The producers behind Throw, a short film by Early Light Media, created a compelling story that gives viewers insight to the subculture of “throwing”. The film has earned multiple awards since its debut including The Directors Award at the Mountain Film Festival 2016 and the Special Jury Commendation at the 2016 Port Townsend Film Festival.
The intro to Throw utilizes a variety of techniques to propel the action and increase the audience’s emotional involvement. The sound design makes a statement on its own that helps grasp our attention from the first shot––setting the emotional tone of the story. The intro evokes a dreamy sentiment with acoustic instruments featured in the soundtrack.
The audio was instrumental in the overall feel of Throw and the work of sound designer Nick Sjostrom was fundamental to the film’s overall success.
I have an exclusive interview with Sjostrom where he discusses the process of gathering and mixing sound for Throw.
The Intro: Slow, steady, and loud
From (0:11) to (0:27), a lone harp plays while the camera slowly tilts up to reveal Coffin Nachtmahr––one of east Baltimore’s best “throwers” as he applies black eye makeup. “I wasn’t like all the rest of the kids,” the yo-yo star says. An abrupt loud but low-pitched sound complements a fade-to-black (0:33) that transitions viewers to the core of Nachtmahr’s story: “People pick on me for just being me,” he says.
A fade-in framing Nachtmahr’s room shows everything from science fiction figures to an empty bottle of Jagermeister. The adjacent window seems to be closed, however we hear a breezy gust of wind roll through (0:37). Nachtmahr’s talents are revealed via a descending drone shot as the music fades out and all we hear is the monologue and the intense “throwing” of the yo-yo back and forth riding along what he describes as his “security string” (1:03).
In the subsequent sequence, a high-pitched sound getting progressively louder is employed to evoke suspense; the audio demands full attention and has viewers wondering why Nachtmahr would “probably not be in the best place,” had it not been for “throwing” (1:09).
As the aerial shot continues to descend on the subject, the sound of the yo-yo slowly fades out as the high-pitched noise gets louder until it is the only audible component (1:20). An out-of-focus medium shot framing Nachtmahr throwing his yo-yo toward the camera lens “stamps” the “O” in the title that reads, “Throw.” A low piano note releases the tension evoked in the audio track by directing our attention to the title; meanwhile, the high-pitched sound effect disperses from the story. “You just throw it out of your hand and once it’s out there, you can do whatever you want to do with it,” he says.
I was lucky enough to speak with Sjostrom (who is also an ADR mixer for shows like House of Cards and Scandal) about the impressive sound design in Throw. He took time to answer some of my questions about the development of the award-winning short doc in our Q&A:
THROW from Early Light Media on Vimeo.
Q: What did you know about the subject matter of Throw before you began working on the sound design? How did that change over time?
A: I knew nothing. Darren and Dave sent me a rough cut of the film just to give me an idea of what I was getting into a month or so before I had their final cut to work to. As far as what I knew about Coffin and yoyo stuff, I knew nothing. I’ve seen Coffin performing in Baltimore a couple of times since the film was made, but I’ve never actually met him.
Q: Do you typically go into a project knowing what you’re looking for or are you recording several sound bites in the field and then you plan out their use in post?
A: All the dialog in the film was recorded by Darren and Dave, I wasn’t along for the shoots. When I got their locked picture, I was able to spot through and plan out what was usable from the production audio and what kind of sound design was needed. I have a pretty good sense for what is in my sound effects library and what I’d need to build from scratch.
Q: How do you decipher when to use sound effects instead of music and vice versa? At what point in the story did you employ the highest number of audio tracks at a given time and why did you chose to do so?
A: Darren and Dave sent me the film with music that they chose already laid out in the timeline. There were lots of spots where I edited their music choices to make them fit with the flow of the story or hit the picture edits. Also, there are some sound effects elements that are “musical” that I added and blended with the music they provided.
As for track count, it’s roughly 30 audio tracks.
But, the workflow of this type of project can make that number not really represent the complexity of the session. All dialog is comped to mono, there are stereo ambiences (room tones and background effects) in every scene and occasionally surround 5.1 ambiences, 5.1 hard sound effects and abstract sound effects, music is upmixed from stereo files to 5.1 and then there is further processing on the stereo and 5.1 groups.
Q: How much of the sound in Throw is synched and how much of it is found using a sound library and mixing them in the design? In other words, can you explain your process for collecting audio and then producing the sound design in the piece?
A: Dialog is from production (there was no ADR). They did a great job of getting clean dialog on the shoots, and I was able to de-noise anything that would have distracted from the dialog. Almost all other sounds you hear were created in post production. And almost all of those come from sound effects libraries that I use every day. At my studio, our sound effects libraries are very very deep- so the craft comes in finding and manipulating sounds to match the picture for either realism or abstraction. Sometimes, a library just doesn’t have a sound you need. For example, even though we have lots of skateboard sounds in the library, none of them quite lined up with the timing of Coffin’s tricks. For that, one of my colleagues rode a skateboard outside of my studio and I ran alongside him with a microphone. On the other hand, sometimes the real sound isn’t as convincing to the audience as an enhanced sound. A yoyo doesn’t actually make much noise as it’s spinning, and any background noise from the city really got in the way of using the production sound for the yoyo.
I used a lot of spinning fan or turbulent air sounds filtered and manipulated to give the impression of the yoyo string.
Also, since much of the footage is in slow motion, I was able to take a lot of artistic license in creating sounds that weren’t realistic, but played up the artistry and drama of what was happening on screen.
Q: You three did a really nice job of changing the tone of the music to change the feel within the piece. Each scene transitions to the next very organically. Are there any of these moments that stood out to you? What is your process for finding the music that fits the tone?
A: Of course, Darren and Dave get credit for the bulk of the work on music. Together, we did fine tune the edits to make those transitions as smooth and dramatic as possible.
