British/Australian filmmaker Bryn Chainey's Rabbit Trap follows a musician and her husband, who move to a remote house in Wales. Their music disturbs local ancient folk magic and brings a nameless child to their door, intent on infiltrating their lives. The feature is set in 1976 and stars Rosy McEwen as Daphne and Dev Patel as her husband Darcy. Jade Croot plays a young rabbit trapper who disturbs their quest for peace.
Graham Reznick (pictured, right, with director Bryn Chainey, left) handled sound design for the feature. In the past, he has collaborated with Ti West (X, The House of the Devil), Jon Watts (
Clown), Jim Mickle (
Stakeland). Here, he shares insight into his approach to
Rabbit Trap's soundtrack, as well as his collaboration with director Bryn Chainey.
Hi Graham! Can you share some insight into your work as a sound designer on Rabbit Trap?
“As a sound designer who is often also a filmmaker and writer, I try to approach sound design as another stage of writing on the film, the same way picture editing is often seen as another stage of writing. Bryn Chainey and I spent weeks discussing the narrative and devising ways that audio can bring out ideas and complexities inherent in the story, but not already expressed through visuals, dialogue or score. Since sound design is an invisible art and generally not as foregrounded as traditional score/music, it has the advantage of being able to sneak into audiences' brains and alter their perception of the story in ways they feel on a deeply intuitive, primal level.”
What were some of the tools you used?
“Rabbit Trap takes place in the mid 1970s, so much of the initial stages of designed audio was created using gear or methods available in that era: manipulated - and abused – reel-to-reel tape, speed modded cassette players, degraded tape loops. I used two pieces of modern gear from Brooklyn-based Landscape FM - the Stereo Field, which allowed us to run audio and electrical current through mushrooms, flowers and leaves to create chaotic noise bursts, and the HC-TT, a magical hand-cranked cassette tape transport. Many of the most prominent pieces of design in the film were made using a cassette recording of my then seven-year-old daughter singing the theme song to her favorite TV show, Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse. Tiny, abstracted snippets of her voice were cranked back and forth in the HC-TT, run through a bank of Eventide’s Factor pedals (Space, ModFactor, TimeFactor, PitchFactor). Everything was pieced together in Pro Tools, and I used an array of plug-ins (Waves, SoundToys, Aberrant DSP, FabFilter, UAD, PaulXStrech) to flourish and sweeten the design.”
Is there a scene that you would point to as an audio highlight?
“The first scene in the film features Darcy Davenport (Dev Patel) recording the sounds of a murmuration of starlings, creating beautiful swirling shapes both visually and aurally. This is intercut with his wife Daphne (Rosy McEwen) in her home studio, using his starling recordings and her analogue synthesizers to compose a startling piece of music. It’s a perfect overture, showing how all the elements of the narrative can become greater than the sum of their parts. It’s also a great example of how sound design and score work [hand-in-hand] in the film. The shrieking of the birds morph into waves of noise and synthesized frequency sweeps (sound design), while the rhythmic and melodic music (Lucrecia Dalt’s incredible score) grows and evolves out of it.
“A few minutes into the story, Darcy sets out to record various sounds - banging of metal, dripping water, wind - but when he’s in an unfamiliar section of the nearby woods, he begins picking up a series of unsettling, otherworldly voices, drifting in and out of his microphone’s pickup pattern. As he gets closer to the source - a fairy circle - a ring of mushrooms - the sound begins to evolve into an eerie, metallic, resonant drone. And when he steps into the circle itself, the overpowering cacophony causes him to black out. The audio Darcy records in this scene plays throughout the film and takes on a life of its own, lashing out at the characters, who have captured it on tape like a frightened, wounded animal.”
“About halfway through the film, Daphne and The Child gather the recording equipment and trek to a sacred part of the forest, an area of massive uprooted trees. The Child calls the trees the ‘Widows of the Woods,’ and, to make them sing for Daphne to record, he whispers an incantation that triggers overwhelming winds and the shocking, mournful wails of the widows, which seize and entrance Daphne like a spell. I particularly love this scene because I think of audio design as an incantation - conjuring an invisible force that has the power to put the viewer in a trance or knock them out of their seat.”