The Revenant - Uma Dança Vasta de Músicas e Efeitos

The Revenant

A Wilderness Dance of Music and Effects 

Hugh Glass is a revenant, a ghost, but he is no benevolent revenant. He is a revenant of revenge.

Set in the remote American wilderness of the 1800s, the harsh environment acts as another adversary in the film. The sound of wind is used to help the audience feel winter’s pervasive presence. Skywalker Sound’s Randy Thom, a supervising sound editor/sound designer/re-recording mixer on The Revenant, says director Iñárritu prefers rough-sounding wind full of rumbles and even distortion. “It’s that sound you hear when wind blows across your ears,” Thom says. “We used a lot of that in addition to every type of whistling wind and moaning wind you can think of.”

Custom-recordings of wind were captured at Point Reyes Peninsula near Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, Calif. “It’s always windy there, and there are many different surfaces for the wind to blow over, like trees, rocks, limbs, wires, and brush of all kinds,” he continues. “You can get wind with lots of different tonalities.”
Having tonal wind options was important as director Iñárritu often encouraged the post sound team to design elements that were musical. Additionally, the film’s composers—Ryuichi Sakamoto, Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto) and Bryce Dessner used musical elements that could easily be mistaken for sound design.

“One of the interesting things about this film is that sometimes you can’t tell what is music and what is sound design,” notes Thom. “I love that, when you can’t necessarily tell which department a particular sound came from. As long as it does the storytelling that it needs to do, that is all that is really important.”

Cutting music in conjunction with sound design is an approach that started for Hernández and Iñárritu last year on Birdman, where Hernández built tracks by cutting takes of Antonio Sanchez playing the drums. “We discovered that a good amount of sound design can come just by cutting the music, and treating and changing the music to fit a scene,” says Hernández. “Alejandro is driven by pieces of sound, and pieces of dialog, and pieces of music. The storytelling aspects of sound are very strong for him. Everything that happens in sound has a natural correlation with the image, but it’s not isolated. In many ways, it is one and the same thing,” 

That passion for realism carried over to the sound. He sought out Thom, who specializes in creature vocals, to craft a realistic bear attack that comes from an entirely CG bear. The bear displays a range of emotion, from being nurturing with her cubs, to being aggressive during the attack, and afterwards, being injured. Starting with Skywalker’s extensive sound library, Thom pulled a variety of bear vocalizations. For the injured bear sounds, Thom built its heavy breathing using recordings of horses with respiratory problems. And since the library didn’t have recordings of a bear attack, Thom admits, “I had to resort to using my own voice a couple of times, too.

Montaño, who mixed Iñárritu’s Birdman with Taylor last year, notes The Revenant’s soundtrack is a delicate blend of dialog, music, and nature that all move in a non-traditional way.

“The camera is always moving to some degree, and sound follows,” Montano says. “Our goal was to always have enough movement without being distracting and having the audience lose focus on the story. Alejandro is always exploring how picture and sound feel together; it may be a literal-sounding scene or a subjective-sounding scene that has the correct impact to create the right feeling for that moment, and that’s when he says, ‘We got it.’” Every possibility was explored.”

“Alejandro is making a very different film,” Hernandez concludes. “It’s very different from Birdman, and it’s very different from his other films. So for him it is a discovery process and it’s an ongoing process that’s still changing. Being a part of that discovery process is very satisfying, but it can be very challenging. When something you did feels like it belongs and really helps to tell the story that Alejandro wanted, that is very satisfying. It really pays off for all the hours you put in.” 

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