We talk with Supervising Sound Editors Bonnie Wild and Mac Smith, as well as Sound Designer Kim Patrick about the supernatural sounds Moon Knight. They talk about creating creature vocals, dreaming up a new super hero’s signature sounds, and deciding what the disembodied voices of gods should sound like.
Below is the tweet that Mac Smith references in the interview about recording frying konnyaku and using the sounds in the jackal screams in Moon Knight.
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The following is a lightly edited and repaired, A.I. generated transcript of Tonebenders episode 196 – The Sound of Moon Knight. 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
Kim Patrick/Sound Designer
Bonnie Wild/Supervising Sound Editor & Re-Recording Mixer
Mac Smith/Bonnie Wild/Supervising Sound Editor & Re-Recording Mixer
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Timothy Muirhead 0:39
Hello, and welcome to Tonebenders. I’m your host for today Tim Muirhead, by my side for this talk is my co host, Mark Kilborn. Mark, are you ready to talk some moon night today?
Mark Kilborn 0:55
I am extremely excited about this episode, Moon Knight is a really cool show. It’s on Disney Plus, if you haven’t seen it, it is about a man who has dissociative identity disorder, who is also a superhero, as many people in the Marvel Universe are. The show goes down the rabbit hole of a mystery dealing with ancient gods in Egypt. And it’s extremely cool. And there’s some very cool sound stuff that we’re looking forward to discussing with the crew here.
Timothy Muirhead 1:18
Yes, and speaking of the crew, let’s introduce our guests today. Starting with Moon Knight’s sound designer Kim Patrick. Kim has worked on a bunch of previous Marvel films and series and as credits as both a sound design/editor and as a foley artist on IMDb. Kim, how did you find jumping between those two worlds?
Kim Patrick 1:33
Well, I love Foley and I love sound effects. So I kind of do that regularly. part time work as a foley artist and I part time cut as the sound effects editor and do some sound designing. I started out as an intern for Randy Thom. So I got to sit in his room for a year and just learn all about sound design from a master, which was incredible. And then one of my first jobs out of the internship was actually walking Foley for Frank Rinella on a Star Wars series called Rebels. And that’s Bonnie’s fist pumping. Yes, I worked with Barney on that too. That was like that was also one of your first shows out of, coming out of Digi right?
Bonnie Wild 2:21
Yeah, yeah, it was. Yeah, that was that was the my first editorial and mix job at Skywalker. Yeah.
Timothy Muirhead 2:27
That’s a pretty great first gig.
Mark Kilborn 2:29
No kidding.
Bonnie Wild 2:30
It was Yeah.
Timothy Muirhead 2:32
Awesome. So that voice you just heard was Bonnie wild, regular listeners will know Bonnie from her previous appearance on Tonebenders in Episode 153. When we were talking about the Mandalorian. She was the RE recording mixer on I think half of the Moon Knight episodes in this series, and also the supervising sound editor. Welcome back, Bonnie.
Bonnie Wild 2:49
Hello.
Timothy Muirhead 2:50
And finally with us is Mac Smith, who was on our show previously to talk about the criminally underrated Nine Days back on episode 170. I was lucky enough to spend an afternoon with Mac in person recently, he seems like a really wonderful person. But I’m gonna save my final judgment on Mac until hearing from Barney and Kim, what it’s like working with him under pressure. Just how nice a guy is this MAC
Bonnie Wild 3:11
Mac is Great.
Timothy Muirhead 3:12
Welcome back Mac.
Mac Smith 3:16
Thanks, Tim. It’s a pleasure to be back.
Timothy Muirhead 3:18
So first question up, Moon Knight is kind of a unique thing in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, in that it’s not really connected to any previous characters or anything. It’s starting from scratch. Kim, how did that affect your approach to the sound design?
Kim Patrick 3:31
Yeah, that was really refreshing to be with new characters we haven’t seen before in any of the previous films or series. So that meant we weren’t tied to any established sounds. And we got to just run with it and whatever direction the showrunners wanted, and what we felt was appropriate for it as well. So it was a really exciting project from the get go just knowing that like, we’re gonna create totally new sounds for new character.
Timothy Muirhead 4:02
So one of those new sounds is the suit transformation. Let’s dig into that.
Kim Patrick 4:07
Well, that was definitely an evolving process. I would say. We did a lot of passes on it. I think the first pass we did was actually in episode five, we tried to do some early design stuff for that. And Mac and I both took a crack at it. We sent stuff to them, and we kept getting it shot back to us, that it wasn’t right. But we also weren’t getting particularly specific notes, other than they just didn’t like it. So that’s always a challenge to translate what they mean when they say they don’t like it. So you have to sort of go through all of your layers and reevaluate, come up with new ideas to go in a different direction from your first initial pass. So there was a weekend that Mac and I just spent the whole weekend making as many suit transformation ideas as we could. I think it was during a mix, Mac had called me up was like, “Can you work this weekend?”. And we’ll just like both do as many versions as we can and send it to them. And then hopefully they’ll like one of them.
Mac Smith 5:20
Yeah, it was a challenge. I think we were most of the way through episode two, which is really the first time you see the the suit transform. The note I remember getting from the client was it needs to sound “majestic”. Okay, what does that mean? So yeah, Kim and I just decided, let’s you know, it’s a very short sequence, it’s probably only like eight seconds. But let’s make as many versions as we can not reusing the same sounds make each version have completely different sounds. And then finally, there was one that they they picked and it was one of Kim’s,
Mark Kilborn 5:59
Do you remember what was in that? Are you able to share what was in that version that they ultimately liked?
Kim Patrick 6:14
Yeah, I was looking through. I think for that version, I had recorded page flips really close up to do all of the cloth transformation. And then I processed that through, I think through crystallizer, I ended up using a lot of the SoundToys bundle to process a lot of the magic stuff, a lot of phase mistress as well. It does a really good job of like taking an ordinary sound, and then turning it into like something magical. So I’m trying to remember what else was in there. I think, I don’t know if this ended up in that version. But I think some dog howling,
Mac Smith 6:54
I know that one of their notes from the very first one that we set from Episode Five was that they did not want it to sound metallic. So we knew to stay away from that.
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