A chat with the man behind all the Yellowjackets frog sounds in Season 3: supervising sound editor Brett Hinton.
There’s a lot going on sonically in Yellowjackets Season 3, including talking animals in a dream sequence, but supervising sound editor Brett Hinton says the frogs were a huge focus for him.
“The mission essentially was: create a sound that is absolutely terrifying to behold when unseen, but natural and disarming once its creator is revealed,” says Hinton. “[Showrunner] Bart (Nickerson) was listening to a lot of frog sounds and had sent me a lot of videos of some of the sounds that we’re referencing as an inspiration. For me, I felt like a lot of those early frog videos I watched were hard for me to take seriously.”
Hinton says he really had to separate the visual from the sound.
“On their own, those sounds were really creepy and weird. As soon as I saw these frogs, they looked so silly. I think I’m only just realizing now how disarming that was and what the point was: How do we reverse-engineer these things to make them so effective and terrifying?”
“They Looked So Silly”
And they are terrifying! Especially when they roar back at Lottie (Courtney Eaton) during one scene.
“In the beginning, I had suggested looking at using Aztec death whistles as the primary component. I remember from watching Apocalypto, they used it as part of the scene where the Mayans were attacking, and they were using the death whistles. I remember how terrifying that was. I wanted to build that as part of the mystique of the frogs.”
So he and his team acquired a few different-sized death whistles and recorded them. The singular sound was cool, but they needed more.
“It didn’t have as much realism at the end of the day. We needed to hide it in other layers and other sounds. We played with dolphins, gorillas, gators, birds, trees, and lots of frogs — bullfrogs, tree frogs, and bayou frogs. Human voices were in there, too. Just weaving all those sounds together in the right balance really brings it all to life.”
Hinton says he feels like an expert on frogs after working on this season of Yellowjackets.
“I can definitely speak to different parts of where a certain frog would be in the country. I really wanted to use these bayou frog recordings. My family is from Louisiana, lived in the bayou, and I had spent time recording bayou frogs. They are in there, but a lot more subtle because I didn’t want anyone to be like, actually, those are bayou frogs and they’re not that far north.”
And every Yellowjackets fan knows that they’d call him out on that, too!
Frogs Within the Score and Mari Hearing Her Demise
In addition to creating the scary frog sound, Hinton also got to collaborate with composers Craig Wedren and Anna Waronker, layering in that sound within the score.
“What’s so great about this season, and specifically with the frogs, is like in past seasons with Yellowjackets, we had wind and we had voices and a lot of subjective non-diegetic sounds that bring the audience into this idea of what is the wilderness? Now you’ve got this physical thing, this frog. What is this sound? It does feel like it’s something in the world as opposed to being scored. That was a really powerful thing for sound and music because now it basically was this bridge that allowed us both to cross freely. And that’s what created so much more collaboration between us. I was sending them frog ideas and lots of other random sounds that they were picking up and then weaving that into their score.”
Speaking of non-diegetic sounds from Season 2, can Hinton answer whether the dripping Mari (Alexa Barajas) heard was foretelling her own demise in Season 3, as many fans have posited?
“I read a lot, too! Sometimes you’ll ask a showrunner a question to get insight. With Ashley (Lyle), I feel like I’m always like, hey, what are we doing here? And like, if you give me some context, maybe it’ll push me in a certain design direction. And I feel like a lot of times, I just never get an answer and that is the answer. Because if she tells me an answer, it’s not gonna get the depth that we’re looking for. None of us know how supernatural it is or whether it’s in our heads.”
Yellowjackets is streaming on Paramount+.
