The Oscar-winning sound designer walks through his process on Dean DeBlois’ hit live-action reimagining of the first film in DreamWorks Animation’s hugely successful animated franchise, including recording wind blowing through barns and around telephone wires.
Following Disney’s fruitful path of turning animated classics into live-action adaptations, DreamWorks Animation and Universal Pictures partnered with filmmaker Dean DeBlois to bring the first film in his and Chris Sanders’ hit trilogy, How to Train Your Dragon, into the real world. Along with DeBlois, other key members of the How to Train Your Dragon team returning from the original trilogy — which pits Vikings in ceaseless combat with fire-breathing, flying reptiles — are Gerard Butler and Randy Thom, who has seamlessly shifted between live-action and animated features throughout his career, winning Oscars for The Right Stuff and The Incredibles. “It’s not as different as most people would assume, partly because so many of the live-action films, at least that I am asked to work on, contain so much in the way of computer graphics that they might as well be animated,” notes Thom, Supervising Sound Designer. “You have to invent that whole world anyway. If I was working on Woody Allen films, it would be a little different.”
Despite treading familiar ground, the sound design was not a complete 1:1 translation. “When Dean DeBlois asked me to work on the live-action version, I have to honestly admit that I thought, ‘Wow, that’s going to be easy. I’ve already done all the sounds,’” states Thom. “But I quickly realized that it wasn’t going to be that easy at all. And in fact, the live-action version called for a fairly different, and I would say in some ways, more detailed sound approach than the animated film series did. Although we certainly relied a lot on the dragon vocabulary that we had established for the first three films, we had to do some serious expanding on that vocabulary, both in terms of the dragon voices and movement.” There was also the opportunity for improvement. “I am never completely satisfied with anything that I do, but I wasn’t very satisfied with Toothless’ wing sounds. I was happy that we had a chance to develop those a little bit more in this version.”
Sounds could not be treated radically differently, as they still had to fit within what had already been established. “It was a tricky line to walk, because on the one hand, if you duplicate exactly what you’ve done before, then you’re not really doing anything interesting, and that was certainly not Dean’s intention,” observes Thom. “On the other hand, if you deviate far from what’s already been established, then you risk alienating the fans who fell in love with the movie in the first place. The visual and sound teams were nervous about figuring out how to walk that line. We were thrilled when the first test screening happened, and the audience responded so positively. I seem to remember that one of the Universal Pictures executives said, after looking at the focus group, ‘This is the kind of response you want to frame and put on a wall,’ because it was rare that they would get such a positive response from a focus group for any film. But the trick was to make sure that all of the dragon species sounded basically like they sounded in the animated film series, but try to expand on the vocabulary; that meant doing some new recordings of various kinds of animals and finding new ways to modify sounds that we already had in the library to generate a greater range of expression for them.”
Interestingly, the three animated features did not serve as audio temp tracks. “In a couple of cases, I did try to literally put in the sound in sync that we had done for the first film,” reveals Thom. “And I quickly realized that not only was the timing completely different than it had been for the animated film, but the action called for a different approach in terms of the sound. It would have saved a lot of labor if it had worked to use the original sound sequences, but that was not our fate.” Whether the imagery is stylized or photorealistic, the goal is to be naturalistic rather than abstract. “Virtually every director that I work with, whether it’s live-action or animation, makes it clear early on that they want almost everything to sound naturalistic, organic, and authentic to the real world. It’s a funny thing, in a way, because even though all animation directors admire the stylized sound work that was done for the old Warner Brothers cartoons, virtually no animation directors want to duplicate that kind of stylized approach in their films. My first conversation with an animation director almost always revolves around ‘This should basically sound like a live-action film.’ It’s an interesting phenomenon that I can’t quite explain.”
Sound plays a major role in establishing the tone for a scene as well as in creating believable characters. “Many animated films don’t even have a script in the beginning, so animation directors desperately need sound effects and music,” Thom explains. “This is because there’s so little visual information there, and that’s the only way that they can get a sense of whether something is going to work and what is needed for the next level of precision that’s going to make it work even better. I get invited to get involved early on, typically on an animated film, and certainly did on the animated How to Train Your Dragon movies. During the first meeting with the director, you’re talking about the story and who the characters are. After that meeting, I will typically go to work finding raw material, like recordings of elephants, horses, or dogs; the voices of which I think hit some useful emotional or dramatic note that a sequence or the film needs. I send those raw sounds, often not even attempting to cut them into sync with any visual image, to the director and the editorial team; they share it with the animators. One great thing about that is that listening to real-world sounds helps give the animators ideas for body movement. If we think about it, when any kind of creature vocalizes, the face and head move. The throat changes its shape, sometimes even the body, certainly with breaths. Breaths are an important part of making a creature’s vocalization credible and interesting.”
Trial and error are at the heart of the sound-design process. According to Thom, “A good artist is somebody who realizes when there’s potential in a certain approach that they’ve tried via an experiment. So, you narrow down what’s going to work and what’s not going to work. The most difficult character to come up with sounds for is one who has a wide range of emotions. Since Toothless’ movements are largely based on cats, both in the animated films and in the live-action, you might think, ‘Maybe we should use cat vocalizations mainly too.’ But the problem with cats in terms of sound is that they don’t have much of an emotional range in their voices, at least to the human ear. Cats have two or three notes that they hit, and that’s it. Whereas dogs have a much larger number of emotional notes that they hit vocally. And believe it or not, elephants. People think of an elephant trumpeting, but elephants make all kinds of interesting sounds. I begin mainly thinking about, ‘What emotional notes do I need to find?’ I’m not going to get them all from one creature because no animal covers all the ground, from sounding terrifying to injured or affectionate. At some point, I go into a little dark room by myself where I won’t be too embarrassed and start making all kinds of bizarre vocal sounds. For dragons, it’s useful that I’m a big guy with a fairly big voice so I don’t have to do as much pitch changing downward as I would otherwise. I have to do 100 vocalizations before I come up with one or two that have potential. I can almost always tell when a creature vocalization has been done by a person, and so I do everything I can to mask these vocalizations that I do while still hitting that emotional note that I’m looking for.”
Deciding which sounds should be prominent — and which should be lessened — is critical. “It’s not possible for a person to perceive more than two or three sounds at the same time, and we really tend to focus on one sound at a time,” Thom notes. “The big trick in mixing is to orchestrate it so that it feels like you’re hearing everything that you’re supposed to be hearing: the music, dialogue, and sound effects. But if you analyze it, there’s this carefully orchestrated change of focus from one thing to another, so that in one moment we subordinate the sound effects so that you can hear an especially important moment in the music that’s really contributing something that the sound effects can’t contribute. And in the next moment, we’re focusing on the dialogue and subordinating the music and the sound effects.”
Thom goes on to say that sound does not always have to be present. “Sometimes either silence or relative silence can be one of the best sound-design decisions that you make.” Even the stirrup strapped to Toothless and ridden upon by Hiccup has its own sonic signature. “The contraption that Hiccup comes up with for controlling Toothless’ artificial tail fin was a bit of a challenge for us,” Thom states. “Dean didn’t want it to sound like a purely metal mechanism. It would have been fairly easy to cut clanks, snaps, and metallic sounds in for that device. But he wanted it to be multifaceted sounding, including leather, stretching, and tension sounds. It needed to sound complicated, in a way, because that makes Hiccup feel even more ingenious for having come up with this thing.”
Creature vocalizations are always the most difficult sounds to design. “Young sound designers send me mix tapes that they’ve done of bizarre ambiences, and that’s the easiest stuff to do,” Thom shares. “When I have the time to reply to them, I say, ‘Send me a creature vocalization, especially one that displays a wide variety of emotions. If you can do that well, I’ll be impressed.’ The wind blowing through the wings was another fairly complex thing to deal with.” Thom constantly records new sounds to expand his sonic vocabulary. “Because here in Northern California, we live fairly close to the Pacific Ocean, there are lots of places to record various kinds of wind,” he says. “We have something like 5,000 recordings of wind in our sound library already. Wind makes a sound when it blows across or through something, so we try to find places where the wind is blowing around telephone wires or through cracks in an old barn. You can get distinctive whistles and vibrations that way. And believe it or not, those kinds of sounds can be useful when adding them to the sound of wind blowing across a dragon wing. If you incorporate enough of those little odd accents, it helps to make the flying sequences more believable.”
The biggest difference between doing the sound design for the live-action and the animated feature was the amount of extra detail required. “All film sound is stylized to some degree,” observes Thom. “Even though we sometimes think that our job is to recreate what something would actually sound like in a real place, we have to keep reminding ourselves that, fundamentally, we’re telling a story and are rarely working on a scientific documentary. It’s all about storytelling. It’s all about metaphor. Something about the live-action version called for more stringent attention to detail than the animated version did, but it’s still all stylized and not literal.”
Thom also shares that there were many proud moments within the film, noting, “We went an extra mile in terms of the dragon fire sounds in the live-action version. There are a million different kinds of fire sounds, just like wind. Since, as you say, nobody’s ever actually seen or heard a real dragon, we have quite a lot of latitude in terms of what dragon fire can sound like. In the film, you see a variety of visual interpretations of the dragon fire. Some of it seems wet, molten. Some of it seems dry. I was happy with the variety of sounds that we were able to come up with for the fire.”
Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer best known for composing in-depth filmmaker and movie profiles for VFX Voice, Animation Magazine, and British Cinematographer.
