Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1475409
MA: The detail of the submerges into the water that trail into the diving are fantastic. You really get the sense of this huge body of water enveloping you. Can you walk us through the design of this? OT: A lot of the design for those was created using heavily filtered big bubble releases—helping the audience feel the soundstage shifting to the diverged sound underwater. The shift in directivity and frequency ranges across the elements we used was a useful tool to depict the change in environments. MA: Once we are underwater, we get a great sense of the tight spaces of the cave that the rescuers need to navigate. There are tanks of oxygen scraping along, human breaths and bubbles, body movements in the water, rushing water and debris. How did you put this together? OT: We wanted to feel a sense of travel through the cave system. Mike and I made sure that there were always big shifts in the base sounds of water for each shot, that it could have been 100 metres further up the tunnel. We had various air and gas tanks that we recorded clanging and scraping with contact mics. We pitched them down, and then put them through a Kyma Cross Filter to give the impression of being underwater. Cross Filter is a great tool, and we kept tweaking the elements till they sounded like the reference recording we had. That Kyma setup was also used for all the elements that the divers touched, such as the guide line, the smaller rocks being pushed about, and some of the vocal efforts. Later in the project we had the amazing opportunity of a recording session with John Volanthen at the Wookey Hole cave system. John was one of the two rescue divers to find the boys, and that day was the highlight of the project for us. John was incredibly generous with his insight into how that environment was, and we got a great set of sounds to use. We swapped out plenty of sounds once we had that library, but we were happy with how close to the real thing our elements had been. The breath bubbles you hear when you see John, are actually him. As is a lot of his movement, and vocal efforts. During the underwater recordings with John we recorded with a setup of two dual hydrophone rigs placed in different locations as well as stereo rigs above the water. We found that regardless of where the hydrophones were placed the sound that they captured of John underwater sounded almost identical. This gave us a great insight into how sound travels differently underwater, and helped back up our choice for designing these scenes to feel like sounds underwater are perceived all around you. For the silt element we used Sound Particles. The company was very generous in spending a few hours with Mike going through the best way to use the software to create the palette we needed. We needed different intensities, and densities, depending on where the divers were and that software was incredibly useful in helping to achieve that. MA: Caves filled with large bodies of water have a very specific sound to them, which you guys did a great job on. Can you walk us through the structure of the environment sounds while in the various open chambers? OT: On the cave wild track recording trip, Hugo recorded some IRs (impulse responses) of various-sized caves that Will Miller (FX re-recording mixer) then used for our tracks above the surface. We wanted each cave to have its own personality, and the verb, along with varying the water work in each chamber, helped to do that. One of the trickiest sounds to create was the sound the boys thought they were hearing in the cave. As they were suffering from malnutrition they had Left to right: Michael Fentum, John Volanthen and Oliver Tarney.