Part Two of the edited tidbits I noted from the interview with Sound Designer Gary Rydstrom in the February 2004 issue of Mix Magazine:
Sound comes to us over time. You don't get a snapshot of sound. Therefore, what you notice with sound, the essential building block, is change. So in... making a basic sound, I'm always thinking in terms of how it is changing over time. Even the simplest sound can have a rhythm to it, dynamics, changing pitch. Orchestrators must think about these things all the time.
So dynamics become a useful tool for getting a sense of contrast. In an action film, say Terminator 2, contrasts, sometimes even massive contrasts, are essential. But it's also about how frequencies work together. There's a trick to making a gunshot big using multiple layers of elements. You take the high snap of a pistol and add to it the low boom of a cannon and the midrange of a canyon echo. You orchestrate it. On an über scale then, we do that to the whole soundtrack, making sounds work together.
I remember a scene in the first Mission Impossible in which Tom Cruise breaks into a computer room... for which we'd added all these sound details for equipment... Yet the idea was that if he made any sound... he would trip the alarm. Brian De Palma ultimately said, "No, take it all out." ...I went to see it with an audience and it had the desired effect: It made everyone lean in, pay closer attention, get nervous.
In a big action scene, the biggest challenge often is to make the track articulate. The mixing and editing challenge is to make the track not turn into mush.
On Cast Away ...there are stretches of that movie in which very little ...sound ...is used. And there's no music. No place to hide sounds, so they have to be the right sounds. Every detail becomes awfully important.
Alan Splet (The Black Stallion, Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Dune) was the best at using sound effects in an overtly psychological and musical way. His ambiences were stunning: applying rhythms and pitches of sounds as evocatively as a composer would.
Sometimes we'll get more punch from a mix by being less loud, by putting big moments in the proper context.
The sound process is a big funnel, narrowing tracks and making choices as it goes forward.
I agree, generally, with the trend to do sound jobs with a smaller core group of creative people who collaborate and cross over traditional roles.
Sound comes to us over time. You don't get a snapshot of sound. Therefore, what you notice with sound, the essential building block, is change. So in... making a basic sound, I'm always thinking in terms of how it is changing over time. Even the simplest sound can have a rhythm to it, dynamics, changing pitch. Orchestrators must think about these things all the time.
So dynamics become a useful tool for getting a sense of contrast. In an action film, say Terminator 2, contrasts, sometimes even massive contrasts, are essential. But it's also about how frequencies work together. There's a trick to making a gunshot big using multiple layers of elements. You take the high snap of a pistol and add to it the low boom of a cannon and the midrange of a canyon echo. You orchestrate it. On an über scale then, we do that to the whole soundtrack, making sounds work together.
I remember a scene in the first Mission Impossible in which Tom Cruise breaks into a computer room... for which we'd added all these sound details for equipment... Yet the idea was that if he made any sound... he would trip the alarm. Brian De Palma ultimately said, "No, take it all out." ...I went to see it with an audience and it had the desired effect: It made everyone lean in, pay closer attention, get nervous.
In a big action scene, the biggest challenge often is to make the track articulate. The mixing and editing challenge is to make the track not turn into mush.
On Cast Away ...there are stretches of that movie in which very little ...sound ...is used. And there's no music. No place to hide sounds, so they have to be the right sounds. Every detail becomes awfully important.
Alan Splet (The Black Stallion, Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Dune) was the best at using sound effects in an overtly psychological and musical way. His ambiences were stunning: applying rhythms and pitches of sounds as evocatively as a composer would.
Sometimes we'll get more punch from a mix by being less loud, by putting big moments in the proper context.
The sound process is a big funnel, narrowing tracks and making choices as it goes forward.
I agree, generally, with the trend to do sound jobs with a smaller core group of creative people who collaborate and cross over traditional roles.
No comments:
Post a Comment