Behind the Fun, Futuristic-retro Sound of ‘Loki’ on Disney+ – with David Acord, Bonnie Wild, & Danielle Dupre:

One of Marvel’s most complex characters is undoubtedly Loki. Is he a villain? Or just doing his thing as the Asgardian trickster ‘God of Mischief?’ The Disney+ Marvel series Loki — officially approved for a second season — makes us question our feelings about the Loki we’ve come to know (and despise) in the Marvel films, like in Thor, The Avengers, Thor: The Dark World, and Thor: Ragnarok.

In addition to the ‘traditional’ Loki, the series introduces a slew of Loki variants, one is a ‘Crocogator’ (part alligator/part crocodile), one is President Loki, one is a woman, Sylvie, who is probably the Loki that deviates most from the original because she’s actually good.

Loki is definitely a departure from what you’d expect from Loki, but it still has the same Marvel flair. For the Skywalker Sound team, their job was to keep the sound true to the Marvel Cinematic Universe while also making it fresh for the series. And there was an abundance of opportunity to make fun, fresh sounds — for the Time Variance Authority and its retro-vibe, for the apocalyptic state of Lamentis-1, for the new tech/gadgets (like the TemPad, Time Baton, Time Twister) and more!

Here, Emmy and MPSE Award-winning supervising sound editor/sound designer David Acord, Emmy, CAS, and MPSE Award-winning re-recording mixer Bonnie Wild, and Daytime Emmy Award-winning re-recording mixer Danielle Dupre discuss their role in helping series creator Michael Waldron and director Kate Herron to maintain that Marvel sound. They also dive into details on creating the sound for the Time Variance Authority, making the sound of the TVA robot, mixing Ep. 3 and Ep. 4 on Lamentis-1, vocal processing for The Timekeepers, and much more!

Marvel Studios’ Loki | Official Trailer | Disney+

Danielle, David, and Bonnie, you have been deeply involved with the sound of the Marvel Cinematic Universe over the years and you really understand the style of these films and series. Working on the Loki series with creator Michael Waldron and director Kate Herron — who are new to the MCU — how did your experience with the MCU help guide their goals for sound on the show?

Danielle Dupre (DD): That’s always something we think quite a bit about. I’ve had a hand in a couple of Marvel films, as has Bonnie [Wild], and Dave [Acord] has done quite a few of them. But even then, collectively, we’re such a small percentage of the actual Marvel work that Skywalker Sound has done.

We take it very seriously, making sure that we’re using the right design, using the right sounds, and staying true to what’s happened in the Marvel Cinematic Universe before.

We take it very seriously, making sure that we’re using the right design, using the right sounds, and staying true to what’s happened in the Marvel Cinematic Universe before.

A big goal for all of us, always, is to play our role in what the director’s creative vision is and to make it sound as good as possible. But at the same time, typically with Marvel films, we’re always thinking about the fans because they are paying close attention. It’s an audience base that you can’t get anything past. We always have to think about what they’re going to say, what they’re going to hear. And they’re fans who know specifically that this is the sound of Iron Man’s suit hydraulics. Or this is the sound of Wanda’s magic. There’s not really much you can get past them. Our job is to take Kate’s vision and Michael’s writing and make it as beautiful and creative and story-focused as possible. But we really do have to pay attention to what sounds are in there.

It’s constantly a back and forth, taking into account what the director may want, but also what the fans are going to hear.

There is a lot of stuff that I may not know or perhaps Dave doesn’t know, so, fortunately, it’s a really collaborative experience with the people at Skywalker. If we don’t know something about a specific element for a specific character, we’ll go into our library and see who designed for that movie, and we’ll talk to them about it, even for magic that’s evolving — like Loki uses some of his magic in the Loki series, but it’s different from what it was before in the movies. So, is that going to evolve? Is that going to be exactly the same as the movies? Are we going to take the basis of the movies and evolve off of that?

It’s constantly a back and forth, taking into account what the director may want, but also what the fans are going to hear. And they do rely on us quite a bit to make sure that we’re using the right sounds for the right moment because we’re really the ones with all the information.

And there’s this direct connection from the films to the series. The first episode of Loki jumps right into where it left off in Avenger: Endgame when Loki stole the Tesseract. It opens right on that scene where he disappears.

The first episode is a treasure trove for sound. This is where you’re establishing the sound of this series, like introducing the Time Variance Authority (TVA), which has this retro, analog, ‘space program from the ’60s’ type of tech. How did you incorporate that style into your design? Could you share some insights into your favorite tech sounds that you created for this series?

DD: Dave can talk in much greater detail about it, but from the conversations that we’ve been privy to, a big part of the idea behind the TVA was that it was timeless. You have no idea what it is. Is it the future? Is it the past? Is it a single point in time? Is it many points in time? That’s reflected a lot in the set decorations and the overall aesthetic of the show. So we had that as a jumping-off point of how they wanted (at least visually) to portray this amorphous time period.

…a big part of the idea behind the TVA was that it was timeless.

I love the set design so much. I thought it was so cool and so smart to balance it out — to have this thing that should be incredibly futuristic mixed with something that is a little bit retro (from our perspective) and a little bit vintage. That was something Dave worked out quite a bit in his sound design, taking brand new sound design for what the TVA powers or magic would be and running it through more vintage recording processes.

When we were spotting sound design, Kate referenced the movie “Brazil” as an influence here.

A lot of that we did on the mix stage ourselves, running it through plugins to make this brand new sound design (these polished high-tech sounds) sound a bit more vintage.

David Acord (DA): Kate was very keen to acknowledge the “mundane” in the TVA office. I think the term “Space DMV” was used, once. So, the tech couldn’t sound too fancy or sci-fi. We leaned more toward the 8-bit, low-tech style, rather than flashy and modern. When we were spotting sound design, Kate referenced the movie Brazil as an influence here.

As far as favorites, I really like where we landed with the TemPads. They have a sort of TRS-80-meets-Mattel-Electronic-Football kinda vibe.

iZotope has this plugin called Vinyl that adds that crackly, analog vinyl sound. Did you use something like that? Or, what were some of the processes that you used to add a vintage feel?

Bonnie Wild (BW): We used Audio Ease’s Speakerphone to make it distorted. We were interested in the distorted feeling of these things. Kate would say that she loved all the sounds but she wanted it to be dirtier. She didn’t want anything to be clean. Everything had to sit with that retro vibe that was going on.

Kate would say that she loved all the sounds but she wanted it to be dirtier. She didn’t want anything to be clean.

DD: Speakerphone is always tried-and-true. We try to branch out from that because we use it so much but every time we do we’re always like, ‘I don’t know. I like Speakerphone.’

I do like iZotope Vinyl. We have used that on previous Marvel series and it’s worked really well. But for this particular instance, I think it was just Speakerphone, some EQ, and maybe a little bit of compression.

In that first episode, there’s a really funny scene where Hunter B 15 hits Loki in the face and he’s moving at 1/16th speed. His face is flapping around in slow motion. So funny! How did you approach the sound for that sequence?

BW: We had a few options in that area. Dave had designed sounds that they had in the AVID for a while. That was actually really nice to have some sound design in the picture edit that everyone was used to and liked.

There’s the slow-mo kind of liquidy part and his slow-mo talking, but I think it’s still the lip sound that’s funny.

For that scene, the approach was to really feel us going into that moment. There was some score in there but we kept that pretty low, actually. And we went with the sound effects there just so we can feel Loki’s slow movement. Victoria [Alonso, exec. producer] especially loved the lip sound so we went for that. That’s a cool moment.

DD: The lip is what really makes it funny. And there are a couple of different elements to it. There’s the slow-mo kind of liquidy part and his slow-mo talking, but I think it’s still the lip sound that’s funny.

BW: And really gross!

After Loki is captured by the TVA, he’s put into that elevator with this robot thing that has a smiley face and many arms. I love the sound of that robot! He makes these funny emote noises. Can you talk about your sound work for the robot?

BW: That was Dave! Dave did those little vocals. We went through a few iterations of what he was going to say, like “Hi. Hi. Hi.” Like he’s kind of broken and kind of janky.

We wanted to make sure we’re playing up the janky sounds rather than the smoother, sci-fi-sounding elements.

And for Kate, we did a rebalance of the pneumatic sounds that the robot has. We wanted to make sure we’re playing up the janky sounds rather than the smoother, sci-fi-sounding elements.

He was cool. I wish he came back in the show. I liked that little guy.

DA: That was a fun character. As Bonnie mentioned, it was meant to be a bit old and in some state of disrepair. The voice is mine, pitched and futzed and then cut to make it have a sort of broken stuttery performance.

Did you do the processing on his voice on the stage? Or was that something Dave had done and it came “pre-packaged” to you?

BW: Dave did that. So I had that packaged-up from him.

Again, they had those sounds in the AVID. Because the mixes are so quick, we want them to be living with sounds in their picture edit so that we’re not making big decisions during the mix. We tweaked things on the stage, but we didn’t want to be going back and forth on big design decisions once we’re there. We want to be focusing on the balance of the mix.

Dave did a great job of getting elements to picture editorial so that sounds could get lived with, agreed upon, and approved.

Dave did a great job of getting elements to picture editorial so that sounds could get lived with, agreed upon, and approved. This way, by the time it gets to the stage, they love it. They’re not starting to get used to something.

I love Marvel’s forethought in that process, to bring the sound team in during picture editorial so they can have these sounds and live with them. You don’t often see that and it’s just brilliant of them to do…

BW: They even get preliminary design time, because it’s less expensive in the long run for the client. When you enter the dub stage, you don’t want to be paying for stage time and still making these decisions.

They even get preliminary design time, because it’s less expensive in the long run for the client.

DD: If it were a longer mix, we definitely would have time to dig into it. But for something like this, I think it’s much better for the editors and the director because they live with what’s in their AVID for so long and are used to hearing it one way. You throw something entirely different in there and it takes time to adjust to hearing something new before you can even determine whether or not you like it, or what parts of it you like, and what parts you want to change. That’s the type of collaboration that really is effective. Because we’re not mixing these episodes for three or four months, that does have to happen beforehand.

Another big part of what Kate wanted to do with the TVA was to sell the idea of what a massive bureaucracy it was. And that’s where a lot of the jankiness came in, reminiscent of the DMV or city hall. They have so much money in their budget and yet they still have computers from 1980. Why is that?

…we try to get these elements in front of everyone ahead of the mix to work out any kinks before they hit the stage, ideally.

So all of the more mechanical elements in the TVA — the robot, the elevator doors, and the loudspeaker announcements — we wanted to sound severely dated. And it was a really good contrast to play with. This seemingly futuristic side of the TVA, the most powerful place in the universe, it’s still a ‘sign your name on the dotted line, pull a ticket, wait for hours’ bureaucracy. That’s definitely some brilliance on Michael’s and Kate’s part. We had a lot of fun playing with that in the sound design and the mix.

DA: We spent some time going back and forth with Kate and the picture editors (Emma, Paul, and Calum) with various options for sound design pieces. As you alluded to, we try to get these elements in front of everyone ahead of the mix to work out any kinks before they hit the stage, ideally. That’s not always feasible on a tight TV schedule, though.

I love the Time Variance Authority’s pre-trial video with that ’80s cartoon sound design…

DD: That was so good. They nailed that and we did work on that pretty much until it aired. It was a big collaboration. I just thought it was so funny.

And Dave got to put a bunch of cartoon sounds in, like for the running. That was something Bonnie spent a lot of time on; that was her episode. I think it turned out great!

Let’s look at the mix side of things. In Ep. 3, we’re on this alien moon called Lamentis-1. It’s during an apocalyptic event where the planet that’s orbiting this moon smashes into it. What were some of your challenges in mixing that episode for the small screen?

I’m hoping people listen to this in 5.1 because there was a lot of surround use…

BW: That was a lot! It was fun, but yeah, there was a lot going on. There’s a heavy score — heavy everything really. I’m hoping people listen to this in 5.1 because there was a lot of surround use, especially when we get to the city of Shuroo and they’re trying to get on the Ark. We have all the crowds, which were really important. We did quite a lot of crowd work. Matt Wood (co-supervising sound editor) shot some really cool loop group for that.
We have the guards, we have the announcements, we have the actual crowd and the crowd reacting to what’s happening. It’s all happening around us as Loki and Sylvie enter the city and the viewers get pulled into it.

It was a lot of fun to get into the panning for that mix.

I watched it wearing headphones and noticed the use of the surround field helping to put the audience into this apocalyptic scenario. Especially in the town, you hear the crowd running back and forth and all of the asteroids hitting the buildings and the buildings falling over. There’s so much detail happening in the surround field in that episode….

DD: What I thought was really interesting about the entire Lamentis-1 apocalypse — both between Ep. 3 and the beginning of Ep. 4 — is that it is chaos all the time.

What I thought was so beautifully done, by Bonnie in Ep. 3 and me in Ep. 4, was carving out specific moments.

Kate and Bonnie both did a really great job of carving out little cocoons of intimacy because in the middle of this chaos, you have this storyline of Loki and Sylvie starting to get pretty emotional and pretty intimate. What I thought was so beautifully done, by Bonnie in Ep. 3 and me in Ep. 4, was carving out specific moments. Hitting the chaos really hard, making it a true world-ending apocalypse, but then also pairing it down when Loki and Sylvie are having their moments together, developing their characters and developing their relationship. It was about taking out all of that apocalypse stuff and making it very cocoon-like and very intimate so that you can focus on what’s happening between Loki and Sylvie. That was my favorite part about Ep. 3 with Lamentis-1 and the beginning of Ep. 4.

In Ep. 4, Loki and Sylvie are taken to meet the Timekeepers. When they’re in that space, this seems like another challenging sequence to mix. Part of that is the vocal processing and also trying to establish how huge this room is. Can you talk about your approach to mixing that sequence, making the room feel large, and about the vocal processing on the Timekeepers?

DD: Dave gave us a starting point for vocal processing on the Timekeepers. And we ran that live in Ep. 4; we ran that live in my mix session.

There were three different sets of processing for the three different Timekeepers. It was a lot to think about there, with the size of the room and the scope of the Timekeepers being huge entities. Obviously, we needed to sell that they’re big, domineering, and scary. But we also needed to hint at the fact that they were robots or androids but also hide that until the very end because that is a big reveal. There were also a lot of different considerations with Kate (that I can’t go into at this point in time) as to what else we really needed to accomplish with their voices.

So it was a balance to make sure that the processing came through, to make sure that it was hinting at the right thing and not giving the wrong thing away, and obviously selling the scope of how big they are, which is so much harder to do when you’re on a small screen. When you’re in front of a giant screen looking up, you can really push into things and make the room shake and use low-end (almost) as much as you want. But it is really a balance when you know that it’s going to be played on smaller speakers that don’t really support that type of detail.

As far as the specific processing that Dave used, I would have to let him talk about that. But it was something that we did play around with a lot, trying to ride the line between mystery and intelligibility. That was a big thing, playing with the wet/dry mix a lot to make sure their voices were processed, but not overly processed, but also not overly dry where you can understand exactly what’s going on and who’s saying what. It was a good hand-in-hand between mystery and performance, basically.

When you’re working on such a reduced scale, you have to take into consideration how things play relative to each other because that’s where you’re going to get the most differences. If we have a much fuller, much bigger, much boomier, more reverb, much louder voice and the characters on the ground, looking up and talking to them, are a lot drier and a lot smaller and less fleshed out from a frequency perspective, that really helps out a lot.

It was fun coming up with a good reverb for that room. And it was fun pairing it down throughout the scene because you want to hear that at the beginning — to establish that in your first couple phrases or lines that you hear in a room so it feels like, “Holy cow, this is huge and cacophonous,” but you don’t want to hear that for the rest of the scenes because it’s just going to distract you.

It was fun to push into that, to find the right settings for that, and then slowly pare it down throughout the rest of the scene.

DA: We spent quite a bit of time on those voice processes! Kate had a very specific idea for what each Timekeeper should sound like. Part of the challenge there was to not let the audience know who the performer was (Jonathan Majors) ahead of his reveal.

…it’s a challenge to ride that line between intelligibility and “alien” with a booming power.

Fortunately, he gave three very unique performances to start with — that helps a LOT. As Danielle mentioned, it’s a challenge to ride that line between intelligibility and “alien” with a booming power. Kate referenced the Supreme Being from Time Bandits as well as Gozer from Ghostbusters, initially. But she also wanted a kind of choral quality behind each voice, as if many voices are speaking as one.

Overall, how has working on the sound for Loki been a unique experience for you?

BW: Danielle and I got to work with each other!

DD: It was so good! Bonnie and I are best friends in real life and have been for over a decade now. We’ve worked together in different roles on different projects, but this is the first time that we got to mix ‘side-by-side’ so that was amazing.

Bonnie and I are best friends in real life…but this is the first time that we got to mix ‘side-by-side’

Plus, our crew — with Matt Wood and Dave Acord as the two supervisors — was phenomenal. You can’t really ask for a better crew. And Kate was really great, and the editors, too. It was such a positive experience. And I loved it.

BW: The score was so cool, and the sounds were amazing. This was one of those projects where everything worked out and sounded cool where you’re pleased with the mixes and you’re excited about it.

DD: It was really fun! We mixed it in a different way. Bonnie and I have both worked on Marvel episodics before. She started with The Mandalorian. I recently worked on WandaVision. We’ve been in this new format of ‘streaming episodics’ for a while now but each new series that we do seems like we do it in a slightly different way, just trying to figure out how to mix for this format and how to work in that case.

This was really unique because we actually had two stages running the whole time: my stage and her stage.

This was really unique because we actually had two stages running the whole time: my stage and her stage. We worked in a very collaborative way across each episode. One of us took odd episodes and we owned those episodes and the other person would play background vocals for them, like mix the Foley, ADR, and the loop group and fly in fixes while the person that owns that episode is with the client. And then vice versa for the even episodes.

So it was really collaborative, even though we weren’t in the same room at the same time. It was also really effective time-wise. We would’ve loved it if the pandemic allowed us to be side-by-side at the console but the schedule on these things doesn’t allow somebody to sit on a stage for 10 minutes while you do a dialogue fix or a dialogue pass. Everybody has to be working full steam all the time. So it was a different way of working, which was really rewarding.

And the crew was really great. I loved the writing on this one. I loved the overall vision — artistically what they were going for.

Kate Herron’s approach to sound mix and design was truly collaborative. She was always so positive and open to suggestions…

BW: And it was focused, as well. It’s one of those shows where you know what you’ve got to do. You can see what everyone wants. The show was really together. It was great. So we were coming in at that point of the mix, being like, “Okay, cool. I think we know what to do here.” Sometimes it’s a bit more like finding your way, but for this, it wasn’t. There was a roadmap laid out for us and we could get in there. That gives us a chance to do what we want, as well. It was really good.

DA: Kate Herron’s approach to sound mix and design was truly collaborative. She was always so positive and open to suggestions and always available for questions and ideas. It wasn’t the easiest mix to accomplish with everyone scattered across the country — pandemic rules kept most of us at home. But, everyone stayed positive and I feel like we delivered a great track for a truly great show.

A big thanks to David Acord, Danielle Dupre, and Bonnie Wild for giving us a behind-the-scenes look at the sound of Loki and to Jennifer Walden for the interview!

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