The Sound of ‘The Thing’

Check out this great feature on the sound design of ‘The Thing’, the just-released prequel to the 1982 John Carpenter classic:

“The wind was a design element,” says Koretz.  “It is not a standard background.  It was incredibly important for us to help convey emotional content in key scenes.  Whether it is isolation, loneliness, paranoia or whatever, we definitely used different frequencies to help sell the emotions that we wanted to convey.  We did a tremendous amount of layering from our existing sound effects libraries, and a lot of processing and sound design.

Nothing just fits out of the box any more; most of the sounds in the film are processed in one way or another.  This film required the full arsenal of all our plug-ins to help in our quest for these emotional wind sounds.”

 

 

“For the creature vocals, everything went to the stage as virtual elements,” Hecker adds.  “We presented virtual 5.1 pre-dubs so that if we were happy with the plug-in reverbs we had used, then we went with it.  If we wanted to adjust or enhance them, we could do that by opening up the ProTools session.”  “We wanted to give the mixers that flexibility,” Koretz confirms, “so they could unwind things or move them around.”

 

 
Read the full feature on the sound for The Thing here, and watch the trailer below: