Q&A with Sound Designer Katie Halliday

Probably one of the more overlooked aspects of the filmmaking process is sound design, which can be a crucial element to any movie, but especially when it comes to genre projects. Sound can elevate a mood, hint at impending dangers, set the stage for the unusual and so much more.

Daily Dead recently had the opportunity to catch up with one of the busiest sound designers out there, Katie Halliday, who recently worked on The Strain, Alleluia! The Devil’s Carnival, Pay the Ghost, as well as Antibirth, which is set to make its world premiere later this month at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival.

Check out what Halliday had to say on the inspiration to pursue a career in sound, some of the earlier projects she worked on, and her thoughts on the misconceptions of sound design.

What made you decide to pursue a career in sound design?

Katie Halliday: When I was seven years old, my father took me to see a little movie called Jurassic Park. I remember being so captivated, so completely enthralled, that it changed everything for me. From that moment, movies were more than just entertainment to me; they were an experience, a magical escape from the real world. Jurassic Park always stuck with me and until this day, it’s been my favorite movie.

It wasn’t until I was older that I realized what drew me into films that I love and hold dear was the sound. The sound bridged the gap from passively watching to actively experiencing the story being told. I knew from the moment I realized I wanted to be in the film industry that sound was where my passion lay. I applied for film school straight out of high school and I’ve never looked back.

I noticed that The Burrowers was one of your early career credits; did that help pave the way for you to work so heavily in the future in horror, or was that always part of your career plan from the beginning?

Katie Halliday: The Burrowers was actually one of the first feature films I ever worked on once graduating from Humber College, where I learned sound design. I went from student films to a multimillion dollar feature film. It was certainly a big jump. I worked mainly on the atmospheric sounds in the film, and that was a really fun and engaging experience, because not only was it a horror film, but a period piece in early settled America, so it required atmospheres specific to that time and place.

It certainly impressed my boss and mentor, Mark Gingras, enough to bring me on board to the next few projects he had lined up, which included the Saw films. So, in a way, I suppose it did pave a path towards a lot of the horror films I ended up working on after that.

How did your experiences working on the Saw films shape you as a sound artist? I would imagine those films would be a bit tricky, considering the contraptions involved.

Katie Halliday: The Saw films were certainly some of the biggest films I’ve ever had the privilege of working on. You’re part of a large team on a show that big, and it was incredibly busy work and highly stylized, so it was no small feat. I was lucky enough to work on different aspects of the films: the atmospheres, the sound effects for different traps, and even the more ethereal, almost musical stings and pads of sound design that made up a great deal of the movie.

The biggest thing with any of the Saw films was to make everything very high-octane, and every trap ominous and huge-sounding, so while there was already an established aesthetic quality to the sound from the previous installments that I hadn’t worked on, there was still plenty of new and creative soundscapes I got to play around with and devise. It was certainly an actively creative endeavor to sell the traps as these giant, deadly pieces of machinery and make the gore as disgusting as possible. I think I have an iron stomach after working on those films.

I think it’s really cool that you worked on The Grey; how different is your approach to a project like that, which is based in a natural kind of realism, versus a straight-up horror movie?

Katie Halliday: Well, thank you. While The Grey isn’t typically viewed as a horror film, it is certainly a thriller, and because of it, the sound plays a crucial role in many scenes. Something as simple as the cold-sounding wind can become an antagonist to the characters if done right. A lot of the sound design in The Grey is subtly manipulating you to feel a sense of foreboding. The distant cry of wolves, the deep groan of the mountain snows shifting and the whistling of the pine trees all accumulate into an uncomfortable presence in the film.

And then there are great action moments like the plane crash, which was so artfully cut together between moments of complete silence and moments of heavy action. I’d say, overall, the approach of The Grey is that of every project I work on, which is how to find a way to put personality into the sound and tell a story with it. The elements in the film are in their own way a character, and so the sound must bring them to life accordingly.

Congrats on working with The Strain too; are there a different set of challenges that come with a project that involves these otherworldly creatures?

Katie Halliday: Thank you, again. Working with and getting to meet Guillermo del Toro is a lifelong dream come true. Working on The Strain is certainly different in many ways from working on a feature film. By nature, television shows tend to have faster schedules and less time for sound. But with a show such as The Strain, which is so intensive with creatures and action sequences and otherworldly locations and characters, it requires a great deal of sound—but with the schedule of a TV show—and so it was a very intense show to work on.

As you may be able to tell from my incredible love of Jurassic Park, within sound design my deepest passion is creating creatures. Every moment with creatures on the show was different, and so I’d say there wasn’t one specific challenge or approach that was the same any given episode, but it was a hell of a fun undertaking to help make such strange characters on the show come to life.

What would you say is the biggest misconception about the world of sound design?

Katie Halliday: Probably that there are almost no conceptions of sound design. Sound design is so generally overlooked as a crucial part of filmmaking; yet any great, classic film has great, classic sound. It is a key element to storytelling and is so often treated as an afterthought. Think of the sound of the shower drain in Psycho, think of the hum of a lightsaber in Star Wars or the ominous whizzing by of bullets underwater in Saving Private Ryan.

The greatest filmmakers always include sound in the very fabric of the story, so it’s considered an elemental part from script to screen. Yet, so often, the general public are completely unaware. That’s part of the magic of film, but also the drawback of working in sound.