The Best of Mix Sound For Film: ‘Alien: Romulus’

Los Angeles, CA (January 13, 2025)—Our recent Mix Presents Sound For Film: Awards Season all-day virtual event highlighted some of the most amazing work happening in motion picture sound right now. We spoke with 13 sound teams from some of the top films released in 2024; here’s one of the most notable moments and insights from the day:

Will Files, Re-Recording Mixer/Supervising Sound Editor:

This is obviously a bit of a dream job as a sound guy, especially for Lee [Gilmore, sound designer/supervising sound editor] I, who are both huge fans of the Alien franchise in general, but especially the first two films. When [director Fede Alvarez] started telling us his vision for wanting to go back aesthetically to that time period—doing things practically, having things be tangible, and then sonically really trying to live in that same world as the original film—we lit up…. The thing that we hit on was that not only is it tape saturation, but also tape wow and flutter that’s a big part of the ’79 movie. If you listen to that movie, any beep or tone has a bunch of warble to it and there’s no pure tones at all in that film. Everything’s ‘wah-wahwah,’ and it sort of comes across as a stylistic choice, but I think largely it was just a limitation of their equipment at the time. Once we hit on that, we said, ‘Well, let’s just try putting that on the entire mix.’ Now the entire mix, every stem, has a layer of tape emulation that’s providing a certain amount of noise and analog-style saturation, and a bit of wow and flutter, which provides an unevenness in the tone, so there’s no pure tones in the whole film. I just had a chance to tell Ben Wallfisch, the composer, about this last week, and I was a little afraid of what he might say, but he was like, ‘That’s so cool!’”