The Lullaby Motel: After Sound Design

Background

The Lullaby Motel is an Australian short film I worked on during the latter part of 2020. It was directed by the multi-talented artist Ryan Chatfield. While the film hasn’t yet been released, he very kindly let me share a scene in order to illustrate how the sound design was put together.

In this video the scene plays several times. First we hear it without any sound design, and new layers of sound are added with each repetition. Finally we hear it with the sound design and score combined.

To check out Ryan’s work in motion graphics, clothing design, photography and more, please visit www.aliveagaincreative.com.

Plot

The Lullaby Motel is an unusual place which facilitates the assisted death of its residents. It seems to exist in a liminal zone in some remote part of Australia. We encounter Jade, who pays a visit with the intention of ending her life. At the reception she meets Cara, who like Jade is in her early 20s. Cara has been tasked with running the place while the manager is away.

As the film develops, we learn that Jade appears to be carrying some kind of trauma which at times causes her reality to break down. In the scene I am sharing, she has a kind of flash forward to her own death which is vividly conveyed by the walls of the room shattering.

Ryan produced some beautiful vfx for the scene so I wanted to really emphasise this, and create a sound design and score that truly did it justice.

Layers Of Sound

The scene came with very little location sound. As is always my practice when commencing work on a film, I had asked Ryan to send me all of the dialogue tracks even if they hadn’t make it into the final cut. Here I found some wild tracks of Jade making vocal sounds which I used to add more emotional impact to the scene. From there, it was a case of building up the rest of the sound.

The sounds can roughly be divided into two categories: real and hyperreal. Even though the whole thing is playing out in Jade’s head, I found it useful to categorise them in this way in order to better navigate the sound design process.

In the real category, I cut in sounds of furniture shaking, the lamp rattling and tipping over, the leaves of the pot plant rustling. In the second repeat of the scene, we hear sounds of gas seeping in and the walls shattering.

Hyperreal Sound

As you can hopefully hear, even with the real sounds in place, the scene is still lacking something. When considering a scene, sound designers very often need to utilise sounds that are more unrealistic or hyperreal in order to emphasise the emotion of the story.

With this in mind, the next layer focuses more on the hyperreal: whooshes to lend a sense of movement to the debris, deep bass to add more impact to the crumbling walls. I added some rising distortion to suggest that her reality is reaching breaking point. Her vocalisations are drenched in reverb and delay to both place them in a space and to help them sound as if in a dream.

From there it was a case of adding the music. The music was composed in time with the scene as a whole. Earlier on, the visuals stretch and pulse so I added a low bass pulse to match this. A haunting, pulsing vocal effect and sweeping strings fill out the sound. Percussive hits emphasise the cuts.

Conclusion

I hope this video was instructive and helped to shed a bit more light on the sound design and music composition process. If you have any questions or feedback, please let me know in the comments!