Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1512183
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S 39 project. Surely if I just approached it in the same way I have done everything else, this will be fine. But then I realized as soon as I hit Los Angeles for the final five months of it, a studio picture is a bigger beast and needed to react more nimbly to cut changes, impromptu screenings, and other things like that. My team did sort of double in size because when you need to recut a load of footsteps and because the surface has changed in VFX, you've got to do it really quickly. I had a team in Los Angeles and a team in London with the team in London covering the bulk of the recutting. The cut was changing quite a lot, so it was really handy that I had three guys in London who could re-cut all eight reels whilst I slept. Every morning, we'd hit the mix stage ready to go. Korey: So, if I remember correctly, your work on Under the Skin was something that Jordan Peele heard and prompted him to reach out to you about working on Nope? Johnnie: I received a call from Jordan's team who said, "Would you like to have a meeting with Jordan Peel about an upcoming Universal horror film?" I said, "Hell yeah!" So, I met Jordan. We chatted for about an hour on a Zoom call. Jordan really enjoyed Under the Skin and the way that it used the natural ambiences to establish a mood in a way that it cleverly blurs the line between music and sound design. From there, we discussed other films that we really enjoyed. Then he described the whole script to me. I discussed some ideas with him about how we could make different situations work. We discussed all the ways the characters could mishear wind and mishear screams as amusement park screams and other things like that. On the Zoom call, I projected a background of the valley that I knew that they'd chosen for the shoot. I had a little squeaky toy that looked like Jean Jacket, the thing, and I had this little dancing man toy, so I gave him a little presentation using my mouth to do the sound effects that we were going to use. He probably thought I was nuts, but I think he liked it. Korey: I think Jean Jacket has a very unique sound. I think what's even more interesting from hearing your tonebenders interview is where those sounds came from. Can you talk a little bit about the source of those sounds? Johnnie: Yeah. Jean Jacket is a combination of things. The interior sound of Jean Jacket, when the guys get sucked up from Jupe's show, is literally me rubbing down the pop shield of a microphone. Then, in the final 10 minutes of the film when Jean Jacket unfolds, that's actually a peacock slowed down like 800 percent, which makes an enormous kind of booming bassy sound. The stealth mode Jean Jacket has in the earlier part of the film is a combination of different winds and dialing them into a sort of blank white noise sound using a really tight EQ curve to make it sound like the same sound as people going on a roller coaster. This became sort of a theme throughout the film where you think you're hearing wind or is it people? And, if it is people, are they happy or are they unhappy? Another thing we needed to narratively figure out with sound was a reason why the horses went out into the field at night. Why do they jump the fence? We came up with this idea of a whistling fence that acts like a wind instrument. Korey: The whole film sounded great! You finished Nope on the Universal lot. Traditionally, they use Pro Tools. You did not. Can you talk a little bit about that? Johnnie: Yeah! I brought Nuendo to Hollywood to complete the edit and mix for Nope. I have worked in Pro Tools, but for me, Nuendo suits my workflow so much better. I tend to think of a mix more like a sculpture from beginning to end and I'm constantly tweaking it and I don't want to wait to get all the ingredients together on a mix stage. If you're going to spend a month on the mix stage at the end, I love to have the mix almost sorted by the time I get there and just spend that month enjoying the room and understanding how the film comes across and working on individual elements and really refining the