John Loranger’s sound mixing work on Netflix’s Wednesday gives life to so many of the moments of this season. From the progression of Slurp from zombie to human, to the many monsters of Nevermore, to fan favorite Thing, the sound work aids greatly in making this gothic world seem lived in.
The Contending: One of the biggest character noises this season was Slurp going from the undead creature with the unhinged jaw as well as a ticking heart who over time becomes more human. What went into creating all of that?
John Loranger: It started with Miles [Millar], the main showrunner who deals with post-production, having a meeting about what Slurp was going to sound like. Miles’ idea was Slurp was a zombie but not a zombie we had really heard before, to be something new. Obviously everyone wants an original idea for their zombie, but there are so many sonic characteristics that we all have embedded in our brains from seeing so much zombie material over the years. That made me really think hard about how I was going to approach creating this character’s voice. Then, on top of that, Slurp has a mechanical heart which was a design challenge of its own. For one, there was a lot of talk about when are we going to hear the heart? Is it going to be audible all the time, or just when we see it? Ultimately we decided to have it just when it was visually available to us, otherwise the ticking of the heart was a bit distracting in the mix.
From there working on Slurp, I was sending versions of him to Tim [Burton] and he was reviewing them and sending me notes. We had three or four iterations, and what the real challenge was after we established what Slurp sounded like he changed in the next episode. So the way I designed it was I made his original design quite wide. It had many tracks of audio, and that allowed me to strip layers away and introduce new layers as he became more human. We brought the actor in and replaced all of his performances as Slurp. We did a loop group version of Slurp. I did my own version of Slurp in the first episode. Then we added all sorts of goo and bone since at the beginning he is just mush inside and he is cracking. So we established all of that in the first episode and then in episode two we had to start stripping away some of those layers and introduce more of the human characteristics. So that was one of the larger challenges of season two for me.
The Contending: You have a lot of unique monsters in this show. The Hyde, the werewolves, even the gorgon snake hair. What goes into making these noises distinct so we can identify each one?
John Loranger: We take our cues visually for these things. Sometimes we have a preconceived notion about what these things should sound like. Like with the Gorgon we leaned into the snake sound. Or as a contrast, DaVincis have telekinesis and we decided to give them a very subtle sound to go with that. That was driven by Tim’s preference; he didn’t want this to be a magical show in that way. He wants to lean more into the gothic with Nevermore and avoid magical sounds. The Hyde has been an evolution from season 1. When I designed it then we were determining how much it weighs. How big is its chest cavity? What food group of sounds are going to determine its main vocals? So taking visual cues from Tim, Miles, and Alfred [Gough], and then I am deciding what matches and glues to the picture, because it needs to be attached and seamless.
The Contending: Thing has been a major figure around both seasons, but was there anything in this season in particular that was an extra challenge?
John Loranger: It’s really interesting with Thing because he has to convey emotion, but he is also quite funny most of the time and we are leaning into the humor with him. When we first started designing Thing, we were adding whooshes and little things, but ultimately where we landed was our lead Foley artist, Jason Charbonneau. He actually performs and injects that emotion and comedy into Thing’s performance with his fingers. It’s remarkable because it’s such a sonic challenge. And we’re pushing things here and there. And Chris Bacon, our composer, is helping all that stuff land with the score. He’s illustrating what Thing is doing, supporting the quick movements and injecting that emotion into Thing’s performance.
The Contending: The other major sound creation was Christopher Lloyd as Professor Orloff being a head in a tank. You’ve got the creaking noise of the machine and we always hear that liquid sound when he talks. What were the challenges in creating that?
John Loranger: That was a unique challenge because ultimately we’re trying to make the dialogue clear. We want everybody to be able to understand the show and not lean in asking “What is he saying?”. Miles, our post-showrunner, and Al Gough, the main writer, were very focused on dialogue clarity throughout the entire process. So when you’ve got a head floating in a jar of water on a robotic chair, and then you also have the logic of like, well, how do we get his voice to come through the water? And there’s bubbles coming out of his mouth. And how do we get this to work?
There was a little speaker on the front of the robot chair, and we used that as the avenue to get the sound to travel from his mouth through the water to the speaker. I mean, we broke some rules here for physics, for sure. We went through several iterations of having it sound, you know, more underwater and less underwater, and ultimately we landed on what’s in the show. We set up a chain where we could control how much water, resonance from the glass jar, and how much of the speaker sound was going to be played. Then we decided on the mix stage how clear it would be. That was a fun challenge to try to figure out because the audience still has to feel like he’s inside the jar and inside the water, but we have to be able to understand him.
The Contending: One of the major focuses this season, and that shows up in so many different ways and powers, is electricity. First Pugsley discovers his abilities, and then we have two different laboratories, one underground and one in the clock tower. What was it like trying to find the balance of that noise to kind of get across the menace or, in Pugsley’s case, the fun of shooting electricity?
John Loranger: You’re exactly right about Pugsley’s powers, that they had to feel fun and feel playful. So to design his powers I use Jacob’s ladders and similar devices to generate electrical sound sparks and welding sounds. Then running electricity through different objects to get the emotion that you’re trying to get out of the sound. I built a whole library of it, and then I could put it on my MIDI keyboard and play it at different pitches and execute it the way I wanted it to, and make it random when necessary. The machines in the labs were a whole other animal. My main sound effects editor, Dan Sexton, he basically took ownership of those two machines, though I did the one in the clock tower during Tim’s animation piece,
But the ones that were in the basement of Willow Hill and in the other tower Dan did, and they were an enormous amount of work to try to design and make you feel the weight of them. And that’s just a ton of intricate sound design process when you’re reacting to what’s there, and what’s a challenge with a show of this scale is that there’s so many moving parts. The VFX are coming in constantly, being updated, and so we’re adjusting our sounds to them. Sometimes we’re adjusting our sounds to them while we’re mixing the final version of the show. So, yeah, that presented a challenge but I was really happy with where they ended up.
The Contending: The one-eyed crow and his bird minions create quite a mood. What went into creating that?
John Loranger: You are right that we were trying to set a tone and a mood in those particular scenes. Some of that’s done with the backgrounds as the bottom foundational layer. We’re outside, and we’re pulling out all the happy birds, and we’re creating a very stark location. So, once one eye arrives the other elements that would normally be in those locations, like in the quad or the forest, would dissipate. Then we’d start to hear the individual caw and then the caw of his gang. Tim’s direction for when the swarm attacks would be when it feels completely oppressive and suffocating. So I spent a lot of time using the Atmos field making hundreds of crow sounds fly around the room. Experiencing it in Atmos, it’s really quite a different experience than in stereo on TV. It feels very much like you’re inside the swarm.
So we essentially stripped away the sort of happier layers of the foundational sounds, made it stark, introduced the crows, and then made them surround and swarm around the character, whoever was being attacked. Though, in the case of the dream state that Wednesday goes into, there were a few less crows, so they were treated, muted, and reverbed out in different ways to make that space also feel unique and scarier.
The Contending: There was a scene from Season 1 that has stuck with me, and it’s a very quiet moment. It’s literally after they’ve dropped Wednesday off at Nevermore, and Gomez is talking to Morticia and saying, do not worry, she will not be alone, and he just pulls this crank, and it just has this quiet little noise, we hear the car driving, and then Thing drops out. That whole sequence, the way the music and noise and visuals flowed together was this great introduction to him. I’m wondering if there’s anything about that moment you remember putting together way back then.
John Loranger: Yeah, that was a long time ago, during COVID. I remember the scene that you’re talking about. Gomez’s whole character throughout the show injects comedy into every scene that he’s in. And then Thing also kind of plays this funny role in their dynamic. But yeah, we were focusing on making the switch on the car itself into a thunk when it was released, playing up the humor. But it’s a combination of all the elements happening together, the sound effects, the music, and the comedic performances, the rhythm of the dialogue there, that’s creating that sort of humorous moment.
Wednesday is streaming now on Netflix.
