NPR Stories: Walter Murch

Behind the Scenes with Film Editor and sound designer Walter Murch.

'Fresh Air' Interview: Walter Murch.

Reconstructing 'Touch of Evil'.

Apocalypse Now Redux.

Walter Murch Lecture - Part 1 of 2

Walter Murch in conversation at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in 2003. The lecture gives an insight behind the scenes to showcase the work of this master of film and sound editing describing not only the techniques used in his craft, but also the creative inspiration behind in the choices he made in the editing room. Murch also notes that film editing is now 100 years old, and recounts achievements from the history of the craft.
[google video]

An interview with Michael Rubin, pt.3

by Matteo Milani, October 2008 

(Continued from Page 2)

MM: User interface. I read that the sound tracks were shown as parallel vertical bars with time being represented on the vertical axis. So the SoundDroid's timeline scrolled vertically. Is it correct? Was the purpose to mime the optical track on film? 

MR: It wasn't because of the optical track, not really. It was imitating the physical orientation of things in the mixing theater (the mags were loaded vertically on dubbers), because of the physical Cue Sheet that runs vertically. The cue sheet had several columns for notations of footage, fades, volume levels, and equalizations which are used in mixing sound tracks, where each column usually represents one track. It was a dubbing log used to alert the mixer of events happening from the various dubbers in the old days of mixing. I thought the SoundDroid was fun, no one had seen a program like that before, doing the patching right there on the touchscreen - "I want a reverb on this, I want to patch that track to a reverb unit." It was very exciting to show people those kind of functions. 

Novices were stunned. Professionals thrilled. SoundDroid allowed a user to go to a digital library of effects, grab one, and drop it on a track running vertically on the Cue Sheet. There you could slide it around, up and down in time, or over to another track. There were handles on the edges of each sound, so it could be shortened or lengthened into endless loops as desired. By using the tools on the right side of the screen, any given sound (or entire tracks) could be augmented with professional audio controls, including EQ, pan, and an enormous variety of filters. All the tracks were slaved to a videotape with the corresponding picture and a pointing finger - the "now line" showed where you were scrolling through the project. - excerpt from Droidmaker 

SoundDroid sound editor "cuesheet" screen. Each shaded vertical stripe represents a track of sound, with time going from the top to the bottom of the screen. The amplitude envelope in each track is shown by the solid black outline. Text annotations show the incipits of spoken text fragments, among other things. 

 from Droidmaker, by Michael Rubin; photo courtesy of Lucasfilm Ltd. 

MM: Can you talk about the SoundDroid's early “spotting” system for searching sound effects libraries? 

MR: We were taking orders for SoundDroids, but it was still not ready for shipping. The company asked: "Is there a subset of what SoundDroid did, that is working and that we can sell now?" They decided that the spotting system was the part of the system that worked best. They built the SoundDroid Spotter, and digitized most of the Lucasfilm sound library at that time. I don't think they ever sold it, at least not between 1985 and 1987. I demonstrated it at NAB and AES, but it was just kind of abandoned, it went anywhere. This is my recollection about this product. I've never heard about it outside the company people. 

[...] The SoundDroid was too big, too general, and too expensive. There were several smaller markets that a scaled-back version of the technology would more readily be able to address. [...] The first logical result was called SoundDroid Spotter, a stand alone sound effects spotting station that utilized the database on the SUN with basic processing tools. Noise reduction was another. Specialized synthesis was a third. It would take years before the costs of storage and processing would make a digital post-production workstation viable for movie sound. - excerpt from Droidmaker 

MM: Did you interview Ben Burtt? 

MR: Yes, I know Ben very well, he's great. When I was writing the book, he spent many months of his time talking to me. At that time he was working on Episode III at Lucasfilm. After Revenge came out, he left Lucasfilm after 30 years of career with George, and went to Pixar. I thought it was a very interesting sight, because back in the 80's, he was one of the people who said: "What are these guys in the Computer Division doing all day? It looks like they're not doing anything." And he's here now, going over to Pixar. He's an unbelievable talent, what he did for the sound of Wall-E is an absolute tour de force. 

MM: Burtt, like Walter Murch did before, moved to picture editing, alongside his main career in sound. 

MR: It's fun, because when Ben first got hired from Lucasfilm, it was because Murch wasn't available. Lucas needed a “young Walter Murch” for Star Wars. His job at that time was partly sound recording, but he was also a production assistant. He said he was driving Carrie Fisher to get her hair cut, or drop off some storyboards over ILM, among other things. 

MM: What's the relevance of GUI (Graphical User Interface) in audio/video applications? What did you expect from its evolution in the long future? 

MR: Predicting the future is notoriously difficult. The best way to predict the future is to invent it (Alan Kay). Haptics will change the way we interact with the machines via the tactile feedback. That will be a cool way to interface with the computer. These devices are very expensive today for industry and medicine use, which means this technology will be cheap in ten years. And I think screens will go away for projections of things in the space. I don't think I would really try to predict which interface it will be, I'm still working by a year out. Watch Minority Report, that's good thinking about. I'm pretty sure it will be something like that, where you move around, you pick this up and control something in the computer, somewhere else. It seems logical to me. Just recently I saw an impressive demonstration of a head-mount that non-invasively reads your brain signals and moves objects on a computer. It is early, but I cannot imagine that kind of technology not changing the way we work with picture and sound. 

droidmaker.blogspot.com

[Prev | 1 | 2 | 3 ]


Related Posts:

• An interview with James A. Moorer 
• SoundDroid pt.1: the Timeline 
• SoundDroid pt.2: THX "The Chord" 
• SoundDroid pt.3: inside Lucasfilm with Michael Rubin 

Bibliography 

Books
Rubin, M. (2006) Droidmaker: George Lucas and the Digital Revolution - Triad Publishing Company Roads, C. (1996) The Computer Music Tutorial - MIT Press

Websites
droidmaker.com
editorsguild.com 
en.wikipedia.org 
nytimes.com 
money.cnn.com
sonicstudio.com 

Randy Thom, keynote speaker at Siggraph

Randy Thom, the brilliant sound effects designer from Skywalker Sound, offered the first keynote of the conference. A protégé of Walter Murch, who “went to school” on Apocalypse Now and earned Oscars for The Right Stuff and The Incredibles, Thom offered an enlightening discussion on “Designing a Movie for Sound.” In fact, he used the openings of both Apocalypse Now and WALL•E to illustrate two innovative approaches. Early collaboration is essential in achieving a cinematic result and so is experimenting with how the visual and the sonic can work together. On Apocalypse Now, when director Francis Ford Coppola made Willard (Martin Sheen) a passive observer, he opened up the possibility for experimentation with sound. Thom even crucially suggested that animation is currently utilizing the best strategy for successful integration of sound design more than live-action. Early collaboration with the director is offering inspiration to animators for finding the right balance between visuals and sound, and the most appropriate combination of dialogue, music and sound effects. The latter, he said, was key.

[via events.animationblogspot.com]


Thom delivers sound ideas at Siggraph

"One emerging difference that's very important ... is the directors of animation more and more often are asking me and other sound designers to get involved very, very early in the process, and do speculative sounds to help animators get inspired."

"This idea that sound is something you do at the end of the process -- that it's sort of a decoration you apply at the end of the movie -- is false. I think it's bound to make a better movie if you start thinking about sound and start experimenting with sound as soon as you start the project."

He urged the assembled graphics designers and animators to remember, "When you're writing the story, think about what your characters might hear that could tell the audience something about who the characters are. Create moments to feature those sounds."

He also warned that if the characters are always talking, "neither they nor the audience will get a chance to hear the objects, places and events that will make your film more cinematic."

[read the full article - via variety.com]
[Twitter realtime results for Randy Thom during #siggraph]

UPDATE:

The following video podcast is up now on ACMSIGGRAPH's Channel:

A message from Randy via Sound Article List:

"My SIGGRAPH presentation went very well. There were more than 3000 people in the audience. Gulp! My long time co-supervisor and in-his-spare-time theater sound design and calibration specialist Dennis Leonard worked with the team in New Orleans to create an amazing sounding 5.1 system for a room that large."

"The audience was mostly computer graphics and animation professionals, but included lots of students interested in those areas too. They were very receptive to the ideas I presented about treating sound as a full collaborator, getting sound experiments started as early on a project as possible, and integrating visual and sonic experiments from the very beginning of the project. I had done video interviews with Francis Coppola and Walter Murch talking about the sound on Apocalypse Now; and Andrew Stanton and Ben Burtt talking about Wall-E, and I used excerpts from those interviews in the presentation."

"I made the point that one emerging difference between sound for animation and sound for live action is that animation directors are increasingly interested in getting sound involved early, whereas nearly all live action filmmakers are stuck in this dumb old notion that sound is a decoration you apply to a film just before it's released."

"Basically the presentation was about integrating visual experimentation and sonic experimentation as soon as either of them starts. That's literally what happened on Wall-E. Ben Burtt started doing sound experiments at the same time the animators started imagining what the robots in the movie would look like. Walter didn't start playing with sound quite that early on Apocalypse Now, but he did start while they were still in principal photography."

"I also talked about the sound design opportunities on Apocalypse increasing exponentially when Coppola re-wrote John Milius' original script. Milius wrote the Willard character as more active, aggressive. Coppola decided he should be more passive, like a lens through which we experience the war... basically an observer. That turned the movie into a playground for sound design, because an observer is also a listener. So, even though Coppola may not have anticipated that outcome exactly in terms of sound, he opened the door nonetheless."

[Randy Thom - Scene Unseen Interview]

Downloadable Walter Murch

The Boston FCPUG has a link to download uber-editor, Walter Murch's talk from last year's FCP User Group Network meeting at Mac World. Walter is the Oscar winning editor of Apocalypse Now, The English Patient and Cold Mountain. If you're not familiar with his work, you should be.

(via sbfinalcut.org).

Walter Murch Lecture - Part 2 of 2

Walter Murch's credits include Apocalypse Now, The Godfather Trilogy, American Graffiti and THX-1138, through to The English Patient and Cold Mountain.
[google video]

Walter Murch: "Three Fathers of Cinema"

Walter Murch: "Three Fathers of Cinema" from Old School Cinema on Vimeo.

"This video brings up a crucial definition of film that many filmmakers forget to their and the art’s detriment. Watch the video for a unique, refreshing, and ultimately transformative view of the world of cinema." - poetzerofilm.com

[oldschoolcinema.com]

Walter Murch about the layers of sound for the editing of a film

[an excerpt from "Film Sound: Theory and Practice"]

I think it's generally misleading  to say, "Well, that sequence had eighty tracks, it must be great." Ideally, for me,  the perfect sound film has zero tracks. You try to get the audience to a point, somehow, where they can imagine the sound. They hear the sound in their minds, and it really isn't on the track at all. That's the ideal sound, the one that exists totally in the mind, because it's the most intimate. It deals with each person's experience, and it's obviously of the highest fidelity imaginable, because it's not being translated through any kind of medium. 

So, at a certain point, there were 160 tracks for Apocalypse. That is an awful lot, but on the other hand, if somehow I could have achieved the same effect with no tracks, I would have been more impressed.  Or one track. If there had been one sound that did all of that, so mysteriously, I would be more impressed. but what that means is: thinking very, very deeply, and being very, very lucky in getting exactly the right thing. And if you can do that, then the number of tracks is meaningless. But, generally speaking, it doesn't happen very often, if ever, to get that one thing. That's just an abstract ideal that I always strive for.

I believe that there have always been sound films, since the invention of films, and there will always be silent films. You can look at television show today, or even some features, and there really is no "sound" in them. There is talking, and there's music, maybe, but the part of the brain that is interested in sound and texture and the meaning of sound as music is totally uninvolved. The sound in those films is conveying little pellets of information - the door closed, the person said this - and there's no duality, no stretching. So there are silent films today: they've got sound tracks, of course, but emotionally, they're silent. 

Whereas you can look at Chaplin's silent comedies and certain other films and they depend tremendously on the sound: the sound that the wardrobe made when it fell on him. You can "hear" all of the dishes break. Those films are using sound. They're asking you to imagine the sound of things. So they are sound films, even though they are completely silent. You try to track yourself along the boundaries between those two things - that's where you swing between zero tracks and 160 tracks.

- Walter Murch

Walter Murch: interview

Academy-award winning film editor Walter Murch talks about his career path.



[full video - via Roadtrip Nation]

Audio Restoration for 'The Godfather Trilogy'

Mark Berger, Francis Coppola, and Walter Murch mixing Godfather II (1974).

POP Sound in Santa Monica, Calif. recently completed audio restoration work and 5.1 surround sound mixing for Paramount Home Entertainment’s release of The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration DVD Collection on DVD and Blu-ray.

POP Sound spent nearly eight months on the project, working in concert with Walter Murch, the original re-recording mixer on The Godfather, Parts II & III. For the first two films, POP Sound worked from the films’ original mono stems, as well as the original multitrack recordings of their musical scores. POP Sound had access to the original stereo elements for The Godfather, Part III. The re-recording mixer on the project for POP Sound was the late Ted Hall. Much of Hall's attention was devoted to eliminating artifacts that had affected the soundtrack over the years and addressing audio issues that were impossible to address when the films were made.

“We had a lot of cleanup to do to make these films sound fluid in transitions—the original mono tracks were very rough, with hard transitions,” recalls POP Sound's Director of Home Theater, Moksha Bruno. “There was a massive amount of de-humming, de-clicking, as well as time alignment issues we had to deal with. The original laser disc mix had a constant hum that wasn’t apparent at the time, but with the better home theater systems of today you begin to hear things of that nature."

[read the full article - via mixonline.com]

An Argument For Reinventing The Term "Sound Design"

Below is an email Randy Thom is sending to people who work in film sound.

In his own words: "My previous post on the list about "Dialog As Sound Design" is related to my interest in broadening the scope of sound design to encompass all creative work in sound. I don't expect this little piece to change people's minds, but I hope it will help start a dialog."

[via Sound Article List]

Hi, All, and Happy New Year!

I'm sorry for this mass mailing, but I couldn't think of a better or less intrusive way to air some ideas I've been puzzling over, regarding issues we all know about, but rarely get to discuss in a formal way. At the center of it is that relatively new, controversial and ambiguous term "Sound Design." To begin to frame some of the issues I want to say something about another historically controversial screen credit. I don't bring it up to suggest that it is an exact model for our current situation in Sound, or a predictor of how the credit Sound Design will eventually be seen, but simply because there are some parallels between the two that are interesting.

In 1939 William Cameron Menzies was the first Art Director to receive the screen credit "Production Designer" on a film that made a rather big splash. The film was "Gone With The Wind." Many other Art Directors were appalled at the new credit, and the acrimony over the "Production Design" continued for several decades. Why, some said, is this new title necessary? Menzies is doing exactly the same job he did when he called himself an Art Director. Is he trying to aggrandize his position? Is he trying to make himself seem better, more desirable than we mere Art Directors are? In other words... Is this a scheme to steal our clients?... some wondered.

In the mid 1980's Richard Beggs and I (presumably because Murch and Burtt weren't available : ) were asked to come to a meeting of the Executive Committee of the Academy's Sound Branch so that we could explain what a sound designer is. I honestly don't remember what we said, but I suspect we did an appallingly bad job of it. What follows is something close to what I think we should have said...

The credit first appeared on a film, actually two films, in 1979. On "Apocalypse Now" Walter Murch took the screen credit "Sound Design and Montage." About the same time Ben Burtt got the "Sound Design" credit on the sequel to "American Graffiti." But they weren't the first to get that credit, they were just the first to get it on a film.
Earlier, some sound people working on Broadway plays in New York had received the credit "Sound Design," and Dan Dugan, who was doing the same kinds of work in the San Francisco theater scene, took that credit as well, before it appeared in the world of film.

Contrary to what many people think, the work that "Sound Designers" do is not new. It was being done long before anyone called him or herself a "Sound Designer." People in film had been doing what "Sound Designers" do at least two generations before "Apocalypse Now." The crucial question then: what is that work? What does a Sound Designer do? Well, we know what sound is, and we know what design is, so shouldn't it be clear? Maybe, but it's not.

When Walter and Ben took that credit they saw it as something very similar to what a few Supervising Sound Editors and Mixers had indeed already done... work with the Director to shape the sound of the film beginning very early in the process, as early as production or even pre-production, and continue that work all the way through post production. Since those opportunities to work on a project from pre-production through post were very rare, they thought it deserved a new name, and Sound Design seemed appropriate. Among others, they used Orson Welles and the way he worked with his sound crews as a model. The idea was that if sound was to be a full collaborator somebody was needed to work with the Director from nearly the beginning of the project so that sound ideas could influence creative decisions in the other crafts before it was too late, so that Sound could be a driving creative force rather than a band-aid. That was the grand theory in a nutshell, but it didn't catch on.

The "sexy" term Sound Design caught on in the movie biz, but with a very different and unfortunately much narrower meaning. Somehow Sound Design in film came to be associated exclusively with things "high tech," with using 24track tape recorders and midi in the early days, and a little later plug-ins. Basically the grand notion of a sound collaborator for the Director morphed into "gadget specialist."
A Sound Designer became something like a high tech audio grease monkey, a nerd you hired to electronically fabricate sounds you couldn't find in the effects library. Lots and lots of people started calling themselves Sound Designers. It quickly became an easy way to get cheap attention, whether the attention was deserved or not. Established Supervising Sound Editors and Mixers, especially in LA, justifiably saw many of these newly minted "Sound Designers" as con artists out to steal their clients with a few slick techy moves.

In my view, the word design applies to all the creative work we do in sound. Fabricating and manipulating sounds is sound design. Editing existing sounds is sound design. Brilliant sound design can be done using unmodified sound effects from the most basic commercial library. Breathtakingly beautiful sound design can be done and has been done with dialog alone, no sound effects at all. Supervising is also design. It's a crucial kind of sound design in my opinion because it consists of guiding the creative process. And finally, Mixing is design. Despite the sometimes questionable use of the term by "wannabees," I think Sound Design is a credit very worth preserving. The "grand notion" is worth preserving and spreading as well. We should all be pushing, to the degree we can, to make Sound a full creative collaborator in the storytelling process.

The most important part of the work that Editors and Mixers do is making creative decisions. The word "design" makes it easy to distinguish us from engineers and administrators, whose work is extremely important but not focused on artistic creativity. Oscars in the Sound categories are awarded to those people who make the final creative decisions for the Director's approval. If someone has acted as a creative supervisor for sound all the way through post production until the end of the final mix I feel strongly that he or she should be eligible for Oscar nomination regardless of whether the person's screen credit was "Supervising Sound Editor," "Mixer," or "Sound Designer." The borders between editing and mixing are rapidly disappearing as technology allows both kinds of work to be done with nearly identical machines. Given that "mixing" and "editing" are becoming one thing, wouldn't it be better if the people supervising the creative decisions in Sound were called "Supervising Sound Designers?"

Randy Thom
January 13, 2009

Walter Murch: History of Editing

Walter looks back on how it used to be in the days when celluloid was cut and spliced [part 1].



[part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5]

[via macvideo.tv]

SF Film festival on KQED radio

As the 50th San Francisco International Film Festival opens, the program discusses film and filmmaking in the Bay Area, from Eadweard Muybridge to the present day.

Guests:

• Graham Leggat, executive director of the San Francisco Film Society

• Rob Nilsson, filmmaker and screenwriter whose new film, "Carved Out of Pavement: The Work of Rob Nilsson" premieres at this year's festival

• Saul Zaentz, producer and winner of three Academy Awards for "Amadeus" "The English Patient" and "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"

• Walter Murch, editor, sound designer and winner of three Academy Awards for "Apocalypse Now" and "The English Patient"

[listen to the program]

[via Sound Article List]

Francis Ford Coppola's Youth Without Youth

Film sound technique and aesthetics

Picture editor/re-recording mixer Walter Murch (left) and sound designer/re-recording mixer Pete Horner

[via mixonline]

'Sound for picture' special

Genre pairs expose secrets of sound
Audio pros compare, contrast their similar films

Details important in sound editing
Even amid 1,000 tracks, small touches can be key

[via Variety]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Listen: Seeing Sound (2003)

Three masters of American sound design joined the Third Coast Festival for a conversation about radio. Academy Award-winning picture and sound editor Walter Murch (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, The English Patient), Academy Award-winning sound designer Randy Thom (The Right Stuff, The Thin Blue Line), and Peabody Award-winning radio artist Joe Frank deconstructed excerpts from their work to reveal the techniques, discoveries and secrets within, forging a conversation about the ways sound can be used to create texture, build character and add rhythm, mystery and suspense to radio storytelling. (1:59:26)

[via Thirdcoastfestival.org]

Randy Thom @ VIEW Conference 2011

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.


Related Post:

• Creating Film Sound: an interview with Richard Beggs, pt.1

The Heliocentric Pantheon: An Interview with Walter Murch

"I spent a lot of time trying to discover those key sounds that bring universes along with them. I tend not to visualize but auralize, to think about sound in terms of space. Rather than listen to the sound itself, I listen to the space in which the sound is contained."

[via TheMusicOfSound]

[source: BLDBLOG]

An interview with Gary Rydstrom

by Matteo Milani and Federico Placidi - U.S.O. Project, 2011 

Gary Rydstrom was born in 1959 in Chicago, IL. He graduated from the University of Southern California - School of Cinematic Arts in 1981. He began his career at Sprocket Systems, formerly Skywalker Sound, in 1983. Offered the job by a college professor, Gary received the opportunity to work with his mentor, Star Wars sound designer Ben Burtt. He created sound for numerous successful films including Backdraft, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Jurassic Park, Titanic, Saving Private Ryan, Minority Report and Finding Nemo. Through this work he has won 7 Academy Awards.
Rydstrom did his first work for Pixar on the short film Luxo Jr.. John Lasseter has said it was Rydstrom's work on Luxo Jr., such as creating the lamp's voice from the squeak of a lightbulb being screwed in, that taught him how sound can be a partner in the storytelling of a film. In 2006 he has made his directorial debut with the Pixar animated short Lifted. He recently jumped again into the director's chair to create his second animated short Hawaiian Vacation, set to play in front of Cars 2. 

[Rydstrom talks about the first of Pixar's new brand of Toy Story shorts @ AWN] 

For every director and for all of us the goal is at any one moment in a movie to have the audience on the edge of their feet and can't wait to see what happens next. You are moved by these characters, you believe in these characters. All the meticulous and hard work should be completely invisible. We wanted to be involved in the scene and we don’t you to think that Nemo is a bunch of computer layout. We do not want you to think the many hours that took to create that scene. You are just carried away by the scene and every focus in every step of the production that we do at Pixar is about the story. It is about entertaining the audience. - John Lasseter, 66th Venice Film Festival 


USO: Gary, you’re the third person – of our personal “respect-list” – who came from a sound career and crossed over to a director’s chair: Walter Murch did it first, Ben Burtt came after him. They still design their own sound for their works, just as you did for your first short movie Lifted (with a tribute like the Wilhelm Scream at the very end). How did you manage the transition from sound designer/re-recording mixer to director? How about your feelings?

Gary Rydstrom: Working in film sound is a great way to immerse yourself in the rhythms of a movie. Having done sound for so many movies, and so many different kinds of movies, I’m hoping I’ve developed some mysterious “film instinct.” I think the best directors – and best sound designers – work more from their gut than their brain. In other words, to make movies, your gut has to be bigger than your brain… or maybe I should rephrase that?


GR: "It was a little scary but I always wanted to make films and wanted to have opportunities to write and tell stories. So Pixar being old friends, they gave me this opportunity to come over there and do that. So it was a little scary because there were a lot of things I had to learn. But doing sound for so many years, what I found was that the big similarity is that sound is all about rhythm. It’s about using sound, rhythm helps delineate sound effects, sound tracks, and telling a story with these kind of rhythms is really key. Animation is really about rhythms and timing so I think working in sound gave me a great sense of timing. In fact, on Lifted I used, before animation had been started, used a temp soundtrack to express the timing that I wanted to the animators so they had some reference of what I was after. It was a way for me to even communicate to the animators." - CanMag

[Lifted producer Katherine Sarafian and director Gary Rydstrom © AWN Inc]

USO: Did you develop and learn your new craft in sound room working movie by movie?

GR: Central to sound design is finding what feels right for a movie, what matches its look and heart. So every movie I worked on taught me different lessons. I kept thinking I was close to end of my lessons, but they never ended. Turns out that’s what makes working in film fun. It’s never the same twice. 


USO: Being close to first-class directors during all your sound career has thought you well?

GR: I felt like a spy, watching a lot of directors. I’ve been very lucky to have worked with many of the best – Spielberg, Cameron, Lasseter, Redford – and you probably don’t need me to tell you (their movies do) how different in approach they were. One thing the best have in common: they inspire their crews.


GR: "... I've had this long, great relationship with John Lasseter and Pixar. I've felt involved throughout the whole filmmaking process on their films. They offered me an opportunity to develop and direct films, maybe because I bring an outsider's perspective while still being a Pixar guy through and through.
My friends there know that I've had a long-standing love of comedy. When I first told Steven Spielberg and George Lucas that I was doing this, they were touchingly supportive and generous with advice. I'm grateful for my sound career. It gave me the equivalent of 50-yard-line seats, second row, during a fascinating era in film history." - Mix Magazine 


USO: Can you describe what you were feeling when you left the Technical Building (where you spent almost 20 years), and all your friends at Lucas Skywalker Sound, to your new life/experience in Emeryville?

GR: Luckily I get back to Skywalker Sound quite often, otherwise I’d REALLY miss my old friends and career. Pixar’s no slouch, but there isn’t a more beautiful place to work than Skywalker Ranch. 


I've known Gary for over 20 years and he's really been a mentor and a role model for me, as to how to do this work. His standard for quality, inventiveness and humor is really always in the back of my mind when I work. No one is a quicker study when you break down a scene or a film in terms of what, soundwise, is the best direction to go to serve the story. - Tom Myers, Skywalker Sound 


USO: What does it mean for you to associate a particular sound to a visual event (identifying it in a vast catalogue as big as the sound library of SkySound)? What are the mental or purely instinctive paths competing in making the choice?

GR: Something magical happens when a sound effect is added to picture – and it’s not predictable. After all my years of doing it, I still depend on experimenting, putting sounds against image and seeing what happens. First time I did this, as a film student, it amazed me how sound could “open up” a movie, how the combination of sound and visual could create something greater than the sum parts. Having a great sound library is essential, but the real secret is how one uses it. 


GR: "I wanted to give the lamps in Luxo Jr. character through sound. I told John (Lasseter) that I'd come up with these voices. He'd never imagined they'd have voices and was wary of the idea. But I experimented with taking real sounds — a lot of it as simple as unscrewing a light bulb or scraping metal. Every once in a while, a sound would be produced that would remind you of sadness or glee. I always think of sound design being like prospecting for gold. Start by, say, goofing around, making lots of sounds, then find the one percent that has something interesting about it. Put this against the film, and there's a magical moment when the sound, if it's right, merges into the image, brings it to life. They were not cartoon-y. They were fun, reality-based sounds. It felt like the birth of something new, even then." - Mix Magazine

USO: Many sound artists working in other domains like electroacoustic music, musique concrete, environmental sounds has been strongly influenced by the contemporary cinema, and by its ability to create stories with the help of sound effects, soundscapes and even to define the personality of some "objects" with unmistakable sounds. How it is possible to interrelate these multiplicity of experience? 

GR: What all sound artists share is a desire to convey emotions, so I certainly was inspired by non-movie sound work. Sound is emotion. Not just music, but all sound. Humans (who can hear) seem to take sound in general for granted, which is frustrating, but liberating. How manipulative can we be when no one’s paying attention! 


USO: While Europe was experiencing electronics and sound design like natural language consequence of the avant-garde of 50's, in the U.S. this journey took place independently in the field of the film industry with other purposes and objectives. You were aware of what was happening in the old continent and its experiments?

GR: I’m certainly aware of the European traditional of producing “soundscapes” (for lack of a better word) for radio. In some ways, I was jealous of sound work that didn’t depend on the visual – how free it seemed! Best I could do was build an “off-screen” world in film. But I always had a movie to be influenced by – how scary to have sound work stand on its own. 


USO: You've been one of the most assiduous "regulars" of the Synclavier, an instrument widely used in various musical fields. Can you describe the creative approach with this tool? What were your procedures? What made it such as a instrument so unique? To create the sound of the engines of the Titanic you and Chris Boyes worked long on the Synclavier to reproduce the effect in question. Do you remember how you did it?

GR: I fell in love with the Synclavier early in my career because it was such a powerful instrument for shaping natural sounds. I never used the FM synthesis – even making electronic sound effects I would try to use natural sounds, just because I find real sounds are more interesting. Sampling sounds and putting them on a keyboard allowed me to quickly experiment with pitch and layering, which are my primary tools for bending real sounds to my will. The Titanic engine sounds took advantage of how the Synclavier could speed up and slow down a sound pattern. For me, nothing beats using a “musical” instrument for creating sound effects.


GR: "The idea of using a sampler for sound effects work had astonishing potential. With sampled sounds in RAM, you can instantly pitch-bend it and layer it and play it and shape it, without using any processing time. You can layer on the same key and very finely manipulate the pitch and delay and merge them together in ways that were harder to do in the tape-to-tape days. It allowed me to create the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, in which I took several layers and blended different animal sounds into what sounds like one animal.
With the Synclavier, I have a library of sound “parts,” little snippets that are like phonemes in language. Interesting bits of sound that can be rearranged in multitudes of ways. It's a library of raw material, and it's valuable still." - Mix Magazine


USO: How about your relationship with Ben Burtt along your sound career and especially now in Pixar? I mean crosstalk and dialogue, to share ideas. Could you describe him as a mentor, a friend, a colleague, a druid?

GR: All of my approaches and philosophies about sound come from Ben Burtt. At the time he was revolutionizing sound design, I was lucky enough to get a job at Sprocket Systems and see how he did it, how much he knew about film sound history, and most importantly how much he cared about using sound to tell a story. When I started working on Jurassic Park, I remember Ben was away on vacation. I stumbled along until he came back – for all sorts of reasons, psychological and practical, I couldn’t get started until he was in the building.



[Gary Rydstrom Talks About Cinema Sound - via DolbyInsider]


USO: Nowadays many sound designers are working in nonlinear environments like Pro Tools, Nuendo with tons of plug-ins to make everything. One thing we always admired in your work is the exquisite and unfailing "organic" sound and his innate musicality. It seems that sounds "exist" in nature and are not a product of a skilled craftsman. Would you like to talk about that?

GR: There’s a danger in processing sound too much. I believe the best sound effects come from the best raw recordings, and are tweaked as little as possible. The world is so full of amazing sounds – sounds no synthesizer can match – so why not find them and use them?


GR: [...] I remember a scene in the first Mission Impossible in which Tom Cruise breaks into a computer room at the CIA, for which we’d added all these sound details for equipment he was using to lower himself in. Yet the idea was that if he made any sound over a certain level, he would trip the alarm. Brian De Palma ultimately said, “No, take it all out.” And for the most part, that scene plays with nothing on the track. I went to see it with an audience and it had the desired effect: It made everyone lean in, pay closer attention, get nervous. Tension comes from the silence of that scene.
[...] Silence can be thought of as a type of sound. It’s like when somebody years ago figured out that zero was a number. And silence is just as valid as an amazing sound. Every sound editor can’t help but think of how to fill up a track; it’s what we’re paid for. - excerpts from “From here on in, absolute silence.” [via Benjamin Wright]

Thanks Gary... keep up the good work! M&F

The Sound World of Dario Argento

"Sounds To Die For - Speaking The Language Of Horror Film Sound"

in discussion with Walter Murch, Gary Rydstrom, Michel Chion, Claude Letessier, Claudio Simonetti...

A fascinating behind the scenes look at the previously unexplored territory of horror film sound. Through in-depth analysis of sound in the films of Dario Argento and discussions with leading practitioners, this book explores our inherent relationship with sound; examining how and why specific sounds are chosen and utilised to express and manipulate human perception and emotion.

[read more: flaithulach.co.uk]

Randy Thom - Skywalker Sound

Randy Thom has been part of Robert Zemeckis' core creative team ever since Forrest Gump (1994). Through his career Thom has worked with such top Hollywood talents as Walter Murch, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg. Thom has received two Academy Awards:

#1 'The Right Stuff' (Best Sound)

['The Right Stuff' original trailer, 1983]

#2 'The Incredibles' (Best Achievement in Sound Editing)

['The Incredibles' original trailer, 2004]

Randy Thom talked about creating sound for 'The Incredibles' in the following interviews:

#1 Mix Magazine
#2 sfgate.com

"My approach to the art is almost always to take something from the past and put an interesting twist on it. Young sound designers, I think, often get caught up in the idea of making a sound that's unlike anything anybody has ever heard before. But that's really hopeless. It also isn't very useful, because a sound needs a frame of reference."