The Importance of Sound

Wolves in the Walls and the Importance of Sound

By Director Pete Billington

Any filmmaker will tell you; “Sound is 50% of the experience.” All you have to do is click mute and watch the emotional impact drain from the screen. Entertainment audio is it is a multicourse feast that is largely invisible to the audience. We begin with the dialog, layer in the ambience, foley, effects and finish with the score. Each component is woven into the mix. The perfect harmony of emotion and nostalgic sense-memory.

Our hope is that the audience is emotionally present throughout the piece. For this to happen, they must believe on a subconscious level that what they are experiencing is real. The traditional audio techniques to trigger these feelings aren’t always easily adapted to a medium where we can perceive complex spatial relationships.

Wolves in the Walls is the perfect wilderness to explore these challenges. It’s a story about a little girl named Lucy who hears sounds in the walls of her house. We wanted to create a progression with Lucy, from singular doubt to shared certainty, and we believed sound design was going to be the most convincing way to do that. At first, the sounds inside the walls are vague, the moans and creaks that old houses make in the middle of the night. But as the story advances we shift to scratching and growling. The more intently you listen, the stronger your desire to ascertain the truth, the more we sonically reward your curiosity.

Sonic Superpowers

We have certain superpowers in this medium. We know things about our audience. We know where their ears, eyes and hands are. We know the choices that they have made, and we know their position in virtual space. This means that we have a pretty good idea what their intentions might be. As a result we can use sound as both motivation and reward.

In a sequence called “Jamming the Signals” the audience helps Lucy listen for wolves by pressing an empty jam jar against the wall. Instead of the evidence we expect, we inadvertently eavesdrop on Lucy’s Mom telling a friend how worried she is about her daughter. This effect works on multiple levels. Its wonderfully rewarding to use our proprioception to “tune” the conversation by moving the jar along the wall relative to your ear. The jar scrapes against the grain of the wallpaper, the muffled conversation reverberates in the jar and all at once the voice becomes amplified and clear. It’s also incredibly connective to be looking at Lucy and know that she is hearing exactly the same thing as us.

What isn’t obvious is that the conversation is completely variable depending on the choices that the audience has made. This places an incredible burden on the audio team to be able to deliver a seamless moment that can contract and dilate in length and still sync with foley, animation and score. Lucy’s despondent reaction to her mother’s doubt must always land at exactly the right spot. These choices are not binary and they require a tremendous amount of planning and role-play to execute successfully.

Emotionally Subjective Sound

Wolves in the Walls also experiments with a technique that we call Emotional Point of View. Since the audience is manifested as Lucy’s imaginary friend, they see and hear the world the way that Lucy feels the world. This approach is especially recognizable in the sequence “Don’t Bug Dad” where Lucy reluctantly interrupts her Dad while he rehearses for a Tuba performance.

Far off, a hundred feet away, Dad is bathed in limelight, playing a somber fugue. He is a beacon of sound and light. Lucy approaches him, cautiously, through a serpentine maze, and as she moves, he somehow seems to get closer to us. We go from concert hall, to jazz club, to basement rehearsal space in the space of five steps.

To perform this magic trick the space had to be defined by sound. The sonic properties of the tuba are the emotional barometer of Lucy’s relationship with her father. When they are connected, we have harmony, when separated; discord. As tense strings accompanied by wolfy howls seep into the score, the audience’s position in space works as a panning slider, mixing between these two emotional states. It’s an incredibly powerful effect that unlocks an intuitive but subtle form of spatial interactivity.

Spatialization Squared

Along with cinema and theater, our team is derived from artists from the gaming industry. We wanted to honor that heritage by placing our audience inside a virtual video game during the experience. In a sequence called “8-bit Inception” they will be two layers deep in a virtual construct. The spatial audio implications of this are quite mind-bending.

As the audience finds themselves in “Wolf Slayer”, they will hear Lucy’s brother barking condescending instructions over voIP about the difficulty of Level 5. This dialog is processed and spatialized such that it feels as though one is wearing a cheap gaming headset. Simultaneously, there is a subtle mix of brother four feet away in virtual space. As Lucy removes our virtual, virtual headset, (and this is when it gets crazy) the sound from the video game leaves headset space and shifts to the mono signal coming from the tube television across the room. This effect is so convincing, the first time I experienced it I reached for my TV remote to mute the sound. My brain had been completely fooled. This is emotional presence.

Deconstructing the Score

Wolves in the Walls is a story about a little girl who must learn how to face her fears. It is also about a family who has become disconnected. We represent this through animation, color, shape and especially sound. Each member of the family embodies a different component of sound. Mom is percussive, Dad is tonal, Brother melodic (in that shallow 8-bit video game way.) Lucy begins as a collage of sound, attempting to pull together the threads into a fully realized harmony. This is metaphoric, but also representative of how we approached the score for Wolves.

When we are alone with Lucy, hear the beautiful haunting compositions of violin and piano. A nod to Lucy’s heritage. Mom’s percussive mambo spills from an old transistor radio. Dad’s somber tuba delivers body blows of tonal emotion. The video game brother is playing transforms into the soundtrack of his scene. We found that where we could, it made sense to motivate the score from sources present in the virtual space. It makes us more connected to the characters, to know that they are hearing the same music that we are. So often in entertainment the characters move to a soundtrack that they can’t perceive. With Wolves in the Walls the characters and audience share the same sonic space. It makes all the difference.

Facebook Sound + Design

None of this would have been possible without the insight, creativity and relentless passion of the Facebook Audio + Design team. Their commitment to the project was stunning. It was a journey of learning, of trial and error, of huge risk and massive reward. Sometimes I just close my eyes and listen, hoping, like Lucy, to hear something unexpected. I am never disappointed.