The Netflix TV series Dark Crystal Age of Resistance, a prequel series to Jim Henson and Frank Oz’s dark fantasy film The Dark Crystal, takes us back to the land of Thra and its inhabitants. Sound Designer and Re-recording Mixer Tim Neilsen of Skywalker Sound and Supervising ADR Editor Tim Hands took time out of their busy schedules to talk about creating the audio for the iconic show.

 

Tim Neilsen performed several roles on the series. “I had three to be exact” said Neilsen. “As Supervising Sound Editor it was my job to organize the entire sound team, handle budgets, schedules and the like. As Sound Designer, it was my job to bring this world to life sonically by creating new and unique sounds, by carefully shaping every aspect of the sound. As Re-Recording Mixer I take all the elements, dialog, sound effects, Foley, music, and render the final soundtrack with the guidance of the director and filmmakers.”

Tim Hands was approached in March 2018 to see if he was available to attend voice tests for actors being cast as the new voices for the Dark Crystal characters. “At this stage the series was still being filmed, but in order to get ahead with Post Production the Director, Louis Leterrier, wanted to get a feel for how the final voices would sound” said Hands. “I joined the crew in January 2019 as Supervising ADR Editor recording, fitting, and QC checking all of the Dialogue sessions that were to be delivered to Tim Neilsen. Every episode went through me before delivery for mixing.”

 

On bringing Thra to life, Neilsen’s goal was to bring as much detail and uniqueness to the sound as the rest of the teams brought to their discipline. “Our ultimate goal is that you never once question the reality of this world. You should absolutely believe while you watch that this world exists. To do that we find and record as many new sounds as time allows, make new sounds and carefully blend them and match them to the vision of the filmmakers. We look especially for unique sounds that you haven’t heard before, but always grounded enough in the real world that you believe that they exist. We spend hundreds of hours adding in the tiniest of details in the attempt of making this world come to life. From the smallest movements of grass and leaves, to the myriad of creatures and environments. Not a single piece of sound that was recorded on the set was used in this series; every single piece of audio you hear was added in by hand by somebody.”

 

With familiar characters in the show such as Augrah, Chamberlain and the Scientist Skeksis it was imperative that the characters kept their familiar and much loved voices. However with the likes of Mark Hamill, Simon Pegg and Helena Bonham Carter in the cast it was a fine line ensuring character familiarity for the audience without compromising on the actor’s familiar voice. “In some cases like Chamberlain and Augrah, these characters have very defined and recognizable voices from the movie” said Nielsen.” Luckily the actors playing these roles did an amazing job getting us very close to the original performances. I did gently pitch and modify several characters just to get us that extra little step. Simon Pegg’s voice is amazing as Chamberlain, but his pitch is just a bit lower than Barry Dennen, who was the voice in the original movie. Deet was slightly pitched up, and the Emperor slightly pitched down, to make one a bit friendlier and the other a bit more menacing. A few other characters also had mild work done, but the voices you hear are for the most part the voices of the performers as is!”

 

Doing the ADR for the series Hands had the task of ensuring the best possible performance for all the actors but before work began he had to choose his team. Hands decided to choose an almost entire female crew which clearly paid off. “The work on Dark Crystal required finding and shaping a character voice” said Hands. “The most important thing is making sure that the actor is comfortable in the studio. Hearing and seeing yourself on screen, remembering the situation and all those details of the set are pivotal, but that’s not what this was. It’s not a pre record either, and the characters were puppets that already had a voice, just not the one we were going to use. We worked with the actor to find the nature, the character and the kind of voice they had imagined and then start to record letting the character emerge as the session progressed. Some scenes were straight forward, others required physical action and reaction, sometimes to VFX that weren’t actually on the screen yet, occasionally a little physical interaction with me helped to get the feel of dialogue with efforts more believable, shaking the actor about a bit can help sometimes!”

 

An actor in ADR is replacing or altering an existing recording and on occasion adding additional lines or adding efforts and reactions. The biggest difficulty with this show was that they were replacing existing performances. “On set the puppeteers had found a character voice themselves and played the scenes for real. Some of the new cast found that they would have chosen a different feel or delivery and adapting what Louis wanted to do to fit the delivery speed of the original voice could be quite a challenge. Almost all of the actors found the process difficult to start with, probably with the exception of Mark Hamill who was very used to voice characterisation. However all of them got better with each session, the characters developed and the sync got better and better. Most of the time the actors were recording their performances against the existing puppeteer voices and not the other cast, on some sessions we were able to feed them the fitted lines from another cast member, but that was a rare treat. It’s very unlike being on set where the performances adjust in real time to each other, there was rigidity because of the existing puppeteer voices which reduced the freedom of expression and therefore tied the actors down somewhat. That’s not a criticism at all. The puppeteers were under tremendous pressure within puppet suits, or underneath the puppet characters, and were listening to multiple radio feeds with instructions from the Director and Animatronics operators as well as the voices of the other characters they were interacting with.”

 

On ADR sessions, Hands usually used either the exact mics that the Production Mixer used, or the nearest equivalent. A Sennheiser Rifle mic and clip mic, DPA or Sanken for example. “For Dark Crystal we followed the Animation approach and used a Neuman U87 for everything. The resultant recording gave us a nice fat sound that we could adjust to suit in the mix. It also meant total consistency across studios and continents. We used Pro Tools for recording and editing and a couple of different Time Compressions and Expansion plug ins when we needed to. Our greatest friend was our ADR cueing software, in this case EdiCue without which we would have been sunk.”

 

With so many characters and lands of Thra it was certainly a challenge bringing them to life. “There were so many creatures!” said Neilsen. “Early in the process the art department sent me a list of each creature in the series, with images of the puppets and often a little blurb about it. But just the sheer amount of new creatures to be dealt with was daunting. In so many scenes there are little creatures poking around, or just on screen left, or in the background. And of course we wanted the world to be lush, so there are also a multitude of off-screen creatures bringing the world to life. In the end, my recommendation to the filmmakers was that we would use voice actors to supply some of the voices even for the creatures. The normal approach may have been to try and use real animal sounds for all of the creatures. But there is such charm to some of these characters, and often the puppets really need human type emotion, that a blend of actor voices and animal sounds was often the best way. Many of the smaller hand puppets in the Scientist’s Lair for example are performed, and then modified by me. Characters such as the Fizzgig, the Armaligs, these are made almost entirely of human voices. Other characters such as Landstriders and Nurlocs are entirely constructed from other sounds.”

 

Scheduling was also a quite extraordinary process as there were so many factors in play. “There was a huge amount of work for everyone in picture and the Sound FX crew couldn’t fit sound to visuals they didn’t have and to items they couldn’t see” said Hands. “There was a bottleneck about two thirds of the way through the mix schedule where I was supposed be fitting, recording, and delivering three different episodes all at the same time. To this day I don’t really understand quite how we did it. As if this wasn’t enough, we had to deliver ADR scripts to the Downstream crew who were translating and preparing the same kind of recordings for all of the foreign language versions. Throughout the process we also had what we called ‘Presence passes’, these were recorded after all of the lines for a scene had been recorded; the actor would breathe and react throughout the scene to fill in all of those little moments where the puppet is doing something but not speaking. We had heaps of it, but the sounds we wanted weren’t always in the right place and we had to spend time painstakingly going through everything to find just the right “Ah” or Ooh.” It may sound daft, but I can assure you that there are many ways to say those things, and not all of them work as a response or even fit the look or nature of the puppets face. The end result was fantastic though; the puppets lived and breathed all the way through the show.”

 

In addition to painstakingly finding the right presence pass there were also some very difficult sounds to create. “I think there were two that were quite difficult” added Neilsen. “The first were the Landstriders, and the second would be Lore. For the Landstriders, Ben had created sounds for the original movie, so that was quite useful. But the Landstriders in the series are more featured and at one point go mad, so it required some more material. I loved the original sound of the Landstriders, so it was a challenge to create an additional palette of sounds, but ones that would match the original work that Ben had done. And Lore was a particular challenge, both for his movement and for finding a voice for him. I recorded quite a lot of new rock material to create a library of his movement sounds and Andre Zweers, one of our editors, did an amazing job bringing his movement to life. But something was still missing so we enlisted David Farmer, who had come on board to help me with some of the design towards the end of the series and with figuring out something that could work as a ‘voice’ for Lore; even though he doesn’t really talk. It turned out to be sort of a morph of rock and vocal, but it gives him the impression of a voice that is really born of his movement.”

 

In addition to familiar characters and lands the much loved Aughra’s Observatory and the Skeksis Castle also had to be brought to life. “Our director, Louie Letterier, felt strongly that in all areas of the Castle, that we can hear lots of the other areas. The Castle is also very large, so has quite a variety of sound from deep in the catacombs and dungeons, to the very high areas where the Skeksis rarely travel. We created a library of ‘castle sounds’ that we could use at any given moment, off-screen activity, steam, chains and gears. But with all of these, the requirements of the scene and series dictate the sound. So in some scenes, the catacombs have to be scarier than at other times, at some times the Castle is peaceful and other times at war. So all of the sounds we may choose at a given moment are dictated by the story itself. Aughra’s Observatory was again a recurring location from the movie, but in the series, her contraption is much more complicated and required a much more complex sound, as we can now see many more moving parts!”

 

Working such an iconic series it was difficult to choose a specific scene as a favourite. “There is one scene that holds a special place in my heart, and it’s where in Episode 3” added Neilsen. “Deet is lost in the forest and scared, and she’s hearing all these crazy sounds. And then she meets these beautiful little tree creatures. They come out in unison and start sort of vocalizing, and it’s a beautiful scene and I get goose bumps watching every time. But it was a chance to use a sound that we had recorded years ago and I had never really found a perfect place to use it. For the film John Carter, we recorded some baby bears in Tennessee and one of the sounds we got was the sound of baby bears sleeping. They make this beautiful and haunting cooing sound. I knew immediately this was the perfect sound for these tree creatures. I was so excited the moment I saw that scene because I knew I already had the sound that was going to fit these creatures perfectly.”

 

In addition to the new characters there was the dreaded Gelfling essence extracting machine. “The Scientist’s machine was an elaborate editing job, mostly done by Lee Gilmore, the first editor to work with us on the show. The electricity was added later by visual effects, so I went back to a library of sounds we had recorded for Solo, for some amazing electricity we had made. The difficulty in something like this machine is that it can quickly become overwhelming sonically. So one thing you do is you layer all of these sounds, gears and chains, steam and pulleys, and then you start to mute them! You overbuild it, so you can then pick and choose at any given moment what you want to really hear, and mute the other pieces. It’s an exercise in focusing, which is what the mixing phase of the project always is.”

 

One of the most difficult scenes to create sonically was not what you might think.

 

By far the hardest scene for me isn’t one that might seem like it at first, but it was the first Skeksis banquet in Episode 4. I was so happy to see this scene, as the feast scene in the original movie was one of my favourite scenes. But the writers for our series had written nearly constant dialog for every one of the Skeksis throughout this scene, and we realized right away there was simply no way we could use it all. We started with something like 64 tracks of dialog for this scene alone. It took a long time to painstakingly weed through all the lines and construct a scene that ‘seems’ chaotic, but is actually controlled that you can hear and understand every piece of dialog you need. Then add the additional layers of the Podling music, all of the movement and Foley and eating, drinking, and other bodily sounds, and quite quickly you have complete chaos. That scene took a long time to go through piece by piece and mix, again with the goal of perceived chaos, but actually every single piece is very carefully placed and mixed to get us to that final illusion!”

 

As for mixing, there were even more challenges. “Basically any time the Skeksis are all together were some of the most difficult just based on the fact that you have nearly a dozen characters who all tend to talk over each other. And of course the last two episodes, 9 and 10 get incredibly busy with battles and very complicated filmmaking. But truth be told, there wasn’t much ‘easy’ in this series. We demanded a level of detail of ourselves that made this sound job a real challenge. In all departments, dialog, sounds effects, Foley, music, there is a complexity to this track that was never easy, but always rewarding. That is the most exciting thing for me, to see how every single person who worked on this show did the best work they were capable of. And I think it shows, and sounds, in the final product!”