Sound brings movies to life — especially animated movies — and the nitty gritty of how and why sound design works can be quite unexpected. Drawing from Pixar films, and live-action films such as “T2,” “Jurassic Park” and “War Horse,” participants will hear many examples of raw sound effects recordings, designed sounds, and mixes to illustrate how sound helps tell stories.
Master Class with Gary Rydstrom | Friday, Oct. 19, 10:00 – 12:15, 17:30 - 18.30
“I invite people who work in sound and filmmakers interested in creatively using sound to bring questions and short examples of their work to this master class. We will explore how sound is being used and how it can be better used to tell stories.”
Rydstrom, along with Directors Eric Darnell, Dan Attias, and Genndy Tartakovsk, cinematographer Tristan Oliver, and professor Chris Perry will join in the roundtable discussion “The future of cinema.” He will also take part in the workshop “Designing for a new world”, in which participants and conference leaders will think and work together to design the year 2025. What will everyday life feel like? What technologies will we use? What will movies, television, and games evolve into?
On Friday, Oct. 28, 2011 VIEW Conference hosted a Master Class with Randy Thom, Director of Sound Design at Skywalker Sound. He is a firm believer that the sooner the sound designer is involved in the pre-production, the better the story can be told. Randy illustrated how sound can shape a film, talking about how doors can be opened to sound. He also shared clips from movies where this kind of early collaboration has happened. Here's an excerpt of his talk during the workshop.
Sound as a full collaborator to make better films
Alan Splet, Walter Murch and Ben Burtt where the three people who lived within about 20 miles each other near San Francisco who really brought a new revolution into American film sound during 70s. I was lucky enough to work with all three of them and “steal” some of their best ideas.
One of the first things that you learn as a sound designer is not think to literally about sound, so one aspect of training your ear is to interpret sound in emotional terms. Subjectivity in filmmaking is a playground for sound: when the audience understand that they don’t figure out consciously, but what they seeing and hearing is being filtered through a character’s or filmmaker’s point of view in a subjective way. Very often working on a sequence for a film what you want to do is think of how you want the sound to make people feel and you analyze what it is about that sound makes you feel certain way and you go looking for sounds or raw material that have those qualities.
Apocalypse Now
If there was ever a film where sound and image were treated more or less equally and allow to affect each other certainly is Apocalypse now. The first sound that you hear in the film - before any music or any dialogue - is a very odd, electronically synthesized helicopter sound - the Ghost Helicopter. Captain Willard is hearing the memory of the helicopter that he has. What you’re listening to is this guy’s brain. He’s remembering things, he’s hallucinating, he’s dreaming, he’s drunk and under the influence of drugs, he’s listening to his brain operate.
The opening sequence is the launching point for all story, immediately the audience is put in a frame of mind that anything can happen, this is going to be a very strange ride.
As he stands at the window looking outside he might heard a little fly buzzing: it took me a week to record that fly (laugh). At first he hears - and we hear - the sound of Saigon outside (car horns, Vespas, police whistles). Those sounds morph into the sound of the jungle: each one of those individual city sounds turns into specific jungle sound. Physically for the all sequence he’s still in his hotel room, but in his mind he moves back into the jungle.
Once upon a time in the West
Sergio Leone decided early on that they will record all the music for this movie before they started shooting the film and they used the music during the shooting to help the actors and essentially to inform how the film is going to be shot. They were struggling how to make music and sound working together before shooting the sequence. Ennio Morricone, the composer, happened to go to a musique concrete concert - a genre involved using real world sounds, rather than traditional musical instruments - by a guy who played a latter, banging and scraping on it. Then he called Leone and said: “There’s should be no conventional music at all in the beginning of the film: instead you perhaps should shoot around the sound effects.”
Leone went shooting the sequence thinking about how the sound of this little train station were going to work in the storytelling.
I think that’s a tragedy that very few studios these days will have the guts to allow a filmmaker to do a sequence like that. They say: “People are going to be bored, we have to fill up with uptempo music through the all thing”. Some budget filmmaking these days is “fear based”, it’s not an attempt to do something new, interesting and unusual, to open people imagination. It’s an attempt to avoid boring people, which is never a good motivation in art.
One of the things that these two scenes have in common is a very strong sense of point of view. Camera angle are very important to sound, believe it or not. The kind of shot, where an actor looking at nothing in particular, is another open door for creative, subjective sound, because the audience knows intuitively that they’re going inside the character’s head. It’s an open door for sound designers to put almost any kind of sound that we want.
Having some ambiguity or mystery about the visual image makes it easier for me to do something useful with the sound. Extreme close-ups get across the idea of subjectivity. Long duration shot opens the door for sound, too. The character’s closing eyes is also an opportunity for sound to do something interesting (imaging, remembering...). The most difficult kind of shot is a brightly-lit medium shot, because you’re not focusing on anything in particular and there’s no mystery there, there’s nothing that invites the ear to help figure out what’s going on.
Another element they’ve in common is sparse dialogue. I’m certainly not against dialogue in film - dialogue will always has a role. Dialogue and sound design generally don’t go well together, because there’s something about the human voice that the human ear want to attempt to. If someone is talking - no matter how hard a director ask me to try to push sound effects during that sequence - it will distract you from the dialogue, which the audience is trying to hear. The way to solve that problem is to design the sequence in a way that there are moments for the dialogue and moments for sound effects. A compromised has to be made, you can’t as a filmmaker try to fire all your bullets at the same time, it’s not going to work. One category of sound tends to dominate at a time - it’s dialogue, it’s music or it’s sound effects.
Another bad tendency in contemporary filmmaking is to try to set it up so that all three dominates simultaneously, it will never works. Lazy filmmakers will just call the composer: “make some very strange music telling the audience that this is a very strange place”. As a sound designer you try to do things and variations in the same way a music composer, to use sound in pure musical way: tempo, harmony and rhythm to evoke emotion. Think about what elements in a set could generate the sound useful for the storytelling: this will be more powerful at the end, it’s not a decoration, that’s a very organic way of telling the audience “this is a very strange place”.
Sound-friendly scripts
Most writers are obsessed with words, and they tend to think words should dominate every sequence, with wall-to-wall dialogue.
Filmmakers simply don’t think about how to use sound in that way before start shooting the sequence. Think about what the characters hear. Think about how the things they hear affects them and how character changes over time. I often found people who come from visual/light background - which David Lynch did - have very interesting sound ideas. He demands you to be creative all the time.
Another thing I told to directors is: during rehearsal in a live action scene, play with your actors in terms to find things in the space that can make sound that will be useful to the story.
As a sound designer, try to imagine ways that sound could playing in an interesting but organic, truthful way to help the storytelling in the sequence. Try to think to other powerful sounds that the audience doesn’t expect. Part of your job as a sound person - I think - is to help the director make the best film possible. If you have interesting ideas - and you should have them - about the way of film shooting that allow you to do something you couldn’t do otherwise, of course you should talk about it.
Sound for Animation
Thanks to big aesthetic jumps in animation, more contemporary animation directors want movies should sound like a live-action movie. For “How to Train Your Dragon” I come up very early on with some speculative vocalizations for the dragons that will help the animators to animate to those elements. I tried to use real-world animal sounds - tiger growls, elephant, whales, goats, camel, dogs - to cover a wide range of emotions, allowing sound to influence the animation. The challenge is how to make the transition from one to another, which needs a lot of work and experimentation with pitch-changing techniques.
Sound Mixing
Mix is about to choose right or most powerful sound in any given moment. In a moment when you need to hear the dialogue you try to artfully lower or eliminate sets of other sounds that are competing with the dialogue at that moment. Space can make sounds useful to the story: there are a lot of others tricks like moving the sound effects and the music into the side loudspeakers and have the voices mostly come out from the center speaker, which make a little bit easier to understand the lines of dialogue. Sound is more powerful if comes from a place we doesn't expect.
You need to think of sound in terms of spectrum and frequencies and tailor those for a given moment.
Stop for a second and listen. Close your eyes, use your ears, and just listen.
Whether you are in a quiet office environment or out on a busy
street, you'll be amazed by how many sounds there are around you. Most
of us do not pay attention to the ambient sounds that surround us. Our
brains filter them out and we don't listen. Yet the sounds we miss can
be very enjoyable.
Designed Sounds
Today, what we hear in our daily lives is often designed sound- music
and sound effects carefully crafted for games, devices, and products.
For example, mission-critical products, such as heart rate monitors used
during medical surgery or a plane’s flight deck controls, use
distinctive alarming sounds that are designed to be easy to perceive and
raise a sense of urgency or danger.
In interfaces for everyday tasks, sound is used to create engaging
and beautiful experiences. Sounds can generate a special feeling or
underline brand identity while simultaneously providing cues that a
command has been received by the system. Most smart phones today come
with subtle sounds that indicate the pressing of a touch screen’s
virtual buttons. Since there is no way to feel if a virtual button has
been pressed, the sounds reinforce the action for the user. Another
example can be found in industrial design, where the latest electric
cars are being designed with artificial motor sounds. The sounds alert
pedestrians to the car as well as reinforce the sense of driving a
powerful vehicle. These examples underline the overall trend of sound
being used to create an aesthetic experience rather than serving as
purely a functional aid to improve interaction.
Blurring the Border Between Listening and Composition
While systems and products are becoming more enjoyable and pleasant
to listen to, they are usually not intentionally designed for sound
interaction. The emergence of accessible music software on computers and
mobile devices is changing this. These programs allow for easy
modification of sound by the average user and blur the border between
listening and sound creation. The small form and limited complexity of
mobile interfaces has forced music software designers to reduce the
complexity of their products, resulting in music software that is widely
used by average mobile phone users.
Music apps are often top sellers. Popular applications allow people
to become mobile DJs, to transform sounds, and to design ringtones.
I was interested in exploring the blur between sound creation and
listening when my friend and colleague Matteo Penzo put me in contact
with Matteo Milani from the U.S.O. Project
sound art group. The ideas and compositions of the U.S.O. Project
revolve around the use of noise and ambient sound as a foundation for
sound installations and music composition. Together we wanted to create a
mobile experience that would support active listening to the everyday
sounds that surround us, making the listener a part of a personal sound
installation. Instead of creating a tool for recording and transforming
sound, we wanted to start from the sounds themselves. Our goal was to
reinforce the sounds of the listener’s environment while blending them
with more musical sounds. Together the sounds would form a unique
experience that could be enjoyed by anybody that has an interest in
sound and art.
Early Experiments
We started with a small prototype app for iOS using simple sound
algorithms to blend U.S.O. music with live recording from the iPhone
microphone. The prototype was tested with real use cases that included
listening to the app while taking a long walk as well as while sitting
at the computer in the office. We added many parameters for the user to
be able to tweak and play with the sound transformation.The parameters
were mapped to on-screen sliders and buttons and to sensors like the
accelerometer.
While doing the informal tests we found that the users were
struggling to understand the relationship between the parameters and the
sound output. Also, in most cases they would end up spending time
experimenting with the parameters to discover how they work. The visual
interface and controls were clearly distracting, taking attention away
from the app’s original goal of reinforcing ambient sounds for the
listener.
Following these early experiments, we decided to take a drastically
different approach. We limited the visual interface as much as possible
and provided a set of sound themes in the app for the listener to
select. This worked much better. All of a sudden the users would pick up
the app and, once started, would tuck it away in a pocket while
listening to the sounds. Each theme takes sounds from the microphone and
blends them with sounds composed by U.S.O. Project. The sounds are
blended using sound algorithms, unique to each theme. Each algorithm is
carefully calibrated to replicate the work and skill that goes into
producing a great listening experience.
Lis10er
The result is Lis10er
(pronounced Listener), an augmented sound installation app. Sounds are
blended from the listener’s surroundings, creating dynamic music that
changes while maintaining its identity. Lis10er provides users with a
creative way of listening to their environment and a unique experience
with every listen.
Tue Haste Andersen is Senior Software Architect based in frog’s Milan studio. Tue is a Human Computer Interaction and Computer Music
expert, with research ranging from DJ work practices to the use of sound
and music in common interaction tasks. He is also the founder and
original author of the popular open source DJ software, Mixxx.
