Like Icarus, it is always possible for movie sound design to fly too close to the sun; Too many sound layers and the sound from a moment can begin to melt into a mess of nothing. So the filmmakers behind ”KPOP Demon Hunters” – In addition to working so diligently with turning filmMusic number of True Bops-started working with supervisory audio editor and re-recording mixer Michael Babcock very early, before animation Had even started.
Babcock and directors Chris Appelhans and Maggie Kang Wanted to find out the demonic voices for the evil boy band Saja Boys and for how the Hunt/X singer Rumi (Arden Cho) would express himself in the moment of stress. This meant that Babcock, who himself has a musician background, went to work on studying the sound of K-pop and pop music in general, to find out the right sonical methods that would be fantastic and transport, but still live inside the film’s musical language.
“K-pop music is very intricate and has a certain polished sound for it,” Babcock told IndieWire. “So it really gave me the excuse to listen to a bunch of different K-pop music and pop music.” Getting the demon sound led Babcock to different ways of processing singing, from computer votes to Billie Eilish and Imogen Heap.
“I took many treatments, the jumping points they use – everything from reverbs to how they cast votes, how they all do harmony because I mean, harmony is a big theme throughout the movie,” Babcock said. “The (Demon Voices) has a very specific treatment on it, a combination of reverb delays and things that go, all of which are production tricks that are actually used in K-pop.”
The sound of K-Pop also hums through the other magical elements of the film, especially the Hunt/X’s weapons and the strange acquaintances such as Rumi and Ji-Noo (AHN Hyo-Sop) use to communicate with each other above enemy lines. The key to Babcock was to make sure, in every sequence, especially the more action -packed, that the sound effects were beaten to the songs.
“They are in the beat. If there are any kind of hits, anywhere in any of the songs, they are to the beat. So that’s a lot of fun. But also finding an organic way to do that and not take away from Those Great Songs – the for exam Didn’t Want Them to Sound Too Processed, For Them To Have Some Organic Genesis To Them, So I Went On Amazon and Bought A Bunch of Tuning Forks, and We Manipulated Those.
One of the more difficult elements of letting design on “KPOP Demon Hunters” was actually the sweetest, most unassuming. The mysterious spirit’s messenger that Ji-Noo sends, a tiger and a shaman who represents noblemen and ordinary Korean people’s stories, needed to be second worldly without being completely demonic. Especially about the tiger and shit has a name among the crew like Derpy and Sussie.
“Especially Derpy – they never say the name, but Derpy was a combination. You can’t make that creature too scary. There’s a sweetness for how it was animated. So it is actually more difficult on the sound design side to make something sweet than it is (to do it) scary. Very derpy is animal sound that is stored with me as manipulating to take the character to take ”
Emotions were reviewed for each sequence in “KPOP demon hunters”, which is part of why Babcock thought the work was so satisfactory. “This movie had some of the most challenging scenes, sonically, I’ve ever worked with,” Babcock said. “Being able to be rhythmic with some things and be very strategic with sound – the entire end of the movie, from SAJA boys who make” My Idol “to the final, it’s one of the funniest, intensely wonderful, emotional things I’ve ever mixed in my career.”
As with music, doing that work and sneaking in so much sound is about beats and the pitch. “There is actually more healthy design than I thought we would get away with, and it doesn’t sound different from how you would hear the songs on the album,” Babcock said. “It is a combination of being exactly accurate and, frankly, tasteful, between the music and everything else that happens.”
