Ask Nathan Robitaille what it's like to work with Guillermo del Toro and he doesn't reach for the word visionary. He reaches for a horse.
"It's like falling off a horse. You have to go limp, because if you brace for impact, you're going to break something."
He means it as a compliment. On a del Toro production, plans change, ideas change, and the schedule you built your week around can move by a month overnight. Show up precious about a sound you love and you've already found the day's point of failure.
Robitaille is the supervising sound editor and sound designer on Frankenstein, working alongside his long-time partner Nelson Ferreira out of Sound Dogs in Toronto. The two of them earned Academy Award nominations for the film. It's the latest chapter in a collaboration with del Toro that now runs more than a decade, from The Strain through The Shape of Water to the creature that finally got its own movie.
He sat down with Zebra Home Cinema to talk about firing chains out of cannons, the temp mix that ate his recording day, and the one piece of home audio advice he gives anyone who asks.
Hired at Seventeen, Because of an Accountant
The origin story is not a film-school story.
Robitaille grew up wanting to be a musician. He'd moved through a high-school phase of visual arts, found a guitar, started playing in bands, and needed a co-op placement to finish a school program. His father's accountant happened to be the same accountant working with Nelson Ferreira.
"My father's accountant said, 'Well, I know a guy who works in movies. Maybe your kid would want to check that out.' And so I showed up to this co-op placement interview."
He was seventeen. Ferreira hired him. He started packing boxes and fetching coffee at Sound Dogs, went off to learn music recording at Fanshawe College in London, Ontario, then came back, because, as he puts it, he was "just too stubborn to leave."
Thirty years later he's Oscar-nominated for a del Toro film, and Ferreira is still his partner. It's the kind of career arc that only makes sense in an industry small enough that an accountant's introduction can redirect a life.
What Sound Dogs Actually Is
The name causes some confusion, because there are two of them.
Sounddogs.com, the commercial sound-effects library that most people in audio have downloaded from at some point, was founded by Rob Nokes and grew out of the Los Angeles side of the business. Nelson Ferreira held onto the Toronto operation, where he is president and owner. That's the Sound Dogs that makes films.
Robitaille describes the Toronto shop less as a company than as a tribe:
"It's a bit of a ragtag crew. A lot of people like myself, we're all independent contractors. We don't work for Sound Dogs, but try and pry us apart. Every now and then someone will come in from outside the Sound Dogs family, and sure enough, they wind up embraced."
Nothing about it is rigid. If you want time off, you take time off. Robitaille had just come back from a couple of months away when we spoke. For a young musician sitting behind people like Craig Henighan or Paula Fairfield, it was, in his words, pretty easy to come back to.
That looseness turns out to be load-bearing. It's what lets a team absorb a director who changes his mind at speed.
Why the Frankenstein Team Wasn't Intimidated
Frankenstein is the film del Toro spent decades wanting to make. By any reasonable measure, that should have been terrifying to work on.
It wasn't, and Robitaille is precise about why.
"Knowing how important this movie is to Guillermo, it should have been intimidating. It should have felt like this really high-stakes challenge. But it just didn't feel that way."
The reason is the roster. Ferreira and Robitaille supervising. Brad Zoern and Christian Cooke on the re-recording mix. A support-editor bench drawn from the same Sound Dogs family. Everyone had worked with everyone, so the right hand knew what the left hand was doing.
Del Toro said the quiet part out loud himself, standing outside the theatre near the end of the mix. He asked how long it had been, answered his own question at ten years, and concluded that's why it went so well.
"I understand his expectations when he asks for something wacky. I understand how to read between the lines."
The pattern extends past sound. Dennis Berardi, the film's overall VFX supervisor, is another long-running del Toro collaborator. So is production designer Tamara Deverell, who walked away with the Academy Award for Best Production Design for the same film. Robitaille's framing is that del Toro collects artists the way other people collect paintings, and the movie is the house he hangs them in.
The Blunderbuss, the Cannons, and the Temp Mix That Moved
Ask about curveballs and you get two, one small and one large.
The small one. Early in the shoot, Robitaille got a call to come sit in the edit suite. Del Toro played him the scene where the cadaver on Victor's table twitches into pseudo-life, then collapses back into death when the leads are pulled. He needed it boosted, for a screening. The brief was, roughly: I need something back from you in 72 hours.
Robitaille was on another show at the time, with other obligations. He did it anyway. That's the job.
The large one started with a gun. Del Toro wanted the blunderbuss at the top of the film to sound bigger than every other weapon in the movie, genuinely special. His own pitch was to buy a shipping container, fire a shotgun inside it, and record that.
Robitaille counter-pitched: what if we fire chains out of cannons?
"He looked at me like I was crazy. But I actually have access to that."
His father-in-law works as a historical consultant, which meant access to cannons, muskets, and the people licensed to fire them. Del Toro's response, once he got past the are you serious stage, was simply: do it.
What followed was months of planning that had very little to do with sound:
- ▪Clerical groundwork. A live-ammunition firearms record in Canada is not a casual booking, especially with cannons and muskets. Permits, armourers, location, insurance.
- ▪Learning how to do it. Robitaille is blunt that the impulse to say I know how to record guns is a trap. Nobody knows how to record guns except people who record guns for a living. The team read published breakdowns from commercial library recordists, split up the research, and reconvened over Zoom calls to compare notes.
- ▪Equipment. Deciding what to record with, then actually getting hands on it.
The date was set, the armourers were booked, and the forecast had given them the one thing an outdoor firearms record actually depends on: low wind, dry air, and not enough insects to ruin a quiet take. And then the text arrived.
"We need you on a plane. We're moving the temp mix up one month. It starts on Monday, and Guillermo wants you in LA."
That's the horse. Going limp meant calling his father-in-law to stand down the armourers, cancelling the location, moving the whole record, flying to Los Angeles, and running the temp mix on a compressed schedule. Then rebuilding the entire cannon shoot from scratch afterward.
Both got done. The temp landed, Ferreira made real progress on the dialogue edit off the back of it, and the team learned what was and wasn't working in a mix environment. Then Robitaille went and recorded cannons.
"Long day. But it was a lot of fun. And the sounds are incredible."
The Lightning Was Edited During a Real Thunderstorm
One credit Robitaille went out of his way to give: Scott Hitchen, who started on Frankenstein as assistant sound effects editor and was promoted to editor mid-stream.
Hitchen cut the thunderstorm in the creation sequence from his apartment, during an actual thunderstorm outside his window. At a certain point he started losing track of which thunder was his and which was the weather.
He nailed it early, and it's in the film.
It's also a useful window into how storm sound actually gets built, because the instinct most people have, that there's a big library and you pick the good thunder, is wrong. Robitaille's experience is that there are massive libraries of unusable sound effects. Dated thunder recordings that sound dated. Overbuilt designed lightning. They are not all made equal, and a large part of the job is digging through them for the shreds worth keeping.
Then the real work starts.
"Once you've got something plausible cut, you've got to make it exciting. That's when you start choosing sounds that aren't lightning. You have to think of the world from that tactile sensibility. What sound would ground somebody in the reality of this moment? Not just a crack of thunder, but the shake in the house."
"Correct the Room Before You Correct the Gear"
Robitaille works out of a bedroom in his Toronto house on Genelec active monitors, the DSP-equipped models that can measure and compensate for the space. He's happy with them, precisely because the room isn't acoustically ideal and the speakers can adapt.
His own home theatre runs on an Anthem receiver, which is where he first met room correction done properly. And when the conversation turned to what listeners should spend money on, his answer was immediate and unfashionable:
"Correct the room before you correct the gear. A well-treated room, or a room that has decent correction, that goes a long way. It's not as sexy an upgrade to put panels on the walls or deal with weird reflections. But if what you're going for is better sound, that's where you find it."
This is the single most common thing we tell clients who arrive with a shortlist of speakers and no plan for the space they're going in. It is also, reliably, the least popular thing to hear. A room that fights you will undo an expensive system. A room that cooperates will flatter a modest one. We've written up the mistakes that cost people the most performance elsewhere, and this one sits at the top for a reason.
He has a demo for the sceptics, too, and it costs nothing.
"Take a song you know has a lot of detail. Listen on one speaker. Then listen on two. Hear how much more you hear. That's when people start to understand. When you divide the load and give two speakers a job, one speaker isn't trying to do all the high frequencies, mid-frequencies, and low frequencies. All of a sudden you get a lot more detail."
Then, he says, imagine five. Imagine Atmos. The argument for a properly specified multichannel system isn't about volume or spectacle. It's about how much information stops being masked.
"Let's Reward the People with the Sound System"
The most quotable thing Robitaille said isn't about Frankenstein at all. It's about who he's mixing for.
Modern production has adapted to divided attention. Second-screen viewing is now a style of writing, with plots reiterated and information repeated so a viewer playing a game on their phone can still follow along. Robitaille calls that content. He draws a line between it and art, which asks for focus.
And when the question comes up in a mix, how will this play on an iPad?, his answer is consistent:
"Let's reward the people with the sound system. Let's reward the people with the big screen. Reward the people who have invested, because they're paying attention."
That's the whole argument for a room built to reproduce what the mix stage heard, stated by someone on the other side of the glass. The detail is in the file. Whether it survives to your ears is a decision you make with your budget.
There's an occupational hazard attached, and he's honest about it: the requirement to be able to switch it off. Motion smoothing left on at a friend's house. A surround system in a triangular room with the centre channel beside the left speaker. You notice, and then you ask what's for dinner, because nobody wants to be that guy.
Why He Still Goes to the Cinema
Robitaille has one of the better arguments for theatrical exhibition we've heard, and it isn't about speaker count.
"If you've ever walked into a room after two people have finished having an argument and they're not talking, you know they've had an argument. It's that connection between human beings that you experience in a theatre. That takes a five-out-of-ten joke and gets you a nine-out-of-ten laugh, because everybody's laughing together."
Everyone is startled together. Everyone is afraid together. You don't know how the person next to you votes, and you're laughing at the same thing anyway.
He's not precious about it, though. Home cinema is comfortable, it's cosy, and the weather is out there. His own summary:
"You will also experience the occasional rattling panel. Or a torn speaker cone. Or ghosting on the screen. But that's part of it. Nothing beautiful is perfect and nothing perfect is beautiful."
What's Next: Silo, and a World With No Wood
Robitaille supervised season three of Silo alongside Dustin Harris, who handles dialogue while Robitaille takes sound design.
The world-building constraint on that show is one of the more elegant problems in recent television sound. The story is set in a vast underground concrete silo housing ten thousand people. Which means:
"One of the big rules in the show is that there's no wood. Wood is scarce. It's like gold down there, because you can't grow a forest of trees."
No wood means no reaching for the normal ingredients. None of the doors can have wood in them. And wood is baked into an enormous proportion of every sound-effects library in existence, the natural warm transient that makes a door sound like a door. Strip it out and most of the shelf becomes unusable. Much of the show had to be built from scratch.
He also flagged an animated feature called Julián, which premiered at Annecy. It's a hand-drawn film from Ireland's Cartoon Saloon about a Dominican boy staying with his abuela in Queens who wants to be a mermaid. Handmade, beautifully done, and worth watching on something decent.
What He's Watching
Asked for recommendations, Robitaille offered a spread:
- ▪*Spider-Noir*, specifically the black-and-white release. He's convinced it was shot with black and white in mind, based on the depth of field, and singles out what they're doing with Nicolas Cage's voice inside the mask.
- ▪*Half Man, from the creator of Baby Reindeer*. Dark, and not a happy watch, but the mix techniques used to make the lead sound big and imposing impressed him.
- ▪*Bugonia*, his favourite of last year. The zany, look-at-it-from-another-angle sensibility is the same instinct that drives good sound design.
- ▪*One Battle After Another*. "Lowhanging fruit," he admits, since it won Best Picture. Still.
- ▪*Obsession*, a modest budget executed with real discipline. He admires films that don't try to do more than their money allows.
- ▪*The Pitt*, which we've also covered, in our conversation with the show's sound supervisor Bryan Parker.
- ▪*True Romance*, the all-time pick. "If you know, you know."
Key Takeaways
- ▪Nathan Robitaille is a supervising sound editor and sound designer at Sound Dogs Toronto. He and partner Nelson Ferreira received Academy Award nominations for Frankenstein, extending a del Toro collaboration that began with The Strain and includes The Shape of Water. The re-recording mix was handled by Brad Zoern and Christian Cooke.
- ▪Working with del Toro means absorbing rapid change. Robitaille's "falling off a horse" analogy is practical advice, not a joke. Arrive attached to a plan or a sound you love, and that attachment becomes the day's point of failure.
- ▪The blunderbuss in Frankenstein was built from live cannon and musket recordings, including chains fired from cannons, organised through Robitaille's father-in-law, a historical consultant. The record had to be cancelled and rebuilt from scratch when the temp mix moved up by a month.
- ▪Sound-effects libraries are not a shortcut. Most stock thunder is unusable. Plausible is the starting point; making it exciting means layering in sounds that aren't the thing you're depicting, like the shake in the house rather than just the crack of thunder.
- ▪Robitaille's home-audio advice is unambiguous: correct the room before you correct the gear. Acoustic treatment and room correction deliver more than equipment upgrades, and his one-speaker-versus-two demonstration is the cheapest way to understand why channel count matters.
- ▪His mixing philosophy is a direct argument for investing in a proper system. When asked how a mix will play on a tablet, his answer is to reward the people who built the room to hear it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who did the sound design for Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein?
Nathan Robitaille and Nelson Ferreira served as supervising sound editors at Sound Dogs in Toronto, with Robitaille also credited as sound designer. Both received Academy Award nominations for the film. The re-recording mix was handled by Brad Zoern and Christian Cooke. Robitaille and Ferreira have worked with del Toro for more than ten years, starting on his vampire series The Strain and continuing through The Shape of Water.
How were the gunshots in Frankenstein recorded?
With real firearms, recorded live. Del Toro wanted the blunderbuss at the start of the film to sound distinctly bigger than every other weapon, so Robitaille organised a dedicated record session with period cannons and muskets, including firing chains out of cannons, through his father-in-law, who works as a historical consultant. The team researched commercial recordists' published techniques before the shoot, since, as Robitaille puts it, nobody actually knows how to record guns except people who do it for a living.
What is Sound Dogs?
Sound Dogs is a Toronto film-sound company owned and run by Nelson Ferreira, staffed largely by independent contractors who work together so consistently they describe themselves as a tribe rather than a payroll. It is related to but distinct from Sounddogs.com, the online commercial sound-effects library founded by Rob Nokes, which grew out of the Los Angeles side of the original business.
What is the best first upgrade for a home cinema system?
According to Robitaille, the room, not the equipment. Acoustic treatment and proper room correction deliver more audible improvement than a gear upgrade of equivalent cost, because an untreated room will undermine any system placed in it. He works on DSP-equipped Genelec monitors specifically because they can compensate for a non-ideal space, and credits an Anthem receiver at home as his introduction to room correction done properly.
How do you explain the benefit of surround sound to someone who has never heard it?
Robitaille's demonstration costs nothing. Take a familiar, detailed recording and play it through a single speaker, then through two. The audible jump comes from dividing the work: when one speaker no longer has to reproduce high, mid, and low frequencies simultaneously, detail that was previously masked becomes clear. From there, extrapolate to five channels, then to an object-based Atmos layout.
What is Nathan Robitaille working on now?
He supervised season three of Silo for Apple TV+, splitting duties with Dustin Harris, who covers dialogue. The show poses an unusual world-building constraint: its underground concrete setting has effectively no wood, which rules out a large share of every standard sound-effects library, since wooden transients are baked into most door, furniture, and prop recordings. Much of the show's sound had to be constructed from scratch.
