#I AM DEAD SOUND EFFECT MOVIE#

Whereas that same loud sound in any other movie, where you’ve got wall-to-wall music score and a lot of sound, wouldn’t read as big or jarring.Įrik Aadahl. And then when we do break those rules of silence and things go south, and you might hear something that’s louder than everything else has been in the film, that’s kind of shocking. They’re holding their breath the same way the characters onscreen are, so it becomes kind of participatory in a way. They become a part of the cinematic experience. In a sense, that makes audiences an active participant in the whole conceit. Viewers are not used to having such a stripped-down environment, where they can hear themselves breathing in the theater, or hear themselves crunching on popcorn. I also think what it did was it pulled the rug out from under the audience a little bit. What that kind of did, in a sense, was it made small sounds really big and small sounds really important. We tried to start with nothing and then just introduce the very specific sounds that we wanted for any moment. Here, it was kind of the inversion of that. Everything is covered and designed, and during the mix, you start tweaking that. Nobody’s mentioned this before, but there’s no doors being opened or closed in this entire movie.įor us, it was about really stripping everything out and building up what we needed, which is sometimes kind of the opposite of what happens when you’re putting the sound together for a movie.

Obviously, this family has gone to extraordinary lengths to cleverly create this homestead where they can survive quietly, to the point of marking floorboards that they can avoid stepping on, pouring sand on the trails outside, so there aren’t twigs or leaves crunching that would attract attention. That was our little thermometer internally.

One of our catchphrases for this movie, as we were developing the soundtrack, was if something was a little too loud, anyone in the room sensing that while we were working on it would go, “Dead!” That character is dead. What were some of the guidelines you set for yourself in terms of how much noise is too much noise? Erik Aadahl That section of our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows. I was interested in finding out just what those rules were, and they told me. The deeper we got into our conversation, the more Aadahl and Van der Ryn mentioned having “rules” for how sound would work within the film. (In addition to talking with Aadahl and Van der Ryn, I discussed AMC’s terrific miniseries The Terror with its showrunners.) That’s why I was so excited to have Aadahl and Van der Ryn on the latest episode of my podcast, I Think You’re Interesting, which I dedicated to some of the most interesting horror to have popped up in the first half of 2018.

#I AM DEAD SOUND EFFECT MOVIE#

It’s a big part of the reason the movie works as well as it does, and much of that is thanks to the work of sound designers Erik Aadahl and Ethan Van der Ryn. In a movie without much spoken dialogue or loud sound effects, the quiet becomes loud and the loud becomes ear-piercing. The soundtrack of the film is filled with the sorts of everyday noises you might expect to hear walking around in your neighborhood or in nature, but calibrated and tweaked just so to make the experience of watching the film feel even more immersive than it normally would be. The movie has gained a reputation as a “silent” one, but of course it’s not it just has a minimum of spoken dialogue (though it contains plenty of subtitled dialogue carried out via American Sign Language). Few horror movies have gripped moviegoers this year quite like A Quiet Place, director John Krasinski’s tale of a world where making too loud a noise will lead to your death at the claws of strange creatures with super-sensitive hearing.

I am dead sound effect