Tonebenders Podcast

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.  Supervising Sound Editor Brad Meyer, Re-Recording...

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 screen and those watching at home. The show's main...

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 sound editorial team and turned the recordings into...

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 in the film, were recorded in the African desert d...

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 impactful, what tools they use for cleaning up trick...

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 team behind the new western series Lawman: Bass Re...

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 happening to the viewer. Re-Recording Mixers Chris...

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 direction and shape the soundtrack is going to take. Rand...

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 what a orchestral score recording session is like,...

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 in processing and lots more. Check out their Conjur...

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/ice, earth and air. Plus they talk about how they o...

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 ice sound design to desolate mountain silence. Show...

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 Fiat car chase scene in Mission Impossible:Dead Recko...

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 Tonebenders Sound Design Meet-Up this Thursday, Feb 29th....

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 get into his work and relationships with other...

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 collaboration with The Wachowskis. Starting with the indie hit...

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 futuristic robots, weapons and vehicles. Show Notes: h...

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 Lapington (Audio Director), Arthur Tisseront (Seni...

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 set of skills to pull off. Re-Recording Mixers De...

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 Effects Recordist), Brent Burge (Sound Effects Editor),...

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 the audience. Show Notes: https://tonebenderspodcas...

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: https://tonebenderspodcast.com/244---what-if/ Podcas...

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 (Knives Out, Memento, Twin Peaks) War Film (1917, A...

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 design and final mixing we go into each step to cre...

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 rope walk of keeping the comedy alive while also not...