Sound Mixer Chases Dialogue in Twisters

Los Angeles, CA (July 24, 2024)—Production sound mixer Devendra Cleary, CAS had his work cut out capturing clear dialogue on the noisy sets and locations during the filming of Twisters, which barreled into a record weekend at the box office.

Audiences were blown away by Twisters, from Universal Pictures, Warner Bros. Pictures and Amblin Entertainment, which took in over $80 million this past opening weekend, a U.S. record for a natural disaster movie. A standalone, current-day chapter of the 1996 summer movie hit, it was shot on location in Oklahoma and directed by Oscar-nominee Lee Isaac Chung.

Production involved outdoor and car-to-car work in the most intense wind and rain that movie magic could simulate—and sometimes the real thing. “Throughout the movie, there’s a lot of shouting above wind noise, ‘Go, go, go!’ and things like that,” Cleary says. He battled the storm with an array of Lectrosonics gear, including the latest generation of D2 fully digital wireless: DSQD, DSR4, and DCR822 receivers; and DBSM, DBu, and DPR-A transmitters, all coordinated using Wireless Designer software.

Production Mixer Takes on Shogun Challenges

He continues, “There’s a scene we affectionately call ‘Datenado.’ Two of the leads, Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glen Powell, are chasing a tornado and it’s essentially their first date. Our crew is blasting them with gigantic Ritter fans from all sides, there’s debris flying around everywhere. Our sound editors, Bjørn Ole Schroeder and Al Nelson, did remove some of the wind noise from the iso tracks using software, but basically, it was nice, loud actors, DPA lav mics, and Lectrosonics digital on one side versus huge fans and FX debris on the other. The scene did not require any ADR [automatic dialogue replacement] so, Lectro one, wind zero.”

Twisters features many car scenes involving in-car dialogue. Cleary found that the Lectrosonics D2 system’s end-to-end digital transmission provided all the range he needed and then some. “We would work one of two ways,” he explains. “Either tow the picture car and have a crane on it, or you have a pod on top of the picture car mechanically coupled so a stunt driver can operate the vehicle from there. Either method had me in a follow van with my setup, and I had to feed the audio program to a video assist operator who’s recording clips — we were shooting on film so that was the only way to review footage quickly. I got impeccable range. I’ll go so far as to say I don’t think I would have been able to do this project at this time with any other wireless gear that’s out there.”