Why ASMR Invaded the Soundscape of ‘La Bola Negra’

There are a lot of things that can be done in a month, theoretically — but it takes a special kind of close-knit team to take the sound design of a film from picture lock to a premiere at Cannes in a month. Supervising sound designers Alejandro López and Anna Harrington had exactly that challenge with “La Bola Negra,” not only directors Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo’s most ambitious film to date, but one of the most epic films to come out of Spain in recent memory.

The pair, who’ve worked on Los Javis projects going back to “Veneno,” had a very condensed span to design multiple timelines and storylines that the directors wanted to each have a slightly different sonic feeling.

For the story of Carlos (Milo Quifes), set in 1932 in Grenada, López and Harrington had license to be a little bit more expressive in the sound design to heighten the emotions of the closeted young man accused of being a homosexual during his attempt to join his father’s members-only casino. This tracks with the fact it is, eventually, revealed to be the lost Federico García Lorca play, “La Bola Negra.”

For the 1937 story of Sebastian (Guitarricadelafuente), however, sound was an important, invisible storytelling partner, guiding its protagonist down the path towards rescuing that lost play by falling in love with Lorca’s (Alberto Cortés) former lover Rafael (Miguel Bernardeau) before he’s shot by fascists in the aftermath of the Battle of Santander during the Spanish Civil War. “The importance there was on the off-screen sound to help tell the story,” López told IndieWire. “To have an oppressive atmosphere beyond the frame.”

The gunshots, shouts, vehicles, movement, and marching that López and Harrington craft offscreen all create a kind of strident tide that threatens to wash Sebastian, Rafael, and/or both of them away at key moments in their story. Harrington did a lot of work with the cast of the 1937 section to precisely sculpt ADR, as much to concoct a sense of tragic, and especially Lorquian, chaos as to maintain key pieces of dialogue.

‘La Bola Negra’ Carla Oset/Netflix

The contemporary 2017 storyline of Sebastian’s grandson Alberto (Carlos González) rediscovering the play his grandfather saved, meanwhile, was meant to be as irritatingly digital and constantly jittering as Alberto’s anxiety is. “Alberto is always surrounded by noise,” Harrington told IndieWire. “Like, he cannot think straight because he’s surrounded by so much noise all of the time.”

But while each storyline has its own specific texture, the sound design team also crafted moments of breathtaking contrasts. There’s invisible but undeniable power when all that noise falls away, where the harsh and heightened soundscapes resolve into softer and more beautiful sonic worlds.

Key among these is a sequence when Sebastian rushes back to the hospital where he’s based and where Rafael is held prisoner, believing that his unrequited (or so he thinks) love may have already been executed while he’d been given a night off. He rushes into the pale dawn light, relieved to find Rafael beaten, but still alive and asleep in a hospital bed. There’s a hush to the moment that brings relief, but not because it’s wholly silent — it’s because of the way that López and Harrington sculpt the sound.

“That moment has really close sound when Sebastian sort of traces [Rafael’s body] and almost touches him. The idea of the shot was for it to be like ASMR. No music at all. Really close, human sounds — the breathing of them both — [were designed] to make that moment immersive. And then I used a low rumble underneath that creates a really strange sensation. It’s like some kind of telluric sound that comes from the Earth. It’s Lorquian.”

“In Lorca’s universe, there are a lot of references to sound,” López added. “We used a lot of resonances with the wind, the ocean, the sound of the waves in the hospital resonating, the winds from the Sierra Nevada, when the old woman appears in the snow. It’s a leitmotif.”

‘La Bola Negra’Carla Oset/Netflix

Sonic leitmotifs, sounds that contain emotional and musical resonances, are important to how “La Bola Negra” moves between timelines, but they’re also how the sound design team added texture to the footage of each of the different timelines. The digital 4K world of Alberto tempted the designers to add sound to absolutely everything in the frame, and make it all as sharp and precise as the image. The 35mm footage, by contrast, could be a little more expressive, the textures a little unbounded by what we see. “It’s like the picture is asking for a certain kind of sound,” Harrington said.

It speaks to the strength of the story of “La Bola Negra,” then, that the sound has its own trajectory alongside the image and the characters. And all in about a month.

“Everybody worked like 200% helping each other. [Composer] Raül Refree was calling us. We were calling [Editor] Alberto Gutiérrez, like, ‘Are you cutting this?’ There was a lot of exchanging ideas and helping each other because we had no time at all,” Harrington said. “Everybody wants to do their best, because we knew from the start we were doing something that touches people.”

“La Bola Negra” is now playing in theaters.