They also designed sounds for the gang of gorillas that came to egg on Akut in his fight.Īll the effects, Foley and backgrounds were edited and premixed in Avid Pro Tools 11. We had to make sure that all of the sounds are really tied to the animal and you feel that he’s not some super ape, but he’s real,” Adiri says. We had to make it dynamic and make sure that there was space for the hits, and the falls, and whatever is happening visually. You see him breathing hard and moving, so his voice had to have his movement in it. “We tried to create dynamics within Akut’s voice so that you feel that he is putting in a lot of effort into the fight. During a fight between Akut and Tarzan, Adiri notes that in the mix, they wanted to communicate Akut’s presence and power through sound.
There were three main gorillas, and each sounds a bit different, but the most domineering of all was Akut. They cut and layered different animal sounds, including processed human vocalizations, to create a wide range of gorilla sounds. Sound24’s sound design team designed the gorillas to have a range of reactions, from massive roars and growls to smaller grunts and snorts. They also researched and collected the best animal sounds they could find, which were particularly useful for the gorilla design. Since capturing their own field recordings in the Congo would have proved too challenging, Sound 24 opted to source sound recordings authentic to that area. Foley was recorded at Shepperton Studios by Foley mixer Glen Gathard. Editing dialogue and ADR was Gillian Dodders. The sound design team included Ben Barker, Tom Sayers, and Eilam Hoffman, with sound effects editing by Dan Freemantle and Robert Malone. They went from building ambient background for different parts of Africa - from the deep jungle to the open plains - at different times of the day and night to covering footsteps for the CG gorillas. Sound24’s sound design got increasingly detailed as the visuals presented more details. We were building temp mixes for the editors to use in their cut, so it was like a progression of sound over time,” he says.
Then all the apes, animals and jungles were put in and gradually the visuals were built up. There was nothing there, nothing to see in the beginning apart from still pictures and previz. “Basically it was right from the nuts and bolts up. When Sound24 first started on the film, a year and a half before its theatrical release, Freemantle says there was very little to work with visually. Another challenge was grounding all the CG animals - the apes, wildebeests, ostriches, elephants, lions, tigers, and other animals - in that world. They wanted the Congo to feel alive, and have the sound change as the characters moved through the space. Studios in Leavesden, UK, so making the CGI-created Congo feel like the real deal was essential. The film was shot on a back lot of Warner Bros. Freemantle notes that everything in the film, apart from the actors on screen, was generated afterward - the Congo, the animals, even the villages and people, a harbor with ships and an action sequence involving a train. The jungle itself is a marvel of sight and sound. To emphasize this, Freemantle says, “We have animal sounds rushing around the jungle after the Tarzan yell, as if he is taking control of it.” Since the new yell always plays in the distance, it needed to feel powerful and raw, as though Tarzan is waking up the jungle. It’s actor Alexander Skarsgård’s voice and there are some human and animal elements, like gorillas, all blended together in it,” explains Freemantle. “We had quite a few tries on that but in the end it’s quite a simple sound. Supervising sound editor/sound designer Glenn Freemantle and sound designer/re-recording mixer Niv Adiri at Sound24, a multi-award winning audio post company located on the lot of Pinewood Film Studios in Buckinghamshire, UK, reveal that they went through numerous iterations of the new Tarzan yell. While we may never know the true story behind the original Tarzan yell, postPerspective went behind the scenes to learn how the new one was created. It has an unmistakable animalistic quality. The updated version is not a far cry from the original, but it is more guttural and throaty, and less like a yodel. Was it actually actor Johnny Weissmuller performing the yell? Or was it a product of post sound magic involving an opera singer, a dog, a violin and a hyena played backwards as MGM Studios claims? Whatever the origin, it doesn’t impact how recognizable that yell is, and this fact wasn’t lost on the filmmakers behind the new Warner Bros. For many sound enthusiasts, Tarzan’s iconic yell is the true legend of that story.