Creating the Sound of The Shape of Water

I'm the Production Sound Mixer and my job is to record the dialogue on set. I'm the Sound Mixer, Post-Production Sound Mixer. I did the music and the dialogue sound mixing. I am the Supervising Sound Editor and Sound Designer and I was responsible for taking care of the sound design elements like the vocalizations from the preacher, coordinating with our Foley team and just generally keeping the team sort of working together and moving forward. Along with my co-supervisor Nelson Ferreira who couldn't be here today. And I'm the Pre-Recording Mixer also for the film. I did all the sound effects, Foley and backgrounds for the final mix of the film. I guess I start the process by recording the original dialogues and then these guys take it from there. A lot of the product that Glenn records gets handed over to our assisting editors and ultimately delivered over to Nelson Ferreira and Jill Purdy on the dialogue side. And they just go through and clean it up, find select takes and make sure that everything sort of comes together seamlessly so that we have the cleanest version of the production audio when all is done as possible. And then for Brad and I, we kind of work closely to sort of craft and melt together the work that I put into the project and as well as my team. We've got an amazing team on this one of sound effects editors who are passionate people who put their back into every frame that got delivered. And so yeah, Brad and I would talk in the early stages about how we're going to lay that out and organize things so that it was ergonomic for him to do his work which he will speak to in a minute. Coordinate the mix. Yeah, and then basically make sure that the Foley artists know what's important to the director. Just make sure that all hands on deck are aware of what the direction is if there's any sort of master overall directive that we all need to follow. I was the guy who was just making sure that people knew what they needed to cover and sort of splitting up the work into manageable pieces. And then once that's all done, these guys deliver all the elements, the dialogue, the sound effects and the Foley to the mix stage where Chris and I will put it all in. And also we get from the composer the finished mix tracks and we basically build the sonic soundscape for the entire movie with the director and picture editor in this point. And yeah, basically put it together for what you hear in the theaters. Once I've delivered my tracks, I'll just check in as they're mixing just to see how it's going. But really it's all in their hands after that. At what point does your phone ring and you know that this is a real project for you? A few months ahead of the production. I'll get a call and check my availability. I'm just curious, who does that call come from? Generally the producer or if it's a Guillermo movie, it's Guillermo. Yeah, that's sort of when we came into the picture. So Nelson, again, and I as well as Doug Wilkinson, our post-production supervisor, we kind of wanted to work together on something for a while. We had a few close calls and it wasn't really lining up for us. Individually we'd all had lunches and decided we want to work together. And then this came up and it kind of fell into place. At least for me it sort of fell into place as a result of that. I'm not sure if there was more footwork for Doug to make that all happen and come to life. But in the end we wound up getting our wish. What came off of that was we wound up getting scripts sent to us. I was actually on vacation when they came through and I got to read the script on a flight home. I was pretty excited about it because I was coming home to a meeting that we had been invited to where we would sit down with Sidney Walensky, the picture editor, as well as Guillermo. It was an opportunity for Guillermo to share with us his intention for this creature, not as a creature but as a lead man, as a romantic lead. The early stage broad stroke creative discussions took place in that meeting where we talked about what kind of tone does this creature take? What kind of range will he have? And then a few other small details that he just wanted to make sure that we understood were important to him. Mainly atmospheric things like the sounds of the lab. Once that was done we got to go off and start planning and scribbling notes down and begging production to lend us vehicles that we could go and record. Do all of this stuff that would help us get the ball rolling so that when we actually started the post schedule we had the materials we needed to get going. As re-recording mixers we vary on depending on when we start on a project. If we've got previous relationships with directors and producers we'll know earlier. But in this particular job neither of us had, well Chris had worked with Guillermo on The Strain before, but I'd never worked with him. I'd worked with the post production supervisor on a previous film. So I reached out to him to get my resume and that to Guillermo because I was really interested in the project. And I was brought on board at that point. Chris, when were you brought on board? Oh you're working on that? Oh great. Chris still doesn't share. What's that? Chris doesn't know how he got on board. I'm not sure. Was I there? I'm not sure. For me it was like we're creating, Nathan's creating and I'm mixing and trying to make this creature that's a romantic lead and make it believable. Doing the sound, creating a whole soundscape for the lead in a film, you don't get to do that every day. That was for me kind of going to be an exciting challenge and also working with Guillermo was a big career highlight for me. Yeah, reading that script was like an out of body experience. I was talking to my co-supervisor Nelson about it afterwards and he had a look at this from just a craft perspective. As a dialogue editor, he's going to be dealing with a character who doesn't speak as his lead. And I'm going to be dealing with a creature who speaks without words. And so like just the creative opportunity that's baked into that idea alone had us just salivating over this thing. He got to take, Nelson got to take a role of almost a sound effects editor in that he was going to be cutting together, they did a full breaths pass. He was cutting together breaths and small emotive gestures from Sally Hawkins through the film, through the whole movie to sort of give her that presence. Add urgency where it was needed, kind of give her that thoughtful vibe. And then for me, yeah, a creature who isn't just angry and doesn't want to eat you, it was amazing. We got to make somebody feel sad, feel happy, feel curious, connect with the female in the movie. And the audience as well, yeah. And that was a big motivator, how is the audience going to react to this guy? Because you read that script, it's really strange. You picture someone pitching that and you've got to ask, are you high? You want a merman to be the romantic lead in this movie. But they pulled it off. It was amazing when we actually started seeing it come together. And so yeah, to take part in that was, like you said, a career highlight. Kind of a main early motivation for where we pulled the sounds from for the creature was actually Doug Jones on set. So he's the actor who played the role of the creature. And on set he was making some kind of like sounds. He was making these sort of guttural clicky sounds. They almost felt like glottal clicks that he was making to communicate with Eliza. And that was just part of the character that he was playing. That paired with just his presence, that sort of matador stance that he took. Those were sort of the big motivators for the kind of expression that I wanted to bring to him. Beyond that it was just sort of exploring, exploring what I could do. Because the base layer of the creature's voice is my own voice. The microphone in my studio at home was like a bottomless pit of material. I could just turn it on and explore and see what I could do. And that all springboarded off of what Doug gave us in his physical performance. And what he did we were able to capture. I didn't mic the creature or anything intentionally. It just happened organically I guess you could say. At the same time as Michael Shannon's character is torturing this creature and whatnot. The water from our perspective was kind of a metaphor for love. The creature can't live without love. The creature can't live without water. He can live outside of water for a while. And so it played a big character in the movie. There was a whole conversation between me and one of the sound effects editors on the team, Tyler Widom. Where the rainstorm at the end had to be a character in itself. We wanted to show up with an immense amount of detail for that storm. Just because that really embodied the turning of the tables. It felt to me like the creature's world was falling down from the sky onto this world. And we wanted to make it feel like that. Tyler did a lot of very specific textured detailed water surface recordings and things like that. And he wasn't the only one. Everyone kind of pitched in on that front. If we heard something, I know that Kevin Howard contributed some water movement in his bathtub at home. I did the same. I have a skylight. We had a lot of rain in Toronto that year. So it was always possible to throw a microphone somewhere and catch something. Get something that would be used in the movie. And most of it did. Most of it found its way in. Whether it was massive curtains of rain sweeping across the docks at the end of the movie. Or even just little ear candy textures. Like the water driplets hitting the foreground side view mirror when Strickland is staking out. Yeah, there's also a little detail if you listen to that track. And we were able to play with a lot in the room. And a lot of movement. There was lots of nice little detail we were able to bring into all those moments. Water gave us a good opportunity to provide a lot of depth to the world. Because it was such an omnipresent source of sound. Its own character. Well, I think there was just so much detail that we could work with. Like in every different set had so much we could play with. And these guys delivered us such amazing tracks of details, of little things. We could create quite a nice little meal out of every scene. Like panable elements that we could... Like in the lab scene, Guillermo shoots a lot of sweeping camera and very fluid motion. And we were able to do a lot of panning and movement and stuff like that. It's sort of just nice and tasteful that you don't really notice. But if you sit there and really dissect the track, you can hear a lot of that. And I know the music. And in particular Sally's apartment where she lived above a theater. And you can hear the score coming through the floor throughout all the scenes. Maybe Chris can talk about that a little bit more. We just had to play that certainly realistic and also use it as score as well. So it was nice to sort of go between those moments and use that score from the films and the playing in the theater as dramatic moments on their own. And use them as score instead of source music at certain points. And it was just an interesting concept that neither of us have ever worked with before. And I think it came together beautifully. It was also really fun to kind of poke fun at the serious world using sound. Like the Foley team, Steve Bane and Pete Prasad and Gina Warf, they put together this amazing track specifically for Strickland. It was a note that we got from Guillermo early on. This guy is uptight and he wears clothes that are too tight. His shoes are tied too tight. The leather has to creak. And so there's all these little things that we could use to kind of poke fun at how seriously... They take themselves too seriously. In that lab, his chair in his office creaking all the time. I have to watch that scene where he's with Sally and Octavia. His interrogation. And it's like every movement there's like the clinking of the chair. He's clicking on the candy. It's just this constant self-inflating government facility. Meanwhile, you've got these strange little jetson carts and stuff like that. It was just kind of fun because that was meant to be a very serious, stuffy environment. Guillermo let us play in a little light. It's easy to pick on the characters that take themselves too seriously. For me, on production sound, it was getting rid of or separating the dialogue from all the effects. Because Guillermo loves the visual water running and steam and creaky chairs. And eliminating as much of that so they could put it in later. That was my challenge. Knowing you guys were going to put it all back. We were all going to put it back. You take it out. We put it back. I want to get rid of it. I want a nice separation between the dialogue and the effects on set. So we can pull the dialogue out from the screen. But for me, the biggest challenge was probably the dance scene. And blending Sally's dialogue in with Rene Fleming's opera singing in the dance number. And making those blend seamlessly from one character to the other. And then back again. For me, the clear contender for biggest challenge would be the creature. Just because he had to be so much. He had to be a bit of a defining character in the movie. And that was going to be the focus of the bulk of my time. And part of that challenge was just being able to trust that... And he made it easy, actually. But being able to trust Guillermo to give me the space to do it. And know when we were in progress versus when we were taking what we were listening to seriously. Because with that much work to do and that many layers to work with, you're going to hear some things that are in progress that aren't fully fleshed out. And it was tricky to decide, okay, when do we devote a lot of energy to this? When is it mid-stream and we come back to it? But yeah, the creature was definitely the biggest challenge for me. For me, the biggest challenge with Nathan is that creature. We created every aspect of that creature from the ground up. And it had to sound like it was in that environment with the actors, with the dialogue that had been recorded on set. Just to make that all work and come together using a number of tracks of Foley for all the movements of the skin. There was like slimy sort of sounding movements for every time he moved. As well as the gills and the eyelids. And blending all that with the hundreds of tracks of vocals Nathan gave me to deal with. And just to sort of put that all together in the environment and make it work. And sound real. And sound like it was just always there in the movie. That was the biggest challenge. And I think my biggest, proudest moment was I think we pulled it off amazingly. And you'd never know that that was recorded from the ground up. And how about the Easter egg? Guillermo's voice in there. Using Guillermo as one of the elements. Guillermo is all the creatures breathing. All of his breaths and things like that came out of Guillermo. Very breathy. He's very generous with his time.