‘Ted Lasso,’ ‘Cobra Kai’ and Billie Eilish Doc Sound Editors on How They Shared Stories Through Audio

Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry (Apple TV+) 

For music director Aron Forbes, work on Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry began with going through archived recordings from live concerts. “We were digging as deep as we could to try and find multitrack recordings of everything. I think it was 25, 26 performances, something like that,” he says. “We’re talking about the early days, really small venues — some of the stuff was just a recording from one of the cameras — all the way to today, where it’s arenas and huge shows.”

It was an interesting project for Forbes, who has been Eilish’s music director “since the beginning. I met her when she was 13 years old,” he says. “I had this really unique experience to be able to music direct a documentary of all the music that I music directed for Billie over the course of five years.”

And he talks about how the rest of the sound team for the doc was like-minded, including music editor Michael Brake. “Every piece of music in here got touched, even if it was her listening to Justin Bieber on an iPhone,” Brake says. “You still want it to feel real and live, but creatively you had to figure out a way to make those pieces fit together, [for instance] going from Jimmy Kimmel Live!, where it was a live recording, into a recorded version that actually scores the scenes and hits those moments better.”

Forbes found it challenging to create space for Eilish’s vocals during arena and stadium performances. “Billie has one of the most gorgeous voices on the planet that I have ever and will ever hear, period. But she sings in this whisper, like from a bedroom where she created all her music with [her brother and producer] Finneas from the beginning,” he explains. “So, take somebody whispering into a mic with this gorgeous voice and then put drums blasting down behind her and then 20,000 fans screaming at the top of their lungs.”

Forbes also saw part of his job as guiding aspects of the music with his knowledge of Billie’s tastes, sensibilities, favorite lyrics — “[things] you would never get to know unless you get to talk to the artist who created it.”

Elmo Ponsdomenech, who mixed the doc with fellow rerecording mixer Jason “Frenchie” Gaya, notes that the direction from writer-director-producer R.J. Cutler was very clear. “This film was verite, and he wanted to keep it as real as possible without over-enhancing, over-producing,” says Ponsdomenech. “This wasn’t meant to be a record. This was meant to be a documentary.

“To that end, the mixes I got from Aron were stereo stems, and we’re mixing into an Atmos theatrical environment. So the challenge for us was trying to fill the theatrical space — it could be TV space, but a big venue type of space, and retain the charm of those mixes.” Restating that the music environments ranged from bedrooms to stadiums, he adds that “being able to mix this in a multichannel environment like Atmos gave us the canvas to be able to spread that out in a way that felt real. And for me, the challenge is always keeping it real.”

The team was on the same page, he says, and that was evident when Eilish came in to review some of the concert mixes: “[To see her] walk out, sort of bouncing around like she was really ecstatic, was really fun for us.”

Ted Lasso (Apple TV+) 

“The overall approach is to serve the story as opposed to trying to be too concrete and literal with the world,” explains sound supervisor Brent Findley of the series, set in the world of Premier League football.

A lot of that, he says, involved “getting out of the way of the acting and the writing,” by which he means, “Jason Sudeikis’ direction of all of his co-stars and his comedic timing and sense of delivery is so good, a lot of times what enhanced the comedy was a vacuum of sound before the joke. And then there’s a beat of nothing right after, let it sink in. Then there are things like the practical physical comedy, [for instance] where Ted jumps and hits his head on Rebecca’s door frame. We got to really play that up. Like, he should be in the hospital after that kind of a thing.”

Dialogue editor Bernard Weiser agreed that the strength of the series is the story and characters. He explains that for his part, “it’s a large cast, and if you just listen to the recordings all flat, it’s a lot of people talking and you’re not following any storyline. The challenge is finding the pieces that are going to continue to tell that story and then making sure all the other voices are still there for the environment, but those voices that are carrying the story are highlighted, and make it all seem seamless and natural.”

Creating the crowds for the matches was a particular challenge, as it wasn’t just about hearing the roar of the fans. They also needed specific elements such as chants for players like Roy Kent or Jamie Tartt. “During season one, primary production was finished before the lockdown, so we did have the benefit of having maybe a couple of hundred people in the stands doing pacing and the foundation of those chants,” Findley says. From there, they recorded loop group voice talent and used audio post software tools and library material to complete the crowd work. “There’s a steady roar,” he explains. “Even if the majority of them are chanting, there’s just this continuous roar. But then we could also impose the characteristics of those chants on some of those recordings to make it sound like a lot more people are participating.”

Findley points out that during the matches, the story is told in locations where the sound of the crowds would vary — whether on the pitch, in the locker room, in the stands or at the pub (where the match is on TV). “The mix challenge is placing all of those elements and when to get the crowd out of the way of the story,” he says, “but also making sure we’re still getting swept along as if we’re in the crowd watching the game — just driving that emotion.”

Cobra Kai (Netflix) 

A key discussion between supervising sound editor Patrick Hogan and the creators of Karate Kid sequel series Cobra Kai was their approach to the sounds of the martial arts sequences, for which they turned to the original 1984 film to guide them. “The first thing I did was actually watch The Karate Kid, and listened to the fight scenes to see how they had handled it,” Hogan says. “And basically what we did was stay true to what they did, and then modernized it. The technology they had available limited them in some ways.” 

When it came to the Foley, or the technique of making everyday sounds, Hogan also found that the movement of the characters’ arms and legs “were almost louder than the punches and impacts of the punches. We decided in the Foley I’d create a new separate track and have the Foley artists use a much stronger-sounding cloth just for the fight scenes for all the arm and leg movement. It’s not a sound effect, so it feels like their natural movement, but heightened to show that they are trained martial artists moving their arms and legs in a very precise way. That sound gives us that feeling it’s not just a street fight.”

Hogan reports that the martial that they don’t sound so like a kung fu movie. Every strike, whether it’s a block or a hit or a kick or even a body fall, there’s anywhere from four to six tracks that make up each one of those hits, and I can vary the sound of a hit in those tracks.” 

Rerecording mixer Joe DeAngelis, who handled dialogue and music, notes that the “massive” score is a “full orchestra, big music. It’s a matter of making space for whatever moments we want to play.” He adds that the series also used music such as ’80s heavy metal. “Those always seemed to be the most challenging because obviously you need to play that up and have the music drive, but then you’ve got to weave around for some dialogue and whatever else we’re trying to get through.”

This story first appeared in an August stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.