Wellington Paranormal Sound Design secrets

Wellington Paranormal, on TVNZ

New Zealand has a distinct brand of humour. Unlike Britain, we can’t depend on the absurdities of the centuries of the class system to mine for comedy, and unlike the USA, we don’t have a long background of stage vaudeville and slapstick which led to the modern sitcom. Australia has its highly exaggerated sense of casualness and vulgarity that has become a staple of their comedy, indeed their national identity (the government once seriously considered replacing the Australian honour system of knights and dames with ‘mate’-ships). NZ is the furthest-flung country of the former colonies of the English-speaking world; comparatively weak in economic power, always trailing behind our larger neighbours; but somehow good at a few sports (rugby, sailing) and harbouring some historical quirks (women voting first, Lord of the Rings, anti-nuclear stance albeit the worst per-head polluters) give us an over-inflated sense of pride and self-importance. Thus our comedy reflects our hypocritical, casual yet indignant, culturally fraught, but all-try-to-get-along nature.

Those who were lucky enough to witness the film that started all of this – Taika Waititi’s What We Do in the Shadows – will know that the soundtrack requirements for this genre of mocku-comedy are truly something else. Being an ostensible documentary, modelled on the ubiquitous cop show where the film crew tags along and records the night’s events, Paranormal needs a sound track that matches this. But it isn’t really a tag-along cop show, it’s a comedy. Just recording the on-set sound can’t work. Obviously there is the grimoire of monsters and supernatural creatures that feature as characters, which obviously need sound design to be composed in post production. Also, the dialogue being full of jokes, needs to be recorded cleanly to give it its due. The soundtrack therefore needs to sound as if it is merely captured footage, but at the same time be clear and interesting enough to let the creatures and jokes land. 

There is an immense difference between making a soundtrack seem crappy and haphazard and simply doing a crappy job. The former takes much work and care; the latter is unthinkable to the whole team: from on-set recordists, to post editors, to rerecording mixers. 

The only way to do it properly is to design a full film-worthy track, then ‘grunge it up’ in the mix. The monsters need to sound as if they are believably recorded live during all the action, but still need to sound interesting and scary-but-funny. I think of it as setting up a few ‘dials’ that the director can tweak at any stage: realistic and grungey, filmic and polished, funny, scary. If we do this correctly, then during the final mix, the director should just be able to run on instinct, gauging the feeling of each scene, and adjusting as necessary. The last thing they want is to go unpicking the soundtrack because it has been locked too much one way or the other.

In terms of designing the creature effects-proper, personally I find it helps that I love the show and its style of self-deprecating, dignity-subverting humour. If I love the creatures and monsters, I find I’m able to delve for long hours getting each one ‘just so’, while maintaining control of the necessary parameters described above. A couple of examples:

The Taniwha: traditionally the taniwha is a semi-supernatural, mythical water monster, a respected and revered part of NZ Māori culture. In the context of Paranormal, it is Sergeant Maaka that feels an almost uncomfortable affinity with taniwha, which says much about his personality. So the creature has to be convincing enough that it could be perceived as some kind of semi-devine being, but also (for those that don’t feel quite such a sense of connection to it) a credible sea monster in its own right. To achieve the vocals for what turned out to be a mating pair of taniwha, we built a chain of live plugins through which we recorded vocals in time to the picture. Once we had a performance that we liked, we enhanced it with various heavily manipulated animal recordings and movement effects. The recorded vocals gave the creature some ‘humanity’, something crucial to their loveability, while the animal effects gave them their beastly flavour. The sound ended up doing significant work, as the shots of the taniwha were often in low light; and during the mating scene, the creatures were pixellated, one assumes to preserve their dignity.

The Fatberg: As many cities are currently discovering in our world of high-fat consumption and devil-may-care attitudes to waste, a massive blob of fat is clogging Welington’s drains. Our hapless Paranormal crew discover that it has become sentient and is abducting and absorbing Wellington citizens. At one point it even absorbs one of the camera crew. Its sonic presence is one of massive size, disgustingly slimy and with a constant drone of voices of the trapped, groaning, moaning and calling out. To make things more difficult for the mixer, this massive thing appears in one shot behind the oblivious officers as they speak to camera – so it is stealthy as well. Again, the idea of setting up ‘dials’ for the director to tweak as necessary, was our workflow. Elsewhere, when the fatberg is tiny and the Paranormal team is studying it, it has a different sonic signature. Though much smaller, it still had to feel gross, semi-sentient and cute, but also a little scary. We miniaturised all our sound effects, so that the slime felt much smaller and its voices much higher and squealier. 

The Robot: One of the key pieces of humour in Paranormal is that once the monsters are revealed, they become less scary and start to feel more feeble and innocuous. Such it is with the robot episode. A conglomeration of forgotten and abandoned technology items from yesteryear, the robot’s plan for global domination is ultimately foiled by its obsolescence in today’s hi-tech world. Consequently, the the sounds that were frightening and spooky early on – the electric zapping of old phones, the eerie mechanical clanking and clicking, the power-up of the robot’s ‘secret weapon’ – are all subverted by the fact that the old technology is useless against us. What the robot hoped would be lethal attack drones have the pathetic buzz of unwanted kids’ toys; what it hoped was its dazzlingly powerful digital communication ability turned out to have the sad warble of dial-up modem, last used in the 1990s. 

In all cases, the ability to pull the rug out from the scariness and flip instantly into humour is key to the show’s success; all the while seeming like every sound was recorded live on location.