The ‘Project Hail Mary’ Sound Design Crafted a New Language for Rocky

[Editor’s note: This article contains spoilers for “Project Hail Mary.”]

One of the nice things about prose is the absolutely enormous narrative checks you don’t ever have to cash. Andy Weir can write that an alien scientist from the star 40 Eridani has a tonal language that ranges from things that sound, to the human ear, like the deepest whale calls to the highest notes on a piccolo, and the reader’s mind does all the work to imagine that.

But for the film adaptation of “Project Hail Mary,” sound designers Erik Aadahl and Ethan Van der Ryn were actually on the hook to come up with that vast aural range for a conlang, and, even more importantly, create a sonic connection between audience and character, similar to the one that the aforementioned Eridanian scientist “Rocky” (James Ortiz) forges with human scientist Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling).  

In fact, the sound design team’s first task, as soon as they got a cut of the Phil Lord and Chris Miller sci-fi adventure, adapted by Drew Goddard from Weir’s book, was to create an Eridanian language. They needed to craft a sonic baseline of performance to stand alongside the work of actor/puppeteer James Ortiz and the film’s VFX team for Rocky.

That meant figuring out how to make Rocky sound as expressive and excited as the character on the page. Lord and Miller wanted to be able to direct Rocky’s vocal performance in the same way that they’d direct a human actor. After all, forget Ryan Gosling; Aadahl and Van der Ryn needed sound work that could act alongside Meryl Streep. 

Much like the scientists working to discover how to save our sun from being eaten by a mysterious substance called astrophage and ending life on Earth as we know it, the sound designers needed to run a lot of different experiments. 

‘Project Hail Mary’©MGM/Courtesy Everett Collection

First, they tried loading a palette of sounds onto a MIDI keyboard, which they could then “play” like a Rocky-sized piano. “The idea was: This needs to be a performance. So the most fluid way to do that is to be able to play sounds as a performance,” Van der Ryn told IndieWire. “We quickly had to jettison that process because on our first demo for Phil and Chris, they heard something that felt like processing. Even though these [were] all organic sounds and there wasn’t any processing happening, something about having the sounds go through a keyboard was triggering something subtle in their brains and throwing it off. We basically had to assemble all the pieces by hand within Pro Tools.” 

Capturing the performance aspect of Rocky’s language in all those many Pro Tools layers, therefore, had to come through the kinds of sounds that Aadahl and Van der Ryn used. Deciding to start with the most sonically challenging Rocky/Grace scenes in the film, they tried a wide range of sounds, too. 

The moment isn’t the first meeting or any of the intense “fishing” that Rocky and Grace get up to later to obtain the tools to counter astrophage. It’s when Grace travels down the new corridor between the Hail Mary (voiced by Priya Kansara of “Polite Society” fame) and the Eridian ship, still light on the ability to translate between the two of them, and they try to talk to each other about the astrophage problem impacting both of their home solar systems. 

‘Project Hail Mary’©MGM/Courtesy Everett Collection

“It’s a great scene for us because they have a back and forth in that scene, and it’s really naked. It’s a great several minutes where we can really establish what Rocky sounds like, and we probably did that scene several dozen times, with totally different approaches, with Chris and Phil,” Aadahl told IndieWire. “We were just trying to hone in on, OK, what is the sound? We started a little bit more creature-ish and animalistic, then we went more musical.”  

Music, in fact, unlocked all the other decisions the sound team made about Rocky. Specifically, Chris Miller voiced a desire to make Rocky’s language sound pretty. “That pushed us into more of a flute direction, and we wound up using [an] ocarina for higher notes and jug for lower notes. We talked to Andy [Weir] personally, and he broke Rocky’s anatomy down for us — he’s basically got like five different bladders — so his whole palette wound up being a combination of wind instruments and calls from the animal world, from whales to birds,” Aadahl said. 

With a sound palette in place, Aadahl and Van der Ryn then had to do the reverse of what Grace does in the film: They come up with sounds and expressive tonality for each word Rocky says, and then precisely place them for each Rocky line. 

“Even on the mixing stage, you know, Phil and Chris might be like, ‘Can we change the word for sleep?’ And we’d come up with a new combination of notes and tones for the word sleep and then have to go, OK, now we need to update that in Reel 3, and Reel 5, and two hours into the movie, and also tune it to the context for what Rocky’s emotionally going through as a character in that moment, too,” Aadahl said. “It turned out to be a giant artistic, sonic puzzle.” 

‘Project Hail Mary’©MGM/Courtesy Everett Collection

“It was a process to find the right balance between going too creature or pulling the other way and going too musical and finding the happy balance between those two poles to create something that’s an organic, living creature sound,” Van der Ryn agreed. “That would change word to word and sentence to sentence and moment to moment.” 

But the variability really allowed the sound team to lean into the emotional swings of “Project Hail Mary” in a rewarding way. For instance, some of the Foley work on Rocky’s “hamster ball” as it moves around the Hail Mary got played up for both comedy and chaos. “There was an actual, physical ball on set. The puppet wasn’t in it, but they had it on a wheel and axle so somebody could push it around like one of those lawn-clipper things, and the sound of that on set was ridiculous. Like, bang!” Aadahl said. “It actually made us laugh, and so we were like, OK, maybe we go a little crazy with it when Rocky shows up and then [we pull it back].” 

But in the most dire moments, when Rocky needs to put himself at risk to save Grace while the Hail Mary is spinning faster than any hamster wheel, Van der Ryn said that the sound design was a huge part of how we understand the chaos and danger and cost of Rocky’s bravery.

“We wanted Rocky’s vocals calling to Grace to be the first sound that brings him back to consciousness a bit,” Van der Ryn said. “That scene was a thrilling challenge of figuring out how to deal with the sound design and the music and the effects and the vocals and when to pull all the sound out, too. It was a process figuring out what combination of all these elements and the timing of the elements would have the most impact. But I ended up being super happy with the way that turned out.” 

Everyone in Earth’s solar system and the 40 Eridani system — or at least everyone who watches “Project Hail Mary” — should end up being pretty happy with it, too. 

“Project Hail Mary” is now playing in theaters.