Electric Shock: How “A Complete Unknown’s” Oscar-Nominated Sound Team Re-Created Bob Dylan Going Electric

In the first part of our conversation with the Oscar-nominated sound team of James Mangold’s music biography A Complete Unknown, they talked about delivering an intensely music-centric film without using playback and differentiating between the soundscapes of 1961 New York, when Bob Dylan (an immaculate portrayal by Timothée Chalamet) first arrives in the city, and four years later towards the end of the film. Now, we continue the discussion with sound mixer Tod A.

“A Complete Unknown”: Orchestrating 60+ Live Performances for Oscar-Worthy Sound

In one of this year’s tour de force performances, Timothée Chalamet’s Oscar-nominated portrayal of one of America’s greatest singer-songwriters took almost six years to perfect (partly thanks to COVD-19 delays in production). For director James Mangold’s music biopic, A Complete Unknown, Chalamet not only learned to play the guitar and harmonica for the film, but also mastered Dylan’s famously idiosyncratic style to deliver over 40 flawless live-to-camera performances as the narrative charts his meteoric rise after arriving in New York in 1961.

“Deadpool & Wolverine” Sound Designers on the Splatter-and-Slash Acoustics of a Honda Odyssey Brawl

In our last conversation about Shawn Levy’s Deadpool & Wolverine, sound designers Craig Henighan and Ryan Cole discussed the hilarious opening sequence where Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool uses Wolverine’s adamantium claws and bones to take down some Time Variance Authority goons, all set to NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye,” and some sound tricks to make the adamantium hits stand out. Today, they break down the savage Honda Odyssey brawl and the stunning cameo extravaganza.

“Deadpool & Wolverine” Sound Designers on Turning Frozen Tea Towels Into Broken Bones

Three months after debuting in theaters this summer, Deadpool & Wolverine’s winning streak still wasn’t over. It eventually surpassed Barbie’s domestic gross in its 13th weekend, with director Shawn Levy’s R-rated box office juggernaut ranking as the 12th highest-grossing movie of all time, with a domestic haul of over $636M.

It has been a hectic year for Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning sound designer Craig Henighan, who not only worked on 2024’s second biggest film but also delivered Apple TV+’s two-hander dark comedy, 

How The “Blitz” Sound Team Shook Steve McQueen’s Harrowing World War II Film

While researching Small Axe, a riveting series about the political awakening of London’s West Indian community, director Steven McQueen found a photograph of a young Black boy standing on a train platform holding a large suitcase. The stark image had the director questioning who the child was and what his story was during the London Blitz, a period in World War II when the city was bombed by Germany over eight long months.

Eye on the Emmys: “The Bear” Emmy-Winning Sound Team on Capturing the Chaos of the Kitchen

*After the 76th Creative Arts Emmy Winners, announced on September 8, and ahead of the 2024 Prime Time Emmy Awards on September 15, we’re looking back at our interviews with some of this year’s nominees. Costume

The Bear’s Re-recording mixer Steve “Major” Giammaria, ADR mixer Patrick Christensen, foley mixer Ryan Collinson, and production mixer Scott D. Smith recently won for Oustanding Sound Mixing for a Comedy or Drama Series (Half-Hour) for the episode “Forks.”

“The Bear” Emmy-Nominated Sound Team on Capturing the Chaos of the Kitchen

The first thing you might notice in Season 2 of Christopher Storer’s hit drama The Bear is how well you can hear chef-owner Carmen (Jeremy Allen White) and his team of kitchen underdogs as they set to work reopening their Chicago restaurant. Restaurant kitchens, especially those still under construction, as the Bear’s is for most of the season, are not quiet places. But no matter how prevalent the sledgehammers and steel cookware may be on screen,

“Twisters” Sound Editors on Creating the Ferocious Voice of Six Distinct Tornadoes

Catastrophic weather struck a chord with moviegoers over the weekend when Twisters blew apart box office expectations and raked in a whopping $81 million for its debut. The action spectacle, directed by Lee Isaac Chung (Minari) and filmed in Oklahoma, stars Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell, and Anthony Ramos as storm chasers determined to study tornadoes by driving right to the edge of wind-torn disaster.

Twisters co-stars six different tornadoes conjured by Industrial Light &

Can You Hear the Fear? How Sound Shapes the Daring Missions of “Masters of the Air”

Masters of the Air, Apple TV+’s new World War II epic showcasing the heroics and travails of a fleet of young U.S. pilots in Europe, has been lauded for its classical filmmaking and realistic approach to mid-century flight. Focusing on sober, earnest Buck (Austin Butler) and Bucky (Callum Turner), a battle-ready scamp, the show toggles between dogfights in the air and quiet moments on the ground, on airfields in the English countryside and in medical wards where some of the crew suffer from as-yet undiagnosed PTSD.

“The Creator” Oscar-Nominated Sound Team on Blending Retro-Futurism, Robot Monks, & the Didgeridoo

The Creator‘s Oscar-nominated supervising sound editors, Erik Aadahl and Ethan Van der Ryn, had a dream experience creating the soundscape for director Gareth Edwards‘ vision of a nightmarish future. The timing of the film couldn’t have been better—The Creator is set at a point in human history where there’s an outright war between humanity and artificial intelligence, a classic sci-fi set-up that felt alarmingly less fictive given the rapid expansion of AI in our real world.

“Rebel Moon” Sound Editors on Creating Different Sonic Worlds for Zack Snyder

Part one of director Zach Snyder’s Netflix space epic, Rebel Moon — A Child of Fire, opens on a quaint farming community on a peaceful moon called Veldt. Hard at work in the fields, Kora (Sofia Boutella) is clearly not of this community of self-styled Luddites, and the evil Imperium she’s escaping soon catches up with her. A massive ship alights above Veldt’s rolling fields, dropping Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein) and a band of soldiers onto the moon to commandeer the farmers’ grain stores and disturb their bucolic way of life forever.

Searching for That Ferocious “Ferrari” Sound With Supervising Sound Editor Tony Lamberti

How eager was Tony Lamberti to work on Michael Mann’s latest feature? Let’s just say the director had Lamberti, a Formula 1 enthusiast, at Ferrari.

The Oscar-nominated (Inglourious Basterds), Emmy-winning (John Adams) audio engineer got his first peek at the feature about Enzo Ferrari and his iconic racing legacy back in 2015. Overseeing a mix update on Mann’s crime thriller Blackhat,

Oscar-Nominated Sound Designer Frank Kruse Makes Some Noise on “All Quiet on the Western Front”

All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel that lays bare the harsh brutality of war through the eyes of a naive youth fighting in the German trenches during WWI, is considered a literary classic. So Frank Kruse admits some hesitation when director Edward Berger told him he was doing a modern retelling. That disappeared after Kruse read the script. Though the challenge would be daunting, he wanted to be the film’s sound designer and supervising sound editor.

Best of 2022: How The “Babylon” Sound Team Built a Sonic Bacchanal

It’s that time of year—we look back on a few of our favorite interviews from 2022 in our annual year-end list.

The opening sequence to Damien Chazelle’s Babylon (in theaters today) hits you like one of the many lines of powder its characters will ingest. It’s eye-opening, choreographed chaos, leaving you with an intensely euphoric feeling – quite fitting for a story that revisits Hollywood’s infancy of the 1920s and ‘30s when La La Land was a sandbox of drugs,

How The “Babylon” Sound Team Built a Sonic Bacchanal

The opening sequence to Damien Chazelle’s Babylon (in theaters today) hits you like one of the many lines of powder its characters will ingest. It’s eye-opening, choreographed chaos, leaving you with an intensely euphoric feeling – quite fitting for a story that revisits Hollywood’s infancy of the 1920s and ‘30s when La La Land was a sandbox of drugs, sex, and all night partying. 

It’s here we meet Manny Torres (Diego Calva),

Best of Summer: How the “Stranger Things” Sound Team Creeps You Out

As we’ve done for the past few summers, we’ve compiled a few of our favorite interviews to highlight in this last week of August. This is by no means a comprehensive list, but a little taste of some of the great conversations we’ve had during these hot summer months. Bring on sweater season. 

When Millie Bobby Brown’s Eleven experiences a flashback a couple of hours into Stranger Things‘

“Nope” Sound Designer Johnnie Burn Puts the Fear in What We Hear

Before the opening credits even clear the screen, Nope plunges us into an alarming soundscape: the canned laughter of a sitcom. Knowing that this is a Jordan Peele horror film, immediate tension strikes. Something is bound to shatter that wholesome sound, and, of course, this happens in a brutal way. 

Our ears get the first warning sign moment after terrifying moment in Nope as we hear what we can’t yet,

“Elvis” Sound Guru Wayne Pashley on the Sonic Glue Holding Baz Luhrmann’s Biopic Together

Bursting through in the golden age of television, Elvis Presley had stunning good looks and taboo-shattering dance moves that instantly attracted legions of female fans, but his legacy rests in that sound. His voice was inimitable with the pain and power he had to share to survive.

Wayne Pashley, the re-recording mixer, sound designer, and supervising sound editor of Baz Luhrmann’s epic biopic Elvis bravely took up the mantle of resurrecting one of the most famous voices ever recorded.

How the “Stranger Things” Sound Team Creeps You Out

When Millie Bobby Brown’s Eleven experiences a flashback a couple of hours into Stranger Things‘ fourth season, sound effects tell the mutant teenager’s nightmarish origins story in a nutshell: thunder, whooshing, whistles, choral voices, more thunder, pistol shots, birds screeching, rumbling, slithering sounds, squishes and thumps flood her head with 50 seconds worth of precision-orchestrated mayhem. In Matt and Ross Duffer’s supernatural thriller, sound effects, melded with Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein‘s throbbing synthesizer music,

“Dune” Oscar-Nominated Sound Team on Sandworms, Ornithopters & More

The experience of seeing writer/director Denis Villeneuve’s Oscar-nominated epic Dune was, for this viewer, as much an auditory experience as it was a visual one. The sounds of the alien world depicted in part one of Villeneuve’s two-part adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel are mesmerizing, from the whispering sands shifting across the desert planet of Arrakis to the oddly soothing purr of the dragon fly-winged aircraft, the ornithopter. For supervising sound editor Mark Mangini and supervising sound editor and sound designer Theo Green,