Creating the dark, evil sounds of ‘Annabelle: Creation’ (includes exclusive video)

 

 

Last summer, director David Sandberg impressed audiences with his first feature length film Lights Out. It was a solid horror story, well-crafted visually and sonically. This summer Sandberg has taken on the story of Annabelle — part of The Conjuring universe, with Annabelle: Creation in theaters August 11th. Award-winning supervising sound editor/sound designer Bill R. Dean at Technicolor Los Angeles, who worked as sound supervisor on Sandberg’s Lights Out, says that Annabelle: Creation is even more intense than the first Annabelle film. “It’s scarier, creepier, and it has a great story as well. It keeps you engaged,” he says.

Director Sandberg uses sound as a way to paint a vivid picture of what’s happening off-screen. It’s an effective way to draw the audience in and it allows their imaginations to get involved in the story. Dean says, “David is really good at making the audience listen to get these clues to find out where the danger is coming from.” Here Dean talks about how they used sound to intensify the fear factor of Annabelle: Creation.

Members of the Annabelle: Creation sound team. Front row ( L to R ): Craig Mann, Laura Wiest, Bill Dean. Back row: Chase Keehn, Kevin Froines, Charley Stauber, Bruce Tanis, Paul Flinchbaugh, and Ando Johnson.
 
You worked on the first Annabelle film as a sound effects editor. Did that experience help for Annabelle: Creation? Or, was this film a ground-up approach?

Bill R. Dean (BD): I would say this film was 90% a new approach. One of the main differences is that the first Annabelle film was set in a city location while Annabelle: Creation is rural. Director David Sandberg really worked with the fact that they’re isolated. Isolation was a big concept in regards to the sound design on this film. The girls from an orphanage end up going to this house in the country where there is no one around.

Director David Sandberg really worked with the fact that they’re isolated. Isolation was a big concept in regards to the sound design on this film

Because of the evil that is there, there’s really nothing around. David didn’t want any birds or pleasant sounding bugs or things like that. He wanted them to feel very isolated.

The first Annabelle was set in Los Angeles and in Pasadena, so you always had that urban environment to give your characters a little bit of safety and normalcy with other people around. In this one, it doesn’t even matter if they leave the house, they’re in trouble. They are out in the middle of nowhere and there is nothing there to help them.
[tweet_box]Creating the dark, evil sound of ‘Annabelle: Creation'[/tweet_box]

There is one similarity. We have the tail end of the first movie in this one to help draw that line that the demon is moving through the generations. One thing I was able to carry forward from the original — even though it happens later in time, was some of the rocking chair sounds that Joe Dzuban and I used for the rocking chair in the first movie. Fans of the first film will recognize it as the same sound as the rocking chair in Mia’s room.

Another key component is the doll itself because it’s a complicated doll. It’s not really a toy. It’s more structural so its movement sounds are very characteristic and we made sure to get the actual prop so that we could match the movement sounds. That sound is consistent between the movies so that you know it’s the same one.

Bill R. Dean, on how they created an evil light bulb filament sound

It sounds like Annabelle: Creation is a starker environment than the first. What did you use to fill up the backgrounds in this film?

BD: The start of the movie is so pleasant. We learn about the daughter Bee [Samara Lee] and how much she is loved by her family. Her parents are so devoted to her and she is just a joy. The house, in the beginning, is set in this beautiful, pastoral scene with lovely birds and gorgeous music. The house looks beautiful.

After the accident when they lose Bee, there is nothing left but the evil. We come back to the house with a new set of girls and it’s a stark environment with angry bugs and no life in the trees anymore. You get to focus on the things that directly pertain to the girls because that is who we really care about. We know what has happened to the parents and we know what happened to their daughter Bee. And of course, we don’t want these new girls to get hurt.

David is really good at making the audience listen to get these clues to find out where the danger is coming from. We know what is coming and we want to protect the girls in the movie. We got to work a lot with different types of creaks of the house and little tiny sounds. For example, there is a great scene under the stairs when Linda [Lulu Wilson] is playing hide and seek and she found this great spot to hide which is under the staircase. Under there is a little storage area with a hidden door. She thinks it’s the best spot to hide but we (the audience) know that is NOT a good place to go.

That little whistle just draws the audience in even more. They are listening to this tiny little sound. Danger is right there and everybody knows it except Linda.

When she goes in there, the house is already quiet because everybody has gone out of the house. So every little creak or movement and the audience’s interest is already piqued. We’re listening really hard. There is a great shot that David did showing the vents that are underneath the steps that pass through into this stairway storage area. So we zoom in there with the camera and we see Linda’s hands come up around the grate because she’s so excited that her spot is so cool and that she can look out and see people but they can’t see her. As we get closer to it we start to hear a little whistle of the wind, a difference in air pressure between the main house and the area under the stairs. That little whistle just draws the audience in even more. They are listening to this tiny little sound. Danger is right there and everybody knows it except Linda.

What were David’s initial focus points for sound? What did he want to hash-out first?

BD: He already had worked on some sequences where he was concerned about how sound would play a part of it. He and Michel Aller (picture editor) were starting to cut the film even while they were still shooting. Even before I saw any of the picture, they would give me some sound effects requests for things here and there. This happens often on films. You get requests for ‘happy birds’ or ‘fast-car bys,’ but Michel and David’s requests were for ‘evil door slamming’ and ‘creepy dried skin movement.’ Their requests were much creepier and already artistic in nature from the get-go. It wasn’t just run-of-the-mill requests. That was fun.

Their requests were much creepier and already artistic in nature from the get-go. It wasn’t just run-of-the-mill requests. That was fun.

One of those requests was for a dumbwaiter. They needed dumbwaiter sounds. Of course, I grabbed the real sounds of dumbwaiters in old houses and sent those off. Then when I finally got the picture I saw that the dumbwaiter was all manual and there was no electricity.

There was also a big sequence that happens with the chairlift. The chairlift is a motorized chair that is attached to the stair rail and it helps folks who can’t get up and down the stairs properly. These are two hard effects that are super important because there is escape involved in both scenarios. David wanted them both to feel rickety like they haven’t been used in a long time. Those are some of the sounds they requested early on and those are some of the sequences that we really needed to get right in the first temp so that the audience could go along with the story.

We continued to refine those sounds as the process went on. It was fun because the realistic dumbwaiter sounds didn’t work with the scene. I tried instead to use big wood slide sounds. We tried metal but metal didn’t have the right feel. It didn’t feel like it was part of the house. It felt like it was taking too much focus away from Linda as she was trying to escape in the dumbwaiter.

I was able to make some nice big sounds. I took some sounds of ice blocks being moved on wood decking and really made those feel large. I moved them in different channels around us while we are in there with her so that we can really feel like she is expelling a lot of effort to try and escape. She’s working really hard and she can barely make it move because it was so old and worn out.

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Another part that we wanted to attack early on was the earthquake. As the movie progresses, the strength of the demon grows and David wanted to give that feeling as well. When the girls enter into this house, the demon starts to grow in strength because it can influence someone other than Mr. and Mrs. Mullins. Once it coerces someone to open the door that should never be opened its power just grows throughout the movie. So that was one of the aspects of David wanting the dumbwaiter to feel very wooden because at the end of the movie the demon’s power becomes so great that it can just move the house and destroy the house. He wanted to have the feeling of that power throughout the creaks of the wood of the house as the earthquake is shaking it apart.

As we got into the final mix, I really started digging into these high-frequency wood creak sounds. I could make them into these gargantuan, gigantic sounds to accentuate the power

I was able to take some recordings that I had done and some library recordings that were done in a high sample rate, and we were able to beef those up here and there to get us to the first temp. As we got into the final mix, I really started digging into these high-frequency wood creak sounds. I could make them into these gargantuan, gigantic sounds to accentuate the power. As we were working we were creating different vocal elements for the demon to convey power. We found that having the environment involved — and not just having a giant roar all the time, worked well. The whole environment is being affected by the demon’s power. The house is coming apart because so much power is being expressed. It’s just coming apart and creaking. That was fun to make what are some of the largest wood creaks that I have ever made. It was the perfect place to do it and it wasn’t even for a movie with a ship!

Another thing they wanted to start with early-on was the knuckle cracks. When Mr. Mullins [Anthony LaPaglia] tries to stop the demon with his crucifix there’s this horrific scene where he is holding the crucifix and the demon’s power just pulls his fingers apart from it and breaks them back. Ando Johnson (sound effects editor) and I had fun finding different cracks and putting those in. We’d go back and forth, like, “Oh these are super sharp let’s put these in.” And, “Oh that one feels too woody, let’s take that out and put in one that is a bit higher.” “Now we need more tendon pops, let’s put those in.”

We would build it up and it would just keep escalating in power. Then we sent that off to them even before we got to do our first temp. Those sounds were for their first mini preview that they were playing out of the Avid. That was one of the first sounds that got finalized. The knuckle cracks didn’t involve too much past that point because we got it where they wanted it before the audience saw it.

Of course every time the audience heard the knuckle cracks they’d cringe, which is exactly what they wanted.

Can you tell me about the vocal work you did for Annabelle: Creation?

We have to feel what that evil spirit is feeling and have someone who can really convey that through their performance.

BD: For this one, we knew early on that we would need to cast an actor to do it. I tried my best to sound like an evil demon but there is a limitation upon my vocal talents in regards to size, mass, vigor, and anger. I was using my voice for temp sounds, and a lot of people can probably identify with the fact that when you hear your own voice recorded you are mortified. You think you sound horrible. Then when you take that material and process it to make it sound bigger and meaner, it makes it even more difficult to live with. It’s my voice and it just doesn’t have the power that I needed. So early-on I was vying for casting a voice actor who can really give us some good stuff from the body and really give us a great performance. It’s not just “RAWR!” It needs to have character. We have to feel what that evil spirit is feeling and have someone who can really convey that through their performance.

We had an audition with several great guys who can do a lot of strong character voice work. We ended up casting Fred Tatasciore, who was my suggestion from the beginning. We really broke down the sections where we need to have demon vocalizations. We figured out exactly what we wanted the demon to do, whether it’s making attacking sounds or saying a few words, or making pain sounds or taunting sounds. Fred was terrific for that. We could give him crazy direction, like, “We need you to be the voice of that girl back there but she’s a demon. And now we need you to be the strongest demon in the world and you are destroying that house. Ok, go.”

We figured out exactly what we wanted the demon to do, whether it’s making attacking sounds or saying a few words, or making pain sounds or taunting sounds

I took his raw recordings, which we recorded at a high sample rate using a microphone that can capture high frequencies, like the Sanken CO-100k, as well as a Neumann U 87. We recorded everything at 192k. This way I had more high frequencies to play with when I pitched down his voice to make it sound more powerful. Fred is a great performer and having that extra high-frequency material helped it to sound real even when it’s really deep.

I used a lot of multiband compression/limiting via the McDSP ML4000 to accent certain parts of his vocal range for different parts of the film. Sometimes we needed it to be all about the low-end power and sometimes it would need a little bit more of the high-end clarity to cut through the music. I was able to manipulate the different frequency bands using limiting and compression to tailor the sounds to keep the power where we needed it and also to give us clarity to cut through things.

The ML4000 is a look-ahead multi-band limiter/compressor. You can really mess with the frequency band spectrum without it distorting. It’s great for experimentation because you can just start grabbing faders and ratios and knees. You can move it around and not have to deal with things getting overloaded. It takes care of that for you so you can find a sound or a setting that you like for a certain sequence and then you can just refine it.

I worked with this primarily in Soundminer. I would build a chain in Soundminer and vary the types of processing depending on what I needed to do. I’m a real fan of working with the VST rack in Soundminer because the pitch shifter in Soundminer is pretty great and you can experiment quickly to find different treatments and save those as settings. One treatment might work really well for the roars, and if I change this setting, it might work really well for the breathing. You can save these big assemblages of plug-ins as these different settings and you can tab quickly between them as you work through the movie.

 

What was the creepiest scene to work on? What were some of the sound choices you made there?

BD: There are a lot of really creepy scenes and it would change for me from day-to-day but they all had different challenges. I think one of my favorites is when Janice [Talitha Bateman] is first attacked by the demon. It’s a sequence that starts out with my favorite scare in the movie and it just runs the gamut. It’s intriguing to start with and then it’s just frightening until she is unconscious.

Janice is investigating the room that she shouldn’t go into, of course, and she sees little girl Bee as a ghost. That’s intriguing for the audience, like, what’s the real story of Bee? I don’t know if I would ever not have been scared but the first time I saw it I was in my room just watching it down and we see little Bee’s reflection in the window, and it’s this nice, cute little girl. Then she whips around and she’s this evil demon with yellow eyes. I was like, “AAAHHHH!”

You don’t see the demon anymore after that. You just focus on Janice and her escape. That’s great for me since now we have to convey the danger and power and growth of the evil that is happening all through sound.

That’s just the start of it. After that point, we focus just on what is happening to Janice. I think that is a really cool way that David shot it, and he and Michel edited the picture. You don’t see the demon anymore after that. You just focus on Janice and her escape. That’s great for me since now we have to convey the danger and power and growth of the evil that is happening all through sound.

Offstage we hear all of these pops and snaps, these horrible sounds. Then into the frame comes this evil, gnarled dark arm. The demon looks like it is now nine feet tall. We follow Janice out of the room and of course, she has a brace on her leg and needs to use the chairlift to get down the stairs. She gets onto the chairlift, which at this point has just been an innocuous appliance, and hits the switch but nothing happens. In the background, you can hear that the evil force is coming back. Janice gets the seatbelt on because that’s what’s keeping the chair from moving, and she hits the switch again. It starts to move. The music lowers a little bit and we go to Janice’s POV. She’s looking at the door as it opens up. You don’t know what to expect because before we saw this humanoid arm and so we think we’ll see the demon come out to attack her. Instead, it’s this icky black cloud that crawls along the door and the wall and comes up onto the ceiling.

Director David F. Sandberg, on making Annabelle: Creation and more

It was a lot of fun to design that sequence. It was a collaboration between myself and Adam Boyd. We were experimenting with having this giant low-end effect when you first see it so that the audience knows this is the demon in its new manifestation. Then we started experimenting with different clicking insects and bugs, the kind of things that make you worry that your skin is going to get touched or bitten.

That turned out to be a great frequency range to work with because it allowed the music to live in the midrange. The strings had their room and so this nasty, evil chittering sound of demonic gnats could live in its own space. They were covering the ceiling and there was no end to how big the cloud could get. They just kept growing and growing and Janice is just trying to get down the stairs away from it.

The strings had their room and so this nasty, evil chittering sound of demonic gnats could live in its own space

As she gets halfway down the stairs, you think she’s escaped but then the chair goes back up. It’s been taken over by the demon. Now the innocuous appliance sound takes on some of the evil. The chairlift is no longer just a little motor attached to a chair on the stair rail. It’s now something that the evil force is using to bring its prey back.

How did you twist the sound of the chair so that it’s no longer just an innocuous appliance?

BD: You have the different elements like the motor element, the metal scraping elements, and the dirty gear elements. The balance of all of those sounds now shifts. There’s a lot more harsh metal and it’s also where I used some of Fred [Tatasciore]’s vocalizations to start to bring that chair up. You can feel this low-end growl in there but you can still hear the electric and mechanical aspects of it. The demon’s vocal presence is the sound that is drawing it back up so it becomes another one of the pieces that helps to convey the fear and the danger that it’s going to take Janice back up into the field of battle. She can’t escape anymore.
 

This film was mixed in Dolby Atmos. Did you know that it would be in Atmos while you were creating the sound for the film?

BD: We didn’t know that they wanted to release it in Atmos. We found out while we were starting to final the film that they were going to go ahead and do an Atmos release. My first thought was, “Oh man, I wish we would have known that at the beginning.” But then I started thinking about it a little bit more and realized that we were in a good position to retool the pieces that we had as needed.

I’ve found that the directionality that Atmos gives to a show is really best exploited when the overall sound level is low. If you have music playing very lightly then you have a lot of room to move sounds around the sonic space. If music is really taking the scene and being the main audible component then you can’t get as much definition. So I focused on the scenes where the music was not at the forefront. When we went to do the Atmos mix, those were the scenes we were able to get the best result from. The scenes where the characters are really listening to what is happening around them are the scenes that play best in Atmos because we can really move sounds around.

For example, when the older girls are listening for Mrs. Mullins [Alicia Vela-Bailey] and her bell, the music isn’t as loud because the girls are listening for just that sound. We can really feel the footsteps and the bell and the crinkling nastiness of her old decrepit skin moving around the girls.

We can really feel the footsteps and the bell and the crinkling nastiness of her old decrepit skin moving around the girls

Also, there’s the scene with Janice in the barn, the music launches us into it and then it rises to a crescendo and then goes away. Then Janice is left under the planks in the barn trying to hide and so she is listening and the audience is listening and we start to hear these creaks and these big footfalls. In Atmos, we are really able to move that stuff right above us and put it behind us so that wherever Janice is looking we can really localize those sounds there very precisely.

 

For the cloud of demonic gnats, were you able to pull those off the screen and bring those overhead in Atmos?

BD: Yeah, absolutely. When we first see it, we are in Janice’s POV so it’s in front of us. Then we cut to the reverse and we see her reaction so as an audience member we are now closer to the cloud and so we are able to make it louder and put it right behind us and all around us and keep the music primarily up front so that’s a great Atmos moment because you can really feel that icky bug stuff starting to get onto your skin.

 

Any fun field recordings for Annabelle: Creation?

BD: When they first asked me about the chairlift I thought, “I’m going to have to go and record this thing.” So I got in contact with a guy who repairs chairlifts. He was not very encouraging. He told me they were very quiet because they had to replace them every eight years because the safety standards change. I thought well ok, I’ll just have to go back to doing what I do and making it sound right by using other elements. Apparently, the chairs are really quiet. That’s what they told me about the one on-set as well. The one they installed for the film was basically a brand-new unit. They said, “Bill you have to do something with this because the sound is basically nothing.”

Another important sound was Mrs. Mullins’s bell. … It boiled down to which bell worked best for when the girls were hiding under the sheet and Mrs. Mullins was getting closer and closer.

Another important sound was Mrs. Mullins’s bell. She’s an invalid and can’t walk so she uses the bell to call Mr. Mullins to come in and help her. When we were first starting on the movie the bell was a few different sounds and the production bell was attached to some of the dialogue. So we had all these different bells in the film and we had to make a decision. We recorded 7 to 10 different bells, different series of them, and David chose three including the production bell. It boiled down to which bell worked best for when the girls were hiding under the sheet and Mrs. Mullins was getting closer and closer. That was the one that we went with in the movie. We worked so hard on it because we wanted to make each scene as good as it could be.

I recorded more creaks at my house and some wood drags and scrapes for when Janice first gets attacked. She gets knocked to the floor and she gets pulled back and her fingernails just gouge into the wood. So I recorded some more wood scraping and dragging fingernails and grabs and things like that. We recorded some wood creaks and high-frequency wood splits so that we could pitch them down more and use them for the earthquake sequence.

I wanted to get new sounds that would really work well for this film. So one weekend I asked my wife if she would like to join me for a romantic day… recording gravel

Another thing I recorded (which doesn’t sound so exciting) was some gravel because the girls arriving and departing from the house in the bus are big sections of the movie and I wanted to get new sounds that would really work well for this film. So one weekend I asked my wife if she would like to join me for a romantic day… recording gravel.  She graciously agreed and we spent a chilly day recording tires on gravel from various perspectives and speeds.

We didn’t get to record any actual demons though. But that’s a good thing. They mess with your microphone diaphragms and your gear is just never the same after that.

One really fun recording though was for this little light bulb sound. We needed an evil light bulb filament sound for a sequence in the barn. I had an idea to record all these different light bulbs but I wanted to change how the light bulbs sounded so I called the engineering department here at Technicolor to see if they had a voltage regulator. Evan Rautiainen showed up with a power amplifier for speakers and said we’re going to power the light bulbs with that while we use a synthesizer to send sounds to the filament of the light bulb.

It’s always good to have a lot of smart folks around. It started with this idea that I had and then Evan came up with this other idea. That was fun to spend the day working out how we would do it and then just recording a whole bunch of different bulbs and different types of sounds feeding it. That is such a small component in the entire scope of the film but it was a really fun, explorative moment. We weren’t throwing aircraft off of the building into a parking lot to record it or anything like that. It was this focused little sound, this interesting idea that helps to convey the story. It’s fun when you can get other people involved who are super excited about it as well. (And who have the know-how to help you achieve your crazy ideas). That just encourages you to come up with even crazier ones.

In terms of sound, what are you most proud of on Annabelle: Creation?

Linda shoots it and the cable goes tight you know the demon is out there. You don’t see it. You have to listen. You see the string rising up and you wonder what’s next.

BD: It’s a really good sounding film and I got to work with a great group of folks on it. Sound-wise, I’m proud of the sequence when Linda is waiting with her popgun just in case something happens. She is going to use the popgun to protect herself. David has this great scene where Linda is shooting the ball into the hallway and the demon grabs it, but you don’t see the demon do anything. The scene starts with these cute little play sounds of the popgun and then we have great Foley of the ball bouncing (that the Foley crew recorded for us). I also re-recorded the popgun elements itself so that we could have a whole lot of detail for the different shots. There is the sound of the reel winding it in and for when it shoots out. All of the sounds pull you tightly into the sequence so that the second time that Linda shoots it and the cable goes tight you know the demon is out there. You don’t see it. You have to listen. You see the string rising up and you wonder what’s next.

David came up with the idea of having giant footfalls just running toward the doorway. We address that in two different ways. I recorded a bunch of different sounds at home of me running, with mics underneath my floor as well as mics on top. I’m running back and forth away from the mic and to the mic at different rates so I can pitch it up and down. We ended up using a combo of the recordings I did at the house with the footsteps that David had chosen. It’s another one of those scenes that’s all about the sound because the footsteps increase in weight and speed as it gets closer, and it’s coming right at us. We’re right there in Linda’s point of view and what can she do? She goes into the top bunk because she has nowhere to escape. David shot it so that we are just watching her. When the footsteps stop, she’s in bed. Then we hear little feet and the bed shakes. We see the bed shake and we know it’s in her bed. It’s another really fun sequence.

It’s fun to be an integral part of the filmmaking, in that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The image that we are seeing is augmented so strongly by what we hear that the story is that much more involved. It’s simple but very elegant and I think that is something that is fun to be part of, and I’m really proud of that.

 

It sounds like David leaned a lot on the sound to fill in the blanks and let the audience’s imagination help the visuals along…

BD: That’s a big part of it, to get the audience’s imagination involved in it. What the demon looks like is not as important as feeling frightened that it is there. It’s just conveying to the audience through sound and the snippets of visuals, like the bed shaking and the cord on the popgun going tight, what is happening in this house to these girls. Those are the cues that communicate the presence of danger and it allows the audience’s imagination to run wild. If you lead them along, then the audience will go even further. They will follow the story and make it even stronger in their own minds.

 

A big thanks to Bill R. Dean for giving us a look at the suspenseful sound of Annabelle: Creation, and to Jennifer Walden for the interview!

 

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