After five seasons, AMC’s The Walking Dead continues to amaze, scare, surprise, and at times frustrate audiences. While showrunners and writers have changed over the years, supervising sound editor Jerry Ross, at Warner Bros. Sound in Burbank, California, has been a mainstay of the post process. He and the sound editing department on The Walking Dead’s “Conquer” episode – the Season 5 finale – were recently nominated for an Emmy. Ross, along with ADR supervisor Lou Thomas and sound designer Tim Farrell, chatted with us about bugs, birds, airplanes, and of course, zombies.
After five solid seasons, how has The Walking Dead evolved from a sound standpoint?
Lou Thomas: There’s a lot less ADR now than there was in the beginning.
Jerry Ross: We’ve been through three different showrunners – the executive producers are basically the head writers as well. So in the beginning, we had Frank Darabont, who is the original creator and showrunner, and he had a different, more filmic idea of how to do certain things. If anything was in question, in terms of ADR, then we would loop everything.
LT: We would loop entire scenes.
JR: It’s pared down from there to become only looping what’s practical. One of the big challenges with dialogue in the show is that because it’s supposed to take place during the zombie apocalypse, there are no real industrialized sounds that are supposed to be heard – i.e., airplanes, trains, highway traffic, and generators – which obviously nobody likes. It’s almost like a period piece in that there is supposed to be nothing but desolation in the background, other than bugs and nature sounds. Really the bugs have been a signature sound for the show. These insects are the only things that are left after the apocalypse.
What about bird sounds?
JR: There’s been a wariness about birds from the beginning. A couple of the picture editors, who I won’t mention by name, had bird-phobia for quite awhile. They were scared to hear birds, but I’ve slowly weaned them. I sent them a copy of the Audubon Society book on birds, and I would tell them to play bird sounds at night to be at peace with them, and learn how to accept birds into their lives. The birds have made their way in. They are occasionally in there. We tend to go with birds that don’t sound too sweet and pretty. Tim [Farrell] is always on the quest for ugly birds. The current showrunner, Scott Gimple, has a few favorite birds that sound moody. Birds can be tricky because they tend to open up the mood of the scene and make it seem happier and less postapocalyptic.
Tim Farrell: The different showrunners have had different tastes in birds. Certain birds that were great for one didn’t work for another, and vice versa. It’s been a challenge to keep up with the taste of the show as it has evolved and things have changed over time.
LT: If there’s a bird in the clear on the dialogue track, or if it’s right on a line and I can find an alternate take that doesn’t have the bird on it, then the birds go away. They’ll still be there on the production effects track if they want to resurrect them, but there seems to be a conscious decision to take them out. It’s part of the austerity of the overall world that is The Walking Dead, to pare things out as much as we can. The birds can always be added back in later to taste.
JR: It’s something to do with the evolving apocalypse, too. Who knows, there could be a plague on some birds that’s happening off-stage. There could be a whole substory here that maybe they haven’t realized yet.
TF: I definitely do try to use the birds to help set the tone. For example, when [the characters]arrive in Alexandria at the end of last season, it was supposed to be a safe place, and so I actually took the opportunity to play more happy sounding birds to help sell that this place is kind of OK for these people. Whereas Terminus only had vultures and carrion birds that are more associated with death and the eating of meat.
You mentioned that the show is more like a period piece in that the backgrounds must be devoid of industrialized sounds. What challenges does that pose for the dialogue?
JR: Lou’s biggest problem, and really a problem for our dialogue re-recording mixer Dan Hiland and the effects re-recording mixer Gary Rogers, is that we’re constantly trying to find this balance where we have enough backgrounds to make it easy for Dan, who has to do an immense amount of noise reduction and has to remove any kind of extraneous civilized sounds from the dialogue so they don’t stick out. [The production is] shooting now in this little town of Senoia, Georgia, and there is traffic from the four main streets and there are trains and airplanes.
LT: It’s one of the few places in the U.S. where stunt flying for prop planes is allowed. So we occasionally get minute-and-a-half-long prop plane noise. Sometimes entire dialogue takes are just covered with the same prop plane on it. Even though they’re stunt planes, you don’t hear anything very compelling or fantastic in the sound, it just stays there for a really long time. Sometimes in the production tracks you hear the actors joke about it. They’ll be doing a very serious scene and they’ll joke about it and crack each other up because the plane is still there.
JR: With jets, we can usually get most of the sound out with mixing or cutting around it, but with an airplane, it’s pretty tough to remove. It’s more broadband. With the jet sound, sometimes you can bury it behind some subtle wind or other background sound. There’s this constant problem of wanting to have a deep, rich background bed and sometimes when paring that back a little bit, it really exposes the dialogue.
LT: We’ve been very lucky to have a wonderful production mixer, Michael Clark, and he and his crew do an outstanding job. They have been a godsend.
After five years, I expect you have an extensive library of zombie sounds. Do you still continue to record new zombie vocals for each episode?
JR: Yes. There is quite a deep library of zombies. For the most part, many of the hero zombies and specific zombies have a character all their own. In shooting, none of the zombies actually make any sound. We replace them completely – with a few exceptions. There are real zombies that we bring in, and we have to record them every few weeks for each episode. I’ve always said it’s very dangerous work. We have to wear special clothing to protect ourselves from getting scratched or bitten. And the really unfortunate part is that we have to kill the zombie when we’re done so it doesn’t threaten anybody else. It’s a constant battle to find new zombies to record.
LT: SAG has some very interesting laws on that, by the way.
TF: We try not to name the zombies so we don’t get too attached.
JR: In reality, we have a group of professional actors who come in to perform the zombie vocals. It’s really, really hard on the actors’ throats and vocal cords. And these are professionals who have to do this for a living all the time. So sometimes after a really rough session of performing attacking and screaming zombies, their voices can be pretty well wrecked. So there are some reservations about getting too aggressive, but for each episode we do a pass of recording zombies for everything in the episode. We will reuse some of the vocals, if the actors agreed to that. These are professionals who are contracted to do the work so we only reuse things that they give us permission to reuse, because it might save them having to do a bed of twenty or so zombies making noises for two minutes. So we’ll try and reuse some of that if it’s for the general zombie beds.
Did you have to develop a whole lexicon for the descriptions of the zombie vocals? What would be an example of a zombie file name?
JR: I get the great opportunity of being the zombie uber-wrangler. W.K. Stratton is our loop group head and I call him the zombie wrangler, because he actually has to bring the zombies in and deal with their personalities. But I go on the stage with them and I get to name each zombie, giving them a personalized name so we can identify them later. Getting to describe what they’re doing is a lot of fun as well. I find ones that look like famous people. I can always find somebody who looks like Tobey Maguire or Tim Robbins. There was a Billie Holiday zombie. Good examples of file names are ‘Zombie decaying LeBron head turn growl at camera CU’ and ‘Zombie Ginger Spice in quiet strong growl snarl knee caps struggles off stage kill to head.’ So Ginger Spice made it, and I think there are some other Spice Girls in there as well, like Sporty Spice.
There are so many great episodes in Season 5. Why was the “Conquer” episode chosen for Emmy consideration?
JR: I think we collectively decided that this was the most interesting episode because it was diverse. It had a lot going on in terms of cross-cutting and going back and forth in time. There were some really interesting zombie kills at the end. One of my favorites from this episode was when Rick [Andrew Lincoln] sticks the gun up inside the zombie’s neck while the zombie is on top of him, screaming and growling and getting louder. Rick keeps pushing the gun right through its vocal cords, and it’s stretching them and that’s changing the pitch, until Rick finally gets the gun all the way up in there and blows its brains out. I thought that was a fun moment.
Director Greg Nicotero, who is a makeup artist, is very involved in the zombies and their unique looks. How does that dedication impact the sound of the show? What’s his involvement in the zombies’ sound?
JR: Greg is so much a part of what makes The Walking Dead special. It’s a show about people struggling and doing really difficult things in difficult situations, but the zombies are the signature of what makes The Walking Dead, and Greg Nicotero is really the master who has created all the zombies. He’s a special effects makeup artist and he has worked on makeup for so many great shows and films. His repertoire and his credits go incredibly deep. So he has to be credited as one of the main guys who gave The Walking Dead its style and its feel.
The zombies are unique and really amazing, and they are constantly different. There is always a new zombie that you can’t believe, from the well zombie that was all bloated to the skull zombie who gets a screwdriver through its head. The zombies are pretty phenomenal. They are the iconic part of the show.
TF: Greg comes by and gives his opinion on sounds, but he’s mainly involved in the director’s cut. After that, the showrunner Scott [Gimple] comes in, and he’s really the one who oversees the sound of the show. We don’t get a real opportunity to work with the directors too much. After they do their cut, they’re done. They’re basically guns for hire. For the most part, by the time we get involved, the directors from the set aren’t usually involved in the show at that point.
JR: But I think Greg is an exception to that. He’s always around the show and he’s always involved. He has really set the tone for how he thinks the zombies should sound and at this point, we know what works and what he likes for the zombie sounds.
Greg actually played himself as a zombie in Woodbury a couple of seasons ago. He made his own zombie sounds on the set and then came in and sweetened them in post as well. He knows what he wants and he did his own [vocals]. He’s like the Tom Cruise of zombies. Tom does his own stunts and Greg does his own zombies.
Music is a key feature of the soundtrack. Does the sound department get to collaborate with composer Bear McCreary?
TF: For scenes that have a lot of design to go along with the music, we definitely communicate and talk about where things are going to be happening. We will coordinate a lot of that. If there is a key sound that is going to go along with the music, then I will send it over to them and find out if it matches the pitch, so it will play nicely with the music. We definitely pitch sounds to try and match the music if we can, based on the design of the scene. I remember there was a scene with bells ringing, and we wanted it to coordinate with the key of the music. We want the design and the music to interact with each other when they can.
JR: Occasionally I’ve even interfaced with Bear McCreary in order to have him use the sound effects in his music. At this point, he knows to keep the score out of the big sound moments that don’t hit in the same way his score will hit, and so he will leave room for the sound design there. He’s pretty savvy about that and he does an amazing job. It’s such a hard job to have to come up with fresh, new music for sixteen episodes a year. It has to be fresh but still have that Walking Dead style. He does some pretty amazing things in terms of keeping the music diverse.
LT: On a side note, Bear is a fellow SC grad – University of Southern California, as are Tim and myself.
JR: I also wanted to talk about the music editor, Michael Baber. He’s one of the more talented music editors we’ve ever worked with. I know the mixers feel the same way. His nickname is Dr. Music and sometimes we just call him ‘The Doctor.’ He can take music, cut it up, and make it work. He can make fixes on the stage that save Bear from having to go in and re-score whole sections of different episodes because he is so facile and talented with that.
What was your favorite scene to design in the “Conquer” episode?
TF: I had a lot of fun designing the sound for Morgan’s staff. He has that wooden staff that he uses to attack members of the Wolves. I had a lot of fun trying to figure out exactly the right resonance for him to make him sound like a badass. Also, there was a scene where Daryl [Norman Reedus] and Aaron [Ross Marquand] are inside the Del Arno Foods warehouse parking lot, and they open the back doors on this truck and find out that it was a trap. It was rigged with this Rube Goldberg type of machine that opens the doors on the other trucks and all the zombies come pouring out. It was quite a challenge to come up with the different parts of that to have it make sense. So that was a fun challenge as well.
JR: A little back story on the mix of that scene – as all those doors go flying up and all the mechanisms are whirling and the zombies all come out in waves, that scene required some compromise from the sound effects, because the score was so big and full during that section. We actually had to back off a little on the detail in the sound design that Tim created. It was unfortunate that we couldn’t get all of the detail to come through. Maybe if we were mixing in Atmos we might’ve been able to squeeze it all in.
After working on the series week after week, do you experience an increase in zombie-related dreams
LT: The first season I pretty much had zombie dreams every single night while we were working on the show. It got to the point where it didn’t wake me up as much, but I definitely had a lot of them in the beginning.
JR: I live and breathe these zombies because I get to look at them while we cue the episodes, and name them and describe all the actions they do. Ultimately, all of these zombies get killed. There aren’t too many that survive once we’ve made something of them in post sound. Once we see a zombie on screen, they pretty much aren’t going to make it. Their fate is sealed. So I’ve grown emotionally detached from the zombies so they haven’t appeared in my dreams. I’m not scared by them anymore. They are more of the amusing part of the show for me, like the comic relief for some of the tense stuff that happens with the human-on-human violence.
LT: Every so often there will be one zombie that is just so fierce and horrible looking that it really is kind of striking. In the Season 5 finale, while Daryl and Aaron are trapped in the car in the warehouse parking lot, surrounded by zombies, there were several zombies that were really fierce looking. Bravo to Nicotero and his crew for continuing to bring the scare to it.
TF: I’ve seen parts of Season 6 and there are some zombies coming up that are really phenomenal. Just when you think they can’t do anything more unique, they come up with these zombies that are even more decayed and have wonderful detail. It really blows my mind every time I see them.
LT: This is really a show about a zombie utopia beleaguered by renegade bands of living humans just screwing it up for the poor zombies.
Making of Episode 516: The Walking Dead: Conquer