‘Noise’ is key in Chaos Walking – here’s how the sound team solved that huge creative challenge:

What if everyone around you could hear what you were thinking? Would you try to hide your thoughts? Control them? Or mentally yell them as loud and proud as possible?

In director Doug Liman’s film Chaos Walking — in theaters now — the male occupants of a foreign planet are dealing with this condition of thought-projection that they call ‘noise,’ which has somehow been caused by the planet’s atmosphere.

Hearing the thoughts of all of the male characters in a film, all the time, could get loud and confusing quickly. It could be overwhelming.

From logistical and creative standpoints, this ‘noise’ challenge raised numerous questions for the sound team. Do they make all thoughts intelligible? Do words swim in and out incoherently? What would thoughts sound like outside the mind? How would the atmosphere affect them? Are they futzed? Soaked in reverb? Or do they sound clean? Does the ‘noise’ sound different for each person? And if so, are there common attributes to the ‘noise?’

It’s no wonder that discovering the sound of the ‘noise’ took more than a year and many different approaches.

Here, supervising sound editor Lon Bender and sound designer Luke Gibleon at Formosa Group, sound designer Alex Nomick, sound designer Mariusz Glabinski, and mix engineer Stefan Wörner at FFS Film-& Fernseh-Synchron GmbH talk about how they honed in on the ‘noise,’ sharing details of paths they explored, steps they retraced, and ideas they ultimately combined in the refined version that plays in the film, and in all the foreign language versions of it as well.

Chaos Walking (2021 Movie) Official Trailer – Daisy Ridley, Tom Holland, Nick Jonas

Chaos Walking presents this unique idea of ‘noise,’ which is basically the thoughts of men that can be heard by everyone around them. What were director Doug Liman’s thoughts on how this ‘noise’ could sound?

Lon Bender (LB): This was an extremely long process, with the film and with Doug. I worked on this film for 14 months and there were a lot of people before me that had come in to try and come up with a sound for the ‘noise.’

Supervising sound editor Lon Bender

The early phases of the ‘noise’ were very different. It pursued Doug’s idea of how the ‘noise’ would reveal itself in pieces of words and was very staticky. Originally, Doug had in his mind that there were sort of electric synapses — this concept of energy inside the brain. He was metaphysical about it and physiological about it when he would talk about it. He really thought there was going to be these pieces of thoughts flying around inside the mind of each character. And that would be how you’d most effectively hear it in the film.

We didn’t even talk about the visuals at that time. Although, they were working on visuals simultaneously as we were working on the sonic development.

So in the film now, you can see this Aurora Borealis look of the ‘noise,’ and the sound of the ‘noise’ is very much attuned to understandability on top of everything. It’s very different from where we were in the early previews of the film. It was nothing like it is now.

I’ve worked with Doug once before, and I think his process always has been to try everything. He just wants to try stuff. That’s why he’s so involved with post-production and big on post-production because he wants to just try things.

[Doug’s] process always has been to try everything…That’s why he’s so involved with post-production…

So we had a team of people that were working on it in early March of 2019. And we finished the film at the end of 2020/beginning of 2021. We were trying all kinds of different things that were pursuing this idea of the sentences. In the early part, we had some of the dialogue from the characters of Todd and Viola that was worked out. They had some dialogue in place, and then there were all these pieces flying in and out.

Mariusz Glabinski (a New York-based sound editor who was working on the show locally in New York while our team was in L.A. during that time) was the frontline guy with that and worked with a lot of experimentation that had to do with cutting words up and having parts of them drop at different pitches and all kinds of things to make it feel like there was a scattering of thoughts in people’s mind that would come together and make a sentence.
 

That’s so cool!

LB: Isn’t it? But guess what? Cool doesn’t work when you can’t understand the movie. And that was the big lesson that everyone learned going through several previews — I think we had six previews. We learned that something can be cool for a moment or a scene or three scenes strung together. But as soon as you get an act strung together or a movie strung together, and you can’t understand what they’re saying, the audience is lost. They’re completely unengaged.

Cool doesn’t work when you can’t understand the movie.

I think that’s why it was so difficult.

Before I got involved with the show, there were people that Doug had gone to, to try this and that. They tried all kinds of cool stuff, but it turned out that it needed to be more than cool. It needed to be subtly cool in a way that was so organic you wouldn’t notice it, as opposed to it being affected in a way that made you go, “That’s so cool.” That was one of the big developments that we came across.

Sound designer Mariusz Glabinski

Mariusz, could you talk about your approach to the ‘noise’ in those early experiments?

Mariusz Glabinski (MG): My first introduction to the concept of the ‘noise’ for the Chaos Walking was back in 2017, as we were finishing another Doug Liman film The Wall. Doug was talking about bouncing around some ideas for it.

This was before any filming took place; he was planning and already thinking about the sound of the ‘noise.’

Then in the early spring or summer of 2019, I joined Lon‘s Formosa team working on the film from New York City.

Then in the early spring or summer of 2019, I joined Lon‘s Formosa team working on the film from New York City.

They were already working on the film for some time, but since Doug was editing in NY, they needed someone to be here working with him.

First, I started working from my home studio, creating sounds and sending them to both Doug and Lon. Then we quickly realized that it will be much more productive for me to just move to the picture department location, to be next to Doug and the whole editing team.

From there, Doug could just stop by my editing room anytime to check on new ideas and sounds.

Not long before Chaos Walking, I worked on a different sci-fi show, and had some templates with plugins and presets established.

I started with manipulating dialogue lines and some sound effects through chains of plugins in those sessions.

The Cargo Cult Envy, iZotope Stutter Edit, Eventide H3000 Harmonizer and some NI Kontakt instruments were among those I used first.

Then I experimented with Spectrasonics Omnisphere and Portal by Output, a plugin that I only used before on musical instruments. But it has some very interesting settings that can take your sounds to a next level and is easy to manipulate and automate.

So that was my starting point. The idea was that the ‘noise’ should sound organic, because it’s a part of that planet’s atmosphere. But also scattered and glitchy.
[tweet_box]Crafting the ‘noise’ for ‘CHAOS WALKING'[/tweet_box]

The idea was that the ‘noise’ should sound organic, because it’s a part of that planet’s atmosphere.

By then there were no visual effects, and Doug would sometimes show me some short videos of different visual things that he found on the internet, and what he thought the ‘noise’ may look like at that point.

At those early stages, I would often just set the session markers at the specific locations of the ‘noise’ throughout the film, play each reel and use my midi keyboard to play and record midi live almost like playing music.

Stutter and Kontakt only respond to midi, and all the other plugins are easily programmable to have midi implemented. That gave me some freedom of not getting too technical, and just recording long takes of interesting sounds, both as midi and recording actual audio output from the chain. Then I would edit small snippets of what sounded right or interesting from each pass and edited those together.

Each character in the film had different specifics to his ‘noise.’ For example, the Preacher was full of maniacal rage, the Mayor was able to control his ‘noise’ better than anyone else and Todd was young, spontaneous, and innocent and was just learning to control his ‘noise.’

Each character in the film had different specifics to his ‘noise.’

I tried to have some element in my sounds reflecting each of those aspects. For example, in one of the early tries for the Preacher, I added some sounds from Cinesamples VOXOS Epic Chorus, which is a simulation of virtual choir voices that you can play like a piano, building very strange phrasing of words but it sounds very realistic. I thought that adding that element may work well with him being a preacher. Also, he is a scary character and those sounds are menacing.

Usually, when I work on a project with other sound editors, everybody is responsible for different sounds, and I work on specific sounds by myself, so often it is easy to get lost in the creative process and not remember every setting and parameter of each plugin. I record automation and midi, but still, when you are making sounds live the way I did, there is always something that you tweak and forget to record or document.

So quickly enough I learned that because I was cooperating with Lon and a few other sound designers in Los Angeles, we were exchanging sounds, ideas, and whole sessions between each other. I had to be extremely careful and accurately document my every move, change, and automation tweak since often they were recreating and taking what I had done here in NY (and what Doug had approved) to the next level.

I had to be extremely careful and accurately document my every move, change, and automation tweak…

Also, I feel a little bad about this but, on their end, they had to purchase every plugin I tried here, even something that, after a few tries, we decided wasn’t working at all. I didn’t want them to get annoyed with me, so I quickly stopped looking for any new quirky and twisted plugins that I can get my hands on, and just stuck with what I had already used.

We had many daily conversations with Lon about any progress and new ideas, as well as many conference calls with the whole sound designing team from Formosa. So there was no worry about going any wrong direction because Lon was coordinating everything very well.

That was all early on. We had temp mixes in NY almost every second week, and each time the sound of the ‘noise’ was evolving a lot. We were still painting in broad strokes at that stage and were looking for something special and new to present to Doug each time.

At that point, Doug didn’t care much about understanding the dialogue in the ‘noise,’ only some particular words coming out of the ‘noise’ in specific places. I had a few spotting sessions with Doug and Alison Winter (Doug’s producer and creative partner) to get those right spots and the right words and the right amount of intelligibility of each line.

A few times we brought in sound-alike actors to record new lines or to emphasize specific existing lines for that.

We had clean lines and clean words on one bank of faders, then various processed or distorted lines on other ones, and then some glitchy, flanging or phasing sound design on the other banks of tracks.

We had clean lines and clean words on one bank of faders, then various processed or distorted lines on other ones…

During our several temp mixes for different previews here in NY, I and our mixer at Postworks/Technicolor NY Christopher Koch were able to quickly adjust the amount of the effect added by just changing the balance between those three different elements.

Then we waited for notes from the preview and from Lon and Doug. Often, early the next morning after a conference call with everybody in LA and NY, we would start the whole process again, keeping what had worked and looking for some new ideas for the sounds that didn’t.

At one point later in the process, Doug really responded well to an effect that was almost an artifact of one of the earlier Stutter dialogue passes I did. It was a word that was repeated several times, almost like a delay, but with very slight pitch changes.

…Doug really responded well to an effect that was almost an artifact of one of the earlier Stutter dialogue passes I did.

And since from early drafts, both our picture editor Doc Crotzer and Lon had many successful ideas with altering pitch in the ‘noise,’ Doug asked me to expand on that. But instead of using a Stutter Edit plugin again, which had less ways of precisely controlling exactly what I wanted, I had an idea of trying to use the same words from different takes of each actor with different performances.

I would go through all the takes for each scene, and from each take I’d pull that particular word and then space it around the actual word in the dialogue of the film, placing some slightly before and some right after just like a delay effect. I’d also change volume and pitch on each additional word.

All the other ‘noise’ lines were unintelligible and playing underneath.

Then Alison and I went through the film a few times and added even more lines to more places. Again we’d bring in voice-alike actors to fill holes if we were changing some performances or even adding a new line.

This whole process was months and months of trying different methods and ideas from many great people…

This whole process was months and months of trying different methods and ideas from many great people, and I think what Lon and his team achieved at the end is really spectacular and something that every designer who contributed to the sound of the ‘noise’ should be proud of.

The most fun and exciting part of the whole process (with the exception of playing with all those great sounds) was the way we all collaborated under the watchful eye of Lon Bender. That was before the COVID19 lockdown and before everybody started working remotely — before Zoom became our everyday meeting room.

But we did it with ease; we all worked remotely and in unison, exchanging tons of ideas on an everyday basis. It was really a wonderful, collaborative process, and a great learning experience working with Lon and his super team!!!

Luke, you and sound designer Jeff Pitts helped to transform the ‘noise’ into how it sounds in the final film. Can you talk about that process of discovery?

Luke Gibleon: The discussion we kept on having throughout the entire process — even when we were doing all of these experimental things that had lots of crazy and really interesting sounds — was about how to make this ‘noise’ feel diegetic to the film, inside the actual environment that they’re in, and how to do it in a way that’s not overwhelming.

Sound designer Luke Gibleon

And as Lon said, it had to not just work in a scene, but work in an act, work for the entire length of the film and not end up feeling overwhelming or gimmicky. How can we piece this together in such a way that it feels natural for the audience, so they can experience it in a natural way?

It was a process though. It was a very, very big process.

The ‘noise’ was built out of three main elements and each element in and of itself had a pretty in-depth process built into making that ‘noise.’

LB: It was a difficult process, how we went about actually coming up with the sound that you hear in the film today.

Luke, let’s talk about the March-April period, the beginning part of what we were doing to the dialogue.

LG: Initially, it was more about pieces and sporadic thoughts — like catching a word or two. As Lon said, the intelligibility wasn’t there.

LB: At that time, we were using Envy as one of the plugins to turn a vocal into a scratchy vocal. It would come in and out of focus. We also used Stutter Edit as well…

LG: Also, because we were having to do temps, we were using pitch and panning that were set to renders that kept moving just slightly here and there. They were variations on it that kept it sounding ever-moving.

LB: And so those were playing live in tracks as opposed to rendering things.

Rendering made it easier to conform because this processing ate up a lot of DSP.

We did render the Envy material and the Stutter Edit material into 7.0. (Actually, we used all 7.1 just so everything could go on any track, but we never used the sub for that.)
Rendering made it easier to conform because this processing ate up a lot of DSP. These sessions were having a very hard time chugging through a lot of it. So we finally did render those elements, processing them using Envy and Stutter Edit.

In terms of pitch, there was a big interest in this sort of bass drop sound for a long time. That was one of the elements that were “so cool.” The ends of a word would pitch-bend down. (These were things that caught Doug’s attention at different times.) That led us through a good part of the summer of 2019.

We took some time off and came back in 2020 and did some more previews. By that time, they recognized that the sort of broken-up approach wouldn’t work because people weren’t understanding the dialogue.

The picture editor Doc [Crotzer] was one of the greatest collaborators I’ve ever worked with.

The picture editor Doc [Crotzer] was one of the greatest collaborators I’ve ever worked with. He worked with both Luke and me, being in the edit with us, letting us do things, really letting us move the agenda forward, and relying on us to bring to the table things in conjunction with him. He didn’t just sit back and say, “You guys do it.” He’d come to our offices many times and would hang out. We really worked together on that.

The second thing that happened was the studio was saying, “Let’s just use reverb.” And Doug didn’t want to use reverb.

I had played for him the Firesign Theatre radio show Nick Danger and that has a really great ‘thought voice’ in it. They were using a combination of futz and echo. So I thought we should try some of that approach.

But instead of making it a plain echo, one of the successful things during one of the previews was Audio Ease’s Altiverb 7‘s iron bath preset. We were just looking through all the different settings on Altiverb 7 and just listening to them. And this one had a very interesting ringiness to it. That ringiness was the beginning — the very earliest phases — of what’s in the film now.

That ringiness was the beginning — the very earliest phases — of what’s in the film now.

Because the audience really stuck with the film, we went straight for that. We went through the whole movie and changed all of the ‘noise’ to that type of approach by playing it live and mixing it.

I mixed that over at Formosa Santa Monica. It was just a very fast temp-type thing. Alison [Winter], the producer, came in from New York and we worked through it quickly. But, it worked. The audience could understand what the thoughts were and that was a big win.

We liked it and we were high-fiving each other, but we felt that it wasn’t cool enough. Because we want things to be emotionally evocative in a way that keeps people’s attention and also makes it interesting for the characters’ interaction and plays on their emotions at the time.

So Luke got involved very heavily once we got to that phase.

LG: Now let’s dive into how exactly we ended up creating the entirety of the ‘noise.’

The ‘noise’ itself was made up of three different groups.

The ‘noise’ itself was made up of three different groups.

The first group we called ‘noise clean.’ And that is the words themselves — the words that we want to hear as far as what the character is thinking.

The second group was called ‘noise processing.’ That was created by effects chains, and we fed the ‘clean noise’ through that. I’ll talk in a bit about the different effects we had on each one of the chains. This ‘noise processing’ was then mixed in with the ‘clean noise.’

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 — the cool Aurora Borealis effect that ended up making it into the final film.

The…‘noise wrap’… was an additional layer of sound design that sat on top of this ‘clean noise’ and ‘noise processing’…

Those are the three groups. Now I can get into how we went about making each one of those three groups.

Let’s start off with the ‘clean noise.’ Doc had provided us with a skeleton-of-sorts of the thoughts each character had. In addition to that, the amazing picture team provided us with every recording they had.

They had done independent recordings with all of the male actors, but especially for Todd, as far as thoughts and ideas of thoughts. They organized that in such a way that they had markers in lines of dialogue for each word that was said. I was then able to create an Excel doc, which allowed me to search through every single line of dialogue ever recorded and find words that we could use to help fill out the ‘noise,’ to build it even more. As I said, they had the skeleton so then we went about adding to the skeleton and filling the thoughts out more so they felt a little bit more freeform and free-flowing.

LB: This situation is pretty unique in our world of sound editing/sound design for a movie. Instead of bringing in a writer to write new material, they said, “Hey, why don’t you guys come up with all the things they’re going to say.” (Aside from the skeleton Doc had created.)

Instead of bringing in a writer to write new material, they said, “Hey, why don’t you guys come up with all the things they’re going to say.”

There was this ‘search and retrieve’ task because there were bits of performances all over the place, but it was very interesting that they didn’t bring in a writer, which they talked about doing during the previews. But that just never came about for one reason or another.

It was interesting to be in a position to actually put in dialogue. Oftentimes, that comes from a writer or the picture department or something.

So Luke did all the ‘noise’ for Todd and other major characters, and Alex Nomick did the Preacher and part of the Mayor’s ‘noise’ as well.

Sound designer Alex Nomick

Alex Nomick (AN): With a character as complex as Aaron, the hardest part was finding the right lines of dialogue to explain his motives through ‘noise’. The skeleton provided by Doc was very minimal and acted more as a guide for where lines of ‘noise’ should go. So the hunt for more material began!

The bulk of Aaron’s ‘noise’ library came from a motion capture shoot which was filmed long before the movie took shape. Actor David Oyelowo, who plays Aaron, was mic’d and performed a series of potential ‘noise’ lines like: “YOUR NOISE WILL LEAD YOU TO TRUTH!” – “AN ANGEL MOVES SWIFTLY” – “SACRIFICE!” – “JUDGEMENT!” – “THE NOISE DEMANDS A MARTYR!”

We had tons of sporadic thoughts about eternal damnation but we needed more than that to make his character work. His ‘noise’ needed to represent his internal struggle. It took weeks to prep something that made sense for the character. The ‘noise’ couldn’t just be chaotic religious babble. Essentially, what we needed to hear from Aaron’s ‘noise’ were lines of scripture, which he would recite (often out of context) to help justify his reasons for genocide.

We brought in a sound-a-like actor for Aaron, and came up with lines that would help us expand the groundwork that Doc provided. It was crucial to have these temp lines in place so that we could continue expanding upon our design ideas.

There were those few cases where no ‘noise’ lines were temp-ed in, but the filmmakers wanted to hear something. At this point, I had completely overused the Aaron ‘noise’ library, so I stepped in to record temp lines that could work, not only for the story but also for our design approach. At this phase, I came into work every day with a TASCAM recorder and just started recording ideas. I’d go through and spot Aaron’s scenes, jot down potential ‘noise’ lines, then record (I took this same approach with the Mayor and Davey).

…I’d get knocks on my door from other editors wondering what the hell I was doing in there.

For example, in the whitewater chase sequence, I imagined Aaron to be thinking of scripture having something to do with water or drowning…something to that effect. I went online and found several verses that were vaguely applicable. And in case you’re wondering, no I don’t sound anything like David Oyelowo, but I tried my damnedest to get close. Our editing suites at Formosa are very soundproof, but ever so often, I’d get knocks on my door from other editors wondering what the hell I was doing in there. I was literally shouting at the top of my lungs into the mic, lines like: “AND HE WAS THROWN INTO A LAKE OF FIRE!!”- “ETERNAL HELLFIRE!” – “SINNER, DROWNED!”

Looking back, it must have been quite comical and definitely a bit alarming to walk past a room with a guy yelling stuff like that into a mic. It might have been overkill, but it was for the sake of the story! And at the end of the day, those temp recordings we came up with are what we used to shape the final product of Aaron’s ‘noise,’ so I’d say it was a successful approach.

LG: Todd was much more of a free-flowing thought process. We hope that it felt like he had a train of thought going. Even when we were experimenting with this sometimes all of us — Lon, Doc, and Alex — would talk about what he’s saying. We’d have a soundalike come in and we’d try out ideas and piece that together before inevitably bringing actor Tom Holland (who plays Todd) or other actors back in to record additional dialogue for the final.

So that was our approach to Todd’s thoughts, but we expanded upon that with both the Mayor and Aaron/the Preacher especially.

Todd was much more of a free-flowing thought process.

That was really cool because each character is different. Most of the characters in this world can’t control their thoughts very well. So often you hear whatever they’re thinking. They have some semblance of control, what’s called their mantra, and that’s how they try to control their thoughts and keep others from hearing what they’re thinking.

As you see in the film, Todd’s mantra is, “I am Todd Hewitt.” He repeats that to himself so he can keep other thoughts from jumping out, thoughts he may not want people to hear.

The Mayor also has a mantra — two in fact. One is, “I am the circle. The circle is me.” And the other mantra of his is called, “Control.”

The really neat thing about the Mayor is we really don’t hear the Mayor’s thoughts as words. He is able to project an image of what his thoughts are. Usually, it’s not necessarily what he’s actually thinking, but it’s what he wants the other characters to see.

LB: In terms of the Mayor, we were trying to work through this idea of his character and his mantras. So one Sunday morning, I sat down with the book — the original book by Patrick Ness — to see what there was that he would say, and that’s where we came up with those mantras. Those came from the original text of the book. I was super excited about that, to be able to honor the original writing of the book. It’s such a cult classic; all these people are aware of it. The mantras were the perfect thing to come up with it, and everyone was pretty excited.

As Luke was saying, people can’t control their ‘noise.’ So in terms of the Preacher, I thought he would have these holy rollers that were just flowing out of him all the time.

I spent a lot of time on YouTube picking up dialogue from holy rollers all over — whatever recordings we could find — and pieced those together before we had the actor David Oyelowo actually record this himself.

The Preacher is one of my favorite characters from a sound perspective because he’s just spewing all these religioso kinds of things that are pretty intense for the other characters.

…we had him speak every line and yell every line and whisper every line.

The flames that came out of him later in the film came much later in the filmmaking process. There were no flames originally. In the final analysis, which Alex [Nomick] was a key player in, we had him speak every line and yell every line and whisper every line. So each of those things are all intertwined with his dialogue. It’s super cool and subtle in a way that makes him extremely creepy. I think it’s very effective.

Our job in all movies is to expand on the written character and make them more intense in whatever way they are. And that seemed to be a very successful addition to that palette for the Preacher. And we were really happy with that as they were really happy with it.

LG: The Preacher fully embraces his ‘noise.’ He didn’t exactly have a mantra. His ‘noise’ was out in the open. He was very unashamed of his ‘noise’ and it was so effective once we came up with this idea of him screaming, whispering, and preaching his ‘noise’ because it made it so wow.

With the Mayor, even though most of his ‘noise’ was just visual images, underneath that we also had the words “control” floating around the images in a very subtle way so that you get the feeling that this image was still something that he was using as a means of control and a means to truly show what he wanted other people to see, not necessarily what he himself was thinking.

LB: An example of that is in the beginning when they’re chasing Viola; at the end of the sequence the big fence comes up around her. That was something he’s projecting in his ‘noise.’

That was an opportunity to really use the Dolby Atmos environment to engulf the audience. And we also have his mantra,”I am the circle. The circle is me,” as it’s rolling out around us. So those words are intertwined with the sound effects and sound design that make up that wall coming up around Viola and stopping her and causing her to be captured.

LG: What we’re talking about right now is just the ‘noise clean,’ which are the words themselves. In addition to that, we then had the ‘noise processing,’ which is the second group. That was made up of three different 7.1 effects chains that we had all mixed together.

the ‘noise processing’…was made up of three different 7.1 effects chains that we had all mixed together.

The first effect was one that Lon had talked about: Altiverb 7’s iron bath. We took the iron bath sound that he came up with early on and we brightened it up because it had such a cool metal resonance sound. It created a bit of a shimmer that matched the shimmer look of the final ‘noise’ visuals.

We then pitched the voice 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 there was a difference in the pitch of the iron bath sound for those characters.

LB: Just to clarify, we’re not talking about pitching up the character’s actual voice. We’re talking about pitching up the reverb return from the iron bath processing.

LG: Another process was one that sound designer Jeff Pitts came up with was using Zynaptiq’s Wormhole.

Wormhole is this cool plugin that also has a bit of reverb to it, but it also has a modulating sound with a really long tail and you can automate these things.

…any panning automation that Lon was doing to the ‘noise’ could still easily move through the 7.0 bus that we had.

But the one thing about this plugin is it’s only a stereo plugin. So inside of our template we had to put the stereo plugin on the left, right, left side surround, right side surround, left rear surround, and right rear surround, and then had another one feeding the center channel. We mixed those all together so that way any panning automation that Lon was doing to the ‘noise’ could still easily move through the 7.0 bus that we had.

The third processing we had — which we used more in the beginning of the film and kind of tailed off of it towards the end so it didn’t feel too overwhelming — 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. It was really cool and we kept it subtle. Again, we backed off of it towards the end just so we weren’t overwhelming the audience with it.

All three of those became the ‘noise processing.’

We then put The Cargo Cult’s Spanner on these 7.0 ‘noise processing’ chains…

We then put The Cargo Cult’s Spanner on these 7.0 ‘noise processing’ chains so Lon could automate the Spanner separately from the actual ‘clean noise’ itself. That way he could independently control the panning of this processed ‘noise’ (which had more of a tail than the ‘clean noise’) and move that independently.

If the visual elements for the ‘noise’ were trailing — like a character is maybe moving off-screen or moving to a different location — Lon could take the tail of that ‘noise’ and pan that separately in Atmos, which created a really neat effect.

LB: One of the things we also learned early on, and that was on Doug’s mind, was you’re not hearing thoughts in a character’s head but you’re also not hearing thoughts all around you in a space.

…you’re not hearing thoughts in a character’s head but you’re also not hearing thoughts all around you in a space.

Early on, we tried to hear ‘noise’ with dialogue in it, panning around the room like it’s all around you. That just didn’t work. Because, again, it took the audience’s attention off the screen. They didn’t know what was going on. Ultimately, in the final movie, the thought-voices in the ‘noise’ are pretty much in the center mostly all the time.

The ‘noise processing’ that Luke is referring to was moved around, to somewhat replicate the movement the cutting room had early on using a Sci-fi plugin to simply move the ‘noise’ left and right and left and right.

With our ‘noise processing’ effect, we are actually able to be much more concise about it in terms of the directionality of where a character was going or coming from.

So every movement of the character’s ‘noise’ got the love from Spanner; we moved that 7.0 processing around.

IOSONO’s AnyMix Pro…allowed us to turn the processed 7.0 sounds clockwise or counterclockwise.

We also used IOSONO’s AnyMix Pro surround mixing plugin, which is another 7.1 plugin that allowed us to turn the processed 7.0 sounds clockwise or counterclockwise.

So we were moving the ‘noise’ around, and turning it.

LG: There’s a rotation on that processed ‘noise,’ just to keep it moving. And with Spanner, again, you can control and kind of shrink the space so it’s not sitting in every speaker. You can shrink it down to start off closer to the center channel and then move it, have it grow, expand, or shrink depending upon where the ‘noise’ is and have it follow the character.

LB: And we made presets. I came up with three different presets for that.
One was basically a small circle in the center. Another was sort of a semicircle, so it was mostly in the center but spread out somewhat to the sides. And then there was the full around you preset.

All of that automation stuck with the whole film. And in fact, the foreign mixes ended up with all the stuff. The mixers got more than they’d ever imagined they’d ever need for a movie.

the visual effects department…created the visual ‘noise’ off of the auditory ‘noise’ that we created…

LG: Once we finished the ‘clean noise’ and the ‘noise processing,’ we then sent that to the visual effects department and they created the visual ‘noise’ off of the auditory ‘noise’ that we created, which was really neat.

When they 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’ve created.

LB: Sound designer Rusty Dunn was involved with creating some of those pieces.

LG: There was a shimmer piece, a flutter piece, and a windy element. We pieced that together and I went through the entire movie, manually creating that against the look of the ‘noise’ for every character and syncing it up.

In addition to that, we had Aaron/the Preacher who had that fire element that they came up with in his ‘noise’ that we added as well.

So there were fire layers for him and his ‘noise wrap’ that I synced to the picture.

LB: An interesting story about the ‘noise wrap’ was that I was in New York working on another project in the fall of 2020, I believe it was, and Doug was in New York. So we had a lot more time together and I was still in the process of playing him different things that were part of the evolution.

I kept thinking about how to tie it all together so that it wasn’t just processing. I started to think about the planet and the atmosphere of the planet as the energy that is making everyone hear each other’s thoughts. That’s what is in the story, in the script. They’re on a planet where the atmosphere is causing this.

I kept thinking about how to tie it all together so that it wasn’t just processing.

I had an apartment on 6th Avenue, on the 25th floor or something. And what do you see when you’re on the 25th floor? You see these steam/exhaust plumes coming out of buildings. I was looking out the window one morning and there was this one steam plume going up. It was a windy day and so every few seconds the wind would hit that and some steam would wisp off to the left.

I thought, that’s exactly what I’m trying to do with the sound. I want to have the atmosphere of the planet be this energy and the words are the wisps that would come out.
I had a meeting with Doug and I had recorded that steam plume on my iPhone to show him this phenomenon. I said to him, “This is what we need to do.” Because it just seemed right. It seemed like those things needed to come together. And he liked the idea.

It really worked with the Aurora Borealis element, which expanded beyond the words. The words ended and the visual ‘noise’ was still doing something. So it needed to be connected with sounds that were part of the atmosphere. Some of the elements that Rusty [Dunn] had done were also things he created for the sonic ambience of the planet. So that was fulfilled with those things coming together.

The words ended and the visual ‘noise’ was still doing something. So it needed to be connected with sounds that were part of the atmosphere.

And then, because the visual ‘noise’ was so detailed — the different colors catching your eye or different densities catching your eye — Luke spent weeks cutting each one to the image of the Aurora Borealis, which he mentioned. But I can’t overstate how much work he had to do because you’d look at the visual ‘noise’ and your eye would be caught by an edge that’s on the left. And the next time you look at it, your eye would be caught by a color that’s stronger on the right.

So there was a constant evolution of it. And there’s no right or wrong. It’s just a very personal thing. When you’re looking at an image like that, your eyes can be drawn to whichever thing is happening.

So Luke really had his hands full to make that come to life. But we get the sense that it works in an organic way, which was our goal with it.

Chaos Walking (2021 Movie) Official Clip ‘Very Clever Use of Your Noise’ – Daisy Ridley, Tom Holland

It feels organic. All of that detail you talked about really comes through: the subtle panning and movement all over the place, and the sound changing as it flicks out in a different direction. All of that comes through and it’s just absolutely amazing…

LB: I’m very happy to hear that because after looking at the mainstream reviews of the movie, they didn’t even give it any detailed look and your words are very kind to us. We really appreciate it because we did do a lot of work on it.

LG: Yeah, a lot of people came together on this. Sometimes it might’ve been the slightest thing that came from a temp — like the third temp — and there were so many cool ideas that people brought to the table that, in their own ways, often made it to the final. Even if it was just a little piece that we loved and we thought sounded perfect for the moment.

There are times when the ‘noise’ isn’t so subtle. We talked about the Preacher, who is this really intense guy anyway, but he kicks it up a couple of notches. For instance, when he’s with Viola in the old spaceship. What were some of the things you did to make his ‘noise’ feel bigger and more intense?

LG: Some of it was this mix that we talked about before, of him preaching and whispering and screaming thoughts that were ever-flowing around him. On top of that, sometimes we’d have cool effects that we’d double-up and pitch ever so slightly and make him sound very aggressive and scary.

Honestly, he was probably the coolest character when it came to ‘noise.’

LB: In the mix, the sound of his voice was actually equalized, expanding on frequencies in the mid-range when we wanted to intensify him more. In some cases, it brought him close to over modulation, but just short of that. That was a way to really just make it harsher in a subtle way.

The moment when he’s trying to kill Viola, it’s all relying on the conceit that his anger can compel all of this fire and flames all around him and that his voice takes on multiple qualities that expand as he gets angrier and angrier.

LG: Alex [Nomick] did a lot of great stuff with that.

Another scene I wanted to look at was with the Mayor. He uses his ‘noise’ to yell at Todd when they’re at the old spaceship. He sends out this blast wave of ‘noise.’ How were you able to beef that one up so that it still felt like ‘noise,’ but like an explosion of ‘noise’?

LG: That was a marrying of both his voice and sound design to create a sonic wave with cool bass elements and wind elements that would blow by the audience.

I think some of the neat things about everyone’s ‘noise’ in general, and in this moment here with the Mayor, is that sometimes when you hear the character say something and then you hear it repeated most audio people would think that we put some kind of a delay on the voice, or we did some after-effect to the voice.

So much of that ‘noise’ that you might think was created by a delay was actually a different take of the actor themselves performing that line.

And though we did have interesting processing, a lot of that is actually an additional performance. So much of that ‘noise’ that you might think was created by a delay was actually a different take of the actor themselves performing that line. And that’s part of why this ‘noise’ was so deep in terms of the building of it. We knew that as the ‘noise’ would move through the atmosphere, it’s going to evolve and change. Rather than try to only do that as an effect with a plugin, we have a different performance of the actual line whenever something was repeated. It created a really cool, natural effect. And that situation is an example of where it can really work well.

LB: Another heavy lift that Luke did was exactly what he just mentioned. In the early part of the final phase, we had an idea to have doubling of the voices. So we went on the hunt for other takes of not just whole lines, but of words.

In one iteration, single words were floating. Going back to Doug’s idea of the pieces of thoughts, there was a type of ‘noise’ that lived for maybe one preview or two, where there were two or three layers of an ending word of a sentence or beginning word of a sentence. Different performances that Luke or Alex found were pieced together in and out of all the lines.

Then we would drift the last couple of words or the first couple of words coming in and out of the ‘noise.’

It’s like with singers, when they double a voice it gets thicker. So we would sync the alt takes to the actual line. Then we would drift the last couple of words or the first couple of words coming in and out of the ‘noise.’

And again, super cool. We all loved it. It lived for a very long time. But you can get one comment at a preview sometimes, and they say, “I didn’t understand this line or that line.” And I think that’s maybe what happened to that idea, which went by the wayside for the most part.

The remnant of it that’s left is this one you’re talking about with the Mayor.

This was another example of experimenting. I would certainly like to thank Lionsgate for their understanding of what it took to do this, and John Portnoy for his leadership as head of post at Lionsgate for giving us the resources to investigate all of these things that Doug wanted to investigate, and Jim Miller, who’s head of production and who got this project off the ground at Lionsgate. They really went to bat and said, “We want you guys to make this movie great.” And they were supporting our staff in all the things that we could do to go down all avenues of discovery.

I would certainly like to thank Lionsgate for their understanding of what it took to do this…

And that was one of them. It was very effective. We have it at the end also when the different voices of mothers and the women are surrounding the Mayor when Todd is on the ground and he’s conjuring up his own ‘noise’ to finally be stronger than the ‘noise’ of the Mayor.

Again, we used multiple voices and multiple pieces of voices that are flying around you like a maelstrom and cacophony of energy. The hero finally is stronger than the villain. And that’s the high point at the end of the movie.

That was a great scene. You had talked earlier about not having all of the ‘noise’ written out, not scripted. Was that one of the scenes where you got to build that ‘noise’ in the way that you thought would be most emotionally effective?

LG: Very much so. The scene at the end, when Todd muster’s all of his energy to control his ‘noise,’ and his mother and the other women who were murdered appear. We were able to do a great build with that, ramping up the emotional intensity with performance and chaos that overwhelms the Mayor.

LB: There’s also the scene when he runs outside of the other Mayor’s house. He’s realizing what happened. The truth comes out and he runs off and leaves at that point. In his ‘noise’ there’s confusion but there’s also certainty in there and it really plays up that story point that he’s confused by what happened but he’s also angered to the point that he rises up and becomes the hero that he ultimately is in the movie.

What about conforming the ‘noise’ to a new cut or new VFX shots? That must have been incredibly challenging too….

LB: Pernell Salinas was our head assistant, who had to take in and send out and deal with the visual effects department and people scattered all over the country and make that happen with versions that kept coming in as ‘noise’ changed and new shots would come in. There were several hundred (I think more than 500) ‘noise’ shots and he was able to keep it all together. That was a big deal.

As I was writing the questions for our interview, I really only had one question: can you tell me about the ‘noise’? Just hearing the ‘noise,’ I knew you must have put so much time and care into creating that. It’s really amazing!

Are there any other scenes you’d like to discuss in Chaos Walking?

LG: The spaceship crash sequence at the beginning was a lot of fun too. That was another moment of both sound design of the planet, of when they first encounter the ‘noise’ as a crew who has no idea what this planet has, and mixing those together with diegetic sounds we’d hear in a typical space crash sequence.

That was really cool because we got a chance to push the ‘noise’ through the ship, and with that, add onto the chaos of the ship already blowing apart. Lon did such a great job and the other mixers, like Ron Bartlett, did such a fantastic job of picking and choosing each moment in that intense scene to play up and tell that story of the discovery of the ‘noise’ along with the ship that’s tearing apart.

…we got a chance to push the ‘noise’ through the ship, and with that, add onto the chaos of the ship already blowing apart.

LB: The biggest moment in that sequence is when the ship is breaking apart and the ‘noise’ from the planet’s atmosphere actually comes up through the ship and goes right through. You see it coming up and go right by Viola.

We’re trying to tell a story and help the audience to understand what is happening here. We really needed to clarify that the atmosphere affects people so that they can hear each other’s thoughts. You hear the CAPCOM guys talking out loud and then all of a sudden you can hear their thoughts.

That moment was the pinnacle of that sequence in terms of storytelling and getting the audience to go, “Oh, I see. They’ve gone into this atmosphere and it’s literally gone right through them. Now they’re in it.” That was really important.

The other component that was very important to me is when I first met Doug Liman, about 10 or 15 years ago, he was doing a project for Paramount, trying to get a space movie project off the ground. I was contacted by Marty Cohen at Paramount who said, “Doug wants to do this whole audio thing with no visual. It’s just gonna be this big 70mm thing… Would you do it?”

So I went and talked to Doug about it. We wanted to have this exciting sequence of a liftoff and going into space. And then there is a problem. But the last shot was a shot of a guy on the moon.

And so my first reaction was structure: how do I structure something like this to be exciting?

And so my first reaction was structure: how do I structure something like this to be exciting? I looked at a number of films that had space liftoff sequences. I chose one of them and I used that as the structure to build this audio-only thing for Doug.

The only reason I’m mentioning that is because of the structure of this sequence in Chaos Walking that Doc put together; the sound is reliant on the structure of the picture. Each of the clash cuts that we were playing up (I believe successfully) were there because the picture editor put them there. But then sound comes in and adds different frequency changes and different cadence changes and different things to the cadence of the picture edit itself. And I think that matching them and then separating from them and coming back to them was a big part of what increased the action.

It’s like in music, you can create a double-time from a quarter note. You could turn it into an eighth note or a 16th note by changing the cadence, which is one thing that we did.
It was structurally very exciting. Each of the components that build to this final moment when the ‘noise’ goes through the cabin had things speeding up — not just in pitch, but in pace.

That was something I’d learned a long time ago. And that’s how I first met Doug and ended up doing this movie.

It was very effective. When I watched that scene without sound, it was like a typical spaceship crash. The sound added this feeling of panic and chaos. Your heart starts to race. You hold your breath. To me, the sound of that scene is what made it so intense.

Plus, you totally nailed it with the atmosphere coming up through the ship. You understand that they’re passing through the atmosphere and now you can hear the male crew members’ ‘noise.’

LB: That’s great. And we feel like we did something right.

It’s a big learning curve for the audience. This was one of the challenges of the movie. The audience needed to be taught what this conceit was because by the time we get past the first two sequences, they needed to be on board. And if they weren’t on board, they’d question the movie, right?

So this was something we talked about at length with all the creative people at every level — within the picture team and our team — because in the preview screenings, the audience was getting lost. They were getting lost until we ultimately came to where we are now.

It’s a big learning curve for the audience. This was one of the challenges of the movie.

And I think that they’re not lost anymore. I think you get that this ‘noise’ is this kid’s thought. And then another person has thoughts. And other people can have thoughts. And it builds. Structurally, it was built that way too. There was editing done by Doc and that helped that learning process.

There were some scenes in an early version of the movie that had too much happening too soon. And the audience didn’t know what was happening. So it was designed to make this happen in steps. Step one, we can hear this guy’s thoughts. Then two people have ‘noise.’ Then four people. And so the audience became comfortable with that. I think that that was a big part of the success of the film.

You mentioned the challenges of recreating the ‘noise’ for the foreign language releases. Can you elaborate on that?

LB: So we got a call in September from the guys at Lionsgate saying, “You stumped the Germans.” The German team handling the foreign mixes are known to be super particular when it comes to deliverables.

Mix engineer Stefan Wörner

Stefan Wörner (SW): I got a call from our spotting department. They had never seen a film like this before in terms of dialog treatment. It turned out, me neither. So we had to figure out how to approach the whole process.

I called my client and told her that it would be very helpful to get as much information as possible about the ‘noise’ design from the production company. Finally, I was given the contact info for Lon, which was great.

LB: So we got a call from Stefan, who’s a great guy. He was going to be doing the mix, the preparation, and set up for this M & E. We basically packaged it for them because they didn’t know what to do. They were like, “Well, do we just put some reverb on this stuff?”

SW: Me and the company I’m working for are always striving for the best possible work we can do for the dubbed versions of a project. In our opinion, it is very important to transport all the efforts that a vast amount of people have put into the making of a film from one language to another. Because of this, I didn’t want to just put some reverb on it. I wanted it to work out in the same way as it did in the original version.

We put together a template that, for each reel of the movie, had live automation for the Spanner panning on the 7.0 processing…

LB: In conversations with the studio, everyone felt we should get them the whole package; let them do the work that it’s going to take to make it great. And Stefan wanted to make it great, too.

SW: They sent me all the sessions and files I asked for. Both Luke and Lon supported me fantastically and told me all the details I needed to know about the stuff they sent. This was and is exceptional. It is very helpful for the foreign version dubbing companies to gain access to these kinds of information as early and direct as possible.

LB: We put together a template that, for each reel of the movie, had live automation for the Spanner panning on the 7.0 processing and then had all the panning on some of the regular ‘noise’ voices and then the ‘noise process.’

SW: It worked out great! Because of the different wording, pitch, length and frequencies of a different language you have to make adjustments. But due to the live automation data that was no problem at all. The clients were very happy with the outcome!

Both Luke and Lon supported me fantastically and told me all the details I needed to know about the stuff they sent.

LB: Finally, by the time they got to the French and the Canadian versions, I think we ended up sending all the sessions for each reel so they could have some understanding of where to put the replacement voices because they each had to be processed separately.

So it wasn’t like a normal M & E for a normal movie, where you are recording some actors doing the voices and popping them in. Here, you had to process everybody separately.

There was also walla/group people that we didn’t even talk about, like people in the towns that we called ‘key players.’ The ‘key players’ had their own section of the template. So Todd, the Mayor and Aaron were the primary players, and then the ‘key players’ were non-scripted characters that said things in the ‘noise.’ So those had to be dealt with.

It became this huge production all over the world of putting together this ‘noise.’

I think it all worked out in the end.

A big thanks to Lon Bender, Luke Gibleon, Alex Nomick, and Stefan Wörner for giving us a behind-the-scenes look at the ‘noise’ in Chaos Walking and to Jennifer Walden for the interview!

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