How ‘Arcane’ Season 2 Turned Sound and Songs Into Its Secret Sauce
By the end of Season 1 of “Arcane,” both the utopian, steampunk city of Piltover and its straight-up punk undercity of Zaun had seen better days. Season 2 of the Netflix animated series, which incorporates the champions and settings of the “League of Legends” games as the backdrop for its story, doubles down on its commitment to property damage, brightly colored mayhem, and new and exciting Hextech weapons that cause both.
Grandiose and complex fight sequences would be a challenge for anyone, but leveling them up is particularly tricky if you want that expansion to boast real narrative and emotional stakes. As much as Studio Fortiche’s gorgeous animation and the cast’s sharp voice performances open the door into Runeterra, the show’s unseen elements — its sound and its music — hook us into the world of “Arcane.” And the show’s creative team doubled down on these, as well.
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The original songs created for Season 2 were utilized in extended, wordless setpieces that allowed Studio Fortiche to incorporate emotionally expressive, strikingly different animation styles. Whether it was a painfully flat, charcoal funeral for Caitlyn’s (Katie Leung) mother or the rainbow lighting–packed showdown between star-crossed sisters Jinx (Ella Purnell) and Vi (Hailee Steinfeld) near the end of Episode 3, “those songs are always king for Riot,” re-recording mixer Andrew Garrett Lange told IndieWire.
Serving these kings (nine of them in Arc 1 of Season 2 alone) meant making sure the songs were loud and proud in the sound mix while balancing key, emotionally motivated hits from the environmental sound effects. “Finding the moments to pop the sound effects out and then get out of the way for the music? That’s probably one of the biggest challenges for the whole series for me,” Lange said.
Even when working on sequences guided by Alexander Temple and Alex Seaver’s original score, there’s a balletic give and take between music and sound to create an emotional crescendo. Take, for example, the declaration of martial law in Piltover at the end of Episode 3, with warlord Ambessa (Ellen Thomas) using a terrorist attack to name Caitlyn as the general in command of the city.
It begins in a stew of sound where the crowd’s murmurs (care of the show’s loop group), the clinks of armor, and the whirring of gears are as audible as the score. Then the logic of authority takes hold among the crowd, and we no longer need to hear them. The flourishes of the strings and the dark baying of the horns, picking up momentum, do the trick. As Ambessa begins a classic group chest thump to cement Caitlyn’s position, the sound of fists hitting armor become almost a percussive element of the score that takes prominence in the mix. Political power has a way of overwhelming the forces that opened the door for it, after all.
Even at a heightened moment like this, Ambessa’s dialogue also needs to ring out. At this, and at even more elevated, noisy times and fights throughout Arc 1, “The music’s at 11, the sound effects are at 11, but we have to hear every word intelligibly,” re-recording mixer Penny Harold told IndieWire. “And a lot of the time that [challenge] includes a lot of cool processing on the dialogue.”
After experimenting, Harold and the sound team took a page from music vocal mixing, which differs from mixing dialogue for TV. They used the CLA 76 compressor from Waves to control dialogue volume and found that it gave the dialogue a grittier sound. “I wouldn’t use it on every show for sure, but it felt like once we changed the way we were working and embraced that style of mixing, it was the gel, and suddenly it felt like the mix came together. We didn’t have to fight so hard for lines in these really loud scenes,” Harold said.
Which was a boon; it’s hard enough to normalize dialogue recorded in actors’ home studios (often closets). Dialog editor and supervising sound editor Brad Beaumont couldn’t praise the cast highly enough, from multiple actors navigating falling hangers to their willingness to re-record additional breaths and efforts.
“Ella Purnell rolled in for a 9 a.m. [efforts ADR session], remotely, in Vancouver, while she’s also filming ‘Yellowjackets,’ and we’re like, ‘We could have scheduled this on a different day,’ and she was like, ‘No, let’s do it!’” Beaumont told IndieWire.
There was a “Let’s do it” ethos across “Arcane,” and both Beaumont and supervising sound editor Eliot Connors cited the ability to communicate across teams early and often as the key to how emotionally well integrated the sound is. Not just shooting concept art and design sketch mp3s back and forth over Slack, either. The sound team was just one floor down at Riot from the art team and the writing team.
“It’s a quick elevator ride or a hop up the staircase to have a sit-down, and having access to early concept art of stuff like the gray [toxic smoke] or some of the crazier stuff we see later in the season, led us to conceptual sound design, creating libraries and shooting over videos with design sketches,” Beaumont said.
“A vital process to telling a clear story is having this dance between all of the aural elements like dialogue, music, background, sound design, foley, and when they’re all clicking together and are given a moment to shine, it really elevates the storytelling and keeps it moving the way you want it to move and in this ‘Arcane’ fashion,” Connors told IndieWire. “The workflow that we put in place really enhances the experience, and I think it was the only way that we were able to figure out those crescendos together.”
There’s music hidden even in pure sound effects like The Gray, maybe best evidenced in the sequence in Episode 2 where Vi and Caitlyn’s strikeforce use it as cover to enter Zaun, and Jinx hides in the smoke. Wind and smoke are hard things to signal with sound because they don’t really make noise unless they’re moving through or against other physical objects. But Connors and the sound team decided to give The Grey a voice of its own.
“That led us towards giving it almost this snake-like rattle sound, which came from maracas. It has a little bit of my voice in it. And then basically we took those volume envelopes of that pattern and put in things like sand and dust and particles of debris to make it feel like smoke and give it movement,” Connors said.
The unsettling, whispering rattle of The Gray combined with a tense underscore keeps the sequence poised on a razor’s edge, even when nobody onscreen is doing much other than moving and breathing. “I think one of the secret sauces behind the sound of ‘Arcane’ is just the collaboration between sound and music,” Connors said.
In that collaboration between music and sound, “Arcane” Season 2 was able to build out a lot of big sounds for big moments, but also make every moment land that much harder, with that much more emotion. “It was never a thing where you come in and you sit in your chair and you just hit play,” Harold said. “We broke our habits. We constantly challenged ourselves to be, like, ‘How can we elevate a scene? How can we make something bigger?’”
“Arcane” Season 2 is streaming on Netflix.
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