While to-be-adapted books provide filmmakers with a detailed roadmap of how the project should look, little instruction is given to the sound. This was the case with Percy Jackson and the Olympians, a Disney+ adaptation of Rick Riordan’s best-selling novels. Showrunners Jonathan E. Steinberg and Dan Shotz were given creative freedom to play around with how they adapted various The Lightning Thief chapters, but they always had the text to fall back on for general framework. The same could not be said for the Percy Jackson score.
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Disney+ brought in Bear McCreary, a critically-acclaimed composer known for his work on The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and God of War, to conceptualize and create Percy Jackson‘s mythological sound. After McCreary baked the cake so to speak, it was up to Percy Jackson score mixer Ryan Sanchez to frost it.
“I joined pretty late in post-production,” Sanchez told ComicBook.com. “Scoring is not the very last thing, but it’s really close to the finish line.”
Sanchez is the founder and CEO of Echo Lane Productions, an audio engineering company that partners with studios and composers to polish their film and television scores.
“We help bring the score to life. We’re at the very end, so it’s about solidifying the final product while respecting the sonic vision of the composer,” Sanchez detailed. “Usually it’s a matter of manipulating sounds that the composer gives to me as well as the recordings to make it the best sounding quality we can before we deliver it. It’s a creative role, it’s a collaborative role, and it’s also a very technical role.”
Being the very final stage of the scoring process means Sanchez’s work is all mechanical, servicing McCreary’s vision rather than warping it.
“The producers and the directors have heard the music or the mockups. We call them in advance. They’ve clearly approved them. They like the vibe of it. My job is to not change that, it’s only to enhance it,” Sanchez noted. “Whatever emotion is in that music, I want to make sure it’s held but also elevated to really help out the scene and obviously the whole production in itself.”
Percy Jackson and the Olympians is just the latest collaboration between McCreary and Sanchez. The two have worked together for over a decade, and that tenure has led to them developing a natural language between each other.
“I feel like we always have to be in sync. Sometimes we don’t even need to communicate that much,” Sanchez mentioned. “We just know each other’s styles so well. It is kind of going without saying in a lot of ways.”
All eight episodes of Percy Jackson and the Olympians Season 1 are now streaming on Disney+. McCreary’s score for the series is available on all music platforms.
