Sinners Sound Mixer Chris Welcker on Rigging Michael B. Jordan’s Twin Conversations and Spending 5 Months in Rural Louisiana
Michael B. Jordan as Smoke and as Stack in 'Sinners' (Warner Bros. Pictures)
Sinners production sound mixer Chris Welcker spent months in the deep South recording dialogue and music for Ryan Coogler's film.
Welcker, who received an Oscar nomination for his work on the film, spoke with The Credits about his experience working on the project. He battled heat, rain, bugs, and noisy IMAX cameras to create conversations between Smoke and Stack, twin brothers played by Michael B. Jordan.
To film these scenes, Jordan would shoot the entire scene as one twin with his double Percy Bell playing the other twin. Once Coogler was happy with the footage, Jordan would head back to costumes and makeup to prepare to shoot the scene as the other brother. That's when Welcker's work would really start.
"During that [break] time, we’d take the video footage, drop it into our Pro Tools playback system, and edit out any dialogue that Percy delivered to make space for Michael, so he could interject his other twin’s dialogue," he said.
Timing was crucial to ensure a smooth transition from one twin to the other. To help Jordan time his performance, Welker pulled Bell's dialogue from the audio and replaced it with ADR beeps so Jordan knew when to begin his dialogue as the other twin.
"Michael would hear beep, beep, beep, and the fourth beep signaled when, for example, the cigarette needed to be handed off from one twin to the other, so even for non-verbal behavior, based on the previous takes," Welker said. "A lot of technical collaboration went into selling the idea that Smoke and Stack are two individual characters."
To find out more about how Welker used sound to bring Sinners to life, read his full interview with The Credits:
How do you think the sound in Sinners contributes to the success of the film? Let us know in the comments!
