Now in its fourth season, the award-winning HISTORY original series Vikings continues to be recognized for its amazing sound, visual effects, acting, directing, picture editing, and just about everything else. Leading the post sound team since Season 1 is Jane Tattersall, supervising sound editor/president of Tattersall Sound & Picture. She looks back at Vikings Season 3 with us and discusses the details of this year’s two MPSE nominated episodes: “Breaking Point” (Episode 9, nominated for best dialogue/ADR editing) and “To the Gates!” (Episode 8, nominated for best sound effects/Foley editing).
You’ve been on Vikings since the first season. How has the sound changed since then?
There have been some changes in the sound from the first season. The first season of Vikings was set mostly in the northern lands of Scandinavia. The Vikings lived within the fjords and the woods of what is now Norway. One of the responsibilities of sound was to convey just how harsh and brutal life was for the Vikings. So there was lots of wind—constant, ever-changing wind, blowing clouds, trees, clothing, hair, waves whipped up by storms, as well as lots of rain, and of course, the cold was meant to be ever-present. But as the Vikings travelled ever farther from their northern base, they came to more clement lands—there are different birds and insects, the land is more fertile, and the wind is less present. In Season 1, the creative producers were very keen to play wind, sometimes even as an alternative to a music cue! Not to say that life was any less harsh, but the constant wind and rain has been tempered.
The other sound change is in the weapons. The Vikings have their axes, shields, and swords but in later seasons, we have a wider assortment of weapons—bows shooting arrows and then bolts, and even a version of a trebuchet. So the fighting has a wider variety of sounds both on and off-screen.
The production/location sound has not changed. The same team does all of the recording. But as time has gone on, we’ve had more discussions with the production sound mixer so we have tried to work together to improve small things. He has had the same challenges from the start, like wind and water—although the crew and the actors are very respectful to the sound department, possibly because they have seen how much sound we have in Vikings. I don’t mean just dialogue—scenes where the story is told without dialogue, and, of course, all the fighting scenes, which are a given in Vikings.
For this year’s MPSE awards, you’ve been nominated for both sound effects/ Foley editing and dialogue/ADR editing. That’s a lot of editing per show! Can you walk us through your workflow on a typical episode?
I can assure you, I don’t do all the editing! We divide into sound effects and Foley, dialogue and ADR. We do a detailed spotting on each episode with the whole sound team present so we can all hear first-hand from the creative producer Sheila Hockin what the themes, concerns, and goals are for each episode. Sheila doesn’t specifically request sounds, but she lets us know what the mood is, and allows us to add sounds which work to support these moods. Examples of this would be betrayal, political machinations, or solitude.
The dialogue editor David McCallum and his assistant Claire Dobson do a pass on the dialogue before our spotting, so we have a clearer idea of what our ADR requirements will be. The ADR is recorded in London or Dublin, so we group the looping for several shows together for efficiency. Dale Sheldrake, the ADR editor, goes over for a week or more at a time. He sends back the fitted ADR, and Claire and David work their dialogue around the ADR, generally steering the re-recording mixer so that he knows when to use ADR and when to use production dialogue. Sometimes David just uses single words of ADR as he knows the producers lean toward using the original performances.
We mix for two days, and on our third day, we have a playback for Sheila. We then have half a day or more of reworking the sound, including the music cues, and thereafter we have an ISDN playback connecting London (and sometimes Dublin), L.A. and Toronto. It’s worth noting that we also have two-and-a-half days of premixing because we have a fair amount of ADR to blend in, dialogue to get rid of tones and buzzes—all the usual technical work required.
We don’t get many notes from the executive producers—sometimes a request for more clarity on a line. In Season 1 we had requests for more wind, more wind—which was a delightful request!
What is your biggest challenge in terms of dialogue and ADR on this series?
The challenge is always clarity, due to accents. That’s the case for all shows of course, but we have a wide range of accents, monitored by a dialogue coach who works in production, and languages: Norse, old English, and Frankish, which sounds a bit like German and is a precursor to modern French. But the actors are very experienced with voice work, and so when we do have to use ADR, we rarely have to use the whole scene. The exception is in the battles because we pretty much have to rebuild the dialogue track from scratch. But even then, we mine a lot of the production sound so that we can hear the energy and the harshness that was there on the day.
What was your favorite episode in Season 3?
I love them all! Truly each and every episode is very satisfying to work on. But Episode 8 “To the Gates!” was a standout. It was the attack by the Vikings on Paris. The attack was prolonged, the fighting was extensive, we had fire and a battering ram and arrows and bolts, and much more. The battle is 25 minutes of screen time, and then it continues in the next episode!
Can you tell us about the Foley? About how many cues are in a typical episode?
All the Foley is done at Footsteps in Toronto. The studio is owned by Foley artist Andy Malcolm and he is one of several artists who work there. I can’t tell you how many cues there are because we don’t set up the sessions for them. They cover the whole show since we need full coverage for the international versions. And for particular moments or sound –needs, we send specific notes for Foley. There is a lot of Foley, lots of walking and fighting and generally groups of people doing things in the background. We cover this with effects and supplement with Foley.
Do you get to do any field recordings for Vikings? If so, what are some sounds you needed to record for Season 3?
We do field recording as we need it. For Season 3 we didn’t need to do much since we had already recorded chopping wood, sharpening swords, boat moves, water sounds, stabbing sounds, and building with wood. But one of the sound editors, Brennan Mercer, was on vacation near some old growth forests where many ravens congregated. He had, of course, brought along recording equipment so he got some excellent recordings of single and group ravens with their very distinct caws. Ravens are a signature creature of Viking, so we’ve been able to make use of these recordings.
What was the most challenging sound you needed to design in Season 3?
In Episode 9 “Breaking Point,” during the attack on Paris, the Franks have designed a weapon that is a huge wooden barrel turned on its side with spikes sticking out all around it. They rigged up a chain system so that it is propelled down the covered bridge entry to Paris. It essentially mows down and impales anything in its path. So we had to create its sound—rolling along the bridge, and the spikes hitting the ground, and the chains pulling as it rolls toward the Vikings. Then, of course, it impales many bodies until Rollo is able to stop it. We handled it by pitching down various wood and metal sounds and chains running through a pulley system. We were happy because it sounded heavy, deadly, and different.
Photos courtesy of HISTORY