When Alex Garland's latest film, Civil War, was released earlier this year, there was a lot of talk about the sound design of the film and its ultra-realistic take on the sound of battle. I was invited by the sound team to come to Pinewood Studios, near London, to hear the film in the room it was mixed in. We talk about the decision process they we…

This past September, Tonebenders' host Tim Muirhead got to cover The Toronto International Film Festival. In this episode he interviews the sound teams behind some of the films he saw at TIFF '24. The main interview is with Eugenio Battaglia and Michael Babcock who did the sound work behind the psychological horror, Heretic. Next, Katie Halliday dr…

Gemma Nicholson made the leap from being a busy sound editor to a successful post production supervisor. It is not a typical career path, but it gives her insight into the sound work done on any given project. This differentiates her from many other post supervisors, that might not have this built-in knowledge. In this interview she gives us her ad…

285 - The Sound Of Arrival by Tonebenders PodcastBởi Tonebenders Podcast

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is the kind of film that feels like anything can happen at any time. The wild sound design plays a large role is setting up that feeling of comedic unease. Supervising Sound Editor Jimmy Boyle, Re-Recording Mixers Chris Burdon & Gilbert Lake, Supervising Dialogue Editor Buster Flaws and Music Consultant & Arranger Mike Higha…

The Palme D’or winner from this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Anora is the latest film from director Sean Baker. Anora is also one of my favourite movies of the year so far. Co-supervising sound editors (and also the re-recording mixers) Andy Hay and John Warrin discuss how they molded the sound of this film. The film was largely shot docu-style wit…

"Best Score" Oscar winner and Grammy "Album of the Year" winner, Jon Batiste joins Tonebenders to talk about his score for the Jason Reitman film, Saturday Night. He discusses the unusual way the music was recoded. It was captured on the set of the film during the evenings, after shooting was wrapped up each day. He also explains the way this idea …

At the premier of Saturday Night at The Toronto International Film Festival, Director Jason Reitman made a special point of telling the audience that the sound team "put in a lot of work into making it feel like they didn't do any work at all". This is not the kind of film that you would think would have tricky sound obstacles, but that was not the…

The Sounding Board 4.0 has just been announced by The Cinema Audio Society and The Motion Picture Sound Editors! So that makes it a great time to push out this talk from last year's Sounding Board, that was moderated by Tonebenders' host Tim Muirhead. We have all heard many interviews with Re-Recording Mixers, so as a contrast, this panel focuses o…

Inside Out 2 takes the foundation of the original film and pushes those ideas even further, especially with sound design. Coya Elliot and Ren Klyce join the show to discuss how the glass memory balls became a much more important sound in this sequel and how they recorded and designed sounds for all the hockey sequences. They also talk about the les…

Kneecap is a film chock full of manic energy, about an Irish hip-hop group swept up into a political grassroots movement almost against their will. This perfect mix of the music, multiple languages and madcap sound design fuels the chaos around our main characters. The Audio Post team of Louise Burton (Dialog Supervisor), Richard Armstrong (Music E…

Today we are going to be talking about field recording for the National Parks Service with recordist Chris Trevino. He tells us about his recent recording gig at Isle Royale Nation Park in Michigan, where he had his mics rolling in the park for 2 summer weeks. His goal was to capture the natural sounds of the pristine environment and the animals th…

Deadpool & Wolverine is the biggest film of summer. It combines action and comedy in a rapid fire pace. The sound team behind the film joins me today to talk about how they managed dialog tracks where the main character is speaking behind a fabric mask and the importance of the interplay between iconic music drops that play over massive sound effec…

As a longtime fan of the Alien franchise, I have been looking forward to seeing director Fede Alvarez's latest instalment Alien: Romulus. The sound team was tasked with designing an audible world that fit in with the original 1979 film but still lives in today's definition of what blockbusters should sound like. Supervising Sound Editors, Will File…

Tonebenders' listeners are simply the best. Back when I asked people to submit their favourite field recording stories, I never dreamed there would be enough sent in for two full episodes!? In this instalment you can hear recordings of cannons firing, beautiful feedback loops, plumbing pipes going entirely wrong, and lots of animals and nature. Big…

Shōgun is an epic series that covers the struggle for power in mid 1600s Japan. The show features excellent sound work. From the extremely detailed foley to the fury of earthquakes, every moment feels like it has a sonic signature. Five members of the audio post production team join the podcast, to discuss how they brought the world of Shōgun to li…

Vancouver based Eugenio Battaglia joins us to go over his work as Supervising Sound Editor, Sound Designer and Re-Recording Mixer on Longlegs. The films amazingly successful theatrical run was fuelled by the unique sounds that drive this movie. Eugenio was instructed by director, Oz Perkins, that he wanted the film's soundscape to feel like rock & …

Charles Maynes and Frank Bry have been friends and admirers of each other's work for decades. They combined forces for the new sound effects library BLAST, that featuresincredible explosion recordings. They talk about the process of recording Tannerite, dynamite, debris and lots more. Plus they discuss their thoughts on 32bit recording, the importa…

We asked our listeners to submit their favourite field recordings and tell us the stories behind how they were captured, and we got some really great submissions. These stories prove that sound design is not for the weak of heart, as people are mauled by dogs or accidentally lit on fire. Other stories are tales of pure luck, by being in the right p…

The sound design community lost one of its brightest stars this week, with the passing of Ann Kroeber. Ann was a legendary field recordists and she left a legacy of amazing sound work. Her talent especially soared with animal recordings. Her sounds are the basis of countless Hollywood creatures and animal characters. Tonebenders' host Tim Muirhead …

Creating sound for an installation in a physical space, like a museum or for an art piece, is a whole different world then tackling the sound of a film or game. There are so many variables it can make your head explode, exhibition space acoustics need to be accounted for, speaker placement can be any arrangement you can dream up, client expectation…

When working on a project that features horses on screen, the sound design can be broken up into 3 main categories: Their hooves, Saddle/Bridle, and their Vocalizations and Breathing. None of these are easy to design the sound for. Luckily we have some of the most talented people working in audio post-production chiming in, to tell us how they appr…

Have you ever been watching a stand-up comedy special and felt like you were in the room the day it was recorded? A lot of that energy relies on the sound of the crowd as they laugh and react to what the performer is doing on stage. Vinny Alfano has worked on the audio post-production on stand-up specials from Mike Birbiglia, Sarah Silverman, Iliza…

This show hits hard! Invincible may be an animated series, but it is definitely not for young kids. There are real consequences here, characters die, battles leave marks. The sound design has to be big and impactful to match the powers of the super heroes going toe to toe on screen. Punches are huge, explosions really go BOOM. Blood rains down. Sup…

How do you use sound to amplify feelings of awkwardness and discomfort? In The Curse the sound design is tasked with making the viewers skin crawl in a very unusual way. The series is not horror, but there are times you feel you have to look away. Long silences (that are never actually silent!) lead to unexpected emotions in both the characters on …

How much Fun would it be to have the opportunity to record one of the few working B17 "Flying Fortress" planes that are still operational? The sound team from AppleTV's "Masters Of The Air" got to do just that. They were able put 60 microphones all over the B17, to record every part of it that made a noise. Then they took those sounds back to the s…

Today marks the opening weekend for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, a prequel for the character first introduced in MadMax: Fury Road. So it seemed like a perfect time to reach into our archives and go back to May of 2015, when we did an episode with Oliver Machin about his work on Fury Road. Hear his amazing story of how the sounds of the vehicles used i…

How do you tackle sound design for a massive car chase scene, that has a fist fight happening on top of the vehicles? For director David Leitch's new film, The Fall Guy, the sound editorial team had their hands (ears?) full to make the movie sound as good as it looked. In this conversation they go down the road, on how to make a car crash sound imp…

For many people that work in sound design, their dream job would be to work on a western. There are the guns, the horses, the creaky floors, and most of all the dusty wide open spaces. They all provide a great playground to create compelling sound, to support the stories of lawmen and the outlaws they seek to bring to justice. So we got the sound t…

In the new film Música (on Prime) we go into the musical mind of Rudy Mancuso. We learn how everyday sounds are re-contextualized into rhythms and music in his brain while he goes about his day. Because the POV of the film changes from what is real to what Rudy is hearing internally, the sound design and mix are extremely important to sell what is …

Are you nervous about starting a new project? Don’t worry; so is everyone else, including your sound design hero, Randy Thom. Spotting sessions are a chance to talk through the edit, scene by scene. These gatherings give the director, the composer and the rest of the editorial team a chance to sort out out technical issues and determine the directi…

Laurence Anslow, who recently recorded and mixed the score for the recent Percy Jackson series and also worked on Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, joins us this week. He is at the top of the game, and yet his workflows as a score recordist and mixer, are a complete mystery to many in audio post. So I asked him to come on the show and talk us through wh…

Magic is always a massive challenge to do sound design for and we can alway use advice on how to tackle it. So we brought in the experts from the team behind the impressive new sound library Conjure, from Echo Collective. Rene Coronado and Brad Dale discuss their approach to magic sound design, recording new material and props, the tools they use i…

The sound work of the recent Netflix series "Avatar The Last Airbender" was a massive challenge on both the sound design and the dialog side of things. We talk with Re-Recording Mixers Joe Barnett & Adam Jenkins as well as Supervising Sound Editors Tim Kimmel & Luke Gibleon about how they made massive battle sounds for powers based on fire, water/i…

We talk with Norway's own Tormod Ringnes, about his excellent sound work on director Margreth Olin's new documentary, Songs Of Earth. As the film's title implies, the sound of the film is extremely important. We follow the director's 83 year old father as he hikes the rugged and beautiful nature of Norway in every season of the year. From intense i…

Tonebenders ran episodes with members of the sound teams of all five nominees in the "Best Achievement In Sound" category at this year's Oscars. So here are some of our favourite clips from each interview. Plus a few un-aired minutes from the Oppenheimer interview that we saved for this episode. Starting with James Mather talking about the epic Fia…

Richard King joins the podcast to talk about his amazing last couple of films, Oppenheimer and Maestro. He explains how his approaches varied between the two films, before spending the majority of the talk digging deep into some of the most arresting sound design scenes in Oppenheimer.LA based listeners, don't forget about The Los Angeles Tonebende…

Dane Davis will be getting the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Motion Picture Sound Editor’s Golden Reel Awards. So I asked him walk down memory lane and talk about many of the amazing films he has worked on over the years. In part 1, episode 250, you can hear him talk about his long and successful collaboration with The Wachowskis. In part 2, we…

For our 250th episode we got one of our all-time favourite guests, Dane Davis, to come back on Tonebenders. He is going to be receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award at the MPSE Golden Reels this year, so we took the opportunity to have him walk us through his storied career. In this episode, part one, Dane talks mostly about his long collaboratio…

The Creator is the recent film by Director Gareth Edwards, that features a sound design philosophy of Retro Futurism. The world is going to war over Artificial Intelligence and the robots, or simulants, powered by AI. Oscar Nominees for their sound work on The Creator, Erik Aadahl & Ethan Van der Ryn, give sonic life to multiple generations of futu…

Alan Wake II was released in the fall of 2023 to great critical acclaim. In this episode we talk with the sound team about their work crafting sounds for Bright Falls, The Dark Place, radio shows, strange commercials, a late night talk show, and all the other oddities that make up Alan's terrifying world. Joining us for this discussion are Richard …

We dig into the ambitious sound work done on Director Bradley Cooper's latest film, Maestro. They recorded the London Symphony Orchestra live on set with out any pre-recorded tracks. I am not sure anything like this has been attempted before? In addition to the huge orchestra scenes, there are intensely quiet scenes, that required a whole different…

We are joined by 5 members of the sound team from The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring. They walk us through their memories of working on this influential film, the sounds they created and the impact this experience had on their careers. Tim Nielsen (Sound Effects Editor), Katy Wood (Assistant Effects Editor, Foley Editor, Sound Effect…

Paul Hsu welcomes Tim and Teresa into his studio at C5 Sound in New York City, for this in-person interview. He talks about his epic collaboration with director Ari Aster on the film Beau Is Afraid. We dig into many specific moments and the over all approach to this mind bending work, where the sounds both help clear things up and further confuse t…

We talk about the challenge of creating the sound design for Marvel's newest super hero, Kahhori, introduced in the new season of the Disney Plus series, What If...? Supervising Sound Editor/Sound Designer Mac Smith and Re-Recording Mixer Jeff King take us through their design process, how the final mix came into focus and lots more.Show Notes: htt…

For the first time in a long time, all 4 Tonebenders hosts get together to hang out and do a draft of our favorite genres to do sound design for. Tim, René, Teresa and Mark take turns picking the types of movies we have always wanted to tackle in our own work. We each have to pick one genre from each of the following subsets:1 - Talkies:Mystery (Kn…

Crowds are so hard to make sound authentic & alive in sports films. So much work goes into designing large crowds that roar with emotion. In The Iron Claw, the wrestling scenes have crowds that sound fantastic and we have the audio team here to tell us how they created them. From capturing the extras on set and recording loop group, through sound d…

Picture Editor Hilda Rasula is joined by Supervising Sound Editor Mandell Winter and Supervising Dialog /ADR Editor Sang Jun Kim, to talk about their work on American Fiction. This film has excellent writing and acting, so it was up to the post production team to live up to those standards and carry it through to the end. They discuss the tight rop…

Michael Mann's new film "Ferrari", is a personal drama at heart, but we all know that it is the CARS that will draw people to see this one. Fortunately those cars sound amazing and we have the sound team with us, to talk about how they created and designed those sounds. Production sound mixer Lee Orloff, Supervising Sound Editors Tony Lamberti & Be…

Johnnie Burn joins in to talk about his work on the new Yorgos Lanthimos film, Poor Things. He discusses his working process with Yorgos, the sonic differences between the black and white portion and the full color parts of the film as well as how he figured out the vocals for the hybrid animals. We even briefly touch on his work on Zone Of Interes…