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SUNDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2010 With great sound design, hearing is believing movies from E1 Wallace hit on the idea of making the
heartbeat part of the sound design of “Sec- retariat” when he discovered that the horse’s real-life jockey, Ron Turcotte, had ridden a horse whose heart had burst dur- ing a race, killing the animal and seriously injuring Turcotte. “It occurred to me that we could hear that reality in a subtle way,” Wallace says. “That horses’ hearts do burst and that Secretariat was going so hard, so fast, that there was a real concern.” The sound team recorded actual horses’
hearts and also put microphones under their noses to pick up the sound of their breathing. Some of the hoof- and heart- beats were augmented with the sound of a Japanese taiko drum, which meshed with Nick Glennie-Smith’s musical score to cre- ate a seamless, stirring whole. In another recent movie, “Buried,” Ryan
Reynolds plays a truck driver in Iraq whose kidnappers bury him in a coffin- size box with only 90 minutes’ worth of oxygen. When “Buried” opens, the screen is pitch dark, with Reynolds’s grunts, kicks and panting the only sensory input the au- dience has for several moments until he ignites a Zippo lighter to illuminate his cramped surroundings. For the next hour and a half, the screen goes in and out of darkness, with only sounds — the lighter, a vibrating cellphone, sifting sand and Reynolds’s own anguished vocalizations — imparting as much or even more narrative information as the visual image itself. In very different ways, “Secretariat” and
“Buried” exemplify the importance of sound in cinema, which despite being de- scribed as a visual medium is just as much an aural one. “What you hear conditions what you see,” says sound designer Walter Murch, whose work on “The Conversa- tion,” “Apocalypse Now” and “The God- father” revolutionized the medium. And at their best, movies are a well-balanced blend of visual images, sound effects, dia- logue and music that create a world as be- lievable as the streets outside the theater, or as bizarre as the most vivid dream. The latter was precisely the goal of Rich- ard King, who designed the sound effects and supervised the sound editing for “In- ception.” That film features a musical score by Hans Zimmer that uses the leit- motif of Edith Piaf’s “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien,” slowing the melody down and syn- thesizing it into an abstract but organic sonic backdrop.
Zimmer used computer software to sep-
arate the song into discrete instrumental and vocal parts and manipulate their pitch. Then King and his team re-recorded those elements on an outdoor set on a Warner Bros. back lot and in nearby can- yons “to get this natural decay and ech- oes,” King says. “It sounded very eerie, those big horns played back on super-loud volume.” He used the same process, this time with an oscillator, to achieve what he de- scribes as his “Holy Grail” of the film, the “low-end boom” that sounds whenever a character drops into a dream. “It’s much more difficult to find one sound that really works than to put in 10 sounds that kind of work,” King says. Sometimes the most radical sound de- signs can be the most subtle. Murch didn’t work on “The Social Network,” about the start-up of Facebook, but he uses director David Fincher’s approach to the sound as an example of when to break the rules. Murch points to one of the film’s pivotal scenes, set in a San Francisco disco with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) and Napster’s Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), who yell at each other throughout the encounter, trying to be heard above the club’s throbbing techno music. Normally, Murch says, a sound de- signer would “play the music really loud, then tuck the music under the dialogue,” the better to hear screenwriter Aaron Sor-
Movies that broke the sound barrier
Many innovations in sound that filmgoers take for granted today were pioneered in the 1970s, when such directors as Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas pushed the limits of what sound could contribute to the cinematic experience. Ann Hornaday selects three great moments:
JOHN BRAMLEY — DISNEY VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
THUB-DUB, THUB-DUB: The sound of a horse’s heart beating amps up the tension during race sequences in “Secretariat.”
STEPHEN VAUGHAN; WARNER BROS. PICTURES
SLO-SO: A slowed-down version of Edith Piaf’s “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” forms a sonic backdrop to “Inception,” with Ken Watanabe, top, and Lucas Haas.
LIONSGATE
ANOTHER DIMENSION:In “Buried,” the screen goes in and out of darkness as you listen to Paul Conroy (Ryan Reynolds) trying to escape from a coffin-size box.
kin’s revealing, rapid-fire exchanges. Instead, Fincher and his sound team
committed what is usually a no-no: They “pushed the music back up,” Murch says, to the point where the disco’s blaring tunes and the actors’ words must compete for the audience’s attention. Rather than alienating the viewer, the resulting strain — along with the acting and camerawork — helped to create a visceral sense of the hyper, multitasking world Zuckerberg lived in and helped create.
The sound of silence
Oscars for sound design tend to go to ac- tion movies, which often boast sound- tracks bursting with deafening bombs, shattering glass, gunshots and attendant heavy-metal cacophony. But even in those films, says Randy Thom, director of sound design at Skywalker Sound, “it’s not sim- ply about making everything loud. You have to figure out how to change the sonic focus from moment to moment.” As an example, Thom points to the 2000 movie “Cast Away,” starring Tom Hanks as a FedEx executive stranded on an uninhabited island. When director Robert Zemeckis told him there would be a 45-minute stretch with no music or dia- logue, Thom recalls, “at first I was com- pletely thrilled. . . . Then in the next min- ute I was terrified.” Zemeckis’s instructions to Thom were to mirror in the sound design the isolation Hanks’s character was experiencing in that scene. Thus no sounds of birds, in- sects, frogs — the filmmaker even digitally removed the flies that occasionally flew in front of the camera. “That removed a huge swash of what I’d normally use as the sound design palette for that place. All I was left with was wind and surf and sounds of him walking in the sand,” Thom says. And simply to go to an island and
on
washingtonpost.com
VIDEO BREAKDOWN Ann Hornaday outlines the nuances of sound design on films such as “Inception,” “The American” and “Secretariat” at
washingtonpost.com/style.
turn on a tape recorder, he adds, wouldn’t have worked. “What you want to do is re- cord only those elements that are going to be emotionally the most appropriate at any given moment. You have to compose it element by element.” So Thom and his crew traveled West Coast beaches to record all-new sounds of wind and waves, and went into the desert to capture palm trees swaying. They also created some effects, such as putting stress on various wicker objects — a chair, a basket, a cat carrier — to simulate the creaking of the trees. “Each had its own set of sonic charac- teristics,” Thom recalls, “so we were able to create a wider variety of sounds, to suggest to the audience subliminally that different parts of the palm tree creaked in distinct ways.” The key in the sound design of “Cast
Away,” as in all movies, was finding speci- ficity within the greater wash of sonic in- formation. Just recording waves crashing onto a shore would have resulted in an un- differentiated muddle for the viewer; tap- ing the sounds of a battle or of a crowd at a horse race would produce a loud, mean- ingless blur of unintelligible noises. Even the busiest sequences are com- posed of individual sonic strands that add up to a densely layered, precise whole. For example, the attack scene in “Pearl Har- bor” contains a lone bomb whistle amid the mayhem; in “Secretariat” you hear the sound of a child excitedly saying, “I saw Big Red!” within the chaos of a crowded horse track. What the best soundtracks have in com-
mon, whether they’re designed for movies about a Triple Crown winner or multi- tasking millennials, is that they capture or convey one character’s experience. Just as important as showing the audience what protagonists are doing is allowing us to hear what they hear. The best sound, in other words, has a point of view.
Tricks of the trade Ann Kroeber has supplied sounds for
“The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” and other Oscar-winning films and has worked with directors Carroll Ballard (“The Black Stallion”), Peter Weir (“Dead Poets Society”) and David Lynch (“Blue Velvet”). All three filmmakers, she says, ex- plored how sound can change the entire tone of a movie.
Consider the simple shot of a couple standing under a streetlight at night: “You could make the scene romantic by having sweet little insects [in the background], the lovely summer chirp,” she says. “You’d hear the very soft sound of traffic, or a car softly goes by. Or it could be Lynchian. You’d have a low rumble, and the traffic and sounds of the city would have a low sound. The street lamp would have a kind of buzzing sound, like a fluorescent light. . . . You could give it a completely different feeling just with the sound effects.” Most movies use sound that was origi- nally recorded during filming, but many — especially action pictures with lots of spe- cial effects — also use sound recorded af- ter the fact, including additional dialogue. Once a film has been shot, sound effects
COLUMBIA TRISTAR MARKETING GROUP/SONY PICTURES
READ MY LIPS:Club techno music blares as tech stars Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), left, and Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) talk in “The Social Network.”
are either recorded, obtained from an ef- fects library or provided by foley artists (named after sound-effects pioneer Jack Foley), who meticulously create sounds while watching the film to coordinate with what’s happening on screen. Thus, when two characters walk down a
street, two foley artists on a soundstage are creating the click of their heels on the concrete; later, if they have a cup of tea, fo- ley artists perform the “cup downs.” Then there are the beloved tricks of the
foley trade: Celery stalks are often broken to re-create the sound of breaking bones, or a watermelon covered in crackers is whacked with a stick to simulate the sound of someone’s brains being bashed in.
And there are editing cheats: Bird afi- cionados wince every time they hear the red-tailed hawk’s screech used when a bald eagle takes flight, just as entomol- ogists groan when crickets can be heard outside a window at night — regardless of the location or season. “No matter how far away a lightning
strike is on the horizon, you hear thunder at the same time,” Thom says about an- other familiar convention. But over time those anomalies have taken on meaning to viewers, so he’s chary of jettisoning them in the name of authenticity. “Lots of us ag- onize over that — how to have impact without being cliche.” Perhaps more than any other part of
filmmaking, the sound should disappear, becoming such a subtle part of the overall texture of the movie that the audience doesn’t notice it. It’s only later, perhaps in the parking lot with its passing traffic and buzzing street- lights, that you realize: The movie you just watched, you also heard.
hornadaya@washpost.com
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR NEWS
FINE WEAVE: In “Nashville,” with Lily Tomlin, the actors’ voices are blended in a sonic tapestry.
“Nashville” (1975) Altman’s experimentation with naturalistic technique
reached critical mass in this crowded ensemble drama set in the country-western capital. Altman collaborated with multitrack recording expert Jim Webb to equip the actors with radio microphones, then gave each voice its own channel, to be accentuated or diminished in postproduction. With “Nashville,” Altman and Webb made the audacious decision to record up to seven actors at a time, creating a complex sonic tapestry of voices and aural points of view, which Altman later knitted into a vivid, naturalistic swirl. Webb also invented a system for recording an on-screen telephone conversation in real time — later used in “All the President’s Men” (1976), for which he won an Oscar.
BUSINESS WIRE
STELLAR: Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia and Han Solo were in Dolby Stereo in “Star Wars: Episode IV.”
“Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope” (1977)
This was the first blockbuster shown in Dolby Stereo! (ask your parents). But even more important, “Star Wars” ushered in a new era in sound effects, by way of legendary sound designer Ben Burtt. Using surprisingly quaint techniques, Burtt created effects that would become a cherished part of a generation’s soundtrack. He invented the sound of Luke Skywalker’s light saber by combining the hum of an idling film projector and the buzz a microphone picks up when placed next to a television set. He constructed Chewbacca’s voice from the grunts and growls of bears at a zoo. He recorded much of R2D2’s voice himself, augmented by actual babies’ burbles, and he created Darth Vader’s labored breathing by recording himself breathing through a scuba regulator. “Star Wars” also demonstrates how sound effects and music can work together to orient filmgoers to a film’s mood and atmosphere. Composer John Williams created a lush orchestral score that, like the effects themselves, felt like a throwback to the serials and B-movie matinees that director George Lucas paid loving homage to with his old-school space opera.
UNITED ARTISTS/PHOTOFEST
ENVELOPING:“Apocalypse Now,” with Martin Sheen, introduced 5.1-channel surround sound.
“Apocalypse Now” (1979)
Sound designer Walter Murch recalls that director Coppola asked for three things for the soundtrack of the Vietnam drama: He wanted it to reflect the hallucinatory experience of soldiers in an often drug-fueled war; he wanted the weapons to be accurate; and he wanted the film “to envelop the audience in all dimensions.” For the film’s extraordinary opening scene, Murch and his team synthesized the sound of a Huey helicopter, then separated its aural components. They used the slightly surreal “woop woop” of the ’copter’s blades in an overture that combined sound effects, the Doors song “The End” and a narration by Capt.Willard (Martin Sheen) to introduce viewers to Willard’s delusional, fever-dream world and the film as a whole. Murch and Coppola also originated what is now known as 5.1-channel split-surround sound with “Apocalypse Now,” with one channel in each corner of the theater, one centered behind the screen and one used for extreme low-frequency effects, like the rumble of exploding bombs.
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