By Michael Kross

When a young boy goes missing in the quiet town of Hawkins, Indiana, his family must join with local law enforcement and the community to search for answers. What follows is a series of strange happenings involving supernatural forces, secret government agencies and mysterious new residents. The incredibly popular Stranger Things is a sci-fi thriller from the Duffer Brothers and Netflix, and all three seasons are now streaming.

We recently had the opportunity to talk to sound supervisor, sound designer and rerecording mixer Craig Henighan. He has worked on all three seasons of Stranger Things, won Emmy awards for his work on the first two seasons and is nominated for his work on Season 3.

Let’s find out more about his process on the show and how he worked with rerecording mixers Will Files and Mark Paterson. Keep an eye out for their upcoming interviews.

Craig Henighan

Can you talk about your multiple titles on the show?
Nowadays, if you do mixing, editing and sound design, they all sort of morph. When I first met with the Duffer Brothers, I was balancing other projects. I told them I was very interested in working on the show but asked if I work in a sound design capacity and come up with the signature sounds and go from there. Then we decided to find a crew that would work with me to deal with the dialogue editing, the Foley and general supervising and mixing.

That slowly morphed in Season 3, when I took over more of the supervising roles and brought in my own crew. I hired a couple new mixers, so we did a little bit of a reshuffling of the decks in Season 3 with Mark Paterson, Will Files and me being the three main guys. When I presented this new idea to Matt and Ross, they were really stoked that they could get the three of us as a team.

That’s how that all started. If I’m sound designing, I’m also sometimes supervising. Sometimes I take a credit on the supervising, sometimes I don’t. I don’t put a lot of weight into those sort of things. I just try to work with the directors as straight as possible. Whether I’m sound designing or supervising, I’m just heavily involved in the sound of the project.

You wind up wearing a lot of hats. Are you involved in everything that’s sound-related, like ADR? 
No. I hire the right people — we’re all only as good as the people around us. This season I had Ryan Cole and Kerry Williams handling the dialogue. Ryan was mostly doing the production and Kerry was dealing with the ADR and stuff. My specialty is sound design, sound effects, supervising and mixing, so I can cut dialogue, but with these sorts of workloads and the schedules, I need to delegate.

I’m not heavily involved with the ADR spotting. Generally, we all do a major spotting together with the Duffer Brothers, composers Michael Stein and Kyle Dixon, music editor Dave Klotz, our picture editors, me, Kerry and Ryan, and sometimes Mark and Will. We do a very involved spotting session and then we start talking about ADR. Then everyone breaks off into their own little categories and starts doing their fine-tuning chew lists or whatever they need to do for technical ADR.

Then they go off and shoot it, Ryan and Kerry cut it, and then it heads to the mix. While that’s going on, I’m dealing with creating monster sounds or any new sound designs. I’m dealing with the Foley and supervising the overall schedule of the effects editors and dialogue editors. I’m making sure everything is going to get to the stage on time, dealing with visual effects updates … all the usual things that come with a show of this size and scope. (The  full sound team on Stranger Things also includes sound editors Angelo Palazzo and Katie Halliday, Foley artist Steve Baine and production mixer Michael Rayle.)

How early do you get involved in projects, and what’s your process?
With the Duffers, it’s really early. For Season 3, for example, I got scenes of certain clips and certain artistic renditions of what they envisioned for the monster. Those sorts of things started months before we actually had a mixing schedule. What that affords me is a lot of time to let the ideas marinate and to go in and record things.

I start to slowly build up a library of ideas and sounds that sit on the side until I get more clips coming in. That happens when the Duffer Brothers start getting into the picture edit. It’s really important to get sounds into the Avid Media Composer early and get your ideas in front of the directors early. The picture editors for Season 3 were Dean Zimmerman, who I’ve known for a long time, and Kat Naranjo and Nat Fuller.

That’s what this whole workflow affords me. But I won’t lie, it’s busy. When we actually get into crunch time, it’s cranking. That’s why it’s nice having Will and Mark working on the final mix and deliverables and mixing episodes while I’m on the front side finishing up pre-mixing and getting on to the next episode. The guys are really awesome about giving me the episodes super-early. I chip away at them; creatively, it allows me to do what I really need to do. I’m always working. I have a studio at home. I think, “Oh yeah, I’ll just do a Sunday afternoon or a Saturday morning,” and next thing I know, I’ve spent eight hours on it.

Can you talk about how you approach backgrounds?
I’m a big fan of backgrounds; they are the foundation of every single thing we do. Starting with the backgrounds allows me to start cutting so I can get into the flow of things. It also allows me to start thinking about the project in a linear sort of fashion. It also allows me to leave markers, spotting notes and ideas of things I want to record as I’m working.

Backgrounds suck me in too. I find myself spending hours on little subtleties, but those subtleties wind up becoming the things that make the scene.
Absolutely. Obviously, you have your general backgrounds of air and wind, but for me, it’s the specific backgrounds. It’s that little background sound in the right area that lands maybe between the lines of dialogue or just before music cue starts. For Stranger Things, it would be the light bulbs flickering or the drone or a roar. There’s lots of stuff going on in the backgrounds that you would think is music but is actually sound design. And vice versa. There are lots of things that Michael and Kyle do that you would think is sound design, but it’s actually music.

That’s the fun part of working on a project like this. The Duffer Brothers love sound, and they love sound design. There are really no boundaries. We can do a lot of things, so I’m really able to apply that stuff. These guys will let it get heard. The Duffers take the time to listen to what we’re doing and make sure it fits. If it doesn’t fit, so be it, but we do spend a lot of time for all those ambiences, crowds, drones, rumbles and weird background-feedback tonal things to really make it feel like it’s enveloping.

What was it like working with the Duffers? Did you bounce ideas off each other?
They are really good at getting their music into Media Composer early. I know when they send me an AFF that it’s pretty much what they want. In Season 1, we talked a lot more about the back and forth of like, “Okay, what are we doing in this scene? If you guys are going to do low-synth stuff, then maybe I’ll do something higher-end.” For the Upside Down (the show’s alternate dimension existing in parallel to the human world), for instance, I tended to stay with higher creaky things.

Then there were other scenes that were obviously going to be music-driven, and I would just lay off of them. There are a bunch of scenes in Season 1 where they didn’t do any music, and I was like, “Oh boy, I’ve got to fill this up somehow, so let me do this, let me do that.” Sometimes I can’t help but try to do a musical background of some sort because it opens doors for other sounds that I get inspired by.

I’m assuming you are a musician?
Yes. I’m a guitar player. I’m that cliché sound guy that was the little kid running around with a tape recorder. I was also the kid who rented the PA for my band when I was 14.  I also loved movies. When I finally got to college to work in recording studios, it was like, “Oh, there’s a whole other world of soundscape stuff.”

I loved The Doors’ “Riders on the Storm” when they had the wind and the ambiences. Or Beatles songs that would put the simple stuff like insects and crickets into “Abbey Road.” All those things — that subtext and subconscious stuff that comes from some unknown place. Once I started identifying these things, I realized, “Oh, I have a musical approach because it’s been ingrained in me to do it that way.”

With the Stranger Things guys, you can sort of develop those things and not be afraid to go down those musical roads, whereas with some other projects you feel like you’ve got to stay away from the music because that’s someone else’s job. It’s a fine line.

How do you organize your tracks and how you set up your Pro Tools session?
For Stranger Things, I’m working in 5.1, but I built a Dolby Atmos on stage at my house, so I’m able to go all the way up because a lot of my other projects are Atmos-based. I work with the Dolby Atmos Bridge and Avid MTRX, which allow me to use the Dolby Atmos RMU toolkit for home use. I can monitor and place objects overhead, you name it. I can pretty much do all that from home.

But for Stranger Things, the Duffer Brothers want 5.1. Our core audience watches this on iPads, on phones, on regular televisions. They really know their audience. So as I said, for this show, I work in 5.1, and then if I need to send something to the Avid, I do a quick stereo bounce of that, throw in a down-mixer plugin and off I go. My template is simple. Since I’m a mixer myself, I run an EQ channel strip on every channel. I have a bunch of reverts, subwoofers, a couple subwoofers synths, samplers, and some other sound design stuff. That sort of thing stays inactive in my template, but I’ll light it up when I need to.

How do you lay out your tracks?
From a track layout, I tend to work in chunks of eight and 16. It’s probably a legacy thing from working on consoles. I learned how to mix on Neve and Harrison consoles, and everything seems to be mapped out in eights. My belief is that as an editor, I should be able to make something work with that many tracks. If I can’t, then I need to start boiling it down because I don’t want to see 60 tracks making up one event. I want it to be organized.

What are the portable devices you use to record sound in the field?
The Zoom H4 is always in my backpack. I also carry the Shure VM80A, which plugs into my iPhone. There’s a program that allows you to change the sample rates, and you can get a half-decent recording. Those two things are always with me. I also have a Fostex F8 and a Sound Devices stereo recorder.

How do you record the outside?
That would be covered by my Fostex F8 or the Sound Devices 722 or any number of other rigs. I basically have one rig inside and a couple rigs outside. Or a one rig outside, one rig inside and one for pass-bys and stuff.

I am blown away by the textures in Stranger Things and what you’re doing with the sound, the layers and the organic-ness of the background layers.
It’s just one of those shows where I have so much fun. There’s no limit to what the Stranger Things universe is, so I try not to limit what I’m doing. Ultimately, it’s got to fit what the scene is and it’s got to help the storytelling. And it’s not just me! I have a great team.

Have you started Season 4 yet?
With COVID, it’s obviously been pushed back. I’ve read a couple scripts, but they’re off doing their thing. I’ll be busy soon enough on it, so I’m not pushing to see anything yet. When they’re ready, they’ll start sending me stuff.

Michael Kross is a re-recording mixer and sound designer based out of Los Angeles. Formerly, senior re-recording mixer at E! Entertainment Television, Kross has been in the industry for over 20 years. You can contact him at Mkross@gmail.com or on Instagram @MichaelKrossSound.