Crafting the sound for Apollo 13: Survival

Netflix film, Apollo 13: Survival, tells the story of how just nine months after Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, NASA faced its greatest crisis — three astronauts stranded halfway to the moon on a spacecraft that had suffered a catastrophic explosion.

Molinare was charged with creating the film’s soundscape

Supervising Sound Editor Paul Darling & Re-recording Mixer Greg Gettens

The key approach to the sound design for Apollo 13: Survival was authenticity and emotion.

From early discussions with director Peter Middleton, the creative brief for the sound was clear – we wanted to create a bespoke soundtrack that would take the audience on a journey which was a) as close as possible to the sonic experience the astronauts and the crew in Mission Control might have had, and b) highlighted the emotional struggle both on the ground and in space.

This is an archive led feature documentary with no talking heads, so our vision was to envelop the audience with the same intense feeling of jeopardy that the astronauts and Mission Control went through with the aim of keeping them on the edge of their seat throughout.

The most formidable challenge we faced was that all the NASA archive material was mute. Unlike most documentaries where you at least have a base sound you can use to work with and enhance, we had to build the entire world from the ground up as we were starting with a completely blank palette.

A meeting was held with Greg and the rest of the team at Molinare and we clicked straight away – there was no doubt they were the best fit for post-production – we hadn’t worked with each other before but it turned out we both love the story of Apollo 13, so we were really excited to get started and immediately dived in, gathering research from films, podcasts, interviews and books

The storytelling in this film is original and authentic; Peter’s technique was to discard the idea of using piece to camera interviews and instead use dialogue from interviews with the astronauts, Mission Control and the Lovell family to tell the story over archive film in a VO style to keep the audience in the action at all times (incidentally in this film there was over 7000 hours of original footage from which had to be untangled and sifted through for the edit).

Much of this audio was almost unusable in its original form as it was too noisy – some of them sounded like they’d been recorded on a dictaphone 5m away in a kitchen! We realised this would be very distracting for an audience and would take them out of the Apollo world, so we restored all the dialogue to get a clearer and fuller sound, giving the voices a more personal feel.

The production crew also spent a long time finding the correct visuals to match the Mission Control audio so that we hear and see the crew speak, which we strengthened in the sound edit, further breathing life into the story. All of this was an essential part of the sound process, giving us confidence that the film was going to work.

From early on in the edit stage, Peter and editor Otto Burnham would send us clips of different sequences for which we would mock-up sounds based on our research and creative thoughts. It was a real organic back and forth process which benefitted both the offline edit as well the sound, bouncing ideas off each other and growing the soundtrack alongside the edit.

This collaboration meant that by the time the project was picture locked, we had an arsenal of tools and sound effects which everyone was happy with, ready for use in the film.

Luckily, there’s a fair bit of information available on the Apollo missions and we were able to find articles and interviews describing many sounds the astronauts experienced – such as inside the spacecraft, where specific whirrs and creaks could be heard from the glycol coolant system, fans and devices – we even managed to find a frequency response graph detailing the frequencies from inside the Command and Lunar Module, which we reconstructed and incorporated into the soundscape. We were also careful to faithfully re-create authentic Quindar tones (the beeps you hear when Mission Control talks to the astronauts) as well as the master alarm sound, which we found details of in the NASA Apollo Operations Handbook.

It was our goal that the audience should be able to experience these specific sounds for themselves and that they should be as close to what we can guess Jim, Jack and Fred would have experienced during their mission.

Outside of the spacecraft, we sourced recordings of the Saturn V rockets used in the Apollo launch, which we manipulated and boosted to give us the awesome power and real sound of the Apollo takeoff. There were also many other layers of sounds used to create the launch scene – some were just everyday objects that we recorded and processed in various ways to give the spacecraft more of a voice, such as a battered old kitchen sink and an old air conditioning pipe.

We were extremely fortunate to be given access to original recordings of Mission Control from NASA, which we painstakingly went through and edited in detail to give us all the atmospheric crowd backgrounds inside the room. To add a further layer of authenticity, we edited together closer dialogue from the same recordings, which we lip-synched to the real-life background characters in the archive footage, meaning what you hear inside Mission Control is from the original team in the 1970s and not from a group of actors inside a studio or library walla, which is often what would be done in post. Although the audience may not notice this at first, the effort really was worthwhile – it’s very pleasing for us to know that that the soundscape is so authentic.

Another element to the soundtrack is foley. It plays a very important role in this film, and we were lucky to have foley mixer Glen Gathard and the talented Molinare foley department on board.

The sound of movement is crucial to the soundscape, as it breathes so much life into the picture and when used and mixed correctly, foley really draws the audience in. It was essential for this film given the mute NASA archive footage – all the little chair moves, switches, gaffer tape rips and movement help bring the characters to life. A lot of time went into getting the right sounds throughout (for example, many different materials were tried until the team settled on a Polish firefighter’s protective uniform being the ‘right’ sound for the spacesuits), ultimately making the individual feel emotionally connected to the action on screen in an almost subliminal way; if the sound department successfully does its job, the audience should feel ‘in’ the action and barely notice the sound at all.

The score was another key element of the film and from the outset, we worked closely with composer James Spinney and Peter to brainstorm how we were going to emotionally approach the film. We really wanted to highlight the fragility of this dying tin can floating around in space, especially as the spaceship is powered down and the astronauts are alone. We set about achieving this by using metallic sounds in all their different forms – We compiled a large bank of different samples to figure out what would work and what wouldn’t and then met up to record different types of metallic shaking, vibrating, stressing and groaning with a variety of different microphones and techniques, which we sped up, slowed down and digitally manipulated for use in the score and sound design.

We went back and forth for a long time deciding at which point the sound design would take over, when the music would soar and when they were going to work together (there was a lot of pitching sounds to match the music – musical spaceship groans!). As a result, it can be quite difficult at times to tell the difference between the score and sound design, which is exactly what we wanted as both are telling the story hand in hand.

This type of collaboration between composers and sound designers is crucial but sadly not always possible. The final mix is a combination of Dialogue, Sound Design, Foley and Music and the key to success is solving the puzzle and creating space for all the elements to shine though. In this case it was a choreographed dance which had been discussed in great detail by the time the mix began, which gave more room for Greg to work his magic in the mix.

Every second of sound in this film was meticulously crafted by the whole team, which has given Apollo 13: Survival an authentic and cinematic experience that we’re all very proud of.