How The Sound Effects In 'A Quiet Place' Were Made | Movies Insider

A Quiet Place was one of the most unlikely hits of 2018. Made on a budget of just $17 million, the horror film would go on to gross more than $332 million worldwide. Emily Blunt earned praise for her performance, and actor John Krasinski had his first major breakthrough as a director. One thing that makes the movie so unique? Its use of sound. A Quiet Place is set in a post-apocalyptic world overrun with monsters with ultra-sensitive hearing. Make a single sound, and you're in big trouble. Therefore, the characters communicate in sign language and make the lightest of footsteps. While the movie has a groundbreaking lack of sound, that doesn't mean it's completely absent of it. Brandon Jones, Ethan Vanderein, and Eric Adol of eSquared are responsible for much of what you hear on screen. Sound was actually written into the script. And so for us, it was like a dream come true, like kids in a candy store. Here's how some of the movie's most notable sounds were made. Foley, a method in which objects are used to create sounds made by humans, or in this case, monsters, was used. A Foley stage is a super quiet environment where we can put a picture up on the screen and then record using our microphones in sync with the picture. Some sounds, like a shotgun loading and water splashing, were made exactly as you'd expect. For other sounds, they had to get creative. The most unusual sound might be the echolocation sounds used to illustrate how the monsters get around without vision. To make this sound, they settled on putting a stun gun up to a patch of grapes. They then manipulated the sound in the next phase, the editing process. The whole concept with these creatures is there's kind of an electromagnetic component. So using something electrical as a source for the vocals seemed to kind of make sense. So here's our recording of the stun gun. We can take that sound and slow it down, and we can hear the individual electric clicks. Not every sound effect requires Foley. For the sound of a baby crying, Brandon Jones recorded the sound of his baby nephew crying. One of the biggest challenges of this movie wasn't what you heard with ease, but the kind of sounds we might normally tune out. Footsteps are a classic Foley noise any sound designer is used to making. Usually, it'll be loud. But for A Quiet Place, the team had to account for the fact that the characters mostly walked around barefoot. Where we would play Foley footsteps were not to, were really dictated by the logic of the film. On a lot of Y-Shots, we didn't even shoot the Foley for those feet. If we can hear it from such a distance, the creatures can too. And then when you cut into an extreme close-up and you see a foot push through sand, then we hear it just chiaroscuro. The scariest sound of all, though, the lack of sound. It's rare that you get to work on a movie that has this much absolute silence and parts where music and dialogue is all stripped away and it's just these faint details. One of the biggest things that happened throughout the course of post-production for this movie was really scaling back and being more minimalist in the creature sound design because our first pass had him making noise all over the place and we kept scaling back and making it kind of a less-is-more approach. Following in the path of one of the great monster movies before it, Jaws, the less we see, or in this case, the less we hear from the monsters, the more terrifying they are. And yet, good luck getting that stun gun sound out of your head now.