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Rogue thrilled cinema-goers over Christmas with tales of a homicidal croc in the Top End. Franc Tetaz, who composed, produced and mixed the soundtrack, and Lachlan Carrick, who engineered it, fill us in on the gory details.Text: Franc Tetaz & Lachlan Carrick

Rogue is a horror movie where the main protagonists are, in the eyes of the main character, lunch. It’s a blockbuster designed to scare the pants off you: teeth gnash, boats sink, main characters float helplessly in the murky water and death rolls abound. It’s the modern Australian equivalent of Jaws or Alien where everyone’s a potential victim and no-one’s safe from the monster’s malevolent mandibles.

For Franc Tetaz, the musical score for Rogue was designed to perform all the classic duties of a horror movie soundtrack: start off calmly, lull you into a false sense of security (even though you know you’re being lulled into a false sense of security) and then scare the life out of you with sudden bursts of controlled musical mayhem. His aim however, was to tread the tightrope and avoid cliché where possible. The music combines mellow Aboriginal dialect sung over cinematic strings, disturbing cello motifs that immediately put you on edge in a ‘there’s something in that water that I don’t trust’ kind of way, and classical swirling string-based horror motifs worthy of a Hitchcock blockbuster. This is what Franc had to say about it:

Franc Tetaz: I worked a couple of years ago with Rogue’s director, Greg McClean, scoring his first feature Wolf Creek [see Issue 44] so I was mentally prepared for what was involved in scoring the Rogue soundtrack. The two films are quite different cinematically, but they also have a lot in common. Both work and develop (musically and cinematically) in three parts, and both have the landscape playing an important role that needed developing musically and both require the score to reinforce the emotions that the main characters were experiencing.

Although the films are structurally similar, they’re very different stylistically. Rogue is a ‘frights & bites’ movie, nothing like the harsh reality/dogma style of Wolf Creek. Rogue is the

kind of film a 16-year-old would have taken his girlfriend to on a date in the ’70s, hoping to scare her into some sort of primal behaviour that included pashing the closest person. Rogue is a romp where Wolf Creek was baldly terrifying.

Rogue aims to be fun and scary, while maintaining depth and believability in the characters. The score is in three parts: the first is a melodic, themed score about the landscape; the second, a dark, violent score about horror and isolation; and the third a classic, spiritual conclusion.

I wanted to give the film a distinctive voice. Rogue is a genre flick, but I wanted the score to work against the expectations of a monster movie. I decided to base the score of the film around a string ensemble, putting the strings through the same journey the tourists go through. They think they’re going on a titillating crocodile tour – they end up terrified and getting eaten. My consideration was: “What happens if I put the ensemble musically through that same journey?” [Editor’s note: no musicians were maimed or dismembered in the scoring of Rogue.]

ROGUE ELEMENTSThe opening of the film, which scores the landscape through the eyes of American Pete McKell, features Jida Gulpillil’s voice, singing songs by Bobby Bununggurr. I also worked with percussionist Graham Leak, who played anything from a contact-miked cactus, gongs and upturned salad bowls in water, to his own string-can basses and a musical saw. Violinist Jenny Thomas, also played classical Indian violin. The other instrumentation I used for this section came from all the countries where crocodiles are found and the textures combine to give a sense of the ‘other’, the exotic and the mysterious.

The second section of the score features Rod Cooper, a sculptor/instrument builder and improvising musician. Rod played his amazing resonating metal instruments to create the

WELCOME TO THE TERRORTORYSCORING ROGUE

www.roguecrocodile.com/videos/rogue_-_sweetheart.mov www.roguecrocodile.com/videos/rogue_-_the_crocs_theme.mov

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FEATURE

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dark atmosphere of terror when night falls. David Franzke [credited on the film as being responsible for creating ‘visceral ambience’] took Rod’s recordings and manipulated them into subtle dark atmospheres, which were blended closely with Craig Carter’s sound design. (Craig travelled to the Northern Territory to record all the atmospheres in surround for the film. His commitment meant we had a great basis to lay nuance. As well as the atmospheres and a library of croc sounds, he collected the most amazing array of mosquito and insect bites.)

Crocs don’t move much – they hunt by stealth. Greg wanted a motif for the croc that captured menace without movement. I worked with Anthea Caddy, a cellist and improvising musician to create a low cello growl that represents the mythic sound of a crocodile and the threat of ‘the monster of the deep’. She ‘prepared’ her instrument by placing a metal skewer between the strings and playing the bow on the piece of metal.

In collaboration with orchestrator, Kate Neal, I made clusters and clouds of violent orchestral techniques: a kaleidoscope of string textures, made out of pizzicato (plucking), glissandi (sliding up and down the string) and col legno (striking the string with the wood of the bow) to articulate the confusion and increasing panic of the stranded tourists.

To flesh out the violence and action accurately, we recorded the orchestral techniques in modular form. The pieces were too complex to perform accurately to picture, so we recorded them section-by-section and reconstructed them to the picture in post-production – in bite-sized chunks, as it were. This also allowed me to have additional building blocks to be able to layer and add as required.

CUTS & POLISHOne of the problems with scoring that accurately with tight sync-to-picture is that the pictures invariably change. In an FX-driven film like Rogue, the cut continually changes, so it was very important for me to be flexible. Recording these pieces as ‘modules’ made the process a little more flexible, though it was very complex to edit.

An example is the main fight sequence in the lair – 100-odd tracks of strings and percussion, frame-accurately edited to picture. It took me over 60 hours to put that sequence back together from its recorded parts. Why did I ever decide to do that?!

I had a clear idea of how I wanted the score to sound and work in the film, though making strong and forceful music sit in with the sound design was a real challenge. This wasn’t helped by the dramatic difference in monitoring between my studio and the horn-loaded monitoring in film mixing theatres. Even though I mixed at a calibrated level, taking mixes into a Dolby room always takes an adjustment, and the Rogue soundtrack was no exception. Music studio monitors are very midrange shy compared to the horn-loaded film monitors. Dynamically they sound very

Franc surveys the scene...

Lachlan Carrick fine tunes his Gunter Theil technique – four cardioid Neumann TLM170s in a ‘square’ placed seven metres behind the conductor.

25-piece string section recording at the Iwaki Auditorium.

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different. The difference in tone and dynamic, together with fatigue initially made me question my sanity until I finally adjusted to the new sound.

I designed the music in the action sequences to marry closely with the sound design and spot FX, articulating the movement and violence of the croc and victims. Pete Smith, the re-recording mixer, allowed the mix to take shape and got the dynamic arc of the film working. It’s very easy to be caught out with a film like Rogue, as everyone wants everything to be loud all the time, but that diminishes impact as the audience becomes aurally fatigued. Pete encouraged me to mix very wide and allow dynamic interplay between FX and the score in the bigger scenes. This meant we mixed well into the surround channels, at times engulfing the audience with the violence and panic of the score. At other times we went very quiet, allowing a big dynamic range, keeping the ‘frights & bites’ dramatic!

FRIGHTS & MICSLachlan Carrick, who works with Franc at Moose Mastering in Melbourne, recorded and engineered the Rogue score. He elaborates:

Lachlan Carrick: Franc and I have worked on several projects together, and for the Rogue recording sessions I provided the recording, mixing and editing grunt, blended with a heap of technical design and planning.

Recoring: The strings and percussion were recorded over seven days at the ABC’s Iwaki Auditorium, Southbank and the ANAM hall in South Melbourne. I worked with the ABC’s Jim Atkins and Richard Girvan, who provided great support and advice.

I decided to track directly to ProTools, via the ABC’s Prism A/D converters. Preamps were Millennia Media, Amek 9098, Focusrite Red and Universal Audio. As the mix would get to well over 100 tracks in some cues, the recordings were set up at 24-bit/48k, balanced over two Firewire drives. Monitoring was via Genelecs in surround.

The bulk of the score features a 25-piece string ensemble, but the tone and perspective needed to be flexible enough to work in a variety of ways. The first third of the film needed to feel very lush and silky, whereas later on, the more violent-sounding multi-layered sections needed to be much more ‘in-your-face’. This meant we needed to mic the ensemble both close-up and from a distance. The string recording track count was around 24, often layered up to six times.

Image: In a thriller like Rogue, the action sequence sound effects are used as a serious shock tactic, so for the score to have impact, it often needs to work as a wide surround mix, keeping away from the screen-centred action. We toyed with the best way to capture the performances with this in mind, and settled on a Gunter Theil technique involving a ‘Main’ LCR array, combined with an ambient ‘Square’ of cardioid mics (four microphones arrayed in the shape of a square).

The main LCR array provides the front image,

with the Square adding a lush surround ambience. Depending on how far back you’ve set up the Square this ambience becomes more or less reverberant. We experimented on the first morning, flipping between the omni and cardioid versions, and tried out various mics as well. I ended up settling on four cardioid Neumann TLM170s, as they felt beautifully dark and the image was tight. We knew we would need these to be strong in some of the mixes, so an overly bright tone or fluffy image wouldn’t work for us. Once this was nailed down, it was a matter of finding the best distance, which ended up being around seven metres behind the conductor. We used three Neumann M149 tube mics for the LCR array, on advice from Jim Atkins and Richard Girvan, who use that configuration regularly and love it. They sounded full and detailed straight off the bat – very musical.

Closeups: Some old favourites were pulled out of the ABC mic cabinet for close mic duties. Violins were miked with Neumann U87s, violas with Schoeps MK4s, celli with AKG 414B/ULS and basses with Microtech Gefell UM900s. The violins and violas were miked as ‘desks’ – one mic per music stand, or two players. Celli and basses were all miked individually.

MIXING IT WITH A CROCFranc and I worked together on the mixes for over six weeks, often flipping between editing and mixing duties, depending on what calls were needed and when. We mixed at Moose on ProTools HD4, with Avid Mojo on video duties. We pushed ’Tools very hard in terms of track count and TDM processing, but mercifully the system held up very well, as the time/money formula was very real and we couldn’t afford any delays.

Towards the end of the process, Franc would head down to Soundfirm and work with Pete Smith, the re-recording mixer, on integrating the music. We had made sure the score stems were running sync’ed off a separate ProTools system for the mix. This meant Franc could email me notes on mixes, and I’d Digideliver new mixes for him to slot in to the film. This was a great way to improve the score without holding up the mix.

“It took me over 60 hours to put that sequence back together from its recorded parts. Why did I ever decide to do that?!

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Rod Cooper (sculptor/instrument builder and improvising musician) with one of his amazing resonating metal instruments.