Velvet or Wonder: Sound that silently built tension

Movie- The Hurt Locker

The Hurt Locker is an Iraqi war thriller that revolves around a bomb defusal squad. Its main key factor is the tension that builds around and accelerates throughout the movie. Without its virtuoso sound editing, the shots of the desert, the exchanges between the U.S. soldiers, their British allies, and their Iraqi enemies would lack tension and belief.

The composition of during the night scene where you can hardly see anything on the screen: It’s the darting sound effects, the background sounds, and the occasional human utterances that make the drama and the movie.

Sound Designer, Paul Ottosson’ s inclination towards organic sounds made him record most the sounds in the middle east itself. "I also recorded guns out in the deserts here in California. Then we went to foley stages, and we recorded a lot of the gear of the movie, and I also got the bomb suit that they used in the movie. There's an air conditioner in the bomb suit that the techs use. I got that down and all the sounds that it makes. And we also recorded a lot of stuff between takes. There were animals in the area and the winds and vehicles. So we tried to capture as much as we could -- city life, these calls to prayer that they have very often in the Middle East and the Muslim part of the world. There's not a whole lot of stuff we tried to fake and get by the audience." Says Ottosson.

Paul Ottosson, Sound Designer

Ottosson spent a year and a half as a ranking officer in the Swedish military, and he drew on his personal experience when creating and recording sounds for "The Hurt Locker," about a U.S. Army bomb squad disposal unit.

To always keep the viewers on their toes they played the foley louder than usual. These intelligently mixed sounds for “The Hurt Locker” definitely had scarring effects.