By M. Louis Gordon
This May, Amazon subscribers were treated to a wondrous and brutal odyssey crafted out of the 19th century escapes from slavery in the Antebellum South. Writer/director Barry Jenkins adapted The Underground Railroad, the historical fantasy novel by Colson Whitehead, into a 10-part series. It follows Cora, a young woman who escapes slavery on a Georgia plantation by way of a literal subterranean railroad, making stops throughout the Southern states that each embody a parable of racism in America.
Onnalee Blank
The Underground Railroad was nominated for seven Emmy Awards, Outstanding Sound Editing and Outstanding Sound Mixing on a Limited Or Anthology Series. Warner Bros.’ supervising sound editor and re-recording mixer Onnalee Blank, of Game of Thrones fame, was nominated for her work in both categories.
We reached out to Blank, who mixed at Universal Dub Stage 6, to discuss the soundscape of this haunting, magical-historical show. She had worked on Jenkins’ two previous films, Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk.
What drew you to The Underground Railroad?
Anything that Barry Jenkins does is an art piece, and I was very excited to be involved. I’ve only heard about the book, so once I knew Barry was adapting a miniseries based off of it, I read it and was blown away. Trying to imagine what Barry would bring to the table was just a fraction of what he actually did.
I sent my ideas and my notes to Barry and his picture editor Joi McMillon, and we got some ideas flowing really early. Barry is so collaborative, kind and willing to try many ideas. He embraces that. You don’t feel scared or judged to try anything, even if you think it’s crazy, weird or different, which is liberating.
How was that process working with the team from pre-production through post?
When dailies were being shot, I would look at them the next day and make a list of requests that I would want the production sound mixer Joseph White to record if he had time. Any day that he had off, he would record. For instance, there was this very particular typewriter that they used. He recorded that, as well as baby carriages, ambiances, anything weird.
Watching the dailies, I start making a library and categorizing it and I send that over to the cutting room, so they can use sounds I’ve been pulling. I’m always begging to start working on [scenes that Joi is assembling] and she’s like, “I haven’t even cut a scene yet.” And I said, “Just send it.” She sends me very early cuts, just scenes. It could be a minute, two minutes, whatever. And I start coming up with a palette for the scenes. Whether it’s the right palette or the wrong palette, it just gets me into the headspace of this world.
The show gets very heavy at times. Was there a particular scene that was difficult for you to work on from an emotional standpoint?
Episode 1 in Georgia was the hardest one to work on. Anthony, when he’s trying to escape the plantation — he’s running and then gets dragged back into a cage. The day-in and day-out meanness of slave life that they were living… we mixed that episode last, so we found the show by that time. When we got to Episode 1, we brought back a lot of motifs and ideas that we had been creating through the other episodes as it evolved.
It’s such a harsh and striking episode. There’s a moment when Cora and a little boy are being lashed at the whipping post and the whip cracks sound enormous.
At first, they were a little tamer, then Harry Cohen, one of our sound designers, had some ideas about making them big, and super sharp. Then we went bigger and hyper-real , but the final version is toned down. In that particular scene, we hear some crowd people crying a little bit — it’s really just about everybody watching what’s happening here. It’s not because they want to watch, it’s because Master Randall is making them watch. Everything should be pretty quiet except for the whips, and Cora and the little boys breathing and screaming. There are a lot of panning tricks, a lot of slap.
I love reverb. I love echo. I love delay. So does effects mixer Mathew Waters. Mathew Waters and I make sure we use the same revers and pan exactly the same percentage. We really want all our sounds to meld together. We don’t want an audience to think or hear that, “Oh, that’s dialogue. Oh, that’s an effect.” We really want it to just be one moment, almost like that’s how it was recorded on set.
Onnalee Blank
How about designing the underground steam engine?
It’s nice to have a bit of escapism from reality, a bit of fantasy. The train could be whatever we wanted it to be. Field recordist Watson Wu put microphones all over a 1831 steam train that was being moved from one museum to another. It took three conductors to run the train because it was so heavy. He lined the track with microphones as well. A few of them were very distorted, but some of them were gems of a recording that we morphed and changed. Those recordings are everywhere. All the elevators were made out of train sounds. There are tones of wind that we morphed that are actually train sounds. Anything that we could do to make it weird.
In Episode 8, Cora goes down to a big, marbled train terminal run and used by only black people. It’s bustling, but also very ghostly. There are sporadic, unintelligible vocals, baby crying and screams, all in a wash of reverb until she gets to the ticket counter.
This scene was fun to do. We initially wanted to play the scene straight, but I was like, “We can’t play completely straight. We’ve got to make it slightly weird.” I wanted to feel as if you’re at a strange party and you’ve had one too many drinks or something, and you don’t know anybody. You just hear all these conversations, and you feel like you’re sticking out like a sore thumb. How do we portray that feeling, that uncomfortableness in her own psyche and her own dream?
Harry at one point said, “I’m giving up. I don’t know what to do there.” And our composer Nicholas Britell told me that the music for this scene is beautiful. The score has a wondering quality to it, so we tried to create the opposite of that. The scary, creepy vibe. So having those two different, almost dissonant pieces on top of each other, it’s beauty and not, at the same time. I love that sequence.
When the ticket teller is looking up Cora in her records, those are everybody’s slave names in those books. So when her hand go over the names, you hear distant screaming and laughs, and when she closes the book, the sound gets sucked out. It’s all the souls that have made it on the train, they’re alive in the books.
You mentioned motifs are everywhere in the series. Can you talk about those?
What made this whole series so challenging on the sound front was that every chapter takes place in a different state. Georgia, Tennessee, Indiana Autumn, Indiana Winter, and those all have to sound different. Tennessee was slave catcher Ronald Ridgeway’s very character-driven episodes. I told Jay Jennings, one of our sound designers, to “give me your own sound here, try anything that comes to you.” Then we realized that this whole series is about Ridgeway’s time running out. So Jay started creating this ticking clock theme with a blacksmith anvil. Then that morphed into all different kinds of pocket watches and stopwatches, and you really hear it in Episode 9. They get faster and faster, and they change. It’s a big payoff, at least for us on the sound front.
In Episode 2, Cesar leads Cora down the Railroad and assures her he won’t leave her side. He delivers his dialogue directly into camera, and it sounds tremendously present.
Everything in that scene is so reverb-y in this cave, so the question was: How do we make him sound different? At first, we added more delay and tried to pan it around the room, but it just took us out. Then I put his dialogue in our Dolby Atmos speakers [above the audience], so it was very dry and very clear in-your-face.
It worked well in the down-mix too.
Thank you. I really don’t like to have dialogue just here at the same level. “Can we feel their performances? Can we get close to the screen? Can we have the audience lean back?” Sometimes that’s hard to portray on TV, so it’s a very fine line because you don’t want people at home to be like, “What? What are they saying?” It’s trying to find a balance. We did that with Ronald Ridgeway in Episode 1, when he’s looking into camera. His dialogue spreads to every front speaker.
How about your approach to mixing dialogue for the bulk of the show?
There’s some good tried-and-true EQs out there, but I feel that less is more on the EQ front on dialogue. To not over-no-noise dialogue .The dialogue session is very wide because I have every microphone at all times in sync and in-phase. You can do a lot with perspective with just microphone balance.
Did you get to use new tools or techniques?
I’m always trying new stuff, and I like outboard reverbs. I use a lot of them. People make fun of me, but they sound great. I like to be bold with music and mix music in object tracks. A lot of people are scared to do that or think the fold-down will be weird. But one thing about mixing music and panning it, it can add an element of almost sound design-ness to it that can merge with stuff that I’m doing. Composer Nicholas Britell is great with that. We would talk about, “What key is he writing in? Are you doing something to cover the whole scene? Okay, I’m going to start my design elements here.”
There was a lot of back and forth. Mathew Waters had a lot of percussive, almost musical sound design, and he did a lot of cool tricks with delay to make sure that they were on the beat in the same tempo. We tried different EQs, Used some UAD [analogue emulation] plugins. I like to try almost every different kind of reverb. I even made a joke, like, “Let’s bring in an EMT spring reverb,” and you should have seen the look on the engineer’s face.
L-R: Mathew Waters and Onnalee Blank
You’ve worked on all sorts of film and television projects. What does it mean to work on a series like this?
Exhaustion? We all worked on it for a very long time. It was pretty heavy. I worked on Game of Thrones for so long as just a re-recording mixer, and that show really molded me and made me become the mixer that I am today. I can’t thank that show enough for one, not firing me, and two, giving me the opportunity to work on so many different kinds of battles and naturalistic sounds. I really got my headspace into a different zone of detail and creativity on that show.
It was interesting to work on Underground Railroad, because I was trying to take everything I learned from Game of Thrones and then just heighten that by 100. How can I make this different, but great and big?
