🎧 Baby Noises & Dope Beats: How TV’s Top Sound Editors Bring the Noise
Emmy nominees Eliot Connors, MPSE (‘Arcane’) and Brad North, MPSE (‘Love Death + Robots Vol 4’) in conversation with Alexandra Fehrman, CAS
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The Netflix animated series Love, Death + Robots has featured several innovative and unexpected episodes during its four-season run, but perhaps none as distinctive as “400 Boys,” where an army of gigantic babies threatens to end the world.
“There’s a lot of sound design that we can play around with for something like that,” says supervising sound editor Brad North, MPSE, about the conceit of the episode. As North, an Emmy nominee this year, explains during The Ankler’s Art & Crafts podcast, recorded at the American Society of Cinematographers’ Clubhouse in Los Angeles on Aug. 7, it was Love, Death + Robots episode director Robert Valley who gave the sound team license to pull a Spinal Tap with the design.
“Robert said to ‘start at 11,’” North tells Art & Crafts moderator Alexandra Fehrman, CAS. “He told us to make it big, and then when it was big, we made it bigger. So that’s where we started. But the art style lent itself to doing all sorts of weird stuff.”
Including, as it turns out, using real babies. “When we got the temp track from the director, he had worked on it quite a bit — because sound is important to a lot of these directors — and he used literal baby sounds on the temp track,” North says. “I don’t know where the baby sounds came from, whether it was his kid or someone else’s kid, but they were real. Baby sounds slowed down and pitched — I thought they sounded great.”
On Netflix’s animated series Arcane, the brief for the sound team didn’t include actual babies. Instead, it required a deep collaboration with the show’s composers, Alexander Temple and Alex Seaver (known professionally as Mako).
“We kind of developed a workflow where I would ingest all the music and dialog and sound design that we were working on, and I would mix as I go,” Eliot Connors, MPSE, the Arcane co-supervising sound editor, explains. “What that does is it shows your problems early. It also shows you your moments where sound design is going to shine, or where music is going to shine, and you can have less focus on other areas and more focus on those moments, so that you’re improving. One of the unique things is that we would carry those mixes to the final stage. At that point, a lot of the notes were already taken care of, so the mixers could focus on what they do best: balancing and making the mix pop. So I think that creates a lot of clarity, and storytelling has improved because of that.”
Listen to the complete conversation with the Emmy nominees above and check out earlier conversations with the season’s nominated artists in cinematography, editing, production design and visual effects.