Crafting the Gritty Sound of Gotham City in ‘The Penguin’ – with Rich Bologna and Larry Zipf

The grim and gritty world of The Batman (2022) extends into the HBO original series The Penguin. Meant to bridge the gap between The Batman and The Batman Part II (slated for release in 2026), The Penguin begins after the events of the first film and delves into the underworld of Gotham City and the rise of crime boss Oswald ‘Oz’ Cobb.

For post sound, series showrunner/creator Lauren LeFranc turned to Warner Bros. Post Production Creative Services in New York City where supervising sound editors Larry Zipf and Rich Bologna use their intimate knowledge and custom recordings of NYC to give Gotham City an authentic NYC/Hoboken/Jersey City vibe.

Here, Zipf and Bologna (who mixed the show alongside Andy Kris) share insights on how they crafted key scenes in the series, like Arkham Asylum, the seawall destruction and flooding of Crown Point, the music-driven fight scenes, and much more.

The Penguin | Official Teaser | Max

Showrunner Lauren LeFranc did the Agents of SHIELD, so she has that ‘superhero’ series experience. How did she want to make The Penguin different from that? In regards to sound, were there sonic ‘superhero’ tropes she wanted to avoid? (Or, embrace?)

Rich Bologna (RB): Lauren was clear on really wanting to honor the aesthetic of the film The Batman (2022). That was our north star in terms of overall style.

But what was fun about this is that Lauren would always stress the idea of keeping everything grounded. She was adamant about being very realistic with the show, and not playing into the superhero tropes. Whenever we would do anything in that hyper-real way, she would take us back to Earth. That makes the show super-believable, super-gritty, and authentic. Her overall direction for us was to keep it in that real-world universe.

Larry Zipf (LZ): I definitely agree. The Penguin feels more like a gritty mob show that’s set within The Batman universe than a straight superhero type of thing. It’s more concerned with Oz, Sofia, and Victor. There are some allusions to Batman and the Riddler briefly, but really we’re dropped into Gotham after the seawall has been destroyed and some of the lower-income neighborhoods, like Crown Point, have been decimated. All of that stuff has strong analogs in today’s world. Lauren was definitely interested in keeping it grounded, as Rich said.

There were a few locations, like Eve’s apartment in the red light district, where even though there’s all this sex work going on outside, Lauren wasn’t interested in us leaning into too many of the “bad neighborhood” tropes. When we’re inside Eve’s apartment, Lauren wanted to make that seem a little cozier, friendlier place, which wasn’t obvious to me when I started working on the scene. After getting to know the characters more and better understanding the whole aesthetic Lauren was going for, it really makes a lot of sense. That was a cool choice she made.

RB: Honestly, we don’t have any superheroes in this show. That’s really the interesting thing and maybe why this show is doing so well. The Batman movie is very much in the POV of Batman and he sees Gotham from a distant, bird’s eye view. But this show zooms into the underbelly of Gotham in a way that most people don’t get to see when they watch The Batman superhero version of Gotham. This very gritty, street-level view of that universe is fun for us to dig into.

And Lauren plays against expectations, as Larry was saying. If we get a scene in a red-light district apartment, we’re going to do what we would probably expect to do, which is to add sirens and people yelling in the street. Lauren would say, “Let’s not do that.” She wanted something that’s still pretty grounded because you’d probably find more kids in those apartments and it’s not just this seedy place.

It’s also grounded in that you never experience the drugs – drops or bliss – in a subjective POV. You see people use them; you see that it messes them up. But, it’s never ‘shown’ from a subjective POV of someone using them…

LZ: It’s definitely ambiguous.

RB: I remember Larry getting a bit grossed out by the fact that you put something – these drops – in your eye…

LZ: Especially after the scene when Oz is talking to some of his guys about how they fished it all out of the flood water. The sewer water! The dropheads don’t care. But, wow, that’s going in your eye!

Gotham City is in that Hoboken/Jersey City/NYC area. As New Yorkers, how did you honor that Gotham City-NYC/NJ connection using sound? How does Gotham City sound uniquely its own? What sound(s) marks this city as “Gotham City”?

RB: I always like doing New York-centric shows because I can just walk outside and get inspired. Gotham is an amalgamation of the New York City area. It’s smart for New York shows to hire New York crews just because we’re very intimately acquainted with the sound of this place. We have a direct connection to it. I’ll often find myself walking in the subway and hearing something interesting and trying to incorporate that, whether it be a siren or a truck-by, into the show.

It’s smart for New York shows to hire New York crews just because we’re very intimately acquainted with the sound of this place.

One of the more interesting textures that are featured in The Penguin is the train situation. We do a lot of train sounds. To me, that is always a very, malleable and interesting sound to play with because you can make it musical or make it a tension-building sound.

LZ: The train sounds are one signature of the city. It’s recognizable, at least for me living in the city. It’s also a way to help the environment feel grounded. As you’re working on the show, you’re hearing other sounds that you have strong associations with, that you can relate to, or that present something tangible from your own experience. It’s great to be able to draw on that.

RB: One of the initial conversations we had with Lauren was that this show touches a lot on class disparities. She was very interested in drawing distinctions between the different environments that are set up in the show, whether it be Oz’s world that’s very much the inner city of Gotham and the East Side, or the Falcone world, which is probably up in Westchester or Long Island – I guess it’s Long Island. It’s very bucolic and quiet. Then you have Oz’s mother and her “outer borough” experience, probably deep Brooklyn or Queens. Lauren wanted to emphasize that in terms of drawing distinctions between these different class areas of Gotham, which was a fun thing for us to work with.

Since you’re in NYC, did you go out and record the elevated trains or the subways? Did you get to grab fresh sounds of the city?

LZ: Our principal dialogue editor on the show, Michael McMenomy, is also a great field recordist. Independent of this show, he’s been going out and recording a lot of elevated trains. He also did a lot of street-level recording in Chinatown. We used that a lot around the Triads’ club.

Michael had many fantastic train recordings that we used. We got a lot of mileage out of those. He has this crazy setup. Sometimes it’s LCR, sometimes it’s 5.0. It’s a giant spaced array. And he’s brave enough to take that out in the city and put that up in various places. He was kind enough to share all of that with us while we were working on the show. That was a big help.

What about the interiors for the jail or mental asylum? Can you talk about your loop group recordings to set the scene there?

RB: We did lean on some great loop group for those moments. Andy Kris, who was also a re-recording mixer on the show, was able to mix that in really nicely. Many of the scenes in the women’s wing of Arkham Asylum have a huge grab bag of harrowing screams and wild stuff. It’s custom for the show, so it fits what we’re trying to do. Loop group makes sense for Arkham Asylum because it’s hard to find a women’s prison in sound effect libraries. It’s very specific. So we leaned on loop group for that, and they did a great job. My favorite sound effect that Larry created for Arkham was this pitched-down recording of an otter.

LZ: We feature it mostly in the hallways outside of Sofia’s cell. I used some otter sounds I recorded years ago for another film at the Philadelphia Zoo. The otters surprised me. They’re really freaky and scary. They just shriek.

I used some otter sounds I recorded years ago for another film at the Philadelphia Zoo…They’re really freaky and scary. They just shriek.

These otters I recorded were just shrieking, and while they were shrieking, they were bobbing their heads constantly. They seemed really wound up. We pitched some of those down and used them as a background scream layer.

There’s a scene where we’re following Sofia (I think it was early in Ep. 4) as she goes from one room where she’s being examined to her cell. You can hear some of the otter screams playing along with all the fantastic loop group that we had for the show.

As Rich said, it was difficult to find good material for a women’s prison in our libraries.

RB: Otters are super cute animals, but they make terrifying sounds. Another thing I liked about that recording is that it has a metallic vibe to it. The otters must have been thrashing around and those surface impacts are present in the recording.

LZ: It was recorded in a back room that was not part of the main zoo exhibit area. It was like a pump room, but the otters had a couple of kiddie pools that they would jump in and out of. But it was just a concrete room, and that fit the jail acoustic.

We also have some slowed-down baby cries in there; that’s always creepy.

We also have some slowed-down baby cries in there; that’s always creepy.

RB: It’s miserable baby crying and it’s slowed down. It just sounds like really awful screaming.

LZ: It communicates the extreme distress they’re in.

RB: There’s that moment in Ep. 4 where we’re tracking through the hallway and you’re getting both the otter and the baby and then it cuts into the room and it gets really quiet and vacuous. Then, there’s a quick cut of them closing the door and you get this burst of baby scream and otter scream just for a second. It’s very effective.

Did you get to record Oz’s car, the Maserati Quattroporte VI?

LZ: We did not. We did discuss that earlier on in the process but it was one of these things that didn’t quite rise to the level of need for how featured it was in the show versus using existing material we had.

In the process of researching it, I found that people hate those cars. It’s somewhat specific to the year they were made. But it seems like there are quite a lot that are known stinkers and money pits. People don’t like them, so I thought it was funny that was Oz’s car. He’s got that great purple and gold paint job – plum, as he says.

RB: That does check out for Oz’s character though. It’s like a very expensive lemon yet it’s his idea of what’s cool.

Larry found some great library sounds of the Maserati.

I remember I read some of the scripts and thought, “Oh man, we’re definitely going to have to record this car.” We had it on the back burner. We work a lot with this great recordist in LA named Eric Potter. But Larry and I hit a point where we felt it would serve us much better to allocate that money for an additional sound design editor. So, Larry found some great library sounds of the Maserati. There’s a fairly good collection of those recordings it seems like.

LZ: The other thing with those cars – for as much as people seem to complain about them – is that they do sound cool and distinct. They have a low purr that seems pretty signature, so it’s fun to cut them in. It’s definitely a recognizable sound.

Any other custom recordings for the show?

LZ: One esoteric prop we recorded for the show was a telescoping plastic middle finger. It was a tchotchke my wife received at a work event. It’s a plastic cast of a hand but when you whip it forward, the middle finger extends to four times the length of a regular middle finger. I recorded that and used it for the baton that Oz gets whacked with at the end of Ep. 7. The middle finger on the plastic hand had that same telescoping action and sounded interesting. We showed it to Lauren and she thought it was a fun prop. So we kept that around as a little talisman on the stage for a while.

The FEMA Disaster Relief staging area car fight scene in Ep. 1 is such a fun scene, with the When in Rome song playing on the car radio. Can you talk about your sound work for this scene?

RB: That’s such a fun, comedic little moment. That was one of the first things that I remember seeing in the show and being like, “Oh, this is going to be fun.”

LZ: The comedy in that scene starts with Oz climbing out of the trunk of his car. He looks around and gets into the driver’s seat, and then he’s approached and the fight kicks off. One of my favorite moments in that scene is after the surprise bus impact – when Sofia’s henchman gets stabbed in the eye and he backs up and gets hit by a school bus – all the kids on the bus are standing up and looking around trying to figure out what happened and Oz gives them this little half smile and waves before he’s knocked out. That was a scene where the show clicked for me and it felt really fun.

RB: Those are the beats that make you fall in love with Oz, in a perverse way.

LZ: There’s another moment like that when he’s arriving at the Falcone house. He gets out of the car and says goodbye to Victor. Then, you see him fix his hair in the reflection of the Maserati and he puts on this sort of performative smile, just to see how it looks. It’s so great.

…there’s a lot of leather movement. There are some big, shingy sounds when he takes the air freshener out of the vent and stabs this guy in the eye with it. There’s some good seatbelt zuzz.

Back to the car fight scene, there’s a lot of leather movement. There are some big, shingy sounds when he takes the air freshener out of the vent and stabs this guy in the eye with it. There’s some good seatbelt zuzz.

The picture editing for that scene was really smart and cut to the song in a very fun way. It makes everything that much easier and more enjoyable for us because a lot of the rhythms have been figured out in a way that’s going to work for everyone.

The leather seat creaks and seatbelts were largely hard effects, but we definitely leaned on foley.

RB: For foley, we worked with a group in England called The Foley Barn – Julien Pirrie (foley mixer), Paula Boram (foley artist), and Gareth Rhys Jones (foley artist). Matthew Haasch was our foley editor. That group did a great job.

Larry cut some great sounds for that scene. Obviously, the Maserati is in there in all its glory. We had some good stuff from Julian for the seat movements. We always love to put in that seatbelt zuzz.

I loved the transition from when Oz gets knocked out outside the car. He blacks out, and there’s this great whoosh into the greenhouse.

You have all these really fun beats in that scene, but I loved the transition from when Oz gets knocked out outside the car. He blacks out, and there’s this great whoosh into the greenhouse. I love that transition. That was really fun to play with. Those things ultimately work because of the picture department. They did a super great job of cutting that together. The sound team is just there to take it home. It helps to have such well-executed editorial to work with.
 

Another fun scene that was cut to music was the FEMA truck heist that’s full of ‘drops’ near the beginning of Ep. 2. That one was set to the Bobby Darin “Call Me Irresponsible.” Can you talk about making this scene work for sound? I love the timing of the music and gunshots. So fun!

RB: We had cut this scene more conventionally, and then Lauren and Matt Reeves on the mix stages were like, “How about if we make this much more impressionistic and not real.” It took some doing on the stage; it was a bit of a scramble. But, we ended up getting it into a good place.

It starts in this interior point of view of Oz when we’re first in the FEMA truck. It’s very muffled, a little bit surreal, and then it steps up into the Bobby Darin moment…

It starts in this interior point of view of Oz when we’re first in the FEMA truck. It’s very muffled, a little bit surreal, and then it steps up into the Bobby Darin moment as the trailer car is approaching and you come out of this weird world that we had set up sound-wise.

Initially, that scene had music leading up into the Bobby Darin song. So I was playing with that in mind. Then we muted the music and it was more of this weird sound designy thing that we ended up doing. I liked the crescendo going from Oz’s interior point of view into all of this mayhem breaking loose.

For scenes like that, the only hard thing about dealing with music is that sometimes it’s recorded in a way that takes up a lot of the space frequency-wise. Andy ended up doing some nice EQ to carve out a little bit of the high-mids so there was a little bit more room for the car sounds and the gunshots to poke through. It was definitely a mixing chore to get all that to work, but it feels like it came together and is fairly dynamic.

It was definitely a mixing chore to get all that to work, but it feels like it came together and is fairly dynamic.

The guns can feel terrifying in those environments, especially with some of the surfaces. Then you cut outside and you get the exterior gunfight and the impacts and destruction of the cars. It just felt really exciting, but it all was paced by this music, which was another unconventional style choice that Lauren put in there. That’s a good example of the tone of the show.

The song is bookended in the scene by going from this interior perspective of Oz to the shot in the getaway car of Oz with blood all over his face. The sound there is a bit muffled. Andy did this cool reverb of the music into the Falcone mansion. It came together nicely.

LZ: The old-school swagger and bluster of the song also really connect the scene to Oz. That was great.

Sofia does this hypno therapy session, reliving her time in Arkham Asylum. Did you want it to feel like she’s reliving this memory or did you want to make it feel more like a flashback? Can you talk about your choices for this scene in Ep. 2?

RB: I wanted to make it a flashback thing. And for that reason, I think it’s hyper-stylized. Sofia is doing EMDR therapy which uses an EMDR light bar. The light bar itself has an almost sci-fi quality – it’s going into Star Wars territory with some of the whoosh-bys.

The light bar itself has an almost sci-fi quality – it’s going into Star Wars territory with some of the whoosh-bys.

The other fun thing for me to play with in that scene is this gnarly alarm that goes off when Sofia is in the jail cell flashback with her brother and the gate closes. It all builds up nicely, creating this weird, hyper-real flashback moment. Anytime you see that bar, it’s the signifier of Sofia’s messed up Arkham past. So we wanted to make it quite grating and awful sounding.

But in reality, I don’t think those light bars make much sound.

In Ep. 3, Victor and his friends are on a rooftop waiting for the fireworks to start. Instead, a series of explosions happen. The seawall breaks, flooding Crown Point. Can you talk about your sound work for this scene? I like the sound you created for the rocks vibrating on the rooftop…

RB: Larry did a great job of cutting that scene. It was a lot of work to get the dam breaking and the water rushing through the street. Again, Matt Reeves had this fairly unconventional idea of taking out all the sound and going right into music. It really worked, and it put you into Victor’s head space.

LZ: We covered that scene traditionally with what you’d expect to hear. But going with just music was incredibly effective. There were a few moments where the new idea seemed to work against the original construction of the scene. Rich and Andy found an elegant way to make that all work. It makes more of a statement about how this affects Victor than just depicting the awe of this big event.

It feels sadder and more traumatic for Victor just having all the sounds sucked out of that moment.

RB: It ends up playing much more emotionally. It feels sadder and more traumatic for Victor just having all the sounds sucked out of that moment.

LZ: Getting back to the rock sounds on the roof, the main rock element was from a recording made by Coll Anderson. I worked with him on a movie years ago, and he had recorded a lot of different rock material vibrating on a speaker cone. So I immediately thought of that recording and it worked perfectly.

It was fun to reintroduce that sound later in the episode when Victor has a flashback in the nightclub. In that scene, he’s dropped all the vials of bliss on the ground and so we could introduce and swap out that rock vibration with a glassier element to fit the vials. We could mix between the rocks and glass vials.

So the sound of the rocks vibrating was, in fact, the sound of rocks vibrating.

RB: It’s one of those sounds that you’re sitting on for forever until the moment arises, and then you think, “Oh, perfect!”

We ended up using a lot of the sounds for that theme in the flashback in the club. So that material wasn’t lost completely, it was just moved.

From a mix standpoint, I turned the subwoofer way up for that, so it feels like a very basey, earthquakey moment, too. It would have been one of those tragic things if we had cut out all of that work of the dam breaking and not been able to use it later. We ended up using a lot of the sounds for that theme in the flashback in the club. So that material wasn’t lost completely, it was just moved.

LZ: You can’t be too precious because, at the end of the day, you need to do whatever is going to make the show the best it can be and follow your filmmakers. I’m never really precious about losing stuff like that.

RB: We did use some of the water sounds before the title sequence. So at the very end of that water rushing scene, the water sounds come back for a bit in the interior apartment shot and then it goes underwater, which is always a fun sound feature. This show has a lot of those really fun transitions.

Let’s talk about that club scene with Victor. What were some of your challenges for designing his mental breakdown as he flashes back to the flood? What went into that design and mix?

RB: One thing we had was the voice of Victor’s girlfriend snap Victor back to reality. So, the character we see on screen is Roxy (played by Jessie Pinnick), who is selling the bliss in the club, but the voice we hear is Graciela (played by Anire Kim Amoda). We had both actresses come in to the mix stage and shoot ADR. That was a last minute request we put together.

…it’s a fairly complicated idea to sell that it was the booming bass in the club that set off Victor’s PTSD.

That was a challenging scene because we had to work around the music. Also, it’s a fairly complicated idea to sell that it was the booming bass in the club that set off Victor’s PTSD. There was a lot of work that went into the mix process. Andy and I had to weave around each other and figure out what sounds were telling the story at each point.

It was very cool imagery to play with, too. There were these ghostly figures in the club, silhouetted behind the screen and those end up being these bodies floating by in the flashback. Larry did some cool, quick cutaway sounds of glitched-out effects to match the ones flashing across the screen.

We also used the repurposed sounds of the rock rumbling and foley, and Larry gave us some cool sounds of vials rattling.

LZ: So we had a glass component as well.

It was just a matter of working through it with Lauren and figuring out what we wanted to focus on at any given moment.

RB: It was a hard scene to choreograph, and figure out what sounds we should take out. On the editorial side, we had a ton of stuff to play with, such as partygoers’ voices, loop group, effects of the club, more sound design, and so on. It was just a matter of working through it with Lauren and figuring out what we wanted to focus on at any given moment. But it feels like it works in the end. It was definitely a challenging scene to work with, though.

LZ: That nightclub music takes up a lot of sonic real estate in the scene. I’m sure that required some work with Andy to figure out exactly what to feature here and there. You really do have to make choices.

RB: The mix on that was tough. At one point, Sofia ostensibly has a voiceover. She’s talking about Gotham and how bliss can make people feel good about themselves. And that monologue is happening in this packed club with loud music. It’s hard to make all that fit together in a way that works. That’s where having a good showrunner and good directors is crucial because she just walks us through it and pulls focus where she wants the audience to be focused.

The other part of it is that, at a certain point, the club music starts to sound like score, which I think Lauren liked, but it was tricky.

What went into the sound of the mushroom grow lab where the bliss drug is harvested?

RB: I liked it because it had a steampunk vibe. It felt like a factory making some wild stuff.

LZ: There was lots of steam – shorter, closer bursts and longer more diffused ones.

We had this throbbing bass pulse that I recorded a couple of years ago. It’s a synthesizer that I had sent out of a bass amp and re-recorded.

We had this throbbing bass pulse that I recorded a couple of years ago. It’s a synthesizer that I had sent out of a bass amp and re-recorded. That sound was just sitting around waiting to be used, so I thought, “Why not here?”

There were also some pitch-changed recordings of water pipes and steam pipes.

RB: I always like scenes that are in bigger spaces, like Arkham and these big factory spaces, because it’s so much easier to make the foley sound really good in big space. You just add some cool reverbs. We’ve probably used the Audio Ease Alitverb “Alcatraz” preset a lot on this show, which sounds great in big spaces like that.

We certainly riffed off what the production designers and our directors put together, which is a very weird-looking environment.

Later, in Ep. 4, we get to see more of Sofia’s time in the Arkham Asylum. Can you talk about designing the sounds for this sequence – like Magpie, and the off-stage screams and noises that swirl around Sofia, the sounds of chains, the fight, and the electroshock ‘therapy’? How did you use sound to show that Sofia’s time here was enough to break even the sanest of people?

RB: Larry and the sound effects team gave us great stuff, especially for when they’re in the big room with all the inmates. Larry cut some really cool sounds for that.

In addition, the director of that episode, Helen Shaver, spent a lot of time with the background actors, getting sounds from the whole background acting crew. So there was a lot of really good production sound whenever you’re in the big cafeteria room with all those women.

…the director of that episode, Helen Shaver, spent a lot of time with the background actors, getting sounds from the whole background acting crew.

LZ: The chants of “Hangman” were really good. That chant would have been hard to create credibly just in post. Rich augmented it with loop group, but the production sound was really good for that chant.

RB: The production chant makes the loop group more believable because you have a bed to sit it on top of.

Both Larry and I were worried about getting the sound of the chains right.

LZ: It’s one of those counterintuitive sounds where you can record a heavy chain but not get the sound that you expect, that you associate with the chains on screen. Obviously, the foley team knows what they’re doing, selecting the right props for the sound you expect to hear as opposed to the sound you might actually hear.

RB: The Arkham episode had great production effects. They had cool sounds for the women banging on tables and we would pepper in sweeteners. Foley gave us some stuff. But it all glued together really nicely because we had that great production track, which was nicely fleshed out.

Larry did some great sounds for the violence in that episdoe, like the intense sound for Magpie’s death and some of the fights.

LZ: Lauren wanted to keep the show grounded but she does not shy away from disturbing sounds or disturbing gore. There would be something that we’d listen to that we felt was really freaky and disgusting and Lauen would ask, “Is there a way to go further?”

RB: She had a very dark side to her. There were a couple of scenes with Oz’s brothers drowning off-screen in the tunnels – they were locked behind this door – and Lauren would be manically giggling. And I thought, “Wow, cool. We’re going real dark.”

Lauren set up that realistic sound rule yet we broke that in Ep.4. It plays to the way this episode is put together, especially segueing into the electroshock therapy.

One of Larry’s sounds that creeped out everyone on the dub stage was the rope noose sound for the flashbacks to Sofia’s mother and her suicide. That’s always a sound that gets under your skin. But, I think there are three or four times it cuts back to young Sofia finding her mom hanging by a noose. That’s a place where the music cuts out and we’re more into the sound design. So, the rope noose sound got a lot of creep points.

Lauren set up that realistic sound rule yet we broke that in Ep.4. It plays to the way this episode is put together, especially segueing into the electroshock therapy. That is super stylized. The music is our hero throughout that, and it’s a cool cue. So, that’s what Lauren wanted to have the audience pay attention to, but Larry created some cool electrical sounds of that thing powering up. It’s complementary to the music track, and together, it works as a whole.

LZ: Talking about the score, in Ep. 1 we get the cello theme for Oz. I think composer Mick Giacchino did some really interesting work. This was a pretty unique score for the show that served it well and helped bring a lot of identity to it and the characters. It was always fun to hear what the score was doing.

There’s a continuity to the style of the music for both The Batman film and The Penguin show.

RB: Absolutely. Those guys were super tasteful. They nailed the tone, which is moody and has some weird, atonal string melody. They had almost a sound design aesthetic to some of their compositions, too, which fits nicely with what we’re doing.

Also, that component grounds the show to the movie. There’s a continuity to the style of the music for both The Batman film and The Penguin show.

What are you most proud of in terms of your sound work on The Penguin? What stands out, sound-wise, for you on this show?

RB: There was some really beautiful stuff that came together in Ep. 1. We wanted to put our best foot forward. That was also an episode that Matt Reeves was very involved in. Hopefully, we’re continuing a through line from the movie. There were even some sound effects that we had to go back to the movie for.

There is great rain sound design that happens throughout that scene with Alberto. There are some jarring gunshots…It felt fun to play in the Gotham sandbox.

So, I’m really proud of that first episode because there’s a lot in there. I love the cold open with Oz going into the Iceberg Lounge. There is great rain sound design that happens throughout that scene with Alberto. There are some jarring gunshots and stuff like that. It felt fun to play in the Gotham sandbox. There are some super cool train-bys. There is a lot in there that makes you lean in and think, “Oh wow, this is going to be a fun show.”

Larry did some amazing stuff at the end too, which was another example of us “building the plane in the air.” Lauren had a lot of ideas for the scene with Alberto’s car coming in and crashing into the fountain. It may sound like music, but there’s really cool sound design going on after the impact. Then it cuts to Sofia walking up and discovering that her brother is the one that was in the car. There’s a horn honk that just continues on and on. I think that horn drove Larry crazy because he couldn’t make it crossfade correctly. Pro tip: it’s really hard to continue a horn honk without hearing the crossfades.

LZ: It made me maybe question everything I thought I understood about our work.

RB: Try it some day. Just try to continue a horn honk with crossfades. You’re going to hear it crossfade. It shouldn’t be hard, but it’s hard.

That stuff is subtle, but there were some moments throughout this show when Lauren wanted to do this “in your head” thing. We did it with Oz in Ep. 2 in the car and we did it with Sofia discovering Alberto was in the car that crashes into the fountain. That one seemed like a tall order that we put together in a fairly short amount of time. I think it came out beautifully.

LZ: I agree. There are a lot of great episodes, but Ep. 1 is one that I particularly liked. There was so much visually that was fun to play with.

…when Lauren directed us to The Batman movie (an amazing sounding film!) as our guide for the show, that felt like a lot of responsibility to try to match.

Generally, when Lauren directed us to The Batman movie (an amazing sounding film!) as our guide for the show, that felt like a lot of responsibility to try to match. We had a much shorter schedule and we didn’t work on that film. Will Files and his team did tremendous work on it. So, it was a great relief to get Lauren and Matt to be into what we were doing on that first episode. We felt like once we had that under our belt then we could have a common language and it was all going to work out. It’s a tremendous-sounding film, so just to be able to make them happy and be adjacent to that world felt great.

RB: It did feel good. I think we earned our stripes on that first episode. At one point, Matt Reeves said, “Wow, you guys did some really tasteful stuff.” And we’re like, “Yeah, we’re pretty good at this.”

LZ: I’m not sure what his expectations were, or what he thought he was going to get.

RB: Maybe he thought he was going to get the B-team TV squad. But we came to play.

I have to give props to Andy Kris. In the Arkham episode (Ep. 4), there was really gnarly dialogue, just tough scenes to mix in Arkham with noisy environments. Andy nailed it.

All joking aside, I’m amazed at how good this show sounds given the time constraints. Larry started doing some editorial in late April and then we started mixing in June. It came together really nicely.

I have to give props to Andy Kris. In the Arkham episode (Ep. 4), there was really gnarly dialogue, just tough scenes to mix in Arkham with noisy environments. Andy nailed it. He was able to make that episode sing and it sounds beautiful. From where it started out to where Andy got it to is incredible. It was a tough episode….

LZ: And Andy makes it look easy. I also would like to highlight the amazing work of our supervising ADR editor Angela Organ. She did an incredible job getting all of the principals and group recorded and cut which was no small feat given the compressed schedule. She is fantastic to work with!

A big thanks to Rich Bologna and Larry Zipf for giving us a behind-the-scenes look at the sound of The Penguin and to Jennifer Walden for the interview!

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