Shaping The Sandman’s Surreal Sound – with Aaron Glascock and Christopher S. Aud

Oscar-nominated and MPSE award-winning supervising sound editor/sound designer/re-recording mixer Aaron Glascock and MPSE award-winning sound designer/re-recording mixer Christopher S. Aud – at Warner Bros. Post Production Creative Services in Burbank – have worked on over 10 films together since they teamed up in 2015; working on series is not something they typically do. So when the showrunners (Neil Gaiman, David S. Goyer, and Allan Heinberg) on Netflix’s The Sandman chose Glascock and Aud to give the series a cinematic sound, they knew they’d need the time and space to truly achieve that goal.

Like Gaiman’s other stories, The Sandman focuses on myths and the interaction of immortals and mortals. This story – based on Gaiman’s award-winning DC comic series THE SANDMAN – mainly follows Dream (an immortal entity who controls our dreams), who finds himself in peril after being trapped by mortals practicing magic. While Dream is imprisoned for over a century, chaos descends upon the mortal realm and it’s up to Dream to break free and set things right.

The show’s settings swing from huge fantastical set pieces, like the realms of Hell and The Dreaming, to unpretentious places such as a roadside diner. The sound team had to craft ambiences, effects, and designs to fit this range of immense and intimate spaces, and supernatural and ordinary situations in a way that felt organic and believable so the audience wouldn’t question the truth of myths and immortals.

Here, Glascock and Aud talk about what went into their cinematic approach to the series’ sound, custom-building a beam for sound design elements, creating unique atmospheres for Hell, working with organic elements like wind, fire, and water to create fantastical sounds, designing the sounds of gargoyles and demon portals, coming up with a vocal sound for The Fates, mixing in Dolby Atmos, and more! Plus, we dive into episode-specific sounds, like the battle of wits between Lucifer and Dream, the meeting between Hobb/Robert and Dream every century, and they talk about the impact the animated half of Ep. 11 had on the sound for both halves of that episode.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83ClbRPRDXU

The Sandman | Official Trailer | Netflix

How did you get started on The Sandman, and what was your initial approach? What were the showrunners looking for in terms of sound on the series?

Aaron Glascock (AG): They presented me with a tall order. The post producer and showrunner were very specific about what they wanted, and so I told the studio I’d need a lot of space.

Sound Supervisor/re-recording mixer Aaron Glascock

They were about to demolish and reconstruct the building that I’m in, which is under the water tower at Warner Brothers. It was right in the middle of the pandemic, and I leveraged the fact that there was very low occupancy at the studio. I told them I wasn’t going to move mid-show and they put me in Screening Room One, which was the very first screening room built in 1923 on this lot. It’s this awesome room that normally seats about 30 people.

They wanted the show to feel different somehow. I hadn’t seen it at that point, and so I asked, “What do you mean by that?”

They said, “Well, we want it to be as organic as possible, and different and rustic where it needs to be, and have a different grain.”

So I said, “Let’s do it. We’re going to build our own whoop-ass factory here.”

Chris [Aud] was working with me this whole while; we had edited and mixed a couple of films over the preceding summer and so we were ping-ponging ideas about how this is going to be done without even knowing what the content was. I wasn’t an avid reader of THE SANDMAN, so we had to develop our knowledge of it.

I decided I was going to build some apparatus to be the seed of the sound design needs. I started collecting old timpani and I built a beam. I built a waterphone-type thing (a timpani with brazed, bowed rods), and a whole bunch of other stuff just for the job. So, I needed some room for the beam, an upright bass, three timpani, and all kinds of systems for making sounds the real way. There’s also a projector in this room so I could work to a large picture. For a fleeting moment, I’m that asshole who has everything!

I decided I was going to build some apparatus to be the seed of the sound design needs.

The way we did this show (and the way I like to think about this work) is a reverse construction that is emotionally based. We know what the show is supposed to be; we have an idea of what makes a cinematic story with the use of sound. We know it has a shape and it has to have meaning and it has to carry all of this. It’s a vessel for all of this knowledge that we will carry forward and build our understanding of the narrative.
[tweet_box]Shaping The Sandman’s Surreal Sound – with Aaron Glascock and Christopher S. Aud[/tweet_box] We just started making sounds. Along the way, we thought, “This sound we made could work for this,” without knowing what it is yet. We were just building the instruments, or the devices, or whatever the aggregate is that makes it. Then we were placing it with our understanding of what we want it to be, and figuring out how it’s supported in the track to be more meaningful. So when we look at something like the way Dream enters with sand, we don’t just start with sand to make the sound. We have all this stuff in there that might be processed race cars going around a dirt track and everything else.

When we’re listening to the thousands of things that we’ve either made for The Sandman, or made for another show that was never used, we’re looking for something that resonates with us. It’s kind of like finger painting.

Christopher S. Aud (CA): We were really fortunate that six months out from when we were supposed to start the show, we knew we were going to be doing it. We had opportunities here and there leading up to the official start to think about what might work and what might be cool.

Sound Designer/re-recording mixer Christopher S. Aud

We had the best post producer, Andrew Cholerton, and so we had a schedule laid out that honors and respects how sound can complement a show and storytelling. Not everybody does that, but Andrew certainly did.

Another thing I had a little bit of trepidation about was that we were designing and mixing the show. Time has to be allotted for that to happen. Luckily, we got on a schedule that (up until the very end) worked out really well. We would officially be able to prep for a little while, then go mix an episode or two, then come back to prepping – taking what we learned about how the clients responded to that mix (or mixes), do more prep, get ready for the next episodes, and then mix those. We kept doing that, alternating back and forth between mixing and prep, design, mixing and prep, design, and so on. I just don’t know how many people get the opportunity to do that on shows. Maybe it happens all the time? I don’t know; I was not familiar with that process.

Luckily, we got on a schedule that (up until the very end) worked out really well.

I didn’t necessarily believe that it was going to hold true, but when you see those spaces in the schedule between mixes, you think – having been in the business long enough to be a cynic, which probably only takes a week – those mixes are going to start pushing down the road and stack up on each other. And that really didn’t happen until the very, very end. The last three episodes, I think, we did all in a row. But we still had enough time upfront to address what we wanted to address in order to get there.

And, of course, the other thing that happened was that we did not mix in order due to visual effects and other things. I think we mixed Ep. 1 first and then we went to Ep. 5 “24/7,” which takes place in the diner.

AG: It was a dream assignment. We all grow up with the lore of how the sound on Star Wars was done and the stories behind the discovery of those voices of things. Certainly, we carry all that forward and bring that into how we approach the problem on every single job. But this was one where we went, “Okay, I’m going to need this much space. I’m going to need this much time.” The time was not open-ended, but the schedule supported the work we needed to do.

The time was not open-ended, but the schedule supported the work we needed to do.

Also, this coincided with me moving my machine shop from one place to another, so I took every single short-end scrap piece of sheet brass, wood veneer, 300-pound machinery vices, and anything that I thought could be useful for what we were about to do. I thought, “This is our journey; these are our tools.” We brought in a Persian rug for in front of the screen in the room and I built this stuff on it. This is our psychedelic rock concert down here with timpani, upright bass, and a beam that has six pickups on it and contact mics and four channels of Schoeps over it and two pounds of piano wire strung across it.

You have to make a beam from scratch. So I had to make the tuner heads out of a plate of brass and put piano pegs on it. It’s totally open source, though. You can bow it, hit it, bounce things off of it, and roll giant bearings on it. It’s on the timps (i.e., timpani) so you can flex the tension on the heads and drop the pitch. We did all these fun bass hits that drop and do these cool things.

Aaron, looking at your setup and the beam you made, I take it you weren’t concerned about tonality in your sound design and having that be dissonant when it’s played alongside the score? Or, did you have an idea of what the score was going to sound like?

AG: We had no idea.

The score from composer David Buckley is amazing. As it turns out, we would be mixing along and we’d hear something in there and I’d say, “Let me take care of that” thinking it was something in the sound design. But it wasn’t. I’m really sure David was using a beam as well and we were making similar sounds. He was using that in the score, and I was using that as design food. It was the perfect crossover of heartbeats. It was really exciting and reassuring. When we made that discovery, it was just like, “Wow, this is awesome.” It’s in the music; it’s in the grain.

When working on something this big, luck is the best part of the magic.

When working on something this big, luck is the best part of the magic. You don’t know what you’re doing. I go into all of this stuff not knowing anything and you want to be instructed by the process and the work the filmmakers have already presented to you.

Anybody who’s an expert on this is limiting themselves by claiming to be the expert. You have to look at each one of these as the opportunity to outdo yourself and try to do it in a way that is fresh – that becomes a fresh outcome. And you have to keep it fresh for yourself if you’re going to keep doing it because so much of it is the tactile, utilitarian aspects of telling the story, too. So, how do you elevate that?

Let’s dive into the sound of specific episodes, starting with Ep. 1 “Sleep of the Just.” Roderick Burgess performs a magical rite to bring Death to life, but instead summons Morpheus/Dream. What went into the sound of the magical rite?

CA: Some of the things I recorded were friction-type sounds and mechanical-type sounds – recordings of me pushing stuff around.

We don’t necessarily want to tout plugins per se, but one of the things that worked really well for me later on in the Hell episode and for a bit of this magic summoning in Ep. 1 was Undertone.

Undertone is an amazing tool to create variety and change in sounds that you have. We never wanted to lay on one thing for very long because people pick up on it quickly and then they get tired of it. We wanted to keep everything evolving and moving forward and so Undertone certainly helps with that.

…wind, water, and fire…helped make it all seem very real and tactile to the viewer.

The other thing we learned as we went through this is that “elements” work really well. And by that, I mean wind, water, and fire. Those things helped make it all seem very real and tactile to the viewer. So there are elements of that running throughout the entire series.

AG: If there is continuity, it’s an earthly connection to these powers. As lifelong sound people, we have these collections of things that are the textural glue for power. For instance, wind is this magical thing because it’s abrasive in the most subtle way. It’s like the way a bow works. It catches your ear, it’s textural, and it has a range. You can definitely use that as your segue from silence. Maybe it’s wrong to call it “wind,” but it’s that voice of something that can be extremely powerful and has a transitional quality. It’s abrasive, but it’s soft.

CA: This happened throughout the show: just about when it seemed like we would really want to go for something on the sound effects side/sound design side, characters would be yelling or talking or doing something in those moments, so Aaron had to get creative mix-wise to keep the power going while we are still able to understand the dialogue. I can think of one scene in particular, where Dream parts the waters and he and Luciene are talking. This is a huge visual moment of coolness and there they are still delivering story to us.

AG: Water is funny because it sits on so much sonic real estate.

That’s a beautiful sequence, visually. It’s just so cool. I love how dialogue-driven this entire show is. Curt Schulkey – the dialogue/ADR supervisor (whom I’ve worked with for decades and have co-supervised many shows with) – spent so much time with the Dream dialogue. The production dialogue circumstances were so bad with all the practical effects going on and Curt had so many thousands of loop lines and the result is incredible.

I just love the use of dialogue as a sound design driver because sound is all relative.

I just love the use of dialogue as a sound design driver because sound is all relative. The value of what you’re experiencing is based on what is in your sight line and how you’re referencing it. Everything is a guide rail, so to speak, or a forest through the trees situation. And so you’re always trying to establish some kind of relativity for it to have a value. And the dialogue throughout this story does that, I think because it’s the one thing that is always the same with the main character.

CA: Certainly we all know and use the tools of noise reduction everywhere, but when dialogue is recorded well, or ADR is performed well, recorded well, cut well, and everyone’s given an opportunity to do their best, I think that will beat a noise-reduced, terrible production recording every time. It certainly did in the case of this show because (amazingly) the producers never once said to us, “Can we go back to production here?” That just never happened. And thank goodness it didn’t because it was never going to match into the beautiful performance of the ADR anyway.

We were very fortunate to have Curt on the show. We were very fortunate that all the actors were willing to go the extra mile, and frankly, that all the creative people on the picture side were on board with ADR including Allan Heinberg (showrunner). It was a team effort; they were open to it and they ended up being really happy about it.

Going back to your work with wind, what’s your philosophy or your approach to that? Some people prefer to find the best wind sound and then use EQ to bring out the characteristics of that particular wind sound that they are really appreciating. And other people will use a sampler and do slight pitch bends to make it move or react the way they need it to. So what was your approach to working with the wind sounds on The Sandman?

AG: Generally, there’s no sacred status of a sound. It’s open season on changing the pitch of something, EQing it, or whatever.

The mixing process starts, in some cases, before it’s cut. I’ll take a whole file and slap it into a place in the mix where I’m working and maybe mix it and then cut it to different lengths and put fades on it to different lengths.

During this whole process, we’re building our boats standing waist-deep in the water.

But it might be sitting in the surrounds before I’ve decided how it’s going to start or end.

During this whole process, we’re building our boats standing waist-deep in the water. We can do it. The tools are designed that way more or less. You’re not having to cue something before you walk it, and you’re not having to cut the in and out before you place a sound in the track. Once you throw an audio file up there, even if it has sync points in it or an event in the middle of it that you can see on the waveform, you just lop it off and slide that action until it’s sitting right in. Maybe while you’re doing that, you’re recording a move on it. It’s all of this. I might mix something and then decide to mute the room and throw it into record mode and perform a different segue from that – right now. Then we’re going to pull it up and make it.

That was what was different about this job; I had an environment where I could stop what I was doing and walk 12 feet that way (to the props/devices) and work towards a different version of it.

Let’s turn to Ep. 2 “Imperfect Hosts.” What went into the sounds of Gregory the gargoyle? And what went into the sound of Goldie the baby gargoyle? How was your approach to these different?

AG: The way Chris and I do things is we attack them from different sides. He had a feeling of what that would be, and I had a feeling.

When you do a creature, you scour the earth for the thing that is going to give meaning to the action and make you feel more. In the case of Gregory, you had to have so much empathy and tune into that character. What was happening, you had to feel it. You had to be crying at the end.

CA: It’s maybe four or five minutes that Gregory is with us. We didn’t have much time to establish who and what Gregory was before he’s saying goodbye.

AG: I found one sound – some series of a dog recording – that had a characteristic. I cut that part in and we did our different versions. Chris went in his direction.

The trick with Gregory is that he’s not terribly scary. He’s very playful and puppy-like…

CA: I tried to do bigger things. The trick with Gregory is that he’s not terribly scary. He’s very playful and puppy-like, and so that was something that Allan kept pushing us towards. We needed to find a wide vocabulary for all the little things that Gregory does so that in the back of your mind you go “awww.” This way, when he has to depart, you’re really feeling that pull on you. You’re with Dream as he does that work, and you’re saying, “Uh, oh. This is a big moment for Cain, Abel, and Dream.”

AG: Basically, I constructed a version and Chris constructed a version and we merged them and simplified it. We came from different canine approaches, basically.

CA: Gregory was his own thing since he’s fully grown. Goldie is so tiny. It wasn’t really possible to say that somehow, sonically, these two creatures could be related because at this moment, they’re so dramatically different.

AG: As you work with them visually, you start with an animatic and if I recall, Goldie was less evolved – very much so. We started working with that creature before it was totally dialed in.

We were so involved with trying to develop non-tactile stuff that we heavily relied on foley for everything that was grounded in the dirt and surfaces.

CA: There was a lot of back and forth about how much Goldie should be reacting to Abel and being cute versus not being cute. That was all about visual effects. So, that went back and forth.

The other thing we haven’t talked about yet is that Walter Spencer (foley supervisor) did quite a bit of foley for Gregory, like wings, tactile things on the roof, Gregory playing with the ball, and walking on the grass.

And he did all of Goldie’s movements. Walter played a pretty big role in how Goldie came together as well.

AG: Walter and Mike Horton (foley artist) really swung for the fences on all of this. We were so involved with trying to develop non-tactile stuff that we heavily relied on foley for everything that was grounded in the dirt and surfaces.

It worked great. We’d send things back and forth. We’d send stuff to foley and they would work against it. They’d send us stuff, and obviously, we’d cut against that. So, hats off to those guys.

In Ep. 3 “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” Johanna hears sounds coming through the door at the club. We don’t see what’s behind there initially so there’s a great opportunity for sound to help the audience create a mental picture of what it could be. What went into the sounds coming from the door? And when Johanna opens it?

CA: First and foremost, we need to mention that every one of these shows (thanks to Aaron being really solid about it) we spotted well before they were handed to us. So we had a lot of information coming in about what everyone thought could be possible in all of these moments. And that included the picture editors and all of the producers and studio people. When it came to these beats, Allan had a specific idea about what he wanted it to be on the other side of that door.

…once they grab the doorknob, everything will get quiet and that gives us a lot of headroom to blow the door open…

We don’t always get to do this, but in the edit that was handed to us, the sound was continuous as it went right from the grab of the doorknob on through to the door bursting open. I decided on an old music production trick they do right before you hit the chorus of a song, where everything comes to a stop – a pregnant pause – and then go! So I thought once they grab the doorknob, everything will get quiet and that gives us a lot of headroom to blow the door open and skip into that world. And luckily, they loved that too. That ended up being very effective.

As to the specific sounds that were playing there, I honestly don’t remember. We’re talking about work that happened a year ago now.

AG: I remember the conversations we’d had with them when we were spotting. It was kind of a brainstorm. We would watch these and talk and discuss these things and any crazy feeling or thought about what was not covered visually or what could be covered or what sound could be doing, we talked about.

It’s so important to be able to have these conversations with your filmmakers because they have to believe in you, especially if you’re dealing with showrunners who are writers. They’re talking about language; they need to be able to have a conversation about their story, and you have to be able to discuss your area of specialty with them in terms of the story.

We’d really unwind into this level of expression that changes medium so that they can understand what the potential is for sound and the story.

So our spotting sessions are like that. We’d really unwind into this level of expression that changes medium so that they can understand what the potential is for sound and the story.

CA: The phrase that Allan threw at us for that particular moment was “demon portal.” We tried a few things behind that door but I don’t think, Aaron, that you were overloaded with sound in there. We tried to bring the right thing to the stage as opposed to 10 different things and then figure it out there.

AG: It can be such a mess to be over-prepared. We knew that we had to make it to the finish line on each one of these. You have to efficiently cover it but know that you’ve built into it a reasonable amount of performability for the mixing process. All these big set pieces start large and we figure out where we can economize on them and make the headroom that we need for the dialogue, or the music, or hand off to the music completely. That’s a pretty good rule for how to prepare for each moment, I think.

Did you mix The Sandman in Dolby Atmos? Did that help in terms of dialogue clarity for the big set-piece moments, like this one with Dream watching as Johanna battles the demon portal, or for the scene in which Dream parts the water?

AG: My general feeling about the Atmos dimension is to just use it where you can add some meaning. You would be hard-pressed to meet your schedule if you utilize Atmos as your total spectrum of expression. For me, I want to be measured about how I utilize that functionality so that we’re not wholly dependent on it for telling the story – so it’s not a compromise for the person who doesn’t have it. Instead, it’s a little more expressive for the person who does have the resource to listen to it. I think it’s pretty cool, but also you don’t want it to drive the entire existence of the medium.

CA: We absolutely did mix in Atmos, and I probably put more music in Atmos than I might otherwise to help accommodate sound effects and dialogue in certain instances.

…I probably put more music in Atmos than I might otherwise to help accommodate sound effects and dialogue in certain instances.

The other thing I was trying to do with music was to keep it moving. There would be certain parts of the music that I would continuously, gently pan to keep it from being too static. We can also do that with level, but panning can do wonders for all that material as well.

So, while we mixed in Atmos and we played back for ourselves in Atmos, the clients rarely heard the Atmos mix. They came over to the studio for the first three episodes we did, which were Ep. 1, Ep. 5, and Ep. 3. They heard those in our screening rooms in 5.1. Then, they mainly experienced the other episodes with headphones. Our mix tech, Rob Young, would listen with the headphones on, as well as Andrew [Cholerton, post producer] who would be watching over ClearView with the headphones on too. And sometimes he would have different notes based on how it sounded to him on the headphones versus how it sounded in the room. So every now and then we would get a note based on headphone mixing, but otherwise, it was Atmos all the time, which was fun.

I really enjoyed the sonic atmospheres you created for Hell. It’s surprisingly cold and stark sounding – not what I was expecting! What went into that?

CA: There are three or four locations on our way to the palace gate and I was very intent on making sure that – as much as we could – each one of those spaces felt very different.

The idea that you bring your own fire to hell was just mind-blowing. That gave us an opportunity to create desolation all the way through. And so with that mindset, I tried to present Aaron with as many original wholly-created backgrounds that would allow for him to pick and choose and move through any given scene to keep it alive (in a weird way since we’re talking about hell) and to keep the interest going.

The idea that you bring your own fire to hell was just mind-blowing. That gave us an opportunity to create desolation all the way through.

Aaron created this beautiful sound of the trees on fire streaking through the sky. Aaron was immediately inspired and knew exactly what to do there. Aaron, it’s a very simple but beautiful thing that you did there. Sound design doesn’t always have to be this amazingly tricky thing. I don’t want to be too corny, but you have to search within yourself to figure out the one thing that’s going to fly. And Aaron did that right away on that scene. The moment the creatives heard that sound, they were like, “OMG, that is perfect.” It elevated that whole moment.

AG: This goes back to the whole thing of working strictly in a sound medium and thinking, “What if I do this? What if I do that?”

We’re trying to invent something that we haven’t experienced before.

You make a sound and then you apply it. You’re not only going in a direction to achieve a singular result. You’re just being a kid and making sounds. And when you take the thing that you made over here and put it into this project or this scene, it’s like, “Holy smokes, that’s it.”

You have an understanding of where you’re at, the relative sounds, and the perspective, and then you play this other sound and go, “Wow. I have all these feelings now.” That’s what you’re doing. It’s a juxtaposition that you’re looking for; you’re looking for this change. We’re trying to invent something that we haven’t experienced before. We’re jaded by our knowledge – all of our life-reflection is how we make these decisions, these choices. So when we hear something in a new setting, that’s when we get to leverage that change up. That’s the magic.

What about the sound of the gong that Dream hits at the gates of Hell? That was a great sound. What went into it?

CA: That gong ended up being very simple. I was surprised at how simple it ended up being. I wasn’t sure if they were going to go for it at first, but they totally went for it.

We started with production. Believe it or not, that gong was recorded decently enough in production. So the production gong kicks it off but then we go an octave or two below that for the sustain. And that sustain came from something that I was playing around with. I didn’t know if it was going to fly or not, but I thought, well, let me try it.

So the production gong kicks it off but then we go an octave or two below that for the sustain.

When I heard it over here in my room, I thought, “Okay. I’m willing to give that a shot.”

And that’s what it ended up being. And it reaches all the way out to Squatterbloat coming in.

For the first little gate – and visually it’s a very small gate – we actually had conversations about that gate and how far we should go with it. We decided to allow it to be more than what we see because you’re entering Hell. You’re being allowed to enter. And that is going to sonically be a much bigger deal emotionally in your head than what’s visually just there.

AG: It had to have bolts that went through the earth, having more than what we see.

I loved the mental battle that Dream and Lucifer have. Before they fight, you don’t know what kind of fight this is going to be – like, hand-to-hand combat or whatever. Then they have this battle of wits; they’re just calling out the things that they are and it’s visually represented in this collective mind space. What were some sonic opportunities you had for that scene?

AG: That had to be so efficient because it needed to sell the idea of this space around it. It took several levels of stripping it down.

CA: We had to get very specific in there.

AG: But it had to start that way, too. When you see something like that, you get it in your mind how it’s supposed to be, but what actually plays out is going to be different. It’s just going to be different. So you have to peel it back and change the pitch of things and make it fit. It’s like the Sesame Street version of a nightmare.

In Ep. 6 “The Sound of Her Wings,” Dream and Hobb/Robert Gadling meet in the same pub every 100 years. What were some of your challenges or sonic opportunities for expressing that passage of time?

AG: We had to make it work from concept. From the first spotting session, we were talking about how can we create a thread through all of them, where it leaves and picks up, making a connection.

We had talked about events happening – the same event happening over and over like there is this cycle that will happen throughout eternity – that we could pick up on.

Then there was the technological arc that had to happen. Like, was it a dirt floor that turned into a wood floor? Was it a kind of shanty door that we would hear that would eventually become something else? It would plot a path.

So that was from the first conversation. Then we had to cut that and we gave instructions to foley too. And we all merged on our approach.

….that joke that they’re telling at the very beginning ends up being the same kind of joke they’re telling in the 1980s.

CA: Group had their instructions about how to evolve those conversations over the hundreds of years. Hopefully, you could hear that in the dialogue. For instance, that joke that they’re telling at the very beginning ends up being the same kind of joke they’re telling in the 1980s.

And, I think that’s one of only two episodes that hsd source music in it. There’s the ’80s music, and earlier on, there’s a lute playing and other things as we move through those meetings between Dream and Hobb.

I think later, when we go to the diner in Ep. 8, we’re playing some source music there. Otherwise, that’s it, which is kind of unusual these days. Usually, there’s source everywhere, but not for this.

Ep. 11 “Dream of a Thousand Cats/Calliope” looked so different in the beginning – the “Dream of a Thousand Cats” part is animated. How did the look of this episode impact your approach to the sound?

AG: That was a hard one; we talked about this a lot and we never saw it for the longest time. We would see tests but we couldn’t really prepare for it. We knew that it was not going to be live-action.

I think we covered it in a drier sense because it seemed like the conversations were more in the characters’ heads because cats are psychic. There was greater distance sonically from the plane that the conversation was on to what we were seeing. I would say it was minimalized for starters.

…we covered it in a drier sense because it seemed like the conversations were more in the characters’ heads because cats are psychic.

CA: All of the things that you see in that opening section were all hand painted. It was done by that director, his group and company. So that brings a certain level of emotion to it visually that you want to support sonically. That is where Walter and his foley team provided us with hand-painted sound, if you will, to support all of that.

It’s absolutely beautiful. I’ve never seen anything like it. I kind of feel that way about this whole arc. I’ve never been involved in anything like this and it was just amazing to be able to get to do it.

…you might have thought we were going to get that animated block separate from the ‘Calliope’ part of the episode, but those two things always came together.

The other thing about that, which is a little strange, is you might have thought we were going to get that animated block separate from the “Calliope” part of the episode, but those two things always came together. It was always one piece that was going to be delivered. We just always worked on that together – as two things but really one.

AG: The biggest thing about Ep. 11 in the “Cats” part was that it was like a fable, and “Calliope” was like a storybook. I think it’s funny how affected we are visually to what we hear. It immediately shifts the values. It’s a totally different aural matrix that happens when you see something drawn on a plane. It just changes everything. Your receptors are totally in a different alignment and that changes what you’re expecting – the kind of feedback that you’re expecting.

I feel like the tone from that animated section was carried into “Calliope” – like the ambiances in “Calliope” weren’t very prominent. If you didn’t see it moving, you didn’t hear it moving. It felt like it had that same minimal approach as the animation, especially when you go back and watch Ep. 2 or Ep. 5…

AG: You’re totally right. It’s that thing about being informed by the filmmakers and by the story. You have to get into it. You don’t just start filling your tracks with backgrounds 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 just because you’re in a city. We read the whole thing and we settle on what the instruction is. It’s telling us what story is there and how hard to push certain things, and how proud that dialogue has to sit to the next signal – is it the door, or is it the footstep that you hear that you don’t see? It’s funny how that works, but all of this has so much information that it’s telling us and they’re all different. Every single one of these is so different.

CA: I don’t know that it was entirely a conscious decision. But again, because those two were never separated (we always watched it all the way through), I think the setup of the animation affected how we went about mixing “Calliope” and how you perceive it.

What are you most proud of in terms of your sound work on The Sandman?

CA: One thing we haven’t talked about is The Fates. The Fates show up in three or four episodes. Most of the time they popped up they had to be looped. And then they had to be dramatically and sonically treated so that they felt otherworldly, and in some instances, more powerful than Dream – certainly in that first meeting.

What’s interesting about the first time that we really dealt with The Fates was that it was in Ep. 5 because we did them out of order.

[The Fates] had to be dramatically and sonically treated so that they felt otherworldly…

I personally had fun creating all those treatments with Curt and then we rolled the dice to see if everybody would buy in and they did. For me, the main thing is that really helps tell the story and keeps you guessing about who they are and what they might be up to. I was really happy with how we were able to execute their story sonically.

AG: That we got through the whole thing is what I’m most proud of. It was so big when we were in front of it. I was just amazed that we got through it and I was so happy with the overall result. I saw how relieved everybody else was, too. I just felt like we made this great thing and it just was awesome.

CA: Not to put too fine a point on it, but sometimes I felt surprised that the creatives could listen to the AAF and understand what was going on because the dialogue tracks (and everything around it) were so raw. I never understood how they could get what they were getting until they sat with us. They were relieved when they finally heard it in a way that respected the story and gave them an opportunity to really let that story shine.

It was so big when we were in front of it. I was just amazed that we got through it…

AG: This project was done with just Chris, Curt, Albert Gasser (dialogue editor who covered all bases), Rob Young on stage with us, Lauren Johnson (Re-Recording Stage Engineer) and Andrew Cholerton our post producer, who was there every single step of the way. He was at the mix every day, coordinating VFX for the mix. He never let us crash. We worked with Walter and Mike in foley and a whole bunch of assistants that were just helpful.

CA: When we started this mix, there was only one other crew that had been working on Dub Stage 17. It was a brand new dub stage in the fall of 2021.

AG: We watched them build this mix room for us from bare bones. They would refer to it as our room, but we knew that it wasn’t really. We’re probably never going to get to work in that room again. Its construction during the earliest stages of The Sandman’s sound design heightened the weight of our path; it was completed just in time for our mix schedule.

CA: And it came off beautifully. So, kudos to the team around here at Warner Brothers for making that happen, because it doesn’t always work out that way where a new room just sails right into making things happen beautifully. It doesn’t always work that way, but it did this time.

A big thanks to Aaron Glascock and Christopher S. Aud for giving us a behind-the-scenes look at the sound of The Sandman and to Jennifer Walden for the interview!

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