bunch of episodes as well. Everyone’s gotten to see the progression of where the tracks are, where they’ve been and sort of where we can take them so everyone sort of works in the same sort of playground of the Stranger Things environment world, but gets to add their own thing gets to do their own things and stuff like that, but we definitely we’ve definitely had a few phone calls. You know, either Katie or Angelo would call me and be like, Oh my god, this is never ending. And then the other thing you got to think about is visual effects. Because there’s a tons of times and there’s a lot of this fell on to Katie because she you know if Angelo and I and Lee, you know if we were sort of working on Episode Two, Katie was still sort of Finishing up with Will and Mark on the stage Episode One and any last minute visual effects coming up with different ideas to sort of add certain sounds or certain things that maybe The Brothers would have wanted changed or, you know. So yeah, there were phone calls many times about like, when is it? When is it good to stop like kind of thing you know, but anyone else can chime in on their feelings on on sort of the the work the workload, but you know, man, I think for all of us, if you’re gonna do it, and you’re working in sounds, you’re kind of just really want to go for it. I know that’s sort of always been my thing, you know that I just if I’m going to work I want to work and I want to be part of something that’s is special, is I want to be part of something that treats sound with the utmost respect, that gives us the room to play things. We’ve all been on projects where we, you know, kill ourselves on certain things. And then it doesn’t get played in the mix. This is not that show. This is the show where the Matt and Ross turn around and go, Okay, what else you have, what more can we add? What other things can we do? So yeah,
Timothy Muirhead 6:02
Angelo?
Angelo Palazzo 6:03
Yeah, that is a that is a pretty fun aspect of the show. There’s so much respect and love and interest in the sound as far as just everyone involved in The Duffers, there’s always this desire to keep pushing things up another notch. And it’s so fun to work on something that is just such a challenge. There’s so much design elements, but there’s also like just really great traditional sound effects moments to that just really challenge you also, and and this season was a for me, it was a lot of fun having a bigger team on bringing Lee on. And then another editor we had Ken McGill and Dave Grimaldi even helped out early on and it was fun to see what everybody was bringing to the table because I remember talking with Craig, what was like Craig kinda was really open to everyone throwing in new ideas, because I think maybe having been on from season one, Craig was like, let’s see where we can take this now and, and so that was always fun. That was kind of opened the floodgate to kind of just really go for it. try out new tones, new, more aggressive sounds more, there were a lot of jumpscares leaning into the horror, all the violence I like I remember when I first saw Episode One, how it ended. I was like, oh, man, this is gonna be super great. We really going to go there?
like, I was like, that’s a heavy duty ending. And then in the whole thing is like that. I was like, Man, this is this is pretty, this is gonna be wild. Yeah,
Katie Halliday 7:41
I’d say on my end on the stage, I sort of had this unique advantage of seeing forward and backwards what was going on with everybody. And I’m still amazed at how everyone was. So everyone’s like, alright, we’re doing it, we’re getting through it. It’s good. It’s, you know, we’re all working our asses off. But at no point was anybody like, nobody was ever at that point, like Craig said of revolting or anything like that, because we were all just so excited and just really wanted, you know, In for a penny in for a pound. We all wanted to be there. 120% and I think you can hear it in the show. I think you can really hear how much everybody’s love and effort is in there. So
Lee Gilmore 8:21
I would a piggyback off that. Yeah, just everybody, you know, brought their “A” game on it big time, I was kind of in an interesting scenario where it came in kind of more mercenary work, just to kind of snipe certain areas and Angelo and Katie totally saved me because they’d already been through it. They already been in the trenches, Angelo was the total gatekeeper for everything. And I know, you know, sitting down, like on the first day and you start cutting and everything’s at an 11 almost on the show, you know, like, I’m just gonna cut a door close. And then you kind of look and see what Angelo has been doing, like, Oh, my God, my door closes gotta be an 11. Door close, you know. So you start doing that. And then you kind of started getting into the vibe, you know, and I probably worked on half the episodes or so. And then it was really exciting to, you know, sit down with my kids and watch what everyone else had done once I was off this show, because I’m super, super proud to be a part of it, because everyone just absolutely crushed it. I thought and so much things that we work on. Like Craig was saying, you know, you get railroaded, by music, you get, you know, everything gets ducked a ton. But like, man, the sound just plays on his thing, you know, and it was really, really exciting. And it’s just, it’s in your face, and just 11 1111 Because it’s about 11, I guess. Yeah,
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