David Acord and Margit Pfeiffer are the sound editors for the critically acclaimed Disney+ drama series Andor. Here, in a conversation with Awards Daily, they dive into the use of legacy Star Wars sounds versus the new material they had to create. They also reveal how they escalate the tension through sound while still making the galactic-set series feel grounded. Plus, they reveal how blasters sounding slightly different can change so much about the sonic landscape of the series.
Pew. Pew.
Awards Daily: The show’s tone is set up so perfectly right from the start with Andor’s fight with guards, the echoey chamber he’s in, the rain hitting the ground, even the way the blaster sounds in that moment. How did you go about creating that scene? Were you trying to create that tone right away?
David Acord: Yeah, the show really kicks off not only with who Cassian Andor is and what he is capable of, but the tone of the show is established right off the bat that this is not your normal or familiar Star Wars world. This is a much more grounded and gritty, more diegetic sound. We wanted to accentuate things like the rain slapping in the alley and the guns have a little more percussive familiar, let’s say Earth-like terrestrial feel to them. There’s a little more familiarity. which gives them a little more danger because you instantly perceive that. So yeah, all of that’s definitely intentional, that gritty grounded feel that we are going for and that Tony (Gilroy) is going for in the show.
Awards Daily: You kind of already answered a question I was going to ask, but the blaster sounded a little different for me in the show that it sounded grittier and more dangerous. So was it true for just that first scene or for the whole show?
David Acord: Yeah, that’s the whole show. There are familiar legacy elements of the guns in there and you can hear that with the trooper blasters. Everything is, as we say in the sound effects world, sweetened, everything’s a little heightened to make it fit in the Andor sound pastiche we are going for the show, to make everything a little more, I guess, hyperreal. You obviously can’t get cinema verite with lasers that are all CG but we want to come as close to it as we can to make the audience feel like this is what this would really sound like in person.
Awards Daily: A very different sound was Mon Mothma when she was speaking in the mainly empty Senate chamber. There is this echo to her speech, and we just have a little bit of ambient noise and doors closing, really playing up her isolation. How did you capture that echoey sound?
Margit Pfeiffer: Most of it was production sound, and then we had a few ADR line changes that were in there, and then some loop groups for the characters in the background, some of them with alien languages and some in English.
David Acord: I just remember I referenced some of the Senate chambers scenes in episode 1 and 2 trying to capture that vibe. But it is a very different speech that she’s giving. It’s a little less well received in some ways, she is a bit of an outsider. The more naked reverb that you can kind of feel in that room makes her feel a little more isolated now.
Awards Daily: Margit, this is your first Star Wars project. Was this a world you were wanting to explore? Or was it just the opportunity that arrived? How did you get involved?
Margit Pfeiffer: So, as you said, this is my first Star Wars, and it is a world I have been wanting to explore. I arrived at the project with Tony and John Gilroy who I already have a 10-year-long working relationship with. So this is how the opportunity came up.
Awards Daily: Were you disappointed you did not get to do the lightsaber noise?
Margit Pfeiffer: [Laughing] I’m totally okay with it cuz I handle the human element so I’m all in with the alien languages- Huttese, Aldhani, Kenari, and the different dialects and accents. I do the dialogue ADR and the group side of things.
Awards Daily: Well, good, because lightsabers wouldn’t fit in this show anyway.
David Acord: No, there are no lightsabers in Andor.
Awards Daily: David, you have worked on Star Wars forever, looking at your IMDb page. The one thing that jumped out at me was you were also involved with the Star Wars video games including the new one that just came out, Jedi Survivor. Did you find working in video games sound different than working with the shows?
David Acord: To be perfectly honest a lot of the video game work that I’ve done, with the Lego video games included, it’s really just me creating a palette and a library of sound effects for them to use. In some cases just pointing them in the right direction. I am not as hands-on; they have these great sound people who do the heavy lifting on that. For me it’s just creating a library of sound effects for them to use or not use, as they see fit. It’s a very different animal, Working on TV and movies, everything is very targeted. I have to create this, this, and this for this scene. For video games it’s more about creating volumes of assets to use, and every time you shoot this creature it’s going to make a different sound every time you play the game. So you have to have ten different sounds for that creature. That is sort of the difference. For movies it makes the same sound every time, so there is only one track.
Awards Daily: One thing that thrilled me right away with the show was you have this sort of gritty backwater world and you get a lot of the background noise with those kinds of places. But we also get Coruscant and these more elegant places where there’s also a bit more sterileness or quietness in the way that world is done. How did you guys approach the different sounds for these kinds of worlds?
David Acord: Margit can weigh in on Ferrix. I think a lot of that background was loop group right?
Margit Pfeiffer: It is a lot of loop groups, and then Ferrix was a five city block of actual sets, so you have a lot of the noise of all the vehicles going around, the crunch of gravel on the ground had to be cleaned out from the dialogue. Then you fill it with different languages because it’s an international trading house, so again we established a location. In comparison, we made Coruscant sound more posh in a way. It was more polished in a totally different style.
David Acord: For Coruscant a lot of the traffic ambience had kind of already been established so that was one of those legacy moments where we don’t want to reinvent the wheel too much because there are familiar sounds that Star Wars fans will want to hear. It is like the TIE Fighter. There are certain sound legacies that we want to make certain are represented in addition to our new palette of sounds.
Awards Daily: With some of those legacy noises, like the hovercrafts and the blasters (though there were some changes), what was the process for deciding what to keep in versus trying to create something new?
David Acord: Most of it is out of necessity; there is so much of the show that is new. The familiar things in the show would be the Stormtroopers that you see later on, and the TIE Fighter and maybe one or two of the guns, and Coruscant, of course. There are a handful of things that are familiar but most of the places we are in the shoots we see the weapons are unique to the show and have been fabricated from scratch. That is in a way kind of trickier to create something and keep it in the vein of 50 years of Star Wars and to have it sit in that world, and make it a modern sound too. We are not trying to create a sound that sounds generations old once we’re remixing it in Native Atmos. We have this big full orchestra trying to create a modern track to it. So that’s the tightrope you want to walk and balancing yourself between the legacy sound and the legacy track and a modern sensibility for what a track should sound like.
Awards Daily: Probably the most intense scene in the show– and sound wise–is the funeral march. With the chanting and music to when Maarva gives her speech and everyone gets quiet except for the hologram noise (one of those legacy noises that just fits perfectly). Then the intense violence that comes after. How did you get that orchestral feel and build up from the funeral to that moment?
David Acord: I believe the funeral dirge was recorded live on set, so that’s what we started, with music editor John Finklea cleaning it up as much as we wanted, because you want to keep some of that grit and dirt in there and some of the sounds that you might otherwise take out to make it pristine. That is not what we are going for here. A big part of that is putting everything in space. We are with the funeral dirge, then we are with Cassian, then we are over here with the Imperials, we are with Bix in her cell. So we’re in all these different places, and it sounds different no matter where you’re at, and people experience that funeral march in different ways depending on where they are. Bix is humming along to it, and you get the sense that everyone is slowly paying attention and is investing in this march. Then it culminates with the big march down the center mall of Ferrix. Then, like you said, it suddenly stops. That is a powerful moment right there and definitely draws you in and brings your attention in. For us sound-wise, it’s all about it’s over here, it’s over there, it’s a reverb. We are kind of pulling it all in until everything that is happening on screen is that funeral march. It is really present, it draws all of your focus, that’s hopefully what we accomplished.
Awards Daily: Was there a particular challenge or a moment you were particularly proud of in creating the work on this show?
Margit Pfeiffer: Each episode had its unique challenges, like during the heist and escape into space, for example, was another moment with a very intense build. You have a juxtaposition of crowd chanting on Aldhani and all the action of the heist itself. Then the escape and the music to basically mold this together gives you an emotion that is not a cluttered environment but something to focus on specifically each time and create a build, and hopefully give everybody goosebumps along with the stunning visuals of the celestial moment. So that is really fun to do and design and work towards. Then send the mix, and witness while we’re there, and see it for the first time.
David Acord: That is definitely a great sequence, a blend of dialogue, music, effects–it’s a great and challenging mix sequence there. I think I really like the prison assembly floor scenes. I sometimes forget how intricate that shot is. The way the sound was to create a rhythm of what they are doing. They put me in touch with the production designer and he sent me a training video that the actors were using to learn the rhythm of everything they were going to be doing. So we talked about it together about what this piece does. What does this tool do? We worked it out and wrote everything down so you know the rhythm is da-da-da reset. So that is the rhythm we built with these heavy metal clangs, airguns, the laser, the welding gun, the screw thing. Then you polish it all off with some really cool Foley stuff of handling the pieces. I was really pleased with the way that turned out.