Sound

Written by Lucas Hibdon

I’ve always felt a special connection to sound. My mom was a music teacher who taught me the joy of letting music take you somewhere off this planet. There were moments, even as a kid, where I would lay on the floor with the lights off, listening to “Stop This Train” by John Mayer. I’ve played piano since I was 3 years old, drums since I was 7 years old, and started learning music and audio production when I was 19. I’ve become very familiar with (and often chase after) the feeling of going to another planet, with music as the vehicle. When I heard from Cody that he wanted to do a film on that exact feeling, I knew I wanted it to be special in the audio world.

My favorite question to ask when working on sound is not “what would I actually hear in this moment,” but instead, “what would I want to hear in this moment?” There’s always a balance between those two questions when doing Foley. However, when you travel somewhere else with music, there’s usually a transition from one headspace to the other.

You start off hearing every detail around you, answering “what do you actually hear?” In this case, it was emphasizing the sizzle of the water, the jingle of the leather buckle, and Peter’s hand flowing through the water in the bucket. Then, as Peter gets lost in his craft, you start to hear the other question sneak in. Sounds start to blend together and have qualities you wouldn’t usually hear. The piano blends with the hammer hits, as if the song is composing itself around Peter’s craft. Finally, the minute Peter begins to get lost in his music, you almost hear nothing realistic.

To emphasize this, I composed an extra 20 layers of instruments around the song that Cody found and added subtle yet expressionistic Foley, matching some sequences with the fire. All of this slows at the end as you transition back into reality, hearing only what you would actually hear in his shop. All sounds were created at my desk using simple props around my house.

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