"A Quiet Place" was one of the most unlikely hits of 2018.
Made on a budget of just 17 million dollars the horror film would go on to
gross more than 332 million dollars worldwide. Emily Blunt earned praise for
her performance and actor John Krasinski had his first major breakthrough as a
director. One thing that makes the movie so unique: its use of sound. "A Quiet Place"
is set in a post-apocalyptic world overrun with monsters with ultra
sensitive hearing. Make a single sound and you're in big trouble
therefore the characters communicate in sign language and make the lightest of
footsteps. While the movie has a groundbreaking lack of sound that
doesn't mean it's completely absent of it. Brandon Jones, Ethan van Der Ryn and
Eric Aadahl of E Squared are responsible for much of what you hear on screen.
"Sound was actually written into the script and so for us it was like a dream
come true like kids in a candy store." Here's how some of the movie's most
notable sounds were made. Foley, a method in which objects are used to create
sounds made by humans, or in this case monsters, was used. "A Foley stage is a
super quiet environment where we can put picture up on the screen and then record
using our microphones in sync with the picture." Some sounds like a shotgun
loading and water splashing were made exactly as you'd expect.
For other sounds they had to get creative
The most unusual sound might be the echolocation sounds used to illustrate
how the monsters get around without vision. To make this sound they settled
on putting a stun gun up to a patch of grapes.
They then manipulated the sound in the next phase: the editing process. "The
whole concept with these creatures is there's kind of an electromagnetic
component so using something electrical as a source for the vocals seemed to kind
of make sense. So here's our recording of the stun gun [buzzing] We can take that sound and
slow it down and we can hear the individual electric
clicks
Not every sound effect requires Foley for the sound of a baby crying Brandon
Jones recorded the sound of his baby nephew crying. One of the biggest
challenges of this movie wasn't what you heard with ease, but the kind of sounds
we might normally tune out. Footsteps are a classic Foley noise any sound
designer is used to making. Usually it'll be loud... but for "A Quiet Place" the team
had to account for the fact that the characters mostly walked around barefoot.
"Where we would play Foley footsteps, and where not to, were really dictated by the
logic of the film. On a lot of why shots we didn't even shoot the Foley for those
feet if we can hear it from such a distance
the creatures can too. And then when you cut into an extreme close-up and you see
a foot push through sand then we hear it just chiaroscuro." The scariest sound of
all though: the lack of sound! "It's rare that you get to work on a movie that has
this much like absolute silence and parts where music and dialogue's all
stripped away and it's just these faint details. One of the biggest things that
happened throughout the course of post-production for this movie was
really scaling back and being more minimalist in the creature sound design
because our first pass had him making noise all over the place and we kept
scaling back and making it kind of a 'less is more' approach." Following in the path
of one of the great monster movies before it "Jaws," the less we see, or in
this case the less we hear from the monsters, the more terrifying they are
and yet good luck getting that stun gun sound out of your head now