Inside Sound Design with Chris Lane

The world of sound design is often seen in the audio community as a somewhat mysterious place full of sub-drops, whooshes, and tik-tik-tik sounds that add to a film or TV score but aren’t handled by composers or engineers. These seemingly esoteric sounds help build the sonic landscapes that underpin the worlds we see on screen, sometimes by adding to the energy or excitement of a scene in a way that can only be felt and not described and sometimes by providing new tones and sonic toys for composers to play with as they work on defining their score's unique identity.

Like a good referee in a football match, sound design often works best when it isn’t noticed, providing continuity and momentum without drawing attention to itself. But when it’s used to deliberately stand out it can change how we perceive a character or scene in ways that dialogue, acting, and music can’t. In the Star Wars franchise alone we can all immediately recall the clashes of a lightsaber in battle, R2-D2 having a conversation, or the ominous breath of Darth Vader.

As the events industry has evolved over the past decade, sound designers have found themselves inhabiting more than just our TV or cinema speakers, with large-scale music concerts, virtual reality environments, and multi-media events all making use of their skills to create believable worlds through sound.

Christopher Lane is a leading sound designer, composer, and technologist who regularly works with award-winning composers like Ludwig Göransson and Theodore Shapiro on blockbuster releases including Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (Marvel), The Mandalorian (Disney), Severance (Apple TV), and Venom (Sony). Chris has also contributed to the live sound of Grammy Award-winning artist Childish Gambino on his tours for almost a decade and even built some of the stock sounds that are used by millions of creators around the world in Logic Pro X.

A few years ago Chris joined the global community of HEDD artists and professionals after choosing our MK2 range of monitors for his immersive audio studio, which he built himself. 

We caught up with Chris after he returned from a recent trip to Japan to discuss the evolving challenges of sound design across TV, film, and live events, the joys of building his own Atmos studio, and how he made cruise passengers think they were actually onboard a train!

Can you start things off by describing the different ways that you work as a sound designer?

Sometimes on a project I'm directly applying new sounds to a piece of music in the same way that you would hire a trumpet player or a guitarist to play over a cue, so in those cases I might be paid as a synthesizer player essentially, and I can be paid through the Musician’s Union as if I was a regular day-player for an orchestral recording.

Other times I'm almost a ‘pre-production, palette-building, player’, where I'm working with the composer before cues have even taken shape - to build a library of new sounds, new patches, new atmospheres, that they can drop in. It really just depends on the composer and the project.

Composers also come to me early on a project and say, “I had a bunch of ideas, and I recorded all this stuff, but I really don't know what to do with it. I need it chopped up, or I need it put into loops, I need it processed and mangled and made more aggressive, or made more mellow.” So I'll be given this kind of wonderful bucket of great recordings to go through and re-render in interesting musical ways. Stripping out or adding in tonality, speeding them up, slowing them down, layering, stretching, all that stuff to really squeeze as much juice out of that particular ‘orange’.

Where do you start the creative process?

I usually start a conversation with the composer around the story, the characters, the colors and the tones in the film - because the music's role is usually going to be a combination of echoing the characters’ feelings or providing propulsion to scenes that need a little extra.

Sometimes those explorations can start with very literal work. On Creed (Warner Bros. 2015) composer Ludwig Goransson came to me and said he wanted to record a boxer working out at a boxing gym. So my job was to capture and build out these patches, and loops, and beats from boxing workouts so they could become part of the percussion layer. When we got into those recordings and started really working with the boxer, we realized how much of boxing has this triplet feel, at least in the gym, where they're doing the overhead bag. I think you'll hear in that score that that triplet pattern really is throughout and I think that was discovered in that boxing gym session.

“A big part of sound design for film and TV is using physical recording techniques and processes to explore the physicality of sound.”

What's the ‘typical’ timeline to complete the sound design for a film?

It's a pretty wide range. I'd say in terms of typical, the most common for me if I'm just working in a pre-production phase, making new palette-building stuff for a composer starting a project, is maybe six weeks, with a half dozen deliveries back and forth is pretty typical. On the other side of the spectrum, projects like the Black Panther movies can take up to a year easily. Ludwig goes out and does a tremendous amount of recording - all over the world - that we might be using as part of the sound design source material and so there’s a trickle of recordings that come in over a couple of months. Then they'll be doing extra overlays on cues that they're wrapping up so those can easily take a year or longer.

What are some of your key film highlights?

I was working on the score for Venom and he is covered in this kind of wet, black, symbiote goo that makes him really visually striking. So I was looking at how can we make some interesting sounds in the score that lean into that idea of Venom’s ooze? Ludwig recorded a vocalist doing all sorts of really wonderful and interesting vocal performances, sort of extended technique type stuff, so I played those sounds through this Bluetooth pool speaker that I put underwater in a big tub. I had contact microphones and hydrophones underwater that I could swirl around the Bluetooth speaker, or swirl the Bluetooth speaker around them, in an underwater stereo field of sorts. It got this great kind of natural Doppler effect and this flangey movement that I would never really have gotten from plugins as I was able to really perform, in a hands on way, with this combination of a speaker and underwater microphones.

I then tried to take it to another level that I thought was going to be the coolest thing ever. I bought a big jug of thick, goopy molasses and I poured it over the speaker. I thought it was going to sound really great but it was terrible! That's how you learn through these things and try different techniques each time.

Outside of film scores you have done a lot of work for concerts. How does working on film scores differ to working on a live show for Childish Gambino?

I've had the good fortune to work on multiple types of Childish Gambino presentations. Donald Glover and the Childish Gambino team at Wolf + Rothstein are always trying new and interesting stuff. For me one of the biggest differences to working on film scores has been that experience of being in the room with the fans as they're watching the show. There's really no feeling like being among thousands of people all losing their minds at a big moment that you've crafted. When a moment like that hits, and the crowd goes insane, and you're sitting in the middle of it at front of house, hearing the eruption from the audience, that's a feeling that I never get to experience working on film scores.

I found the big learning curve with live venues and big PA speakers is that you don't always have as much detail as you'd like, and so you have to strip out the extra layers that are really nice in a studio environment but that do not translate in much larger venues.

One of the more interesting setups was for a dome show in New Zealand that we did. The band and Donald Glover were set up in the center and the crowd were all around like a donut. The band speakers and PA were at the center, projecting outward across the crowd, and then we had speakers set around the perimeter of the dome facing inwards, towards the center. That was a great way to separate, psychoacoustically, what we were doing for the visuals with sound design, and ambience, and texture from the band. So we weren't competing with the music as you would with a typical front-facing stage show. It gave us a unique opportunity to have these two separate worlds coexisting and just wrapping the crowd in sound from both sides.

What challenges does working on live shows like those of Childish Gambino bring to your work?

It depends on the technical setup. Sometimes we're triggering live from controllers. Some stuff, of course, is triggered off the timecode as you would expect. Sometimes they're triggered by actions happening on stage, so the visual operator can queue a visual and that'll trigger the audio automatically. The visual operator is playing the visual controls like an instrument and is able to jam with the band, which is something I wasn't expecting, and was really fun to see happen - it feels much more natural and organic.

“The big learning curve with live venues is that you don't always have as much detail as you'd like, and so you have to strip out the extra layers that are really nice in a studio environment but do not translate in much larger venues.”

Chris Lane added sound design to live performances by Childish Gambino held inside a custom dome design in New Zealand.

You've also worked on immersive experiences for branded events. Could you explain what's involved in those instances from a sound design perspective?

I recently contributed to a Royal Caribbean project that's a good example. I was approached for it by a former colleague, Zach Kennedy, who's a great creative designer who I had worked with previously. Royal Caribbean were building a new dining venue on one of their ships that was intended to replicate a train dining car and would host a special immersive dinner and theater show. This was a life-size dining car, based on a turn of the century steam train, where the windows are replaced by giant high definition screens and speakers are embedded throughout. In addition there are also speakers on the outside, on a mock platform used to load people into the train car, and there are also vibration speakers under the seats to create rumble.

We had the opportunity to do a classic Spaghetti Western style, Ennio Morricone-style soundtrack for it, for which I contributed sound design, score elements, the immersive mix, and then the on site mix as well. Once I had that first on site visit I was able to tune a few things where some extra compensation was happening, and I then went back to my studio to make edits and adjustments before sending the files over and confident that they were going to play great in the room. Being able to do that on site visit before delivering the final audio was a great advantage as this is a venue that only exists in the middle of the ocean, and you can't just pop over to do a quick mix check because they're in the Bahamas!

When I look at the final specs and deliverables on this project it was really just incredible because we had well over 100 speakers and over 50 channels of discrete audio. I'm so happy that when you walk through it feels like a living and breathing thing but it's in the middle of a cruise ship, in the middle of the ocean. It was great to be able to transport people in that environment and have them forget that they are even on a ship.

When did you install your Atmos system in your home studio?

I started the process of building out this rig in 2021 but it took almost two full years to get all the pieces in place. Initially at that time in 2021 there were still parts shortages lingering from COVID lockdowns so it took a while to get everything in the room. We were starting from the ground up and I was ripping out carpet, putting in new floors, putting in new wall materials, and then building a custom composing desk for myself. I had long dreamed of having as ergonomic of a desk as I could possibly have with everything exactly how I wanted it. I bought all the tools and taught myself from YouTube woodworker videos how to build larger furniture pieces. I put together this desk, speaker stands, room treatment elements like big floor to ceiling bass traps. It was really hands-on and kind of a one person show. Partly because we were still in lockdowns and it just wasn't a time to have a crew of people in my space with my family nearby, so I learned how to do it myself and I'm really proud of the room.

“I've played mixes on my HEDD Atmos system for people that have far better ears than me, and who work on bigger systems, and they've been really blown away.”

Why did you go for a 7.1.4 configuration specifically?

I had always just worked 2.0 - I'd never even had a dedicated subwoofer. But I had been working in virtual reality for a number of years and really loved doing the immersive work there, however it was one of those things where the budgets didn't really justify rebuilding my studio from the ground up. When I got the new space it was time to upgrade, I was excited for it because it meant I could do even more cool immersive projects and more installations. I'd been doing projects that had height channels in them but I was always faking it by throwing up my backup pair of monitors on a set of free floating stands in the back of my room. I got away with that for long enough but when I had this new space that was really the opportunity to go all in.

Finding HEDD as the speaker supplier made it even easier. I knew I needed great sounding stereo monitors, because most of my clients were still working in stereo. As much as I push them to try to experiment more with surround, they're usually working in stereo. So I wanted my core speakers to still be great in that situation and when I switch from stereo to surround, I wanted that to be as seamless as possible. I wanted it to be super clean and super simple. Making everything on one horizontal plane meant the TYPE 07s were a no-brainer solution, and it was at a price point that made it possible because it was going to be a bit of a roll of the dice situation with a ‘build it and they will come’ mindset. I wanted to do more of this work, so if I got the system then I could offer more of it. It was a bit of a risk, so I needed to have a line of monitors that was high quality, that I could trust, and that wasn't going to break the bank when you have to buy 12 speakers!

I've played mixes in here for people that have far better ears than me, and who work on bigger systems than I do, and they've been really blown away. To me that was a great feeling to know that I set up this room correctly and chose the right brand. People that I know spent way more on two speakers than I spent on twelve had really great things to say about it, and were hearing things in their mixes that they hadn't heard on their setups.

I do have the slightly smaller TYPE 05s for my overheads. They have a screw mount option so that made it much simpler to get them mounted without having a whole lot of ceiling mounting gear that was gonna be an eyesore.

Chris built a custom 7.1.4 Atmos immersive audio setup in his home studio using the HEDD MK2 range of monitors and subwoofers.

What role does your sub play in your creative process? Do you explore bass musically or as more of a physical impact tool?

I have great bass reinforcement from the HEDD BASS 12. I'm using it both as a Low Frequency Extension speaker and as bass reinforcement, and it's pulling double duty just fine for the size of my room and the volume I work at.

When I'm doing sound design for film scoring, bass is certainly being used musically because it's a great tension source - that kind of classic, old film scoring approach of just throwing in a little bit of almost imperceptible bass drone to make people feel uneasy, without it being like a big Psycho chord type of a thing. I also have a special category of sounds that go into a lot of film scores. A composer that I work with, Theodore Shapiro, calls them “wumps” and they're almost all sub. They just give a little bit of unease, and a little bit of subliminal heartbeat effect, and he uses those all the time. They're a great tool so it's been nice actually having a dedicated sub to design those on as I'd been more imagining them before and having to wait until I heard them in a bigger studio to see if I'd got it right.

What projects have you got coming up in 2025 that we should be looking out for?

I recorded a ton of custom piano, and built a full piano sample library for composer Theodore Shapiro for season two of Severance, the Apple TV series that won an Emmy for its first season of music. I'm really excited for this second season to come out. We leaned really hard into the piano as a source, so I did a session that was a lot of prepared piano featuring weird tricks and gadgets, holding and plucking strings, e-bows and anything I could get out of the instrument that isn't quite what you'd expect from a piano. I turned those into percussion loops, tonal loops, and playable patches.

We're gonna have a new show for the Royal Caribbean train project - I don't think I can say what it is just yet - but it's another type of show with all new content, and that's going to be a really exciting couple of months of work.

There are a couple of immersive projects lined up, more virtual reality on the way, and there's always cool stuff being cooked up by the people I work with so I'm excited to see what they bring to me this year.