My Squirrel Recording is in a MOVIE! 📽 DUNE- Mark Mangini, Oscar Winning Sound Designer

That's the sound of a baby squirrel eating. Last year I was in Sweden and I found four orphaned baby squirrels. After weeks of filming them there was something I was missing and that was the adorable high-pitched sound they make when they eat. So I put a microphone in front of baby pear. I posted it on Twitter and by the end of the day the video had 15 million views and it caught the unexpected attention of Mark Mangini. Mark is an Oscar award-winning sound designer and he's worked on films such as Blade Runner 2049 and Mad Max Fury Road. When Mark first sent me a message I wasn't sure if it was real. He said to me I'd like to use the sound in a movie. Mark and I then spoke on the phone and he couldn't tell me what film he was working on but he said go on my IMDb and you can work it out. So I went on to IMDb and the film was Dune. I'd already heard of Dune because it's known as the best sci-fi film that's never been made until now and somewhere in that film is a baby squirrel recording. I'm seeing the film tomorrow at seven o'clock in the morning but I'm about to speak to Mark about Dune, his work as a sound editor and designer and the baby squirrel recording. Hello, hi Mark how are you? Well I must say a really good thanks for asking. I'm happy to say that the film Dune is doing quite well. We hear it opens here in the US in North America I think on Friday. I hear that Europe it's done quite well. I think it opens for you in the UK on Friday as well no? Actually tomorrow so I'm seeing it tomorrow morning in IMAX and I'm very excited. So you work in the world of sound. Can you explain what you do and why sound is so important? Wow well do we have two hours? Why is sound important? Well why don't you stick your fingers in your ears first and see what it's like when we don't have any sound. My job, I am what's known as a sound designer. Our role in a film is to be responsible for everything the audience hears except for the music. So that means in in a film our job is to make sure the dialogue is properly recorded and edited and adjusted in such a way that you don't miss what the actors say. Our job is to record, design, create, edit the sounds that don't exist in the real world in say a science fiction or fantasy film. Somebody has to make those sounds for the things that don't exist and as well as going out and recording raw elements as the fodder for these fantastical sound designs that we put in a film that include elements like your beautiful red squirrels that were so perfectly adapted into Dune. Yeah well I was very surprised when you messaged me last year and I have to admit when I first received your message I didn't think it was real because you just said in one line I'd like to use this sound in a movie and I was like what? But an amazing opportunity but what first attracted you to that sound of the baby squirrel? It started with Joe Walker our film editor that's the individual on a movie who takes all the scenes that are shot in the camera and assembles them into the correct order so a movie looks like a movie, tells a story and then I add the sound to it and Joe happened to be fooling around on YouTube and came across your viral video. Okay. He immediately said Mark you've got to listen to this I think we found our desert mouse. Oh so it's a desert mouse. Yeah the minute and we had already been playing around with sounds for the desert mouse we had the visual effects created and we were playing with the sounds of hamsters and guinea pigs and you know small rodental like real things that we would manipulate with speed or equalization to try to make it sound just a little bit different for this creature that doesn't actually exist in real life so when we heard those sounds we all felt as though these are things this is something we've never heard before there was first of all it's real it's an organic sound it's not a synthesizer or anything we fabricated and it also had the right body size and there was a certain expressiveness to it that we couldn't find in any other animal recordings that we had I mean I have a vast sound library with the sounds of mice and rats and gerbils hamsters and guinea pigs and none of those sounds had the expressiveness that the red squirrels had and so I just took it upon myself to find you and in fact my wife found you because she's a whiz with the old internet and she passed it along and yeah I just emailed you and said we want these sounds for our movie and I can only imagine that when you saw that one line of text or email you thought this is Dave pulling my leg a little bit yeah how do you usually create sounds do you usually make them in a studio do you go into the field and actually record them yourself what's the process well it's actually both in a sort of a certain order the first step is to watch the film and identify all the sounds that we need and make a list and that includes real sounds that we might capture and sounds that don't exist in doom for example there's these fantastical things called ornithopters and there's worms and there's shields and there's all these things that don't exist in the real world so we imagine the kinds of sound that we might use to make those fantastic sounds and then we set about to go and record them part of our mandate in cinema is to make something that you've never seen before feel believable it's best to start with a sound that is believable so we start with acoustic sound we go out and record everything we can imagine that might be interesting source material kind of the raw materials and then we bring those sounds into the studio and we manipulate them combine layer massage filter those sounds to end up with something that maybe you've never heard before because of the way we change them so that we almost always start with a real sound which was why those red squirrels were so brilliant for us because already in and of themselves they were perfect and in fact they are some of the few sounds in the film that we didn't do anything to they were so right just as you recorded them they are in the film exactly as you had recorded them except we had to edit the little chirps and phrases to match the mouth okay did in visual effects so we did splicing to make it fit the image but we didn't alter it in any way it's exactly as you have recorded it so i'm going to recognize it oh immediately oh immediately unquestionably amazing and have you ever recorded animal sounds before yourself i have made i have a rich long 45 year history of recording animals that include being charged by wild elephants by having my nose almost ripped off by a wild macaque i've put my microphone on every possible animal because that is the fodder that we use to create creature and alien sounds you know if you have a big monster like a godzilla or something like that a monster you've never seen before we usually start again with an acoustic recording of an animal doing something usually when it's enraged or threatened but nonetheless and interestingly in the wild kingdom and you know more about this than i because this is more your field in and of themselves on their own don't usually make a lot of sound until there is distress or hunger yeah so we try to capture those sounds somehow and then bring those into the studio and manipulate them into making these sounds of creatures and monsters so yeah i have been recording everything from wild elephants to my pet cat and dog so for example one of the first films i did this on was the first gremlins movie it's a very very old movie from the 80s i've seen it so but all of the gizmo purring sounds are my cat purring oh wow microphone right in right right in the snout and you get it close up enough and it's a perspective the human ear doesn't usually capture and so that made gizmo feel warm and cuddly and friendly which is the attributes we wanted for that character that's exactly what i found with the squirrels is that i could hear the sounds when i was very close to them but from a distance you can't hear them at all and that's why i put the microphone right up to the squirrel to be able to get that squeaky sound it's such a beautiful unusual sound and bless you for having the presence of mind to get the microphone close i hear lots of recordings like that i review them on every film that i do and they're never close mic in a way that kind of eliminates the background sound so that you can focus just on the sound that you want to get to yeah that's what made those sounds so usable well thank you so much for speaking to me and i'm so excited to see the film tomorrow um i'll let you know my thoughts but i've been told the sound is astonishing so i'm very excited i hope you like it and please do me a favor and go see it in a cinema that has oh you're going imax theater yeah i'm seeing at the bfi um that's really good that will be very good sound and that's really important yeah i'm sitting in the middle so everything's planned hopefully it's incredible but i'm sure it will be oh i'm excited if you don't like it don't call me no i'm sure it'd be great i'm a big sci-fi fan i'm sure it's fantastic well thank you so much my pleasure danny i've just seen june and it was incredible um mark was right baby pear was very recognizable they removed the grunts and chewing noises but the high-pitched squeaks are almost exactly how i recorded them so i recognized baby pear you'll recognize baby pear um and as soon as i saw the desert rat i knew i was about to hear baby pear but it was an amazing film the costumes are incredible the sound and the soundtrack is amazing so go and see june tell me if you hear baby pear and i'm going to sweden next week so i'll see you in sweden but thank you for watching and i'll see you in the next video