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Lori Mortimer

Doing the Doog with Richard Parks III [SOTG #6]

It’s great to be back with this issue of Sound Off the Ground. I spent the spring and summer developing sound-design training programs for this fall. I made a video about sound design for narrative podcasts that will be included in a Penn State podcasting course. And I’m leading a workshop called Music for Non-Musicians: Create Music on Your iOS Device, which runs on Sept 27. Participants will learn how to compose songs on their iPad or iPhone with GarageBand and a $4 generative-music app. No musical skill required (really!). You can learn more and register here. I’d love to see you there!


My all-time favorite sound design of a narrative podcast is in “The Ballad of Mount Doogie Dowler,” an episode of Storytime with Seth Rogen.

It’s the most intense, incredible true story I’ve heard on a podcast.

In the episode, Colin Dowler tells us how he decided to “do the Doog” and summit the Canadian mountain named after his grandfather, Doogie Dowler. Colin was supposed to do the Doog with his brother but ended up going alone. And he almost didn’t come back.

All because he crossed paths with a pesky 900-pound grizzly bear who tried to eat him alive.

From the start, we know that Colin survives the bear attack. I mean, he’s alive enough to tell us the story himself. And yet, I was on the edge of my seat.

I credit Seth Rogen and Colin’s storytelling skills. But the sound design also creates suspense and tension, especially during the 22 minutes dedicated to the attack itself.  

It has a percussive, instrumental, scattered Peter and the Wolf vibe. These sounds and textures amplify Colin’s emotions and illustrate the menacing actions of the bear. From a sound-design perspective, it’s not a literal scene. Yet those sounds got my heart racing and evoked Colin’s terror without a single “realistic” bear-attack sound.

It’s brilliant, and I wanted to learn how the sound for this scene was conceived. I reached out to Richard Parks III, who produced and sound designed the episode.

You may know Richard as the creator of Richard’s Famous Food Podcast, a documentary food show that is, as Richard says, “more like Pee Wee’s Play House than a normal podcast.”

Since the spring, Richard has also been publishing Dodger Blue Dream, which chronicles the Los Angeles Dodgers’ 2024 baseball season. A gambling scandal broke out early in the season when it was revealed that Ippei Mizuhara, the translator for the Dodgers’ star pitcher, Shohei Ohtani, stole millions of dollars from Ohtani to cover his own gambling debts. He will be sentenced on October 25, which just happens to coincide with the World Series.

Dodger Blue Dream episodes “The Talented Mr. Ippei” and “The Complaint Against Ippei” cover the scandal.

Richard says the podcast is “a perfect primer for anybody casually interested in baseball and looking for a fun way to get caught up on some of the year’s biggest storylines in a tightly edited, sound-rich package.”

Sound Designing the Doog

Now, let’s get back to our topic at hand: The Doog! Richard and I spoke for an hour, so I’ve edited and condensed our conversation below. To get started, let’s look at some key points Richard made:

  • Sound design is like writing and editing. With writing and editing, you’re arranging words in a particular order. And with sound design, you’re arranging sounds – music, narration, interview tape, sound effects – in a particular order.
  • The informational and emotional meaning of sound is always a part of whatever piece of sound you’re using.
  • The emotional tenor of the story overall, especially in the interview tape and what you know about the subject of the story, should drive your decisions about how you’re going to approach the overall sound design of the piece.
  • For “The Ballad of Mount Doogie Dowler,” Richard decided that there would be no difference between music and sound design.
  • An audio project is really a series of decisions – deciding what to put into a container, how big the container is, how much stuff you want to put in it, and the order in which you’ll put it in the container.

How would you describe your approach to sound design in general?

The first thing for me is that sound design is just a part of writing. I don’t see a line between music, sound design, or tape. The informational and emotional meaning of sound is always a part of whatever piece of sound you’re using. And so sound design is deciding what length and order that those things go in from zero minutes to the end of the piece.

And that’s also what writing is. Inevitably, what you’re doing is arranging sound in a certain order. The job is always the same, whether you’re writing, editing, sound designing, scoring. Those things have symbiotic, inevitable relationships.

The more you think of it as an integrated process, it opens up avenues for better ideas, in my experience.

In the bear attack scene, I expected realistic bear sounds, like growling and snarling. But you chose non-representational sound design. Why did you choose that?

It was a decision that came early on, and I think that it just made sense for the piece because it’s man and nature. And Colin telling the story of being alone, of being attacked by a bear, just happens to lend itself to that kind of sound design.

You have to use the emotional tenor of the story overall. In this case, the interview tape, the man telling the story, what he’s like, what his experience was, and what you know about him from your interactions producing the episode – taking all that into account, to make the first decisions about how you’re going to approach how it should sound.

Other Storytime episodes we did are these kind of psychedelic multimedia collages, as opposed to the stark-landscape oil painting from, you know, 1898 that this piece was. It just made sense for this piece.

How did you create the specific sounds for that scene – the boom-boom of a drum (was it timpani?), the scratching and clicking sounds …

I worked with a composer named William Ryan Fritch, who I’ve worked with for eons. I come from a documentary film background, and Will contributed music [for some of those projects].

When we worked together before, he gave me music, and then I wrote and scored and sound designed with that. That’s how I like to work. I like to start with music a lot of the time.

With Doogie Dowler, because of what the story was, I came up with comps [musical examples] that I knew I wanted to talk to Will about. It was like dirty, pulsing, synth things. I put in something with a sort of acoustic, eerie Americana vibe.

I knew that he had this in his palette, because he lives in a barn and has all these antique instruments. He’s always playing and recording things. He sent me a bunch of files that were like sound effects. For example, he was making little clicky sounds with an instrument, basically. A bass clarinet.

Then I got to bounce off of the rhythms that were in those files and mess with them. And I realized the music and sound design were the same thing. I immediately took that as a rule for the piece. I’m allowed to change the rule later on, but for now, that’s the rule, and I’m going to see where that takes me just to create forward momentum.

There were a couple times that Colin made noises himself. I’m sorry, this is pretty gory stuff – but he talks about the bear chewing on him sounding like a lab chewing on a cow bone.

He also describes the bear’s nails on the gravel, and he goes like this [Richard makes scatching noises]. He even had a rhythm to it. So, I took those and they became another piece of the sound design.

Then I had a new variation to my rule, which was to use any nonverbal sound that Colin made.

You didn’t want to use realistic sound effects?

In Doogie Dowler, I think that a man’s voice, along with the kind of texture and musical elements in the palette that Will gave me, is hyper-real in someone’s mind.

To me, it feels like reading a good book because it’s only descriptive to a certain point. And that really engages the mind’s imagination. And I think that’s what people refer to as cinematic in audio.

This story had a beautifully simple version of that. I had played with a few sound design pieces [realistic sounds], and I realized that it was taking me out of the cinematic world a little bit.

So I decided wouldn’t go into my sound design folders [of sound effects]. That decision indicated a philosophical approach to how I would work on this thing.

Richard’s Famous Food Podcast has what you’ve called a maximalist sound design. Doogie Dowler leans more minimalist. How do you know when to pull back?

It’s good to think about it in terms of decisions. That’s what every creative project is like – you just need to make decisions.

That’s what editing is. You have to decide to cut, cut away. It’s like we’re deciding what to put into a container. How big the container is, how much stuff you want to put in it, and the order of it.

The whole idea of the music and sound design is to help transport you. It puts you right there. It’s like creating a proscenium for the storyteller to be heard. There’s a spotlight, it’s in the right place, and you know that the person wielding it is being intentional about it. And, so, sound design just doing a lot in order to get out of the way.

The episode is 59 minutes long, and the bear attack scene is 22 minutes of that. It’s incredibly suspenseful, even though we know Colin is going to survive.

There’s no comparison to Man Fights Off Bear. It’s the perfect distillate of high stakes, live or die. And we know that he lives, but also, we’re not thinking about that if it’s told right.

It’s hard work. And it went incredibly fast. Working on that episode was one of the most intense things I’ve done.

The attack probably lasted only a few minutes in real life. Why did you decide to slow time down?

It all comes back to how Colin told it. I think when you go through a physical trauma like this, it’s not uncommon to have time slow down.

And Colin had all this detail. Sometimes I try to work around exhaustive detail or length. But in this case, I realized it was just part of the fact that we were talking to someone who fought off a grizzly bear, and it means that we’re gonna sit there and we’re gonna hear all about that moment because it’s embedded in his memory for very good reason.

Any final sound design thoughts?

I think it’s important to just remember that the job is different depending on what venue your work is going to be in, and what the purpose is, and what the emotional and informational value of the interview – and therefore the piece – is going to be, and to whom.

You need a lot of context, so I wouldn’t want to prescribe one thing or another. But each piece is its own movie, and this one was kind an outdoors action-horror-real-life thriller movie. So, I made decisions around that.

In terms of like how to approach things, I think the last thing I would say is just make me listen and make me care.

You can follow Richard Parks III at @reechardparks on Instagram and X.

Lori Mortimer

Copy That! [SOTG #1]

Years ago, one of my sons was drawing a picture after dinner. He said he was copying something his friend drew that day in preschool.

I said, “Oh, that’s nice. But why don’t you draw your own original thing?”

He said, “My own original thing is copying people.”

Turns out, he was on to something.

We learn by copying others

You can expect copying to be a recurring theme in this newsletter. As in, don’t be afraid to copy, borrow, or imitate ideas and techniques from other sound designers. That’s the best way to learn.

Color photo of tortie cat sitting and facing the camera, with a window behind her. The photo is repeated four times in a square layout. The photo is labeled "Copy cat".

Sound Off the Ground began germinating in my brain when I read the first issue of Alice Wilder’s newsletter, Starting Out. In an interview with Alice, Tobin Low said the most helpful mentors to new audio makers are often not experts or higher-ups but people just ahead of them in skill and experience.

But for independent podcasters who don’t work on a team, it can be hard to find a mentor or discover work by people who are slightly ahead of you.

Luckily, we can still learn from the work of people who are far more advanced. My favorite podcasts tend to be narrative-style shows made by experienced, professional teams with actual budgets (god love ya!). These teams make complex, rich, immersive podcasts that sound amazing. Of course, their skill sets and resources far exceed mine.

How can I learn from my favorite “higher-ups” if there’s such a big gap between them and me? How can I copy what they do with my skills still in the larval stage?

By narrowing the scope of what I’m listening for in their sound design.

Concentrate on timing and music

When learning a new skill, sometimes you get worse before you get better. But I never wanted to reveal that to my audience. I wanted each episode to sound a little better than its predecessor.

So I concentrated on what I knew I could manage — what was within my skill set or just a little past it — when listening to other audio for inspiration.

I started by giving most of my attention to timing and music because to me, they’re the core of basic sound design. I just needed the ability to:

  • make basic edits in my audio software (DAW) of choice
  • listen to and identify cadences and patterns in speech and music

Keeping in mind my preference for narrative shows, here’s what I listened for (and still do).

Timing:

  • Transitions between scenes or when music or sound effects start, end, or blend together. When is the music fading in or out? When does it start or stop suddenly, without fading? What’s happening in the story when the music starts or ends? Is that effective? Would I change it or leave it the way it is? 
  • Pacing and spacing. Does the timing sound intentional? Does the story “breathe”? If it doesn’t, is it that way for a reason? When a speaker says something important or reflective, is there time for the audience to sit with it and their own thoughts and emotions for a few seconds, or does the scene jump quickly to the next thing, killing the buzz?

Music:

  • The music or sound effects under someone speaking. Does the volume level or style of music compete with the people speaking, making it harder to hear or follow? Does it hang back a bit and help move the speech along? Does it complement what’s being said? Would another style of music have been better? 
  • Repetition. Does the same music appear more than once in the episode? When does that happen? Why do I think it’s repeated in those places? Is the repetition effective for the story or is it just … repetitive?

Timing + Music:

  • The beat or cadence of the music under narration. Does music line up well with the phrasing and timing the speaker’s words and pauses? Are quiet parts of the music that allow the speaker to be more prominent? Do musical beats align with the words the speaker is emphasizing? 

By listening intentionally for these sound-design choices, I stayed focused and was able compare similar scenarios across different podcasts and episodes. Over time, I developed a sense for what sounded good to me. And then I tried to mimic it in my episodes.

Originality is nothing but judicious imitation.

Voltaire

Example: Outside/In’s “Windfall” series

Sometimes I nerd out and listen to a show or episode more than once, focusing on different things each time.

I did that with Outside/In’s “Windfall” series about the history and future of wind farms in the United States. The first time through, I listened because I wanted to learn about wind farms. But it had such great sound design that I listened again to focus on that.

The entire series is beautifully sound designed, and I’ll probably talk about it again in future issues. But focusing on timing, specifically, I learned from “Windfall” to expand the transitions between scenes in an episode. Here’s an example from “Windfall Part 1: Sea Change.” (If you’re reading the newsletter in your email, click here.)

Notice how long the musical transition is between the end of the first scene (when Sam Evans Brown says “…to reshape the future of where our energy comes from”) and the next one (when Annie Ropeik says, “In the spring of this year….”). 

It’s 16 seconds.

In audio, 16 seconds is an eternity. In many cases, including probably all of my Mementos episodes, it would be too long. But not here. 

The hosts have just spent the first seven minutes establishing the background for the series, and they’re about to delve into the details. There’s no rush to get to the next scene. Listeners are afforded the time to reflect on what they’ve just heard about the context for the series and the multiple voices they’ll hear throughout it. 

Although a 16-second musical transition would be too long for my episodes, I still took something from this “Windfall” example: I can trust my audience with longer transitions than I thought.

Conventional wisdom says audiences are busy and have short attention spans, so you better keep things moving. But the “Windfall” example showed me that’s not necessarily true and that I could play around with longer transitions between scenes. If the story was good, the listeners would still be there when the next scene started.

I wouldn’t have noticed that minor detail had I not been listening specifically to learn. It’s important, I think, because over the course of an episode, making small adjustments to timing and pacing can make a big impact on the listener’s experience. And those kinds of adjustments are often within a beginner’s skill set.

So the next time you’re listening to your favorite show, pay close attention to timing and music, and see if there’s anything you want to copy as “your own original thing” on your next piece.

Cheers,

Lori

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