Sound Design and Color Grading
Workflow for Armageddon Time

By Iain Blair

Armageddon Time, the new film from writer/director James Gray, might sound like a nuclear disaster epic, but titles can be misleading. It’s actually a timeless, intimate and personal coming-of-age story based on Gray’s own childhood growing up in Queens in the 1980s.

It revolves around the director’s alter ego, sixth-grader Paul Graff (Banks Repeta) — a smart but distracted student with dreams of becoming an artist — as he struggles to navigate the demands of school and his friendship with an equally smart but poor Black classmate, Johnny (Jaylin Webb). He juggles it all while dealing with his loving but chaotic family, a middle-class Jewish clan headed by harried parents (Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong) and anchored by his grandfather (Anthony Hopkins).

Gray’s creative team on Armageddon Time included several regular collaborators, including the team at Harbor Post. “Working on the sound is the part of post I love the most, especially the mix, along with the DI,” says Gray. “That’s when I see and hear the whole film come together.”

I spoke with Armageddon Time‘s supervising sound editor/re-recording mixer Robert Hein and re-recording mixer Josh Berger, as well as Harbor senior colorist Damien Vandercruyssen, about the workflow and collaborating with Gray.

This has a great soundscape. What did the director want in terms of the audio post?
Robert Hein: He told us to use our imaginations and think outside the standard sounds for a small period film set in Queens. He said to go crazy with the sound design, and that’s exactly what we did for the whole film — for both the editing and the mixing. The editing process was a lot of experimentation, and dreaming things up and creating sounds that somehow fell into place and worked with the characters and story.

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