How Sound Oscar Nominees From ‘Wicked’ to ‘Emilia Perez’ Created Emotion
From “Defying Gravity” to “Like a Rolling Stone,” music was a thread through many of this year’s sound Oscar nominees as “A Complete Unknown,” “Emilia Perez” and “Wicked” all involved live singing as part of their sonic work. But category noms, rounded out by “Dune: Part Two” and a rare animated film, “The Wild Robot,” all involved unique creative approaches.
“Primarily, the edict was to do live,” supervising sound editor, designer and rerecording mixer John Marquis says of Jon M. Chu’s adaptation of the stage musical “Wicked,” noting Cynthia Erivo, who plays Elphaba, and Ariana Grande, as Glinda, performed live.
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He added that production sound mixer Simon Hayes “was very detailed in mic placement and making sure we’re capturing everything, so as much live material as possible.” Supervising sound editor Nancy Nugent Title adds that this involved coordination “with every department, including costume, the effects, lighting and and cinematography. [For instance] he worked with the costume department as far as placing microphones on each actor.”
Even when production involves live singing, it’s not uncommon to incorporate other vocal tracks for various technical reasons. Rerecording mixer Andy Nelson relates that for this musical, “We wanted to go with [live recordings of the singing] wherever possible, because of the immediacy and the connection you get to the actors.”
Marquis adds that sound work also involves making “the environment an instrument.” Citing the Ozdust ballroom scene, he says, “You have a scene that’s built on partying and fun and living life to its fullest. And Elphaba crashes into that, and the world comes crashing down. So you go from something very full and jovial and fun to a very stark, lonely, timid moment of just raw emotion.”
Supervising sound editor and rerecording mixer Cyril Holtz notes that there are many ways to approach a music-driven film and for the nominated genre-defying crime-musical-drama, “the first thing [director] Jacques Audiard said was that ‘Emilia Perez’ was not a musical. Actually, it was more like a drama.
“I always wanted us to totally get rid of boundaries between music and sound effects, between dialog and songs,” he adds, saying the aim of transitions between dialogs and songs were “sometimes to be very abrupt, and to have really like sudden breakups, but also to have very smooth and seamless transitions between all those elements. As it was not really a musical, we had to play with all the genres.”
The work also involved creating the sounds of the various countries in which the story occurs. “Our main concern before postproduction was Mexico, trying to be as as real as possible,” Holtz remembers, saying members of the team recorded sounds “in markets and in the desert, so we had a very extensive library of sounds.”
For “A Complete Unknown,” production sound mixer Tod A. Maitland says he had microphones “everywhere” while filming the Timothee Chalamet-starring Bob Dylan biopic’s 1965 Newport Folk Festival scene. “Everybody was wired on stage. And the practical microphones were all period.”
Rerecording mixer Paul Massey describes the sonic arc they created of the sequence, during which three songs are performed in electric mode with the band and before Dylan goes back to acoustic. “We wanted each one of the those songs to build so that it was never starting to deflate for the audience, even though the audience around him at the folk festival wasn’t always appreciating what he was doing.”
Supervising sound editor Don Sylvester adds in that scene and throughout the film, the crowds and other external forces and sounds of the ’60s were vital. “The audience in the concerts was a character in the film, a very important character. We hear them talk, we hear them cheer. We hear their feelings and emotions.”
“Dune: Part Two” supervising sound editor and designer Richard King noted that director Denis Villeneuve wanted to expand the world of Arrakis in the sequel, noting “he used the word ‘documentary’ as a way to describe the kind of sound we wanted, [meaning] that it was to feel like all the sounds you were hearing in this fantastical world were actually recorded on the day.” They went out and recorded sounds, for instance, in the desert, to capture the sense of the “real world.”
The climatic worm-riding sequence, King says, had to convey the emotional arc with Paul [Chalament], first “being out of control and right on the verge of disaster. And he slowly gains confidence and gains control of the sand worm. … You really have to think of the sound design effects track like music, you know, with exciting frequency shifts and compelling movement changes.
“It really was just about sitting down with that scene and working on it for weeks and coming back to it–feeling like this moment could be enhanced, or this moment could be a little more frightening,” he continues. “We are all working from our gut instincts.”
The final nom is “The Wild Robot,” a rare animated feature in the category. Supervising sound designer Randy Thom noted that in the titular robot Roz, voiced by Lupita Nyong’o, he and director Chris Sanders wanted her movements to “avoid some of what have become sort of cliches of robot sounds … There are lots of films who have used that kind of sound very well, but we didn’t want to duplicate that.”
He started the process by listening to and recording things like pneumatic and hydraulic systems, which proved useful. “It occurred to me that, in a way, those sounds are a little like breathing. I started doing experiments, just kind of breathing into the microphone, inhaling and exhaling in sync with Roz’s movements. And it worked. You still buy it as a movement sound, especially if you process it in a certain way,” he says. “That turned out to be a really interesting and useful coincidence, that the sound of human breath synchronized with her movements would be believable as robot movements, and in a subtle way, reinforce this idea that she’s kind of alive and organic in some sense.”
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