Cinematic Sound Design with Garrett Tiedemann of Campside Media

Jeff Umbro: This is Podcast Perspectives, a show about the podcast industry and the people behind it. I'm your host, Jeff Umbro, founder and CEO of The Podglomerate. This week on the show, we're going to switch things up. I am going to hand off the host seat to my colleague, Chris Boniello, The Podglomerate's VP of Production Services. If you like this kind of episode, let us know and we will do more in the future. Here is Chris.

Chris Boniello: Even if you haven't heard the name Garrett Tiedemann, you've almost certainly heard some of his work.

[CLIP: Suspect Season 1] Matthew Shaer: From Campside Media and Wondery, I'm Matthew Shaer, and this is Suspect.

[CLIP: Cover Up: Body Brokers] Ashley Fantz: This is Cover Up: Body Brokers.

[CLIP: Chameleon: Wild Boys] Sam Mullins: This is Chameleon: Wild Boys.

Chris Boniello: Today, Garrett works as an engineer and sound designer at Campside Media, where he scores, mixes, and writes original music for their flagship podcast series, like Suspect and Chameleon. Just this year, he was nominated for Best Production and Sound Design at the Ambies for his work on Chameleon: Dr. Dante.

[CLIP: Chameleon: Dr. Dante] Sam Mullins: The legend of Dr. Ronald Dante spans decades, movie stars, fugitive yachts, continents, if you believe his version of events. But it all started on a stage.

Chris Boniello: I wanted to have Garrett on to talk about how he made Dr. Dante. Which I think is a notable show for a few reasons. For one, if you're a producer like me, it's an absolute masterclass in sound design.

But beyond that, I think this high level of audio engineering is especially impressive, since Dr. Dante is also an excellent piece of journalism. The kind of hyper-produced scenes that Garrett puts together for this series are typically reserved for genres like narrative fiction or more experimental podcasts. But here, he makes it work in the audio documentary format, without it feeling overbearing. As Garrett told me:

Garrett Tiedemann: Dante is an interesting experiment, I think, because I think it really tests how far can you push the design and not interrupt or destroy the journalistic ethics, not take it away from journalism too much into entertainment.

Chris Boniello: But before we get into Dr. Dante, I want to start way back with Garrett's initial interest in audio, which, like many of us in podcasting, came through movies and music. And of course, spoilers for Chameleon: Dr. Dante ahead.

Garrett Tiedemann: I started in music with guitar, just taking it as a thing that, like, I was interested in. I learned classical guitar first, like, reading music, learning time signature, all those sorts of things. It was when I heard the opening lines of Nirvana's In Utero that I got really interested in what else there was besides understanding it as a language. And understanding it instead as sound. So I shifted into electric guitar, started picking up different instruments, such as drums and piano, and kind of anything.

I always had a love of film. And then I think like a lot of people I saw Jurassic Park and it had a really big impact on me. And that started to turn film into something I wanted to do rather than just a thing I was interested in. By the end of high school, I started making films. I wrote, I directed, I produced, I did cinematography, edited, sound designed, and often scored the films, or would work with people who were scoring them, and kind of have a better collaboration on it, because I actually understood how the pieces worked.

And then I had to make a living.

Chris Boniello: So Garrett went to film school and found that the kind of Hollywood jobs he was looking for were few and far between. So after he got out of college, he took a different path.

Garrett Tiedemann: I started freelancing for Minnesota Public Radio. And most of what I did were written articles covering a lot of film scores. Actually, I interviewed a lot of composers for them.

At the same time, I ran an oral history project, or at least the media side of it. And within the oral history project, we also made a lot of short films and we started making podcasts, which was the first time I dabbled in that.

I had always been interested in podcasts. I understood how my skill sets could apply in podcasts, but I hadn't had an opportunity to really do it. I started first with a foray into my own podcast called The White Whale.

I wasn't trying to make it sound like everything else. It was an experiment. And that got the interest of Jonathan Hirsch, who at the time he was doing a show Arrivals, now he's at Neon Hum. He built Neon Hum and they just moved into Sony.

And I also got the attention of Here Be Monsters with Jeffrey Emtman. And so that became some more building blocks, where working with Here Be Monsters gave me an opportunity to do the kind of work I strive to do. But I also got to learn and understand the mechanics of how do you like do this, how do you make it sustainable, how do you do it from episode to episode.

And then I was one of the fortunate ones where when COVID hit and everyone was working from home, a lot of people needed the work I could do. And in that mix, around 2021, we get to Campside. I'd been talking with Doug Slawin at Campside for a while, trying to figure out a way to work with them. And it just finally came together with Suspect 1.

[CLIP: Suspect Season 1] Matthew Shaer: From Campside Media and Wondery, I'm Matthew Shaer, and this is Suspect.

Garrett Tiedemann: And that became a door. That really fundamentally changed my life.

Chris Boniello: Since walking through Campside's door in 2021, Garrett has produced about half a dozen series with them. And with each new show, Garrett says his role has become better defined.

Garrett Tiedemann: I slot in a bit weird into shows. When I'm brought on a show proper, it's at table reads. We do a table read for every episode. At least for the narrative series. So you've got your tape lined up, you read through the VO live.

Chris Boniello: VO meaning voiceover.

Garrett Tiedemann: And you just kind of see how does it flow? How does it work? And then you have a conversation afterwards about where ideas going to fall later in the series, stuff like that.

I come in early, kind of as like a music director at that point. I'm really listening to listen to it. How does the VO sound? What's the rhythm? What is the world that it seems like we're wanting to create? And then I'll have actual, like, full on conversations with the team about what do you hear as the tone? Before you're getting into what actually is the music, how much original music are you going to do versus pulling from libraries, any of these questions, I think it's really good to say, like, what are comparisons that you think it sounds like?

Chris Boniello: And for Garrett, these early conversations are instrumental to his process. Oftentimes, he's working with teams who don't have a background in production. So to realize his colleague's vision, it's essential to establish a shared language around music and sound design.

Garrett Tiedemann: For something like Body Brokers, first thing Ashley Fontz said to me was Twin Peaks.

I was like, oh, well that's a tone. That is a space of audio. And from there, we talked a little bit more about like the main theme for Six Feet Under. Which I was up front, I was like, I will never be as good as Thomas Newman, but I get like there's, you know, there's bells and he uses a lot of drums and rhythms below the high end.

But then we got into like True Detective. Which then you're thinking a lot about low end bass and drums.

And we kind of found that spot. So like the theme for Body Brokers 2, you can hear there's bells in there. There's sort of a theremin-type synth that comes over the guitar. The guitar is a waltz. So it's kind of like a dance, which kind of fits in with the sort of Twin Peaks thing.

And all of that comes from conversations.

Chris Boniello: Before engineering Body Brokers, Garrett was having these same conversations with a different team working on Chameleon: Dr. Dante. This season of Campside's Chameleon series follows the life of Ronald Dante, a prolific American hypnotist and fraudster. The series was written and hosted by Sam Mullins, who at the time was just coming off another Campside show.

Garrett Tiedemann: Dante was great in that it was almost the entire same team as Wild Boys.

Chris Boniello: Which by the way, won podcast of the year at the 2023 Ampies. Garrett worked on this show too.

Garrett Tiedemann: So there was a rapport already there. There was a trust. Everyone knew what everyone was good at and capable of. And Sam is an amazing collaborator when it comes to design. That was something I encountered with him, with Wild Boys too, where he loves to take a four minutes and say like, could it do this?

Chris Boniello: But Dante was a very different show than Wild Boys and thus posed very different challenges when it came to sound design. Namely:

Garrett Tiedemann: We had an interesting thing with the first episode where we didn't have a lot of tape and so there was going to be a lot of VO, and Sam is one of the best hosts I've ever worked with and I could listen to him all day, but there's still this notion of, but are listeners going to come along for the ride if it's just Sam talking for five, six, seven minutes.

Chris Boniello: The reason they didn't have much tape for these early episodes was because their subject, the hypnotist Ronald Dante, started his act in the 60s. So in episode one, which covers Dante's early career, host Sam Mullins would have to do much of the narrative heavy lifting with just voiceover.

Garrett Tiedemann: And that kind of opened a door, like, okay, if it's a question of how do we elevate Sam talking for 40 minutes, then it's a question of design. From the beginning, design is going to do a whole lot of work, a whole lot of heavy lifting. And if it's going to do that in the first episode, it has to do them in all of them.

Chris Boniello: And design he did.

[CLIP: Chameleon: Dr. Dante] Sam Mullins: He'd ask you to look into the stage lights, to slow your breathing, to focus on his words and his words alone. And he has you. Deep breath.

Garrett Tiedemann: Dante is an interesting experiment, I think, because I think it really tests how far can you push the design and not interrupt or destroy the journalistic ethics, not take it away from journalism too much into entertainment?

That is very different than something like Suspect. Suspect is sparser by design. I think suspect is much more focused on making sure we hear the survivors of a situation. You don't get in the way of their story. And in something like Suspect, I really take my cues from VO and Tape of like, when is adding music gonna actually give these people the story they're telling, the, the weight and the respect it needs?

[CLIP: Suspect Season 1] Matthew Shaer: Could you start by just telling us exactly where you are right now?

[CLIP: Suspect Season 3] Leon Benson: Hey, right now, I'm at, uh, in Pendleton, Indiana, at Correctional Industrial Facility, and uh, I've been here since, uh, November of 2019.

Garrett Tiedemann: But like, Dante is an insanely entertaining show about a person who did a lot of bad things. There's sort of this conversation in that piece of like, he did a lot of bad things, but he didn't kind of cross the last line. He almost did. And so we have to treat all those elements seriously, but we also have to have an element of levity, an element of comedy, and then at the end, an element of sort of redemption, that he was a flawed human being, instead of black or white thinking.

I think it's a bit of an untapped reservoir in podcasting, where you're holding on to everything that you believe in when it comes to journalism, but you're getting to also entertain people. But it, it really does take a specific story.

Chris Boniello: And for this story, Garrett started where he usually does: the setting.

Garrett Tiedemann: When it gets to doing music and design, along with sitting on table reads, the next thing I think about is geography and time. So where is it taking place? When is it taking place? What's the musical backbone of that?

Dante was an interesting thing in that it was both old and new, because he existed in old Hollywood. Before I was even thinking about music, I thought a lot about old film projectors, tape to tape reels. I thought a lot about static.

I mean, especially since some of the early stuff we had of Dante was very hissy and very recorded. I didn't want to clean it up and destroy the dynamics of that, I wanted to hold on to it. And so I needed to create a space where that could live.

[CLIP: Chameleon: Dr. Dante] Ronald Dante:: My name is Ronald Dante. And I'd like to thank you for inviting me into your subconscious.

Garrett Tiedemann: Instead of trying to clean all that tape up, we just let that tape ride. And we just built the design around it, that's like, oh no, a lot of this is about the mechanics of recording. A lot of this is about the mechanics of storytelling.

I think in many regards my approach to making music, and filmmaking, podcasting is completely indebted to making mixtapes in the summer off the radio. Because you'd get these weird like, oh no, it's starting! And you'd miss like the first 15 seconds, but you'd accidentally cut off the other song that was already on the tape.

That's a lot of how I think. Where do you find the interesting moments and dial those in? Dante is just the clearest, like, oh yeah, this is like a mixtape. This whole thing is like one big mix tape.

Chris Boniello: And much like a mix tape, Dr. Dante has a very musical feel to it. So here, I don't just mean there's a lot of music in the show, though that certainly is true.

What I mean is that the episodes are mixed so that the voiceover, clips, sound design elements, and music all kind of feel like they're one cohesive thing, rather than a bunch of layered elements. This kind of sound, Garrett says, comes from his experience in filmmaking.

Garrett Tiedemann: In podcasts, I just am always thinking about How do you make the VO and the tape feel like it's having a conversation with the design, without overstepping? Because of my experience working in film, I tend to mix louder.

Chris Boniello: Mixing louder means that Garrett brings the volume of the music closer to the volume of the voiceover. Throughout Dante, you can hear these moments where it almost sounds like Sam is competing for space with the music.

[CLIP: Chameleon: Dr. Dante] Sam Mullins: There was Artie Shaw, a jazz musician slash complete asshole.

[CLIP: Chameleon: Dr. Dante] Lana Turner: I knew the third day that it was not a marriage.

[CLIP: Chameleon: Dr. Dante] Sam Mullins: Then Stephen Crane, husband number two, who, whoops, forgot to mention that he already had a wife.

[CLIP: Chameleon: Dr. Dante] Lana Turner: That was a bad scene.

Garrett Tiedemann: I bring the VO and the tape closer to the level of what the music is doing to create kind of a wrap. And I really think about VO and tape as sort of like the vocal track for the music that you're making.

And so like, when I write music, I build the music in my sessions instead of building it out and just pulling it in.

Chris Boniello: Typically, when a producer is editing an episode, they take a complete song that they've written, or something they've gotten from a sound library, and make adjustments to it to fit it to the voiceover. This could mean adjusting volume, rhythms, pitch. But what Garrett does is compose music right into his sessions with the voiceover. That way his music is tailored specifically to everything happening around it.

Garrett Tiedemann: Because that allows me to then actually compose the music to the rhythms of the VO and the tape and understand the dynamic range of it, and kind of make something that feels really collaborative and integral.

I feel really committed that you're going to have the best sense of if the music is working in a mix rather than on its own because sometimes the tones, frequency tones don't work, sometimes the rhythm doesn't work.

Chris Boniello: I wanted Garrett to walk me through how he built some specific scenes in Dr. Dante, and more importantly, some of the design principles he used to do so. Fittingly, we started with the series opening, which features this very cool, highly textured hypnosis scene. Garrett told me there were some initial concerns about the direction of the design.

Garrett Tiedemann: I remember there was a worry, it was really near the end of production, of in that sort of opening, cold open, when everything goes off the rails.

[CLIP: Chameleon: Dr. Dante] Sam Mullins: You hand over the keys to your whole being. As his voice becomes your world, disconnecting you from reality as he brings you to a new place. Suddenly you're a child, nine years old, you're a dancer.

Garrett Tiedemann: You know, Sam was like, can you even hear what I'm saying? I was like, instead of worrying about clarity, what if we distort you more?

[CLIP: Chameleon: Dr. Dante] Sam Mullins: You do anything he asks you to do, for as long as he asks, until he's done with you.

Garrett Tiedemann: So the idea isn't that you have to know what you're saying. The idea is that you're actually being pulled under too. I mean, the funny thing is it gave some level of clarity, but it also made it okay for people to not know what he was saying. It's just a wonderful cohesion.

Chris Boniello: This is also a great example of an idea that Garrett uses throughout Dr. Dante and the rest of his work: non-literal design.

Garrett Tiedemann: I think anyone in our field recognizes that people aren't supposed to recognize what we're doing. People aren't supposed to be like, oh, that's clever. Blah, blah, blah. But you are supposed to feel it.

Chris Boniello: Garrett told me he's always looking for new and subtle ways to evoke these kinds of feelings without making it so explicit that the listener should feel nervous or say uneasy.

Garrett Tiedemann: There's a scene where they go to a, an event. And there's drums there. There's just like a jazz drum sort of thing going on, right? And she's getting drunk and has to go up and speak. But I remember I lined up three or four different takes and they start in time and then the left and right channel slowly fall out of time and I keep one center.

[CLIP: Chameleon: Dr. Dante] Sam Mullins: But then, as Lana started talking into the microphone, it became apparent that the day of travel had rendered her very drunk.

Garrett Tiedemann: And you start getting this weird sort of whirring effect of like, someone being drunk, and not sort of working. And it all come back in time at the end when they walk out onto the San Francisco streets.

[CLIP: Chameleon: Dr. Dante] Sam Mullins: They work the room while also working their way to the exit. And they made it outside. Their obligation was fulfilled, and the night was young.

Garrett Tiedemann: I like it because it's simple. There wasn't a ton of things happening. It was just your sense of internal rhythm was starting to get distorted, but not in a clear way because your kind of main heartbeat is still center. Still your guiding light. You're feeling it at the edges.

And I think that's sort of a really good moment of like, you feel that in your ears, like you feel that sort of weird pivot shift, the same as you would if you were getting a little seasick. But someone doesn't have to know why to feel it.

Chris Boniello: But for Garrett, sound design is as much about zooming in on these individual moments as it is about zooming out to look at the whole picture.

Garrett Tiedemann: Part of what I always think about in my process of storytelling too is how do you start ideas in episode one that you can bring home in episode eight so that you create an arc, a narrative arc.

Chris Boniello: In episode one, for example, A young Ronald Dante performs his famous closing act, where he stands up with two feet, fully planted on a small, hypnotized woman who's laying horizontally between two folding chairs on stage, a notoriously dangerous stunt among hypnotists.

[CLIP: Chameleon: Dr. Dante] Sam Mullins: Dante would climb on one of the chairs with a theatrical intensity and focus, or perhaps an actual intensity and focus, and he would lift a foot and softly place it on the woman's stomach.

Chris Boniello: It's a triumphant moment when he pulls it off. But then, in the series finale, Dante is a much older man, and takes a stab at this dangerous stunt one last time.

Garrett Tiedemann: In the last episode, when he's trying to do his schtick again, and he can't do it, I took the same build, but then I pulled out all the low end, and I made it sparser, and thinner. I gave it a lot more reverb and echo, and so I made it sound like a ghost of itself.

[CLIP: Chameleon: Dr. Dante] Sam Mullins: He moves forward, when suddenly, you can see something change in Dante. Like the possession of the incredible Dr. Dante leaves the room without warning. And all that's left, is an old man, perched on a chair, wobbly, unsure.

Garrett Tiedemann: I made it sound like this thing that he can't do it anymore. It informs your listener that like, this is the end. We're coming to the end. It takes them back to the beginning, but like now he's not the same human being.

Chris Boniello: Garrett told me he's at a point today where Campside Media is willing to give him the time, resources, and creative freedom to make cinematic shows like Dr. Dante. But that wasn't always the case. Anyone who's made a narrative podcast knows how challenging it can be to stay on time and on budget. So by the time you get to the final phases of sound design and mixing, it can feel like a bit of a rush to the finish line. And to Garrett, this is a huge missed opportunity for the industry.

Garrett Tiedemann: Right now, podcasting has had this like die off effect of the last year, right? Of people laying off and money's drying up. And so you've almost had like a tsunami coming in, pulling everything out.

So now you have this space. And what's going to fill that space? Is that space going to be a lot of really expensive chat shows? Or is there an opportunity to finally try to not make serial for the 20th thousand time? Can you push things? And I think that's something that Dante does.

A show doesn't have to be number one on Apple podcasts for 20 months to be successful. You can make things that are more for a niche audience and trust that those people will love it, and they will push it. And if it doesn't rise to charts, it doesn't mean the show's not good.

And that can allow you the freedom to try stuff, and experiment and try to make something that is sonically different, and it's just not as concerned with that. But I know that that's a hard thing to argue when you're also trying to make money.

Chris Boniello: Thank you so much to Garrett Tiedemann for joining us on this episode. You can find him on LinkedIn and Twitter @whitewhalepod. And if you haven't listened already, you can find Chameleon: Dr. Dante wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was produced by me, Chris Boniello, Henry Lavoie, and Jeff Umbro. It was written by Henry Lavoie

And thank you to our marketing team. Joni Deutsch, Madison Richards, Morgan Swift, Annabella Pena, and Vanessa Ullman. And a special thanks to Dan Christo. If you liked this kind of episode, please let us know.