MUSIC+SOUND AWARDS 2024 WINNER SPOTLIGHT
BEST SOUND DESIGN IN A TELEVISION SERIES / PROGRAMME
BEST SOUND DESIGN IN a television SERIES or programme
The Continental: From the World of John Wick
Entrant: Formosa Group
Sound Designers: Luke Gibleon, Nick Interlandi, Joshua Adeniji, Angelina Faulkner, Borja Sau
Supervising Sound Editor: Luke Gibleon
Re-Recording Mixers: Joe Barnett + Adam Jenkins
Audio Engineer: Cameron Combe
Foley Artists: Adrian Medhusrt + Duncan Campbell
Director: Albert Hughes
The sound team at Formosa Group took home the Music+Sound Award this year for Best Sound Design in TV for their groundbreaking work on The Continental: From the World of John Wick.
Let's hear how they brought this iconic world to life through sound…
“This was a very sound-intensive show, especially for a more broadcast style of show with broadcast resources. Though there were only 3 episodes, each episode was around 90min, and treated a little more like a movie than a show.
The action needed to sound like action of the John Wick world. I like to call it precision violence. We want each moment to be heard and have its own impact. These fights and action scenes are so well choreographed, it’s important we do our job with sound to help tell this story with sound. And that can be seconds, of even frames at a time. If it’s not precise and carefully crafted, it can get messy, and unfocused quickly, and the audience won’t be able to experience the story and action the way it’s meant to be interpreted. So we create this hyperreal, graphic novel action, that feels natural.
The director Albert also added his own style to the show with his filmmaking. It’s very edgy, and has a totally different flare than what’s done in the John Wick movies. Lots of transitional design, subjective moments, and blackness as Albert calls it (working in black frames) that requires sound to tell the story. It is fun, edgy, and pops out, grabbing you for a different immersive experience. It’s very bold and stylistic.
We got to do a lot of sound design with music for this series. Some of it was with the composer, like a thematic pulse we came up with. They also scored to heli blades we made. However, where we did a ton of sound design to music, was with almost all of the needle drops (the wonderful songs of the 70’s) - and the show is packed with them. Most of the time, filmmakers just turn the sound effects way down while the needle drops play, but Albert wanted it to be immersive, and having sound design to these needle drops helped a bunch to achieve that. The post production department actually shared a live spread sheet with me that updated every time a song was licensed (approved). That’s when I knew we could design to it. My favorite was “One (Is the Loneliest Number)” by Three Dog Night. It’s in Night 3, Mel Gibson’s character Cormac is riding in a unique elevator (I wont spoil it). We made the elevator gears and mechanical movement clank along to the electric keyboard. When he gets out we have some fun, gigantic footsteps. He’s in a hidden area in the walls, where pipes are running. We used the steam running through the pipes to create a false rise with the phrase of the song, then grow to the opening of a door. They play so well together, it really works to elevate this fun moment.
In Night 1 we have environmental elements playing along to a Satana song. A person shaking a salvation army bell to it, a subway horn rising with a long sustained organ chord, with the subway’s doors and hydraulics all playing in rhythm with the song. It was a lot of fun to create.
The dialog/ADR work for the show was very involved. There was a lot of dialog cleanup and smoothing, but also a fair amount of ADR and Group ADR recorded.
We had to record almost all of one main character’s lines. Jenkins. He was very mumbly and had a thick southern accent. It was very hard to understand what he said, so most of his lines are ADR. We also had to re-record almost all of the character Yen’s English lines as she was just starting to learn English at the time. In addition to that, we had to re-record all Vietnamese lines by the English actors to capture the correct pronunciations.
Then we needed to record fighting efforts for almost all of the main characters, as well as the henchmen/bad guys. There’s quite a few fights in the show, especially for a broadcast show.
We also recorded a lot of group ADR. The director wanted the show and world to be very experiential and immersive, and that was helped greatly by putting a lot of group actors in the environments, especially in and around New York City. We did Group ADR for most of the henchmen/bad guys throughout the show. The show runner actually wrote a lot of specific lines for Group ADR background and henchmen characters.”
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