How Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio built its stop-motion sound from guitar-maker's scrap wood

Sound designer Scott Martin Gershin built roughly 99 percent of Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio's (2022) sound from scratch, because recording the film's actual wooden puppets did not produce usable character audio -- stop motion's silent, frame-by-frame stage leaves almost nothing for a sound team to capture on set. Gershin sourced about fifty pounds of luthier's offcuts (Brazilian rosewood, mahogany, flame maple) from guitar maker Paul Reed Smith and shaped Pinocchio's specific wooden-body sound from those tonal woods, deliberately harsher and more rattling ('like a bunch of Lincoln Logs') in the character's early scenes and smoothed as he matures, so the sound design tracks the performance arc. Foley artist Dan O'Connell performed footsteps and cloth to the animated scratch track; Gershin's mixing principle treated silence as an active tool -- 'the loudest sound is silence, especially in a theater' -- reserved for moments a fully sound-designed puppet film could otherwise fill wall-to-wall.