The Sound of Fallout: From Iconic Games to Prestige TV

Summary

Podcast Summary: “The Sound of Fallout: From Iconic Games to Prestige TV”

Podcast: Twenty Thousand Hertz
Host: Dallas Taylor
Guests: Mark Lampert, Sue Cahill, Daniel Coleman, Steve Busino, Keith Rogers
Release Date: December 3, 2025

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Overview

In this episode, Dallas Taylor explores the legendary sound world of the Fallout franchise, from its roots as a cult-classic post-apocalyptic video game to its adaptation as a prestige television series on Amazon. Through conversations with key sound designers and editors from both the games and the TV show, the episode dives deep into the challenges and delights of creating the sonic identity of the Fallout universe, highlighting the analog, mechanical aesthetic that sets it apart from more typical “slick” sci-fi sonics. The episode is rich with behind-the-scenes stories, practical approaches to world-building through sound, and reflections on how sound memories connect games, TV, and fans alike.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Dallas’ Fallout Origin Story and Early Collaboration

• Dallas shares his personal Fallout fan history and how it led to meeting Mark Lampert (Audio Director for Fallout 3, 4, 76).

• A chance meeting and mutual professional respect led Dallas to mix the Fallout: New Vegas trailer, launching a continued studio relationship.

  Notable Quote:

  • "I remember internally exploding … But externally, I was like, play it cool, play it cool, play it cool." — Dallas Taylor (04:04)

2. The Sonic World of Fallout Games

• Mark Lampert describes how Fallout’s “frozen-in-1950s” future required an analog approach—think metal, hydraulics, CRT screens, and mechanical clicks.
• The team eschewed generic sci-fi sounds in favor of grounded, industrial textures to make the world tangible and immersive.
• The design for the iconic “vault doors” needed to feel like massive real machines rather than digital Hollywood fantasy.
  • "[Vault doors] should sound like what it is doing. It is two big pieces of metal... there's some sort of hydraulic assistance." — Mark Lampert (08:41)

3. Game Sound Design: The Everyday and the Extraordinary

• Footstep design: about 250 unique sounds, meticulously tailored so that nothing becomes annoying or stands out negatively, despite endless player repetition.
• The sounds of mundane actions (walking, opening doors) provide a believable sound bed; the special moments (power armor, weapons) stand out by contrast.
  • "We don't know how much it's going to happen. It's up to the player. The player has total freedom." — Mark Lampert (09:39)

4. Signature Technologies and Creatures

• Pip Boy: Built from real-world mechanical sounds, especially hard drive ticks, to evoke a tactile, analog gadget.
  • "A lot of the hard drive ticks that you hear... that's just an old 7200rpm hard drive booting up." — Mark Lampert (12:35)
• Power Armor: Transformed from an instant suit-up to a full vehicle-like entry process, with evolved sounds to match the new mechanics and add drama.
• Dogmeat: The beloved dog companion is voiced with authentic recordings of a designer’s German shepherd, River, capturing play, eating, and organic behavior (15:50).

5. Transition to Prestige Television

• In adapting Fallout for TV, the sound team (led by Sue Cahill and Daniel Coleman) faced the challenge of honoring iconic game sounds while elevating them for cinema.
  • "The overall sound was not in the sci-fi digital world. It was in the analog mechanical world." — Sue Cahill (21:27)
• The team referenced Bethesda’s original assets and even had a color-coded system to track which show sounds came from the game, were built new, or were temp (“offline”) placeholders (24:52).

6. Reimagining Creatures and Effects for TV

• Vault Door & Pip Boy: Small samples from games were referenced or sampled directly for authenticity; the Pip Boy in particular is “about 90% from the game” (24:26).
• Yao Guai (mutant bear) & Gulper (giant salamander): TV reimagining of creatures required nuanced differences and creative flexibility; Daniel Coleman was hired after demonstrating his range on these creatures (28:26).
• Collaborative spirit: multiple sound designers contributed, multiple design approaches combined, and even director Jonathan Nolan did throat gurgle performances for final versions!
  • "He's just practically eating the microphone, making all these throat gurgly sounds." — Daniel Coleman on Jonathan Nolan recording for the Gulper (33:27)

7. Iconic Character and Weapon Sounds

• Knight’s Power Armor Voice: Each line was custom-treated to calibrate comedic and menacing tones, especially for the helmet-off “reveal” (35:19).
• The Ghoul’s Gun: Started as a game-faithful shotgun, but evolved with creative liberty to an explosive “potato cannon” to fit the show’s unique needs (38:12, 39:43).
  • "It made this iconic sound that is very far away from anything that exists in the game." — Daniel Coleman (40:17)

8. Sound as Memory and Emotion

• Both game and show sound teams reflect on how small, authentic audio moments trigger “scent memory” and fan nostalgia (41:36).
  • "...A little through line for players who are going to instantly feel and recognize that familiarity, almost like a scent memory." — Mark Lampert (41:36)
• Daniel Coleman muses on how sound arose before images as storytelling’s primal vehicle:
  • "We get much more emotional content and sense of ourselves through sound than we ever do through visual media.” — Daniel Coleman (42:08)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “It is really worth spending a lot of time on. Because if there is anything stand out about any of the individual samples that make up those footsteps... you’re going to hear it. Eventually.” — Mark Lampert (10:40)
• “The shortest path is the answer.” — Mark Lampert on recording creature sounds with the human voice, in both games and the TV show (34:57)
• “Stay close to this game sound... it’s really great to know, okay, we can experiment, we can go to extremes.” — Daniel Coleman (40:37)
• “It’s the fundamental part of storytelling ... we get much more emotional content and sense of ourselves through sound than we ever do through visual media.” — Daniel Coleman (42:08)

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Timestamps of Key Segments

• [03:08] — Mark Lampert recounts joining Bethesda and the bootstrapped start of Fallout sound.
• [08:41] — Designing sounds for Fallout’s analog technology.
• [10:14] — The work behind “mundane” game sounds.
• [12:35] — Creating the Pip Boy from real, old hardware sounds.
• [15:50] — Recording real dog River for Dogmeat’s sound.
• [21:22] — Sue Cahill on bringing Fallout’s analog soundscape to TV.
• [24:10] — Referencing and adapting iconic game assets for TV.
• [26:23] — Building the Yao Guai and Gulper for television.
• [33:27] — Director Jonathan Nolan provides creature vocalizations for the Gulper.
• [35:19] — Customizing the Knight’s power armor voice for humor and character.
• [38:12] — Crafting the Ghoul’s signature gun for TV.
• [41:36] — Mark Lampert on sonic nostalgia and memory.
• [42:08] — Daniel Coleman on sound as the primal form of storytelling.

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Conclusion

This episode captures a vibrant, affectionate, and technical look behind two of the most ambitious soundscapes in entertainment—the Fallout games and the streaming television adaptation. Through candid interviews and deep dives into the creative workflow, listeners experience how authentic, analog, and lovingly detailed sound transforms post-apocalyptic fiction into a place that feels both familiar and unforgettable. The camaraderie between creators past and present, and their shared reverence for sound’s emotional and memeorial power, make this a must-listen for fans of Fallout, film, and the art of sound.

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Transcript

[Dallas Taylor]

Hey listeners. I love it when people engage with our episodes. So if something we make resonates with you or reminds you of something, or you have an idea for an episode, then let us know if you're on Spotify. The simplest way to do that is to leave us a comment. Just open any episode and scroll down to the comments section over on Apple Podcasts. Just leave us a review and include whatever you'd like to say there. You can also get in touch using the contact form on our website 20k.org we read every message, every comment, and every review that comes in. And while we don't have time to respond to every single one, we do whenever we can. But we always love hearing from you. Thanks. This episode is sponsored by CuriosityStream, an incredible streaming service that I personally subscribe to. They have thousands of documentaries on secret histories, space exploration, true crime, ancient engineering, and so much more. Right now, CuriosityStream is giving 20,000 Hz listeners their best deal of the year, which is 50% off an annual subscription. For just $1.67 a month, you'll get a full year of the best documentary streaming service. Visit curiositystream.com 20k for 50% off. That's curiositystream.com 20k. You can also use the promo code 20k for the same discount. A quick heads up. This episode is about a video game and TV show that features scary monsters and sci fi violence. While this episode has clean language, there are sounds in it that might be too much for little ears. You're listening to 20,000 hertz, the stories behind the world's most iconic and fascinating sounds. I'm Dallas Taylor. Before 20,000 hertz or my sound agency, Defacto Sound existed, I worked as a senior sound designer and mixer for the Discovery Channel and all the networks under its umbrella. Back then, Discovery was based in the Washington, D.C. area. D.C. is an amazing city, and one very cool bonus of living there was that it was also the setting of my favorite game at the time, Fallout 3. I could literally navigate the National Mall because I knew it so well from playing Fallout. And it turned out the publisher of Fallout, Bethesda Softworks, was also based in the D.C. area. A few years went by and I eventually left Discovery to start Defacto Sound. But I never stopped loving Fallout, and one day I worked up the courage to email the audio director at Bethesda Softworks, Mark Lampert. I sheepishly explained that I'm a sound designer myself and asked if he wanted to meet up.

[Mark Lampert]

I think it was just an email.

[Dallas Taylor]

That it started with That's Mark, who is the audio Director on Fallout 3, 4 and 76, and now is a principal sound designer at Bethesda.

[Mark Lampert]

It was just, hey, I'm Dallas. I do this. You know, I live in the area, work at this studio over here. We should meet for lunch sometime. That's kind of what I remember. It was a completely friendly, not asking for anything. We're two people who should know one another.

[Dallas Taylor]

Yeah. On my side, what was interesting is I was like, an uber fan of Fallout at this point, so I'm glad I played it cool. So we met up, and Mark gave me a tour of Bethesda Game Studios. At one point, he walked me into a screening room, basically a small theater they used for team reviews. And that is where I remember you saying, do you mix 5.1 by chance? And I was like, oh, yeah. I do a lot of discovery work, and everything that we do for the most part, is 5.1. And you're like, I have this trailer for this other game, game, Fallout New Vegas. Would you be interested in doing that? And I remember internally exploding with that, like, no, I'm excited. Just as excited now telling it. There was no agenda other than to meet a audio hero who's working on one of the greatest games that I've ever experienced in my life. And by the end of our first meeting, you asked if I wanted to mix the first Fallout New Vegas gameplay trailer. And it was the biggest whiplash in my career. But externally, I was like, play it cool, play it cool, play it cool. And I was just like, hmm, yeah, I bet I could do that. And I put everything I could into that thing. Here's the trailer that I mixed and sound designed, which shows the player taking on mutant creatures, robots, rocket launchers, explosive lasers, and more. As I go riding me along and they sing. Oh, interesting.

[Mark Lampert]

I didn't realize that was such a pivotal hangout.

[Dallas Taylor]

Oh, it was cute. I just wanted to meet somebody that I respected. And then I walk out the door with a trailer that turned into, gosh, 30 more projects for many other Fallout DLCs and some Fallout 4, some Elder Scrolls. All of the other studios around the world, like Dishonored and Evil within and Wolfenstein, it just, like, kept going from that point. So it was a huge, pivotal moment. But this episode isn't about the trailers. It's about the sonic world of Fallout, from the earliest games through the prestige television series on Amazon. So for anyone who's not familiar with the franchise, let me paint the picture. Fallout takes place in an alternate version of The United States, where history split from ours after World War II. Instead of moving into the digital age like our world, society kept its 1950s culture, design and values, but powered everything with nuclear energy. Then, in 2077, a massive nuclear war wiped out civilization. Some people survived in underground vaults, while others struggled on the surface. Fallout 3, the game I started with, picks up 200 years later in the year 2277. It's a world that's frozen in this uncanny version of what people in the 1950s thought the future would look like. You play the game as a vault dweller emerging from your underground shelter into the ruined wasteland of America. From there, you complete quests and scavenge for gear, all while facing mutants, raiders, and robots. The Fallout games layer real vintage music with a mix of quirky retro nostalgia, sci fi, horror, and big action. The original Fallout game came out in 1997. Since then, the series has expanded with multiple sequels and spinoffs and sold over 55 million copies worldwide. In 2024, Fallout was adapted into a major TV series, which pulled in more than 100 million viewers and got 17 Emmy nominations. But let's go back to when Mark Lampert first got the job on Fallout 3. Back then, he was already a huge fan of the series.

[Mark Lampert]

I played the original Fallout 1 and 2 back at university, and then I worked at a studio in Austin, Texas for about two and a half years. That studio closed down. We were all laid off. And it was very quick. It was like in a week and a half. I found the job posting for Bethesda Game Studios looking for their first in house audio person. And I said, I've played all those games. And so it was an easy phone interview because I'd already played it. I had opinions of what I liked, what I didn't like. I could speak to all those kind of things and then flew up there and interviewed and it was within like two weeks or something. I was there because I said yes to something and showed up. Right place, right time, and all of a sudden all this amazing work is coming my way, a lot of which I really was not ready for or even really qualified for, but I was there. I'm going to do it and I'm going to figure it out. And I don't care how many versions it takes.

[Dallas Taylor]

Sound is essential to the world building in Fallout. While other futuristic games might have spaceships and teleportation devices, Fallout is very analog. The computers use CRT screens, the wearable devices are big and bulky, and the environments are all very industrial.

[Mark Lampert]

Take the vault, for example, there are these massive hydraulic doors all over the place. I didn't want to make them sci fi. I didn't want them to sound sleek or synthetic or just over designed. It should sound like what it is doing. It is two big pieces of metal. They're incredibly heavy, so there's some sort of hydraulic assistance. And maybe there's a pressure release when it reaches the extent of its travel or it fully closes. Do I have any recordings of my own that involve anything like that? I'll use that first. If I don't have that, I'll go to sound libraries and I'm going to pick little pieces and rearrange them and mash them into something new and just get the sound of that door.

[Dallas Taylor]

Compared to their peers in television and film, video game sound designers have very little control over how often a sound will be heard. And they have to keep that in mind when designing these sounds.

[Mark Lampert]

Players are going to do this a lot. We don't know how much it's going to happen. It's up to the player. The player has total freedom. They could come in and out of some facility and open the same door over and over and over again, or pick up some crucial item and drop it hundreds of times if that's likely to happen. I want something to sound just very plain. I don't want to constantly be showing off. Hey, look at all this cool stuff. That sounds doing it. We want to support the game. The player does not need to fall in love with the sound of each and every footstep.

[Dallas Taylor]

But just because it's not drawing your attention, that doesn't mean it's not a lot of work. In Fallout 3, there are about 250 individual footstep sounds. These vary based on whether you're walking, running, landing, or sneaking on wood, grass, gravel, broken concrete, solid concrete, hollow metal, solid metal. And the list goes on.

[Mark Lampert]

It's strangely a lot of work for something unbelievably mundane. You hear it so much and it is really worth spending a lot of time on. Because if there is anything stand out about any of the individual samples that make up those footsteps of walking on dirt in default leather boots. If there's like the tiniest squeak of a shoe in one of those, you're going to hear it. Eventually. You're going to get to hear this weird rhythm or this weird musicality that you don't want and you go in and you shave off that rough edge or you find another sample that'll work.

[Dallas Taylor]

Better when you break down the Sounds. In this game, you have this massive.

[Mark Lampert]

Bed of the everyday, the familiar, very believable, And then punctuated in little spots around that. Here and there are those really special moments or the really special device or weapon or suit of armor or chain reaction that the player causes. Then I think it's time to start playing with synthesizers, otherworldly stuff, really twist and mangle stuff, so that those things can stand out when they matter.

[Dallas Taylor]

In the game, the way you control things in your environment is with a device called the Pip Boy. It's a bulky, wearable computer that straps to your character's wrist. For the player, it acts as your menu screen, where you can see your stats, check the map, and track your progress. There's no touchscreen to use the device. Your character turns knobs and pushes buttons, each of which required a sound.

[Mark Lampert]

The source of the Pip Boy sound itself was nothing but fun because you look around the room, wherever you're sitting, wherever you're listening to this from, and you can find plenty of devices that make a click, cover a pop, or a little chirp, and all of that stuff is great raw material to create some sort of fantasy device with. And a lot of it is like an old gaming PC tower that I had. So a lot of the hard drive ticks that you hear the little reading a hard drive platter, that's just an old 7200 rpm hard drive booting up. And it was used again and again and again. Every time you flip from one page to another in the Pip Boy, I'm firing off a little sputter of those hard drive tick sounds, as if it's reading something inside. The goal was always to make it very mechanical, very analog. Like, this thing probably gets hot when it's been on and sitting on your forearm for a while.

[Dallas Taylor]

Another important piece of technology in Fallout is the power armor. It's a mechanized combat suit, almost like a bulkier version of what Iron man wears. It's pretty rare, but when you find it, you become nearly invincible. In Fallout 3, putting on the suit was instantaneous, but in later games, it became more of a process.

[Mark Lampert]

We wanted it to be like this vehicle you get into. That was a tremendous amount of work by the team to figure out not just how does this thing open up, but when the player gets into it. How does it completely change the experience? How does your view change on the sound side? How does your sound change? You can play the game while you're in the suit of armor, And you hear it a lot from the outside because you can always pop the camera out in our games into third person, And then again that sort of hydraulic release when he would get into the suit as it closes around him, pulling the fusion core or jamming a new one in. You know, those became big moments for people in the game because you could run this thing out of power or have it be damaged and have to leave it somewhere. Go go find another fusion core and then find your way back to it and then re energize it and get back in and you're back on the rails again.

[Dallas Taylor]

In Fallout, you mostly wander the wasteland alone, but sometimes you'll encounter a non player character or NPC who can join you for a while. And by far the most popular NPC is a German shepherd named Dogmeat. Dogmeat has appeared in every main game in the series, and players love him. Fallout designer Chris Taylor once said, we never expected that Dogmeat would become such a popular character. I always intended that the various NPCs that joined up with the player would come to a violent end. I was shocked when I heard of all of the work people went through to keep Dogmeat alive to the end.

[Mark Lampert]

The sound of dog meat, as much as possible we got from the real source, which was one of the designer's dog, a German shepherd named River. Awesome dog. And we got to go follow river around. Joel would be like, hey, we're going to go take river out to this park. Do you want to come along with your recording gear and we'll try to get some stuff? Dogs do not necessarily behave and follow your commands and sit and face the microphone, stop making other sounds. But nevertheless. So he'd throw the Frisbee and later on did more recording sessions where Joel would bring the dog to work and bring him some like raw rib meat. So the dog eating or attacking a lot of that stuff. Is river just settling down to lunch?

[Dallas Taylor]

Since the time Mark joined Fallout back in the mid aughts, this franchise has gotten bigger and bigger. And like the Last of Us and Halo, it eventually made the leap to prestige television. But how do you translate the sound of a game with all of its constraints to the sound of a television series?

[Daniel Coleman]

And he's just practically eating the microphone, making all these throat gurgly sounds, and it adds this great comedy level to it.

[Dallas Taylor]

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[Dallas Taylor]

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[Sue Cahill]

Fallout takes place in the future, yet it's really stuck in the 50s in a lot of ways.

[Dallas Taylor]

That's Sue Cahill, the supervising sound editor of the Fallout television series.

[Sue Cahill]

So the overall sound was not in the sci fi digital world. It was in the analog mechanical world.

[Dallas Taylor]

I interviewed sue and the Fallout sound team on the same mix stage where they mixed the show at the NBC Universal lot in Los Angeles.

[Sue Cahill]

You have all those iconic sounds that are from the game that all the gamers know. Like everyone knows the sound of the vaults. And the Pip Boy and Mr. Handy.

[Dallas Taylor]

Mr. Handy is a cheerful floating robot. Attention everyone.

[Daniel Coleman]

It's time to cut the cake.

[Sue Cahill]

So we were able to use those as our foundation and then we were able to build it out from there.

[Dallas Taylor]

One of the key creatives behind the Fallout show is executive producer Jonathan Nolan, known by his collaborators as Jonah. He also directed the first three episodes. Here's the sound designer of the Fallout series, Daniel Coleman.

[Daniel Coleman]

Jonah's prompt on working with the sound of the show was that anything that existed from the game, we were to at least reference what the sound was in the game, whether we could use that or not, and whether it fit within the context of the show. They gave us videos to watch. So There was like 10 hour videos of gameplay to watch. Operating system. And then Bethesda sent over a sort of sampling library of stuff from the various different games. So for everything that we could, we would have pieces that we could use if they would work.

[Dallas Taylor]

But.

[Daniel Coleman]

But since video game sounds are usually tiny little short snippets, most of them couldn't actually be used in the show, but they worked as a great reference. So I could listen to that and go, okay, I know what they're going, for now I'm going to start building it. And in some places where I could, I would steal little pieces of it. So like in episode one, there's the big vault door opening sequence. So I listened to all the different vault doors from the various different games and took a little starting sound that triggered my ear from Vault 111 from Fallout 4. And then as it gets to the end of the opening, there's this great wrong from Vault 76. So for a gamer, it's going to trigger, oh, I know that sound. Even though it's a tiny little piece of the actual game sound.

[Dallas Taylor]

Here's a clip of the vault sequence from the ship show.

[Daniel Coleman]

The only thing that is probably about 90% from the game is the pip boy. There's stuff that the pip boy is doing in our show that it doesn't do in the game. So we had to create things that sound like the pip boy. But for the most part, the pip boy is all authentic sounds from the game.

[Dallas Taylor]

To keep track of what sounds came from where, the team developed a color coded system. We had three codes. So one color was from the game, authentic. That's sound effects RE recording mixer Steve Busino. Another color was stuff that Daniel designed, and another color was stuff that they had in their offline, like what came from picture editorial. An offline edit is an early rough cut with placeholder sound effects that get swapped out by the sound team later. Many, many times I was asked now, is any of that actually from the game? And I could just quickly identify and demonstrate what's from the game. And then what we have added. Despite this reverence for the sound of the game, the TV show sound team and the video game sound team never actually met each other. So I told the TV show crew about my history with Mark from the Fallout games and how he'd be paired with them on this podcast. I want to have him on the show too. I wrote him earlier today and he was like, I would love to do this. He was like, maybe I should watch the show now. And I'm just like, you have not watched. I was like, you spent so long and you haven't seen it. So I've asked him to actually, if he can give me reactions to it.

[Daniel Coleman]

He got that gun sound wrong.

[Dallas Taylor]

For the television sound team, the goal was to take those short distilled sounds that Mark and his colleagues made for the games and build them into huge cinematic moments. For example, one classic Fallout creature is called a Yao Guai. It's basically a mutated Black bear. Here's how Mark approached this character in the Fallout 3 game.

[Mark Lampert]

I have to admit, I did not really bend over backward to make something too exotic for the one you hear in the game. To me, the Yao Guai is so close to a bear as the profile of a bear, it is immediately recognizable as a bear. So I didn't stray too far from that. I stayed pretty close to sound effects library stuff. I could bet there's probably some vocalizations from me in there to fill in where it was needed, because I would do that a lot too. There's nothing like the human voice. There's no instrument you can't imitate. And therefore the same is true for creatures too. Otherwise, it was largely just based on bear recordings or other similarly sized creatures.

[Dallas Taylor]

Another classic Fallout creature is the Gulper, which is like a monstrous salamander.

[Mark Lampert]

This thing basically lives in the swamp, and therefore is shiny and wet and just sticky and oily looking. So that's my bread and butter as a sound designer. Great. Go straight for the Mac and cheese, right? Next time you stir Mac and cheese, think about that. Just put your ear close to the pot. That is gore made to order right there.

[Dallas Taylor]

And just like he had done with the Yao gui, Mark also incorporated vocal sounds into the gulper.

[Mark Lampert]

Again, that's probably something I wouldn't have done myself because again, sometimes it's easier just to grab the mic and put the mic halfway into your throat and make awful sounds. You throw it in and you go, yeah, let's not mess with genius. That works.

[Dallas Taylor]

Both of these creatures appear in the TV show, and as it happens, they ended up being Daniel's audition for the role of sound designer.

[Daniel Coleman]

So on a Friday, while I was working on some other project, the two post producers came with the Yao Guai scene and the gulper scene. They wanted to show me these two creatures and see what I could do with it. And we talked about the problems they were having specifically with the Yao Guai. It has to be so many different things where this is a bear and it's sick because it's been exposed to radiation, but it's this mutated monster, so it's got to be scary. But this is a comedy, so it's sort of goofy. But we need to play Maximus and Titus View. You know, everything in the show is done from perspective, so we needed to feel their fear, this incredibly huge creature. So there were all these problems, and everything that they had worked out filled one of those niches. But they couldn't get something that was actually doing all of these things.

[Dallas Taylor]

So Daniel holed up all weekend trying to check all of those emotional boxes through the sound design.

[Daniel Coleman]

And when they came back on Monday morning, I presented them with five completely different versions of each of these creatures. For the Yao Guai, I had one version that was more realistic, all built off various different bear sounds. And I had one that was more struggling with the idea that it's sick. And so it would have to struggle through everything and then roar. And I did one version that had more of a comedic flair to. I had one that was a completely ridiculous, huge monster with no bear sounds whatsoever. And I did one that mixed and matched a whole bunch of different ideas together. And, you know, these were two post producers. So it's not like they could listen to it and go, yeah, that's the sound of the Ya Guai. But that's not what they were looking for. What they were looking for was a sound designer who was very flexible and could take direction and go in whatever different vector that Jodah wanted. They really wanted a collaborator on this. And so that's how I got hired as a sound designer on it.

[Dallas Taylor]

And when the show came out, here's what the Yao GUI sounded like. As for the gulper, that slimy salamander.

[Daniel Coleman]

Creature, this was much more of a amorphous idea because they weren't really working on this yet. So they didn't really tell me any of the backstory of it. It was just, here you go. Design this creature.

[Dallas Taylor]

At the time, the effects for the gulper weren't very far along yet.

[Daniel Coleman]

And what I was working with was mostly the large puppet that they used in production that eventually got completely replaced by cgi. And so I just, like the Yao gui. I took it in a whole bunch of different ways, knowing that what they were looking for was this ability to go in a lot of different directions. And then we had a long break before we came back to do episode three, and I went off to work on another project.

[Dallas Taylor]

In the meantime, they brought in sound designer Joseph Fraioli to work on a few elements, including the gulper.

[Daniel Coleman]

And he came up with this just disgusting, burpy, gurgling, flatulent creature. So then when I came to actually start working on three, when they locked the picture now, I had five versions that I created the version that Joe created, the version from the video game. And I took all of these and put it together and created a creature. And we mixed that and everybody was happy, and it was great.

[Dallas Taylor]

Later on, the visuals were finalized, and with the gulper, the visual Effects added.

[Daniel Coleman]

A lot more character in the face than we originally had. And we go back to the dub stage and we watch that down with the final visual effects.

[Dallas Taylor]

A dubstage is a state of the art theater where the sound mix is finalized. Basically, it's meant to replicate what an audience would hear in a theater. Now, dubstages aren't typically used for recording, but in this case, Jonah's like, you know what?

[Daniel Coleman]

It's not really working for me anymore. I've got an idea. So he asks for a microphone to be put up on the stage, and he does one pass through all three scenes, and he's just practically eating the microphone, making all these throat gurgly sounds.

[Dallas Taylor]

After the session, they tried mixing that voice in as is, but it felt too human for this massive creature.

[Daniel Coleman]

I went back to my edit room, I took Jonah's voice and I pitched it way down, and I added a lot of resonance to it and added his layer on top of all of these other layers that I had already put together. And it added this great character. You can really tell when the Gulper is chasing Thaddeus up the embankment and.

[Dallas Taylor]

Going, rah, rah, rah, rah, rah.

[Daniel Coleman]

That's Jonah in there. And it adds this great comedy level to it.

[Dallas Taylor]

In my interview with Mark, I told him how Jonathan recorded vocal sounds for the Gulper, just like he had done when he originally sound designed the creature for the games. So very similar approach, but straight from the director in the mix room. Yeah, which is so cool.

[Mark Lampert]

That's awesome. Really. I mean, like, sometimes it's. The shortest path is the answer.

[Dallas Taylor]

But it wasn't just the creatures that required creative sound design. It was also the characters. In the scene where we first see the Yao Guai, a knight named Tidus and his squire Maximus are investigating a cave. Tidus is all decked out in power armor and speaking through a microphone inside the suit.

[Sue Cahill]

The treatment of the knight's voice was really important to the character.

[Dallas Taylor]

Again, that's supervising sound editor Sue Cahill.

[Sue Cahill]

We had a few different plugins. We used to make it sound like the voice was coming out of a speaker out of a big metal suit.

[Dallas Taylor]

Go see if the target's in there.

[Sue Cahill]

But we had to treat each line individually based on the actor's performance. So it wasn't just one setting for the knight's voice. It was all individually crafted.

[Dallas Taylor]

See anything?

[Sue Cahill]

And we could really use that to help the comedy. So in this scene, for instance, with the Yao Guai, we're playing the voice as this, like, big Booming, menacing voice. And Maximus is really threatened by it.

[Daniel Coleman]

You earn the suit through acts of bravery. This is an act of bravery.

[Sue Cahill]

And then you have the reveal when he takes off the helmet and he's just a guy in a suit with a high voice.

[Daniel Coleman]

Where were you, huh? There's always something. This wasteland sucks.

[Dallas Taylor]

I always think about the first time I ever mix that scene. That's dialogue and music rerecord recording mixer Keith Rogers. Early on, Keith was working with temporary dialogue. In that scene, temp dialogue serves as a placeholder until the ADR phase, which is when the actor can re record their lines cleanly in a vocal booth. The temp was really great. I don't know if that was Jonah or not. I think it was, but great comedic timing and all that. Later on, Keith got the actual ADR lines from the actor who plays the knight, Michael Rapoport. I remember the first time when I was going through the tracks and I did it and his voice came out in his squeaky high voice.

[Daniel Coleman]

Where were you, huh?

[Dallas Taylor]

It made me laugh. Like was one of the first things that I really laughed out on the show. And you just didn't want to ruin that spontaneity. Like the first time viewing it, it worked. While Fallout has plenty of comedic moments, it also has a lot of really intense action. And one of the biggest sonic challenges was the gun sounds.

[Daniel Coleman]

There's a couple of really cool guns in the game, like the junk jet, which is sort of a wind up mortar system where you can throw anything into it and it'll fire back. We use it at the end of episode one. Aside from that, most of the game sounds of guns are either laser guns, which we don't have in the show at least yet. I don't know what's coming up, or they're just normal gun sounds.

[Dallas Taylor]

One of the main characters in the show is a scarred up bounty hunter known as the Ghoul. Now, the Ghoul's signature weapon is a heavy revolver that shoots explosive rounds. And for the big shootout in episode two, it was crucial to get that sound right.

[Daniel Coleman]

When we first spotted the show, there was no specific direction for the Ghoul's gun. So we followed what the game was like and used, I think it was a sawed off shotgun sound, which worked perfectly fine. But when it came time to really do the mix, after they finished editing and locked the cut, Jonah had this idea that we could make it more interesting by having sort of a three beat thing where it would fire a cartridge out. The cartridge would Impact and then it would explode. And that works really well on the first shot, and it works really well on the second shot. And it works really, really well on the two slo mo shots. But it really doesn't work anywhere else. There's also shots where camera's right with the ghoul and he's just firing rapid fire. Bam, bam, bam. And there's no time to do these three beats. So I worked on this sequence and tried to get it to work the best I could. And when we got done with the day, it was fine, but nobody was really satisfied because it really wasn't doing what Jonah asked for. But we knew we were coming back in when we got the final visual effects months later, so we'd have another.

[Dallas Taylor]

Crack at this again. During the break, Joseph Fraioli came in to work on a few sounds, including the ghoul's gun.

[Daniel Coleman]

And he threw a whole bunch of different ideas at Jonah and finally came up with what is absolutely the ultimate homemade gun sound, which is the potato cannon, which has this great low end thump to it where you can really feel that cartridge going out. And he added a couple of details to it. There's like a metal ring to it. Then there's a little thunder as it shoots out, which is really cool. But it made this iconic sound that is very far away from anything that exists in the game.

[Dallas Taylor]

Here's the final sound in the show.

[Daniel Coleman]

What was great about this was that it sort of opened us up because when you're told, stay close to this game sound, stay close to what they've already done, and just veer when you need to, it's really great to know, okay, we can experiment, we can go to extremes. We just have to keep in mind the idea of the game. So it's the post apocalyptic. These people are putting together guns with spare parts. And it led to other gun sounds later in the show where we could really stray far away from the game sounds and yet make them still feel like they're part of the game.

[Dallas Taylor]

From an audio standpoint, the Fallout games are some of my absolute favorites. And with the Fallout show, the creative sound team managed to craft something that feels deeply rooted in those sounds, but also original, epic and cinematic.

[Mark Lampert]

That's something that Fallout live action series did so well was to Every time they use a little piece of the game that's a little through line for players who are going to instantly feel and recognize that familiarity, almost like a scent memory. You know, you smell something that reminds you of childhood, and for that split second, you're there in that memory. And sound does that really easily.

[Dallas Taylor]

There's a reason that sound is wired so deeply into our memories and the feelings that go with those memories.

[Daniel Coleman]

It's the fundamental part of storytelling our existence as a civilization. The fundamental is the stories we tell. And that didn't start with visual things. It started with people talking, started with painting pictures in sound. And whether that's the emotion that you feel listening to music or to the sound of a loved one talking, we get much more emotional content and sense of ourselves through sound than we ever do through visual media. And that sounds almost like sacrilege in that we are in essence working in a visual media and adding sound to it. But I think the sound is what is fundamental to it.

[Dallas Taylor]

20,000 Hz is produced out of my sound agency, Defacto Sound, which is still going strong 15 years after that first meeting with Mark. To learn more, follow Defacto Sound on instagram or visit defactosound.com this episode was.

[Daniel Coleman]

Written and produced by Ashley Hamer and Casey Emerling with with help from Grace East.

[Dallas Taylor]

It was sound designed and mixed by Brandon Pratt and Joel Boyter. Thanks to our guests Mark Lampert, Sue Cahill, Daniel Coleman, Steve Busino and Keith Rogers. And a Huge thanks to NBCUniversal Studio Post for all of their help in making this episode happen. Subscribe to my YouTube channel for video exclusives including my on location recordings with all kinds of fascinating sonic experts. You can also find my short videos on Instagram and TikTok. All three accounts are under DallasTaylor MP3. Finally, if you'd like to support the show directly so we can keep telling these incredible sound stories, then sign up for our premium [e-mail] plus all of these links are in the show Notes. I'm Dallas Taylor. Thanks for listening. Okay, I know that the show is done, but before we go, this is a reminder to use our unique sponsor codes so that we can have a strong finish to our yearly ad campaigns. Because it's really our sponsors that are really the financial foundation that keeps this show afloat. And I only accept ads from companies that I think are doing a good job. So with that in mind, get the very best documentary streaming service with CuriosityStream and 20000 Hz listeners will get 50% off at curiositystream.com 2 0K get up to 25% off Sonos speakers from December 12th through the 28th at sonos.com if you're looking to hire, get a $75 credit to get your job post more visibility at indeed.com hertz and start your dollar per month trial of [e-mail] 20K. All of these links are in the show notes, so if you need any of this, go click them. Thanks.