2021 MUSIC+SOUND AWARDS
BEST SOUND DESIGN IN A FEATURE FILM
BEST SOUND DESIGN IN A FEATURE FILM
Chaos Walking
Entrant: Formosa Group
Sound Designers: Lon Bender, Luke Gibleon, Alex Nomick, Jeff Pitts, Mariusz Glabinski + Rusty Dunn
Director: Doug Liman
Further project information from Formosa…
Chaos Walking was a very unique film as it relates to storytelling with sound. It all centers around what’s called “The Noise”. The noise is an effect the planet’s atmosphere has on men who live there. We can hear their thoughts, and sometimes even see their thoughts. This turned out to be a massive undertaking.
In addition to the “Noise”, there was already the large job of creating the sound for a feature sci-fi film, on a new planet, with its own species, environment, and action sequences. We designed new sounds for the planet, weapons, gear, and the planet’s humanoid species, the “Spackle”.
The “Spackle” were fun to design. We wanted them to be a peaceful, curious creature, who could still be aggressive and powerful. As they communicate through “Noise”, we worked on sounds that had an emotive feel, using warm deep lower animal sounds we would pitch along with clicks like a dolphin, that helped to add a curious element to the creature.
Then there was the job of creating “The Noise”. This was an extremely experimental process that involved a lot of people trying a whole number of ideas. The prime directive was that this “noise” had to feel diegetic, a natural moving source in the environment. The director, Doug Liman, was adamant that the “noise” not have the “Voice of God” effect often used for VO or character’s thoughts in other films where thoughts are on display for audiences. Job one then became, how can we make this work, for an entire film, without it becoming overwhelming, or gimmicky? How can we piece this together in such a way that it feels natural for the audience, so they be introduced naturally, and not get pulled out of the film?
What was also very unique about this already unique process, was the sound department being given the green light to come up with a lot of the actual spoken material, not just the sound of it. So we actually wrote a lot of the noise ourselves.
“The Noise” was made up of 3 groups. The first group we called ‘noise clean.’ And that is the words themselves, the actual thoughts of the characters.
The second group was called ‘noise processing.’ That was created by effects chains, and we fed the ‘clean noise’ through that.
The third group is called ‘noise wrap.’ That was an additional layer of sound design that sat on top of this ‘clean noise’ and ‘noise processing’ that also synced heavily to the visual effects that we saw that represented the noise.
For the “clean noise” the editorial department provided us with a skeleton-of-sorts of the thoughts each character had. Then, by diving into every recording we had, as well as getting new recordings from soundalike actors, we would fill out the thoughts so they felt a little bit more freeform and free-flowing.
Another important concept we had to introduce was a “mantra”. A meditation device used to control thoughts, primarily to keep others from hearing a character’s inner thoughts. Todd’s mantra was “I am Todd Hewitt.” The mayor’s was “I am the circle, the circle is me.”
The preacher Aaron, his “noise” was completely different. He fully embraces his “noise”, and wants it on full display. He was a very cool character to create noise for. We actually recorded all of his lines as 3 different performances. One, as a preacher to his congregation, another, as a sinister whisper, and the third, as a wild scream. We would weave these performances around each other and it created a very cool effect.
The “Noise processing” group is where we sent all of the noise through processing chains that gave it an effect.
The first effect involved using Altiverb’s Iron bath. We then pitched the effect up with Soundtoys Little AlterBoy. For Todd, we did six semitones as he’s the younger kid; he’s the youngest of the group so it helped his youth a bit. Whereas all the other characters, we pitched up two semitones. So Todd would sound different from the other characters.
The second effect used Zynaptiq’s Wormhole, a cool plugin that also has a bit of reverb to it, but it also has a modulating sound with a really long tail.
The third processing we had, was one of the effects in TL Space. The effect in TL Space had a very watery sound. As the ‘noise’ itself looks very wavy and free-flowing, it helped create that tail that the ‘noise’ had.
We then put The Cargo Cult’s Spanner on these 7.0 ‘noise processing’ chains so we could automate the Spanner separately from the actual ‘clean noise’ itself. That way we could independently control the panning of this processed ‘noise’.
If the visual elements for the ‘noise’ were trailing — like a character is maybe moving off-screen or moving to a different location, we could take the tail of that ‘noise’ and pan that separately in Atmos, which created a really neat effect.
When visual effects sent back the visual ‘noise,’ that’s when we added the third element, which is the ‘noise wrap.’ It’s made up of three different sound design effects that we created. We pieced that together and went through the entire movie, manually creating it against the look of the ‘noise’ for every character and syncing it up. Aaron/the Preacher had that fire element in his ‘noise’, so there were fire layers in his ‘noise wrap’ also.
So that’s how we came up with “The Noise”.
To read more, check out their interview in www.asoundeffect.com
Full Credits:
Chaos Walking
Entrant: Formosa Group, California
Sound Designers: Lon Bender, Luke Gibleon, Alex Nomick, Jeff Pitts, Mariusz Glabinski + Rusty Dunn
Supervising Sound Editors: Lon Bender + Luke Gibleon
Supervising Dialog, ADR Editor: Alexa Zimmerman
Sound Mixer: Simon Poudrette
Sound Effects Editors: Peter Staubli, Ronald Eng + Christopher Bonis
Dialog Editors: Michael McMenomy, Dan Newman + Andy Hay
Assistant sound editors: Pernell Salinas + Eric Mcallister
Foley Artists: Leslie Bloome + Joanna Fang
Foley Mixers: Ryan Collison + Connor Nagy
Foley Editors: Nick Seaman + Laura Heinzinger
Director: Doug Liman
Film Studio: Lionsgate
