Ethan Van der Ryn and Erik Aadahl (‘Transformers: Rise of the Beasts’) on ‘finding the souls of these characters’ in the blockbuster reboot [Exclusive Video Interview]
“This movie really provided us some new opportunities in terms of finding the souls of these characters,” two-time Oscar-winning supervising sound editor Ethan Van der Ryn (“The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers,” “King Kong”) shares about what made this installment of the film franchise special. For our recent webchat, Van der Ryn (joined by frequent collaborator and four-time Oscar nominee Erik Aadahl) adds, “So much of what we do on these big visual effects movies is about helping to find the soul of these characters that are essentially animated, and of course the main thing is the actors who bring the voice. But then there’s also so much that we as sound designers bring to the character in terms of movement, in terms of all the things that go around the voice.” Watch our exclusive video interview above.
Paramount‘s franchise reboot “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts” takes audiences on a nineties globetrotting adventure with the Autobots and the Maximals, a whole new faction of Transformers, to join them as allies in the ongoing battle for Earth. The action adventure is directed by Steven Caple Jr. and written by Joby Harold and Darnell Metayer & Josh Peters and Erich Hoeber & Jon Hoeber. Emmy nominees Anthony Ramos (“Hamilton”) and Dominique Fishback (“Swarm”) lead an ensemble cast including Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”), Emmy winners Peter Dinklage (“Game of Thrones”) and Colman Domingo (“Euphoria”), alongside Luna Lauren Velez, Dean Scott Vazquez, Tobe Nwigwe, Peter Cullen, Ron Perlman, Liza Koshy, John DiMaggio, David Sobolov, Michaela Jaé Rodriguez, Pete Davidson, Cristo Fernández and Tongayi Chirisa. It is the seventh installment in the “Transformers” film series, serving as both a standalone sequel to “Bumblebee” (2018) and a prequel to the original 2007 blockbuster “Transformers.”
“The first thing he said was ‘the emotion,'” Aadahl recalls about their first meeting with Caple to discuss the film. “The heart of the movie is the most important thing to him. So in a sense, everything that we’re doing is bringing a soul to the characters, having them all have a sonic signature. All of that has to be character-based and feed into the heart of the movie. And I think Stephen did such an incredible job of melding that emotion with this high-concept action science-fiction into something that’s special,” he explains. “Ethan and I are one of just a handful of people who’ve worked on all of the ‘Transformers’ movies, and so the biggest challenge was, ‘how do we make it fresh?’ And that was the first direction Steven gave us. It’s like, we know what Optimus Prime sounds like. We know what Bumblebee sounds like. But how do we take it to the next step and play off of those tropes in a new and fresh way. And of course, we have all these new characters also, from Scourge, played by Peter Dinklage to Unicron, who’s voiced by Coleman Domingo, who did this incredible performance of it. He was literally eating the microphone on the ADR stage to get that huge proximity. We had so much talent to work with to make something really fun.”
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