Designing the Disturbing Sound of The Third Day

Oscar-winning supervising sound editor/sound designer/re-recording mixer Niv Adiri at Woodpecker Sound Ltd. in the UK has teamed up with directors Marc Munden and Philippa Lowthorpe on the dramatic and disturbing new HBO Max series The Third Day — a six part miniseries split into two seasons (Summer and Winter) and told from the perspective of two different characters (Sam, played by Jude Law, and Helen, played by Naomie Harris). Both stories are set on Osea Island, which is populated by a religious group with odd rituals. It’s a place that is striking and strange.

Here, Adiri discusses his approach to sound on the Summer episodes directed by Munden. The first episode opens on an aerial shot of remote countryside. There are the sounds of squeaks and clatters (like those of an old bicycle perhaps) and windchimes mixed with ambient music. The camera slowly pans left as Sam’s panicked voice cuts in. He’s talking about money, stolen money. The shot cuts to a corner of his face, to his eye. The image goes in and out of focus. The effect is disorientating. It keeps the audience from finding their footing.

Throughout the series, sound adds to the feeling of disorientation and unease. Insects sound ‘off’ or birds sound overly present. There are voices and whispers swirling around inside the grass and trees as Sam passes through them. Sam encounters disturbing things, like a young girl who’s just hung herself. On Osea Island, he sees quarrels happening just beyond his range of hearing. You’re never sure if what you hear is reality or Sam’s distorted perspective.

This subjective reality opened up the creative possibilities for sound — both in terms of effects and mixing choices.

The Third Day: Official Trailer | HBO

This series is interesting in that it covers the same location — Osea Island — for two different seasons — Summer and Winter — from the viewpoint of two different characters — Sam (Jude Law) and Helen (Naomie Harris) — for three days each…

Niv Adiri (NA): There’s actually an “Autumn” event, a 12-hour live event that follows Jude Law. It’s more like immersive/live theater, not a scripted episode. I’m not sure how they handled it in the States, but in the UK it’s running on a different channel. It ran online on HBO facebook though, for sure. It’s certainly been quite a ride, this one.

It really has! And sound plays such a strong role. Right from the beginning, sound adds to the disorienting feeling that you get. Initially, you don’t know what’s going on with Sam or where he’s at. You’re trying to figure it out and there are all of these weird noises coming from the woods and his surroundings. I loved it!

NA: Thank you! It’s nice that you notice the sound. People should notice it, but you never know. Sound is certainly a big part of Sam’s journey.

For the first episode, I was listening over headphones. And I’m so glad I did. I watched Ep. 3 on my 5.1 surround setup but I just feel like I got so much more from the experience over headphones…

NA: When we mix it, we are monitoring at a nice, loud level in a perfect environment and so you hear everything. But when you’re on headphones, at home, you definitely get the closeness of everything.

Oscar-winning Supervising sound editor/Re-recording mixer Niv Adiri

Who was your point person on the show? Was it series creators Felix Barrett and Dennis Kelly?

NA: No. Felix and Dennis created the idea and Dennis wrote it. And then you have Adrian Sturges (the main producer) who was really into sound as well. There was DeDe Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner and Brad Pitt and their production company Plan B. The directors were Marc Munden (for the Winter block) and Philippa Lowthorpe (for the Summer block).

I worked mainly with the directors. And I met Felix and Dennis on the review days for each episode. But they had a very close connection with the directors throughout and so their ideas and thoughts came to the directors as we were working on it.

Interesting! Often times on television series, a producer or the series creator — sometimes even the writer — will be the main person (or people) that the post sound team talks to. But on a film, it’s always the director. It’s great that you got to work with the directors on this series….

NA: Absolutely. There are two things to think about here. For me, this was the first TV series that I’ve worked on from start to finish. I’ve been doing film for 17 years!

So, Philippa and I had worked together on a film last year called Misbehaviour, which was just recently released in the States. She brought me onto The Third Day. And I, of course, met Marc and the producer.

But the idea from the beginning was to take a film approach. There wasn’t any compromise — I hate to say ‘compromise’ because TV series today sound like films. They have that same high standard for picture and sound that films do.

But the approach for this series was to think of it as six short films. So I worked very closely with the directors. There was a lot of great input and collaboration between us.

When you sat down to talk with director Munden, did he have very specific ideas for how he wanted to use sound? Like, ‘I want to hear this over there and that over here.’ Or did he paint in broader strokes?

NA: It was a bit of both. He’s very involved in sound, and so is Philippa.

Marc was very much involved from the beginning and wanted to be a part of the process. He very much wanted to hear things as ideas were forming. He was always up for that. In fact, my process is always to share my work as soon as possible, as soon as I think there is something to share. Because the last thing you want are surprises at the very last minute.

Marc and I had a spotting session early on where he talked about Sam’s journey and how he saw it. You could see from how he shot it that everything was very subjective. You’re certainly in Sam’s head a lot of the time. And you don’t know if what he’s going through is real or not real, if he’s thinking about it or if he’s actually experiencing it. It was very much a part of the whole idea of the show, and certainly the first three episodes.

Marc was very supportive of me just going for it, which is great. You always want that sort of collaboration with directors. You want them to tell you to go for it. There’s no such thing for me ever as too much. Obviously, we’ll find the right balance of things and the sounds for things as we explore it. So, he told me to go for it.

In the beginning, he told me — and this is true for the entire process — that I should try to push things a bit further. He’s one to push it a bit further until it feels like too much and then we’ll bring it back. That’s a great process to have. It’s a great way of working, especially with creative people like those in sound for picture.

Marc definitely had clear ideas, but at the same time, he let me have free reign in how I achieved them. He was very open to hear new ideas and new things. We would change them and review them and push them. It was a lot of trying, which was great because the picture allowed you to do that, to explore these different ideas of what Sam is experiencing. Sam’s experience is filtered through his grief, his loss, and that’s how he perceives everything. That affects his mental state and we can explore that with sound. Also, too, he experiments with drugs and alcohol. And those things let you go to town with sound. There’s no limit. So, it was a lot of fun.

There were a lot of organic sounds, like the tree leaves and tall grass, the crickets, grasshoppers, the ocean and wind… Did you capture any custom recordings to help you fill that palette of natural sounds?

NA: Yes, for sure. As much as the sound design went to the extreme, the role of nature was still prominent. Marc mentioned early on that the island — when Sam first sees it and arrives there — it’s like paradise. There are beautiful birds, authentic water birds that we have here in the UK around that area. But, we were very much into championing one bird per shot instead of having a lot of them all of the time. We chose one sound that was specific and beautiful and we really go for it with that sound.

The same was true for the trees and water. Everything had to sound super real but super pretty and heightened because of the look of it. All the colors are pushed and saturated in a really lovely way. The same goes for sound.

Some recordings I had, like water and waves. But I’ve also captured new sounds for that. And for the leaves and trees, I’ve added some new recordings for that.

COVID hit and the lockdown happened just before we started the mix on the first three episodes. So, everything went very quiet and I was home in the countryside. There were no cars. Everything was so quiet and I had a lot of fun walking around capturing the sounds of nature that normally I couldn’t because there’s a highway or road and traffic. So I was very lucky in that regard.

There were bird songs that I was able to capture and add to the tracklay as we were nearing the mix.

What mic and recorder did you use to capture the nature sounds?

NA: When lockdown started, the only recorder that I had at home at the time was my portable Sony PCM-D100, which I actually managed to get some decent recordings from. And I used a Sanken CO-100K for some spot FX recordings that I wanted to process or be really crisp and heightened.

A lot of the feeling comes from the music and it gives you that sense that something is ‘off.’ Did you also do anything to the background sounds to help support that feeling that something is amiss?

NA: A big part of the sound design was to create this uneasy feeling in places where it’s not necessarily obvious that something is wrong. But, we wanted to keep the audience on edge and have this uneasy feeling.

Much of that comes from the music, and there are a lot of interesting flavors in the music that are almost sound design. And that helps. But there were quite a few areas without music, or the music didn’t have that feeling in it and so we created that with sound design.

Marc likes using airplanes in a non-traditional way, and drones. So my team and I created quite a few drones for several areas where Marc wanted that. We had quite a lot of trial and error with that. A drone isn’t something that I normally do, I have to say. With sound design, I try to stay away from that because it’s so tonal. But Marc was asking for it and so we made quite a few. Some of them were made from thunders, some from metallic elements, some from wind, and many were made from elements we used in that specific episode. We would take these sounds and slow them down, load them into a sampler and manipulate them, and they became quite musical. There are quite a lot of them in the first three episodes, in areas where we wanted to create uneasiness. They just come and go under the right lines. We spent a lot of time on that, putting sound design and sound effects in those areas.

Sometimes it’s so subtle that you don’t know if the audience is going to hear it through the television. But it’s one of those things you don’t need to hear; you just need to feel it. I was quite careful to remember that, that it’s not something that we need to hear. We want to hear the dialogue. You don’t want to hear that you’re being led anywhere. You just want to experience it as a feeling.

There are also scary scenes and gory scenes in the show that venture into that realm of overt sound effects. The sound there is meant to shock you, or gross you out. For example, near the end of Ep. 1, when Sam follows the kid into this tower-like structure on the beach and there is blood and body parts everywhere. You’re not sure if that was real or a dream…

NA: It’s one of Sam’s nightmares. But, it could be real because the boy is there. It looks like a normal location on the island.

How did you use sound to help intensify those moments that were meant to be scary or shocking?

NA: It’s all about heightened sounds.

There’s a fox scream that we used in there at the beginning of Ep. 2 when Sam calls out. When he opens his mouth, there’s no actual dialogue there. That’s actually a fox bark coming out of his mouth.

That idea started in the cutting room. Marc and the picture editor put that in and I just took it a bit further. I used a recording of foxes and manipulated them a bit more, to make it sound brighter and more heightened and disturbing.

For the other sounds, like when he turns on the flashlight or when he turns over the bits of bone and flesh on the floor, every sound had a distorted reality to it and I made it a little bit more bright and rash, almost hurting.

The music, of course, helped there as well, to create a build-up throughout the scene until he wakes up.

It was a lot of fun, a lot of trial and error. I started with quite a lot of sound in there and we slowly picked through the ingredients with Marc and chose the ones he really liked and lost the ones he didn’t get. You don’t want to overload the sound; it has to be clear. So we kept the best stuff in there and pushed it further when we could.

For the acid trip in Ep. 2 and 3, it’s really anything goes. What were some of your boundaries and limits for what that palette of sounds should be?

NA: It started in one place and finished in quite another. Some things did make it through.

The acid trip for me was fun because you hear one thing but could see something completely different. Then you completely switch off of that and move onto a completely different sound. So the concentration goes from one sound to another to another very quickly. We started with that.

When the trip starts and they go into the woods, there are birds and leaves — sounds of the forest but manipulated. The bird sounds are the Osea Island birds we’ve been using but they are slowed down or sped up or stretched. But anything I did still had to feel beautiful because they’re having a beautiful moment at that point before it gets into the darker side, to the bad trip.

We used organic elements but manipulated them. And they’re all singular events. We weren’t trying to overload each shot. We wanted to champion a specific sound.

(Throughout the process, Marc was always saying let’s ‘champion’ this or ‘champion’ that. And I like it. It’s very clear instruction. And I feel the same way, that each shot should have its own story and sonic focus so as not to overload your brain and ears.)

Slowly, through the shot at the end, you can see that we’re turning into a darker trip. Sam and Jess (Katherine Waterston) go back to the bonfire. All the people there — the crowd and their voices — are slowed down. There’s a lot of modulation within the voices because their faces are sort of deformed. So that was fun!

Then we take that away so you can concentrate on the real chat with Mr. Martin (Paddy Considine), Mrs. Martin (Emily Watson), and Sam.

Mrs. Martin leads Sam away from the party, and there’s shouting. Some of that was recorded on the day and some we recorded later on. That was also manipulated and heightened; we pulled out singular sonic events.

Outside the church, Sam’s trip distorts the trees and there’s this almost underwater element to it so I used underwater sounds to heighten that effect. I think I used the sounds of vegetables and heightened that but added an effect to make them sound almost like they’re underwater. It worked because the picture was so good and that always helps for sound.

There’s a scene in which Mrs. Martin fires a shotgun within close range of Sam, which causes him to lose his hearing. It’s always tough to figure out the best way to make the sound muted but still have the dialogue intelligible…

NA: Yeah, and that effect is done so many times that you really try to not do it the same way again.

There’s a reason why everybody makes it sound the same way because that’s supposedly what it sounds like, and it does work. On The Third Day, we tried to keep the effect going much longer than you’d normally have, with the tinnitus sound coming in and out and using filtering as well. We kept it on for quite a long time but there were dialogue scenes that you had to understand, so intelligibility was definitely a factor.

And there was rain, and insects, and the little butterfly he experienced in the field. Those sounds are high-frequency and once you filter them, they disappear. There was quite a lot of playing with individual filters on individual elements to see how much they could take. Since most of the environment is filtered, you buy the one or two brighter sounds that you hear. You still feel that you are in that environment. But it changes and we wanted to make that feel fluid. Depending on the shot, that filtering comes and goes as if his hearing is coming and going a bit until the boat scene. Once they get on the boat, he’s more or less back to normal.

There was so much trial and error because of the dialogue. I didn’t want the sound to just be dull, so the audience thought there was something wrong with the television. Or, make it dull and hard to understand. You’re mindful of that all the time, especially when you mix for TV. You have to find some in-between.

One trick was to filter his breathing. His breathing was closely recorded and so we could have a bit of that with more filtering. But, the dialogue was more trial and error. It was a lot of fun though because there were a lot of interesting elements to mix.

Did you mix this in 5.1 or Atmos?

NA: The idea was that we were supposed to mix in Atmos as a starting point. But that changed. The final mix was supposed to be in London but it was moved to my home studio in my garden because of COVID. We ended up doing a 5.1 mix and a 2.0 mix.

Actually, all of the track lay was done in 7.1.2. So, if there is ever a need for an Atmos mix, we’re ready to do it.

Listening to the show over headphones, it sounds like you had a lot of fun with the surround field. For instance, there’s a scene in the woods with some masked people who are throwing hunks of metal at Sam. You can really feel the directionality of the metal as it flies toward Sam, landing at his feet or zipping by his head…

NA: Coming from the film side, I’m used to using the surround environment in 5.1, 7.1, and Atmos. I’m a great believer that those formats have to be used in the right way — not, it’s there so let’s use it. On this show, the immersive feeling of the environment was so important to Sam’s journey. I didn’t need to hold back.

But there are also a few places where we close the sound down to almost a mono feel to help with a certain moment in a scene and then opening it up back to 5.1 feels even more effective. Marc was really into these kinds of things.

The backgrounds also had a big, really wide feeling to them. It was like being outside. All of the birds are moving because they’re flying through frame. And the trees, depending on the shot, we tried to make them sound as wide and rich all around you as possible.

That was something both Philippa and Marc were very much into — making the environment as rich and immersive and surrounding the viewer as much as possible.

The same with the music. The music came in stereo stems and I spent quite a lot of time on upmixing each music cue/music stem. I made sure there’s a lot of movement in the music to help with our immersive experience.

For the moments when Sam is walking through the woods, sometimes he hears voices off in the distance or he hears whispers. He hears sounds that moved in and out of the woods and grass around him. For these kinds of effects, what’s your approach to reverb? What’s your philosophy on using reverb and what amount to use? Are you in the camp of “reverb is a useful tool for adding a sense of space and distance” or “reverb can quickly make the mix sound undefined and mushy and should be avoided”?

NA: I’m somewhere between the two. I do like using reverbs and delays but try to keep it as simple as possible. For exterior dialogue and FX, I prefer using just a simple short slap, just for a bit of perspective. I sometimes use a slap into a reverb (but a very tight, small one).

I don’t like hearing reverbs. So, I always try to make it sound as natural as possible. For me, it’s a feeling — if the reverb feels right for what I’m trying to describe on-screen.

What was the most challenging scene in terms of sound design, in the first three episodes?

NA: I think it was challenging as a whole. There are scenes where things are so busy — like the nightmare we talked about, and the festival procession.

The procession was a massive challenge in terms of dialogue. There was quite a bit of pushing and pulling the dialogue, music, and effects. Marc wanted these things to be like waves of sound, so the dialogue would lead and then the music and then the effects. That takes a long time but that was the challenge in these busy sequences.

There was that big sequence in the church with Mrs. Martin and Sam. We wanted that to feel very violent and scary for Sam but also real. We talked before about his experience of hearing loss.

But, it was all coming from the same idea of focus — where do we want the focus to be at any moment?

What would you want other sound pros to know about your work on The Third Day?

NA: It would be cool to mention the environment we had to operate in. We were supposed to go into mixing on a Wednesday, but on the previous Friday, we were told that Monday would start lockdown and we couldn’t go into mix it.

At that point, I said to the producers, “Give me ten days and we can do it in my place.” But at that point, I was thinking my little cutting and premixing room in my garden wasn’t set up for a final mix. So I spent those 10 days doing a big upgrade to my studio.

HBO and Sky Entertainment wanted the show delivered but they pushed the delivery date back, from July to October. That gave us a bit more time and I was able to purchase some new speakers and the whole bunch of soundproofing, acoustic panels, and a little mixing desk/Controller and all the stuff I knew I needed to replicate the mixing room that I was expecting to mix in.

Then we came up with a workable way to collaborate and mix live with me and the director via Source Connect. Production sent both of the directors a new 4k iMac and I recommended to them a couple of small speakers that I know the sound of, and would be really good to use.
We sent those to the directors’ homes. We installed Pro Tools on their machines. They had local picture.

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Every morning I would log into Marc’s machine or Philippa’s machine, open Pro Tools, pull in new picture, check the sync, and we had Skype running on the laptop on the side so we could talk between the passes. And that is how we worked for months. The first week or so was all about getting used to this new way of working, but it worked really well.

Once every few days, I’d send a stereo bounce to the cutting room and they would produce a QuickTime for Marc to review over the weekend, or for the producers to review. We also made them DVDs so they could listen through their 5.1 systems at home in environments that they know. We did everything we could so they could experience the mix as much as possible and be part of the process. Not being in the same room and being able to react to the same things was a challenge, but we got there.

All six episodes were really mixed at home, but for the last three episodes we had a stage at Pinewood Studios for reviews. We spend a few days there together with Philippa and Adrian mixing. Dennis and Felix came on playback days as well. It made a big difference being in the same room in these final stages of the mix.

It was quite a revelation that we could actually do this caliber of work remotely. But, it’s always nice to be in the same room.

When you reviewed the mix at Pinewood Studios, how did it translate? Do you feel like the mix held up well?

NA: Before I started mixing in my room, I listened to a lot of reference material that I knew really well. And I had a remote calibration session with a technician via video chat while I was tuning the room. We looked at the graph together and probably did four or five different tunings until I got it to where I like it.

And, in the cover of night, I went to a couple of rooms that I know and listened to stuff back. Since it was during lockdown, I couldn’t go during the day. So I made sure it was safe and no one was in the room. I listened to the mix about two or three times in stages at Pinewood that I know and trust. I listened to it at home through my home theater setup, and I listened through headphones. I also sent the mixes in the early stages to a couple of friends with home studios and got feedback from them. So, when we got to the room at Pinewood it translated really well. My home studio is a nearfield set up so it was perfect for TV mixing.

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