Here are the edited tidbits I noted from the interview with Sound Designer Gary Rydstrom in the February 2004 issue of Mix Magazine:
On Cocoon, we had to do alien glow sounds... so I did the glass harmonica trick by rubbing my finger on the top of these glasses that meant a lot to me. A little echo and pitching and layering, and it became an alien glow sound.
I wanted to give the lamps in Luxo Jr. character through sound... 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.
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.
(To this day, I think the biggest advantage to the Synclavier is it's ability to so quickly pitch individual sounds in a layer for tuning.)
When we cut on mag... we had three dubbers available. We could cut up to three tracks — very limited. But you learned to work within this limitation ...if you go right to Pro Tools, you have almost too many possibilities right out of the gate; it's harder to focus on the essence of what sound editing is through all the bells and whistles.
I remember on Saving Private Ryan, I was trying to come up with weird sounds for these incoming tanks as they approached the village. Spielberg wanted scary, odd sounds bouncing between the buildings. I put sounds of metal scraping and engines beating on quarter-inch tape and rocked the tape back and forth by hand — like record scratching — and coming up with strange sounds and rhythms. I could only do that with a quarter-inch tape deck.
There has been no revolution in sound to parallel the revolution in visuals in the last 10 years... I can't go into a computer that I know of and create a lion roar, synthesize it entirely and make it a believable, interesting lion like ILM can make a lion. I would think that creating a lion visually is harder than creating a lion roar, but I guess I'm wrong.
On Cocoon, we had to do alien glow sounds... so I did the glass harmonica trick by rubbing my finger on the top of these glasses that meant a lot to me. A little echo and pitching and layering, and it became an alien glow sound.
I wanted to give the lamps in Luxo Jr. character through sound... 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.
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.
(To this day, I think the biggest advantage to the Synclavier is it's ability to so quickly pitch individual sounds in a layer for tuning.)
When we cut on mag... we had three dubbers available. We could cut up to three tracks — very limited. But you learned to work within this limitation ...if you go right to Pro Tools, you have almost too many possibilities right out of the gate; it's harder to focus on the essence of what sound editing is through all the bells and whistles.
I remember on Saving Private Ryan, I was trying to come up with weird sounds for these incoming tanks as they approached the village. Spielberg wanted scary, odd sounds bouncing between the buildings. I put sounds of metal scraping and engines beating on quarter-inch tape and rocked the tape back and forth by hand — like record scratching — and coming up with strange sounds and rhythms. I could only do that with a quarter-inch tape deck.
There has been no revolution in sound to parallel the revolution in visuals in the last 10 years... I can't go into a computer that I know of and create a lion roar, synthesize it entirely and make it a believable, interesting lion like ILM can make a lion. I would think that creating a lion visually is harder than creating a lion roar, but I guess I'm wrong.
