Midnight Mass interview: The sounds of Crockett Island with supervising sound editor Jonathan Wales

Midnight Mass is the newest Mike Flanagan series to hit Netflix and anyone who has watched it is familiar with the setting of Crockett Island. The isolated setting has its own unique personality, and part of that personality was brought to us by the sound team.

1428 Elm had the chance to chat with Midnight Mass supervising sound editor/re-recording mixer Jonathan Wales (Get Out, Freaky, Happy Death Day, and numerous Mike Flanagan projects) about what it takes to provide sound elements to a series this deep.

1428 Elm interviews Midnight Mass

1428 Elm: I personally loved Midnight Mass and so many other things that you have worked on as well. I did a little bit of research online, and you don’t have a very shabby resume! You were the co-supervising sound editor and re-recording mixer for Midnight Mass. Tell us what that entails.

Jonathan: The supervising sound editor portion is a credit that I’m sharing with Trevor Gates, and we both are approaching it from a slightly different angle.  The job, in general, is just basically making sure that all of the content of the sound is exactly the way that Mike Flanagan wants it to be, and just being in charge of all aspects of getting the sound vision that Mike has realized onto the screen.

Trevor’s angle on that is that he is actually creating the sound design and manipulating all the different sound effects and dialogue, and my angle on it is that I’m manipulating both what Trevor is giving me and also any other ideas that I’ve got; just to get Mike’s vision to happen, which is very often a bit of a journey. Because Mike is very specific, he knows exactly what he wants, but chasing it down can be tricky because we’re working with a story that is kind of on a knife’s edge.

That’s primarily what the supervising job is. And as the mixer, I’m sort of taking all the different elements that come in – so, music, the dialogue, sound effects, background – putting that together into the final soundtrack that you actually hear when you watch the show.

1428 Elm: I’m actually on my second watch of Midnight Mass, I’m writing recaps, and it’s occurring to me how often music is used throughout the series. Some of it’s the Neil Diamond tunes, and some of it is the Newton Brothers‘ soundtrack, and a lot of it is the traditional hymns. I know that production began during the early stages of the COVID crisis, and I understand that made the mixing of the vocals a bit challenging. Tell us about that.

Jonathan: I also worked very closely with The Newton Brothers on Midnight Mass, mixing the score of this as well, so all the music fell in my jurisdiction, and that’s something we had decided to do anyway because the music was such a woven-in part of the piece. Before COVID, we planned it out fairly simple conceptually we would get different size groups of people at a studio and record them, like you would record a choir.

And of course, COVID happened, and no one can go in a studio together, so what we ended up doing was we actually assembled a group of singers, and in some cases, we literally cast them for different people we were seeing on screen. But, the basic process was they literally recorded these things in their houses, and sent us back the tracks of them singing.

And sometimes they would record them in different voices as well, so you had some people who would record, you know, this is them singing well, this is them singing less well. It’s a process of sort of building a congregation.

And so, I ended up with 120, 150 tracks of just people singing, and we had to piece that together. So, for the congregation stuff, that worked incredibly well. But, it had one other benefit. When we had the hymns that are the really nicely sung versions, like Abide With Me or Holy, Holy, Holy, we decided that because we had every single voice individually, we could wrap them around, so the voices are literally all around you, like you’re standing in the middle of a complete circle of people who are just singing around you, which is really cool. It was fun, but it definitely multiplied the amount of work for everybody.