Lord Of The Rings' sound design

There are a series of videos on Youtube (embedded below) based around the sound design for the  first two films of the Lord Of The Rings film trilogy.

The studio used to record foley and edit/mix the sound was purpose-designed for the sound team to have access to the best and most appropriate equipment available. This was done due to the size of the job of designing sound for the films - the soundtrack is responsible for making the invented world of Middle Earth seem real, but, unlike Star Wars, the sounds all have to be rooted in nature, as Middle Earth is based on Earth centuries before industry and the technology it brought about.

According to the interviews conducted with the sound team, almost every sound in the film was recorded in post - even the dialogue was almost entirely ("about 98%") recorded in ADR. This was because the studio used for filming was in close proximity to the main airport in Wellington, meaning the sound was constantly interrupted by air traffic.

Although Middle Earth is based on Earth, is many mythical elements and many invented creatures. An example of an invented creature is the Cave Troll seen in The Fellowship Of The Ring. The creature had to sound big, strong and frightening, and in the end its voice (which we hear through growls and roars) was created by processing recordings of real animals' growls and roars. To add authenticity to the sound of the cave troll, the technique of 'worldising' was used - the recordings of its growls were played back on speakers set up in tunnels on the outskirts of Wellington, and recorded "in this natural environment that is similar to the environment he [the Cave Troll] is in in the movie".

A less realistic creature in The Fellowship Of The Rings is introduced shortly after the Cave Troll is slain. When considering the sound design for the Balrog, Peter Jackson told the sound team "This is not a physical creature. It's basically shadow and flame." This meant that the sound designers had to decide how a giant creature made of 'shadow and flame' might sound, and so to match the visual representation they decided to give it a "natural, organic, rocky feel". The growl of the Balrog was created by processing the recording of a breeze block being scraped across a wooden panel, as the sound team felt it should sound rocky and lava-like.

A new and different type of creature was introduced in The Two Towers in Treebeard, essentially a talking, moving tree. John Rhys-Davies (who also plays the character of Gimli) was chosen to voice Treebeard, but obviously his voice-acting talent on its own couldn't make his sound tree-like, and so a specially-designed wooden cabinet was built with many ways for the sound to resonate when played through speakers in the cabinet, and this was recorded to produce a large, resonant, wooden quality to his voice, which was further processed digitally (judging from the way it sounds in the film).

The Two Towers introduced more difficult scenarios than the invented characters. The sound team were faced with the challenge of creating the sound of a ten-thousand-strong Uruk-Hai army chanting and marching. One way to create these sounds would be to record a large group of people performing the sounds and multiply the recordings in the mix, but the sound designers went for a more authentic sound. During the half-time of a cricket match in New Zealand, Peter Jackson and the sound recordists went on the pitch and recorded the crowd chanting phrases in Black Speech (the language spoken in Mordor, home to the 'baddies' of Middle Earth). The sound of marching was created by David Farmer, the sound designer for the film trilogy, who layered "tracks of volcano rumbles and things like this" and created the rhythm of the army marching by performing volume swells with the faders on the mixing desk. This created a good weight to be enhanced with foley sounds of metal armour clanking and feet stamping on soil.

The five videos I've taken this information from:


*** This video has embedding diabled, but the link is: http://youtu.be/RMNwotOm27g