Senior re-recording mixer Christian Cooke of Company 3 Toronto joined forces with industry veteran re-recording mixer Brad Zoern to create the powerful, evocative, Oscar-nominated sound for Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein. As lead mixer, Cooke handled dialogue and music so that the thousands of elements would work together seamlessly to create the enveloping soundscape of this film. (Zoern mixed the massive number of sound effects.) Besides Best Sound, the film received eight other Academy Award nominations this year, including for Best Picture.

They broke down responsibilities in a similar way to what they did on the previous del Toro projects Antlers, Nightmare Alley and The Shape of Water (the soundtrack for which was nominated for both Academy and BAFTA Awards). The final mix was performed in one of Company 3’s fully loaded Dolby Atmos theaters in Toronto. As an aside, Company 3 CEO/senior colorist Stefan Sonnenfeld also collaborated with del Toro and cinematographer Dan Laustsen on the unique color grade.

We caught up with Cooke to learn more about his process of building the sound.

Talk a bit about working with del Toro on the sound.
When the mixing started, we were together on the mixing stage with the sound crew and picture editor Evan Schiff. Guillermo, who was in Los Angeles for part of the time, watched and listened via linked playback at the Hitchcock stage at Universal.

He gave us his notes, which weren’t many. I think the fact that Brad and I have worked with him so much helped us a great deal to know what he likes.

You have the edited production audio, the music and a whole lot of sound effects and Foley to work with. Can you touch on how all the elements you and Brad mixed came about?
We work a lot with the Toronto sound editing company Sound Dogs. Foley was done by the company Footsteps. Sound Dogs supervising sound effects editor Nathan Robitaille and supervising dialogue editor Nelson Ferreira built all the effects and did the final edit on all the dialogue, including production sound and ADR. And then all the sounds — from footsteps to thunderclaps to explosions and everything else — were assembled with much more than we ended up using. It’s always important to be able to have different options.

For the actual mix, Cooke and Zoern worked in tandem, sharing the room’s 2048-input Avid S6 console, where they performed all the volume adjustments, compression, EQ and filtering. They also used Dolby Atmos and its immersive qualities to place all the sounds in space.

We also did a version in IMAX’s most immersive format. The primary difference between the two is mostly about bass management. Instead of using a subwoofer, the IMAX system sends all the frequencies to all the speakers, but the actual sound experience is very similar.

The film is so rich in terms of sound. Can you share some examples of the kind of work you did in the mix that’s specific to Frankenstein.
At the beginning of the film, we see a ship and its sailors trapped in ice around the North Pole. When they hear an explosion and go investigate, they find The Creature (Jacob Elordi).

We then see The Creature follow them to their boat and attack their ship and their men. Then we find out that Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) is telling the captain of the vessel about how this situation came about. We had to manage the interplay with dialogue, music and a lot of effects that create the sense of the creaky ice that has trapped the ship and so forth. For the ice, we had dozens of effects for Brad to choose from and manipulate. Some were designed to sound realistic, and some work on a more subliminal level. Guillermo wanted to add a couple of effects of a bullet hitting glass, which also included the sound of an arrow whistling by.

Eventually, the crew shoots at The Creature with a blunderbuss, a gigantic four-barrel gun from the period. Nathan has access to an armory and recorded the sound of a real blunderbuss. He recorded it in many different ways and supplemented those sounds with many other sounds.

So you want to isolate certain frequencies so the audience hears each thing rather than just a big mélange of stuff?
Yes. It’s about dialing back certain sounds and accentuating others to get a different sense of the sounds from the various perspectives of the shots. Each time we see a piece of ice, it’s a different sound.

The Creature has a distinct voice in the film. Can you talk about creating that sound?
Nathan had prepared 40 tracks of dialogue for The Creature’s lines: 12 production and ADR tracks, 14 tracks of dialogue that he had processed to emphasize certain frequencies, and then another 14 different animal sound effects to sweeten every line.

He took each word and processed it through a dialogue chain, and then I did the balancing to create the final sounds. I started out thinking that when The Creature was young, he wouldn’t sound as much like the animals because he was still growing, so I kept the animal sounds to a minimum until The Creature had gone through a lot and was angry. That’s when we interjected more of the animal sweetener sounds into his dialogue.=

You had the 40 tracks, each of which had different aspects of The Creature’s sound, and then you brought out the animal sounds for certain scenes?
Not exactly. There were sweetener tracks in every line of his dialogue, but most people wouldn’t hear them. It was really just in low frequencies to give it subwoofer weight. Then we made those sounds more or less present, depending on The Creature’s emotions.

What about the other characters?
They were just clean, except we’d add more reverbs to create a sense of their surroundings and put them into a particular environment, just as we always do for everything we mix.

I know that traditionally, dialogue is tacked to the center, but when you were doing dialogue for The Creature, did you distribute it all over the space?
I spread dialogue across the front wall. Especially when he was yelling and exerting himself, it would be all over the front wall and into the subwoofer for the Dolby version.

The sound effects in a big period film with a surreal feel. It makes sense that you would want a lot of these sounds to declare themselves in a major way, but obviously, the music is very important too, and we have to hear what the characters are saying. Talk a bit about the thought process that went into that.
The music in the film is beautiful. The composer Alexandre Desplat, who also did The Shape of Water and [Guillermo del Toro’s] Pinocchio, wrote an inventive score featuring violinist Eldbjørg Hemsing and choral music filled with wonderful moments. Score mixers Peter Cobbin and Kirsty Whalley recorded and mixed the music in Dolby Atmos.

The music was delivered as four banks of 15 tracks made up of 7.1.4. stems. That gave us a lot of leeway to make very fine adjustments to particular elements if we had to in order to make the mix work in its entirety.

What was done to accomplish that? Did you take certain frequencies down in the music if there was a strange effect coming up?
Yes, we did that in certain instances, and we did a lot with speaker placement. We pulled music back off the front wall and brought it into the middle of the room, especially when Dr. Frankenstein and Harlander (Christoph Waltz) are up in the rafters of the castle right before the creation of The Creature.

They are having a big argument, and there is a huge thunderstorm with intense rain. The thunder was spectacular. We had a lot of it coming out of the overhead speakers, so we pulled the music back just so we could hear the dialogue better. Evan Schiff was instrumental in getting us to where we needed to go. So much of what we did was about ensuring we conveyed everything about the story, and the picture editor is an excellent collaborator when there are so many subtle choices to make with the sound.

A lot of what you do is shape the environment of the audio so that the production sound, which might not have been recorded in a giant castle or in a ship’s cabin, sounds as if it had been. What are the primary tools you use?
A lot of that aspect of the mix is related to adding room delay and reverb. There are many tools to do that. I use a tool called UltraReverb quite a lot. It has a lot of different parameters. You can change the frequency of return, the amount of reverb, the amount of pre-delay.

Say a character is walking away in a big room. You can use the tool to change the distance, altering [all the attributes of a sound] on the fly. As opposed to just making more reverb, it becomes more real because of the different delay time you can dial in. So we can not only create a “big room” sound, but we can make that sound trail off but with really low amplitude. A reverb reflection is the correct term for that, and we have complete control of it.

You were working in Dolby Atmos. A lot of people will hear it in 5.1 or even stereo at home. Do you factor that into your decisions about placement of sounds, or do you just make it the best it can be for the best possible viewing and listening conditions?
You want to do the best for the environment that you’re mixing in, which in this case was a 100% Dolby-certified room. It’s the best room in Canada and possibly the best room on the East Coast. It holds up to any room in Los Angeles, as far as I’m concerned. Brad and I are going to use that to do the best mix possible.

For other systems, the Dolby system is very good at translating the mix to other configurations — like other Atmos systems with fewer speakers, or 7.1 and 5.1 and others — in ways that get the best possible translation out of them. Even after we’ve generated other versions, we’ll still go through and make some revisions to ensure that every moment works as well as it can without those additional speakers, but the system is good at getting us close. 

Can you think of any example where you really made the most out of the immersive sound?
There are so many. The thunder that we placed in the overheads really helps put you in the middle of that climactic scene on the castle roof, before Victor brings The Creature to life. Also, when The Creature first meets his maker, very close to the beginning of the film, we see Victor and we hear some rumbling and rattling and so forth behind us. We don’t know what the sound is yet. That’s when Victor wakes up, and the camera reveals it’s The Creature standing over his bed. That was a very cool effect!

My advice is to see this movie with the best sound system possible.