Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound

Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound (Midge Costin, 2019)

 

This one's on me. Maybe, it's too technical, I don't care. Maybe you don't like learning "how sausage is made." I don't care if you're interested in watching it. I don't care if you'd just as soon watch something else.

 

Just be aware that if you watch something else, this nifty documentary covers something that you might not be aware of. 

That what you're hearing in movies, commercials, TV shows, whatever...is faked.

People do this for a living. They try to make things better than reality...or, more crudely, they're "selling" you something that you have every intention to buy, whether you're conscience of it or not.

But, I think it's important that people know stuff like this. I sometimes read comments from people, or see things that people have posted, and it's apparent to me that an awful lot of people know very little about "the magic" than can happen in post-production to enhance what we're seeing...and now, we're of an age where one can't accept anything "on faith." Sounds (which this doc focuses on) and images can be produced or manipulated that you should probably not believe what you're seeing.

Ben Burtt recording the bear that made up the bulk

of the vocalizations of "Chewbacca" in Star Wars.

Why do I care? Because I used to do this for a living. In my past-life, I used to do "post-sound" for radio, television, film, and computer programs. It was something I was interested in when I was a kid, and somehow managed to do it when I grew up, taking "the kid" with me. And it was fun...it could be a lot of fun and had an inherent joy in making things "work." But, it could also be painstakingly tedious (which was readily apparent whenever I showed somebody "my work"—the attraction to the process would always "thin" for observers).

But, the thrill of the finished project always made it worth it. I especially loved when I made something out of elements so completely different from what the visuals were and people "bought it" anyway. It was a little conspiracy I played with an audience that took advantage of their natural proclivities to see an image, hear a sound with it and put two and two together in their heads. Manipulative, sure. But, nobody cared because they were "in on the act."

And I was lucky to get in on this when everything was changing, when sound wasn't part of a corporate department to be done using stock sound effects that had been in the vaults for 30 years, but became something new and creative—I remember sitting in the Crossroads theater to see THX-1138 (sound-designed by Walter Murch) and being stunned by the sounds and created environments I was hearing and wanting to do stuff like that. Then, American Graffiti. Star Wars. I was blown away attending a very early screening of Apocalypse Now (also designed by Murch, but more importantly he'd also personally set up the speaker arrays in the theater!) and having my mind blown when the helicopters in that first sequence flew right through my head. Murch and Ben Burtt and the others in their foot-steps would become as much a reason to see the film as the actors or who directed it.

And Making Waves shows all of that—the technical advancements and the advancements in creativity—of what was possible, without compromise. Of how the old ways of doing things were left by the way-side because the new ways became better and took over, so that now the sound isn't just a paint-by-numbers formality, but is, in itself, its own art.

 

Now, all of that is behind me. I watch things and don't even notice the sound-design anymore. Oh, I do if something's "off" or if I recognize an old library sound that I used a couple decades ago (it happens more frequently than I'd like!). These days I appreciate when a film doesn't throw a sonic kitchen-sink at everything. I appreciate the silences...the judicious choices...the spareness...and the realization of what's important. 

And I appreciate the time spent doing it.

The Wolfman (2010)

It's still October—Hallowe'en month. And things are getting hairier as we head for November. ("No-shave November").

"Clap-Trap for The Wolfman"

Benicio Del Toro's dream project of a modern...er, make that period remake of The Wolf Man (1941) has had more transformations than a month with two full moons! There have been two directors, settling on Joe Johnston, a litter of writers and re-writers, two scores—one by Danny Elfman, the other by Paul Haslinger, then reverting back to the Elfman score—a pack of editors, including the legendary Walter Murch, all trying to beat this one into shape. Whether this is studio interference or the "creative differences" that emerges when the star is The Big Dog is not known, but there've been a lot of changes on The Wolfman, some of them quite hairy.*

You can tighten up the editing, change the score, even bleed the color out of the thing, but if the script is mangey, no amount of post-production wizardry can save it. I'd say something about "lipstick on a pig" but that would be the wrong genus, and I'd probably get a nasty tweet from Alaska for it (but, I digress). Movie-making, as in lycanthropy, requires an engaging source from which a fiendish entertainment can spring.

Let's start with the curse. I've always loved the doggerel poem ** (written by 1941's scripter Curt Siodmak) that describes the werewolf mark. It contains the essence of Horror-tragedy. Yes, we like to see the fur flying and the blood spatters on the wall, but it's all just gristle for the grinder unless it evokes empathy, inspires sympathy and not merely psychopathy. I'm not saying that every villager who has his heart (and one noticeable liver) stolen by the werewolf should have a back-story, but we could at least set up a situation where their hasty plans to hide goes for naught, which would inspire a cruel comedy, which is tragedy's keister-kicking cousin. Nope, the film-makers are too busy with the stop-watch trying to elevate the body-count per minute than to think about The Wolfman's victims.
And that includes the beast, himself.

Because at the beating, pulsing heart of that curse lies the secret. Any man (or woman, for all of that ***) who is pure of heart...can become a wolf. And that's the tragedy, and the horror, of this particular story. And Benicio Del Toro's Lawrence Talbot, famous American touring actor (eh?), has little going for him to evoke sympathy...in the script, or Del Toro's performance. The actor (the real one, not the film one) may love the story, and the movie may have been constructed around him, but the performance is so internal as to be inscrutable—a surprise, as Del Toro is one actor you can count on to do something interesting...even audience-challenging...in his roles. 

Sure, he grunts and groans and strains and bugs his eyes suitably in the transformations, but as Larry Talbot—actor—all he does is hang around, looking miserable, and some of his line readings are merely flat. Yes, he's sad—he is, after all, in mourning for his brother, killed in a vicious wolf attack—but Del Toro doesn't do anything with it, and it's a plum opportunity to, at least, emote—as in, Talbot's an actor, he's supposed to be grieving, and some actors might seize on that for material, research...something?

But, that's not the aim of the scripters (Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self). Here, they go back to their Freud texts, and the curse becomes a familial one. Dear old dad (Anthony Hopkins, gleefully playing a sadist) is the cause of all of Larry's problems and "the sins of the father, blah, blah, blah." For this Larry Talbot, his fate is not so much a Curse as a Destiny.**** And you know how things go with Destiny—the Ending is telegraphed a mile away. Things go as planned. The End.

Destiny is the Curse of the modern Movie-goer, not just the cost of the ticket (or 3-D head-aches).

So, as a movie, this dog don't hunt. Oh, the sets are nicely gloomy, with carefully applied wisps of cob-webs in corners and all the floor-boards creak ominously (I mean, ALL the floor-boards creak, and the stuffed animal-heads growl—editor Murch started out as the One True Sound Designer, but this is sonically gilding the lily). The effects are bloody-good, the wolf-turnings snap, crackle and pop, and the village square has the cozy compactness, familiar of the Universal back-lot. Emily Blunt is appropriately tremulous, Hopkins tries desperately to make his evil part fun—he calls son Larry "pup" at one point—but the film was pre-ordained to be uninvolving. That was its curse by taking the tragedy out of the horror and the melodrama out of the actor.

Those howls you hear in the night are from the Hollywood Hills.

* Rick Baker, the make-up genius who's worked on so many great projects over the years, did the 2010 Wolfman design, basing it on Jack Pierce's legendary work for the 1941 film, and joked "You don't have to do much to turn Benicio into a Wolfman."

** "Even a man who is pure in heart,
And says his prayers by night
May become a Wolf when the Wolfbane blooms
And the autumn Moon is bright"

*** Alan Moore, the writer of "Watchmen" and "V for Vendetta," bless his tilted little mind, also wrote a werewolf story when he was exploring the roots of the horror genre while writing "Swamp Thing." In it, a woman became a marauding werewolf not on the monthly lunar cycle, but on her once-a-month menstrual cycle. Moore's title for it? "The Curse." Moore is very, very good.

**** Modern script-writers are so hung up with pre-ordained Fates the argument by the Religious Right that Hollywood is anti-God goes up in a puff of Intelligent Design. You can't have a Destiny without some Omniscient Travel Agent planning the itinerary.

Return to Oz (1985)

Return to Oz (Walter Murch, 1985) In 1980, when Walter Murch talked to Disney about working on a project, the subject of L. Frank Baum's "Oz" books came up. Disney had acquired the series in 1954 and some filming had been done on an adaptation of later stories, but it was never completed, and the company's rights to do anything with them were about to expire. Murch and writer Gill Dennis started work on a screenplay based on threads and characters from later books in the series. When filming began, things turned contentious with a change in executive producers (Gary Kurtz out and Paul Maslansky in), Murch being fired for a time—and rehired with the assurances of George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg, and a regime-change at Disney which lost any interest in promoting the film as something different from what an audience saturated with memories of the 1939 musical would expect.

The result was a fascinating film, truer to Baum, but far different in tone from M-G-M's The Wizard of Oz.

The thing is, the films' DNA are so similar, it's the presentation that's very different.

Six months after Dorothy Gale (Fairuza Balk—10 years old at the time) survived the terrible twister that decimated her family's farm, she is still having sleepless nights and talking incessantly about her friends visited in another land far away from the flat colorless expanse of Kansas, even prattling on that a key she has found with what she interprets as the word "Oz" in the bow fell with a shooting star to tell her that they're in trouble. For her folks, Aunt Em' (Piper Laurie) and Uncle Harry (Matt Clark), who have troubles of their own and are still re-building and trying to scratch together a farming existence, this is not only impractical, but troubling. Perhaps it's time to see a specialist. An advertisement in the local paper gives Em' a possible solution.

Dr. J. B. Worley (Nicol Williamson) runs a local asylum and boasts great success using electroshock therapy ("It's the 20th Century! The age of electricity!") and, after some condescending questions about "Oz" and how she got back from there ("Where are those ruby slippers now?" "I lost them!"), he is only too quick to prescribe strapping Dorothy down and zapping her fantasies away. But, before the procedure can be performed, an electrical storm causes a power black-out, and Dorothy is saved by another little girl who escapes with her until they stumble in the dark and Dorothy falls into the river, a chicken coop providing her only life-line.

The next morning, she wakes up in Oz, but not the Oz she remembers—Munchkinland is in ruins, the yellow brick road is just rubble and everyone in the city of Oz, including the Cowardly Lion and the Tin Woodsman, has been turned to stone and King Scarecrow is missing! With the help of her favorite Kansas farm-chicken, Billina—who has followed her to Oz and can now talk—Dorothy manages to avoid capture by a roving pack of malicious "Wheelers" and uses her "Oz" key to open a door when she's trapped in a hallway to escape them.

She finds one of Oz's mechanical soldiers and reads the instructions how to start him up. Its name is "Tik-Tok" and with its help, Dorothy captures one of the Wheelers and they're told what has befallen the emerald city: Oz was attacked by the Nome King, who took the Scarecrow captive, turned all of the Ozians to stone and has plucked every last emerald from the city to his mountain-lair across the Deadly Desert, which will kill anyone who dares to walk across it. Dorothy is desperate to find the Scarecrow and the captured Wheeler tells her that Princess Mombi (played by three actresses—Jean Marsh, Sophie Ward, and Fiona Victory—for a reason), who lives now in Oz, can tell him what happened to the Straw-King.

The little party travels to the only part of Oz that hasn't fallen to ruin, where the Princess lives, and are informed that the Scarecrow has been taken captive by the Nome King. They also find out that Princess Mombi collects heads, and switches hers out whenever the fancy strikes her, bringing them to life with her Powder of Life (naturally...or unnaturally). Meeting Dorothy, she finds she has a good head on her shoulders, so she locks her up in her attic until Dorothy is old enough to be usable. Out the window attic, Dorothy can see the mountain of the Nome King, where the Scarecrow is held captive, enticingly in the distance across the Deadly Desert.

But, one finds all sorts of interesting things in attics—for example, there's Jack Pumpkinhead, who has been "powdered" into existence by Mombi, and together, he and Dorothy devise a plan to escape, using Jack's height and agility, a couch, a couple of plants and the mounted head of a Gump, but only if she can get downstairs and get the Princess's Powder of Life. Jack gets the door open, and starts to assemble their transport, while Dorothy sneaks down to Mombi's quarters while the headless princess sleeps. She is able to find the Powder, but not without waking up one of the heads, and while the Princess scrambles to find her head—or any head—Dorothy runs back up to attic, and just in the nick...she and her companions are able to hop on their Gump-plane and crash through their attic-prison window. It's off to the Nome King's mountain. 

More perils ensue, and Dorothy must play a game of wits with the Nome King if she wishes to save her friends, the Princess is after Dorothy after her escape, and there's also the matter of the mysterious girl who saved her back in Kansas. Dorothy must muddle through and save the day, before she can earn her reward to go back home, having made new friends and dispatched troubles and enemies.

Return to Oz did not perform well at the box office, perhaps due to the differences from the 1939 M-G-M musical with its dependence on sprightly songs and fantasy characters portrayed by heavily made-up (but easily recognized as) human actors with a distinctly vaudevillian approach to the material. There were also rumblings of the film being too scary for children, despite being given a "PG" rating (the more restrictive PG-13 rating had been available since Summer 1983), with its threatened electroshock therapy, scary characters like the Wheelers, a headless Princess Mombi, and decidedly evil Nome King (without the theatricality of, say, the Wicked Witch of the West).

This is is a bit disingenuous, as M-G-M's film also had a lot of traumatizing aspects, such as the flying monkeys, a liberal use of very real fire against the Scarecrow, and the intense hour-glass scene as Judy Garland's Dorothy is forced to watch her life run out.

To say nothing of a tornado that imperils Dorothy and crushes a character on its crash-landing in Oz; Baum's initial "Oz" books are rife with ingenious ways to traumatize Dorothy enough to get her back to her safe, if constantly jeopardized, fantasy-land. Let's be real about the fantasy—Oz is a sublimating dream-land caused by physical peril that helps Dorothy deal with the vagaries of real life (amplified in the movies, as in the original film, the Scarecrow, Woodsman and Lion all have Kansas counterparts as field-hands and the Wicked Witch is Kansas' worst-neighbor-in-the-world Elmira Gulch, and in Murch's follow-up, the Nome King is a manifestation of Dr. Worley and Mombi is his less-than-empathetic nurse).

Murch's cherry-picking of elements from Baum, particularly his sequels "The Marvelous Land of Oz" and "Ozma of Oz" is seamless, but complicated, and the added electroshock therapy peril is an ingenious way to threaten to "cure" Dorothy of her dreams, and a particularly cruel one, given their therapeutic value to the girl and, thus, the transposition of Worley with the Nome King is inspired (Baum used earthquakes and being swept off ocean liners as traumas in the books but the doctor intends to rob the girl of her "safe-place" making the cure worse than the disease).

Murch's presentation might also be somewhat disturbing, but in a very basic way: the 1939 "musical" was all done on sound-stages, even the Kansas scenes, giving the film a safer, artificial look, but in Return to Oz, things are filmed on location outside, giving a heightened sense of reality—even the ruined Oz is filmed with natural light, which might have had a subliminal effect on the reality of the movie, making it more menacing.

Perhaps that's an overreach, but the reaction to Murch's Oz film was more in its relationship to the musical version of Oz than to itself as its own adaptation of Baum (and one should remember that, although a critical success, The Wizard of Oz was not considered a box-office success that year, only making back its costs with a 1949 re-release). And, that is a big factor. M-G-M's version had traumatizing elements, sure, but sublimated it with a happy tune every 10 minutes in a constant bi-polar yin-yang of emotion—danger/release-danger/release.

Return to Oz didn't have that steady stream of emotional tonic to off-set the troubles, merely showing the resolution of those troubles in the story-line. Without the constant insulin-drip of song cluing audiences in to how people were feeling, The Wizard of Oz would be alarming, as well, inspiring folks to look for a soothing poppy-field somewhere.

I remember Roger Ebert's review of The Phantom Menace, where he wrote: "If it were the first 'Star Wars' movie, 'The Phantom Menace' would be hailed as a visionary breakthrough. But this is the fourth movie of the famous series, and we think we know the territory" By comparison to the earlier films (and, more importantly, our memories of them), The Phantom Menace came up short. But, taken on its own, it's still an amazing movie—it just didn't have all the inter-species hugging and celebrating of A New Hope.

And that may be the issue: Return to Oz is an amazing, smart intricate little film that actually does right by Baum, even improving on his spare style a bit. But its charms are ones of the intellect, rather than the Garland musical vehicle, wearing its heart on its sleeve.

It really should come as no surprise, really, that we would find more endearing the Tin Woodsman, always in danger of rusting from his own tears, than we would the Scarecrow, who only had a brain.

Oz help us all.

Sight and Sound: The Cinema of Water Murch

Murch Ado About...

I've written a bit about Walter Murch—editor, sound-designer, writer, author, philosopher—specifically in the area of sound design (or "audio montage" as Murch coined it), where his work was industry-changing, moving away from recycled sound libraries (for example, that "ubiquitous" jangling "Universal" telephone ring!), and creating specific sound-scapes for the picture and tailoring them for the environment, be it physical or emotional. When it works, it becomes a singular emotional experience, wrapping an audience member into a cocoon of individual reactions and interpretations, getting under their skin and firing neurons in quite unexpected ways—making what McLuhan called a hot medium and cooling it off. When it's done wrong, the experience is that of a wall of sound and creating an expectation that every little detail in a scene must be given its aural due. 

Analog Murch super-imposed over digital Murch

Murch has done all sorts of interviews about sound editing and picture editing, and being a particularly curious individual has tried to convey the processes and the philosophies behind them in books, articles, video's and speaking engagements, sometimes a mix of the media. And these are all readily available with a simple browser search utilizing "All", "News", "Images" or "Video."

He had me at The Star-Child: Lefkovitz begins with an image from 2001

Documentary-composer-editor Jon Lefkovitz has done all that searching for you and made a broad overview entitled Sight and Sound: the Art of Walter Murch, which does the exact opposite of Murch's job, starting with a through-line narration made of Murch talking points and concepts and does an interpretive picture match illustrating those concepts—those sequences being from Murch's work when he could, but also from a broad swath of films that Murch had nothing to do with, but still manage to hit the point that is being made in the shortest time possible.

"Should I be doing this?": Murch edits a scene in Jarhead featuring a sequence he edited in Apocalypse Now.

Murch worked with Francis Coppola—still does, in fact—George Lucas (in pre-Star Wars days), Anthony Minghella, Philip Kaufman, Fred Zinnemann, Sam Mendes, Jerry Zucker and Katheryn Bigelow, and directed a film of his own, the culture-smashing film of Return to Oz (which we'll look at next week), his first encounter with the Disney Company (which he seems to have bad luck with), and the films all presented different challenges—some brought acclaim, some languished at the box-office—and despite Murch's legendary status, he can still get fired (he was on Tomorrowland) 

One could go on...but there are links and you can look up past posts. The film itself is a fast view, probably 80 minutes as the credits are vast. And it's a nice little tutorial the power and potential of the film medium, and nice skimming of Murch's career.

"Sometimes you have to kill the chicken to save the monkey..."

Particle Fever

The Stuff That Dreams (And Everything) Are Made of
or
The Unknown Known

One of my heroes in film-making and life is Walter Murch.  His past work as a sound designer directly influenced my decision to go into that field and his work as an editor and all-around renaissance man has expanded my understanding of film and its possibilities to move the emotions through its mechanisms.  For the past couple of years, he's been working on a documentary about the Cern super-collider with documentarian Mark Levinson.  The result, Particle Fever, is one of the better documentaries about science—and hard science—that has been produced in many years.

It concerns the construction of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, designed to accelerate and collide two proton particle beams with the intention of seeing what would happen—what the resulting collision would produce, then analyze it in the hopes of finding an essential bonding agent in the sub-strata of molecules, the Higgs-Boson, the so-called "God particle."  "So-called" because that is the media term for the Higgs-Boson, a way of reducing large complicated ideas to the level of imbecility for mass-consumption.  Higgs-Boson is merely a theoretic idea for what should be there, but its properties are unknown, and only by the detection of the energy it generates in these insane collisions can we known what's supposed to be there could be (like the astronomers who calculated unseen bodies by the gravitational effect they had on the seen).

Culled from 500 hours of footage during the construction (where the delicate fitting of huge components is sped up so we can see its movement, turning the humans into skittering insects), interviews with theorists and scientists alike, many via Skype, and during the operations that buzz like Mission Control at a lunar launch—only geekier—and extraordinary graphics by the firm MK12, Particle Fever is, itself, an amazing undertaking from the sheer volume of material used to tell a story of such complexity and intricacy, while still giving the big picture a sense of wonder and the results a certain irony.  There's a lot of technical jargon being tossed about, but the stories of the individual theorists and experiment technicians are personal and involving, a combination of deep thought and and deep feeling, of lifetimes dedicated to theory coming to fruition...or for naught...and of careers ending over the findings, but the work never stopping. 

The Universe keeps expanding, after all.  Why shouldn't the process of understanding it?

Personal Heroes: Walter Murch

Walter Murch

Who?

Walter Murch is a film editor, sound editor, film historian and renaissance man. He is part of the "young turks" class of students at USC who changed movies forever--Coppola, Lucas, Milius. Murch directed one movie (the opportunity provided to him by the clout of his class-mates) the weird and wonderful Return to Oz, which followed L. Frank Baum's version of Oz, rather than the MGM Musical Department's (which is probably why few went to see it, and the ones that did were confused and disoriented by it--"Toto, we're really not in Kansas anymore!"). The rest of his career he's been support-staff, but a major supporter whose influence and technique determines the shape and feel of each film he works on.

When I caught up to Murch, he had already done one significant thing--he had coined the phrase that now pervades the sound-editing field, that being "Sound Designer." Briefly, the story of that phrase originates with Murch not being a member of the sound editor's union at the time he was working on Coppola's The Rain People. Coppola asked him how he wanted to be listed in the credits, since they were prohibited from using the "Sound Editor" designation. "Sound Designer" was Murch's reply* And a new aspect and depth to the field was coined. The credit on his next film, George Lucas' THX-1138 had his work classified, not him. "Sound Montage by Walter Murch" (he also co-wrote the screenplay) was how the credits (rolling from the top of the screen against the norm) read. Murch filled the spaces of "THX" with echoing yelps, bizarre clusters of sounds and cheap Muzak. His motorcycles emitted flangeing screams and in plexiglas confessionals deep, sonorous voices gave comfort. His sounds were not only accurate (in that they sounded appropriate to the visuals) but also displayed wit and satire.

His next film for Lucas, American Graffiti, was more sophisticated and tougher to pull off in its more recognizable world. Lucas had strung together a continuous soundtrack of golden oldies and Wolfman Jack patter to serve as a constant back-drop and Greek chorus, and Murch re-recorded the entire track using a method he dubbed "world-izing" (a technique he later found had been used by Orson Welles to authenticate sound). He took the track, played it in a large empty space and recorded the result, moving the speakers at key times to muffle the sound, delay it by a few frames, attenuate it to a thin squeal, or layer on vast coat of echo. He inserted recorded kids' conversations and shrieks to enliven the background, making the empty midnight world of the cruisers full of activity and fun. For Coppola's The Godfather, Murch kept the soundtrack real, but everyone remembers the roar of the el' train as Michael Corleone hesitates in the bathroom of an Italian restaurant before he sets out to "make his bones." There's another favorite sound moment of mine in The Godfather as Michael Corleone walks the deserted echoing halls of the hospital on a visit to see his father. He finds a Christmas party halted in mid-revelry, including a Johnny Fontaine record stuck in a groove and playing one chilling word--"toniiiiihght/toniiiiight." It's unnerving, and the moment we can distinguish what the words are, Michael snaps into action to save his father from a "hit." Murch expanded his role during Coppola's The Conversation, editing the picture as well as the sound, and was responsible for all the sonic permutations that "the conversation" take on. And his other-worldly sound design for Apocalypse Now, took us into the madness and surreal beauty of Viet Nam. Or Coppola's Viet Nam, anyway.

Over the years he's cherry-picked the movies he's supervised: Fred Zinnemann's Julia; three films with Anthony Minghella (The English Patient, The Talented Mr.Ripley, and Cold Mountain) K-19: The Widowmaker, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Ghost, Jarhead for Sam Mendes, Youth without Youth, Francis Coppola's first film in ages.

He's written one book, "In the Blink of an Eye," a practical and philosophical guide to film editing, done numerous interviews and essays (links below) and had two books written about him--"The Conversations" by the author of "The English Patient," Michael Ondaatje and "Behind the Seen," which talks about Murch's efforts to edit "Cold Mountain" using Final Cut Pro, a consumer editing system--and which became a book about Murch, himself. Plus, he's tackled personal assignments, like taking Orson Welles' detailed memo of the steps that could be taken to get "Touch of Evil" back to his original intentions, and then doing just that. Or syncing pioneer film maker W.K.L. Dickson's first attempt at a film-audio hybrid by finally marrying the sound found on a tinfoil cylinder to the original film "reel" both done in 1895. The historic results are here:

When I saw (and heard) THX-1138 on the lower-end of a "Sci-Fi" double bill (with the egregiously pedestrian Soylent Green) at the Crossroads Theater with my brother John, it was a "thunderbolt" moment. No other film I'd seen looked like it, or, more importantly, sounded like it. It was right then that I, more than anything, wanted to be doing that kind of work with sound like that--a "creative" way to bring reality to the screen and color it with a certain sensibility. Not many people get to live their dream. I have. And I'm grateful to Walter Murch for inspiring me--and for continuing to teach me new things with every new film he does.  

 We'll be looking at the new film edited by Murch tomorrow: Particle Fever.



Murch articles at FilmSound.Org
Murch articles at Transom. org-Has a great article on Murch's "Rule of 2 1/2 of Sound Mixing"
Murch interviewed on "Fresh Air"
Murch story on "All Things Considered"
Murch as guest on "Studio 360"
Murch on American Graffiti: "Music as Mist"

Apocalypse Now - Ghost Helicopter Flyover from U.S.O. Project on Vimeo.

An interesting little piece on those initial helicopter sounds in "Apocalypse" and a nifty little graphic showing how Murch made it spin through your head.

And finally, Murch explains "Worldizing" far better than I ever could

* Back in my "Bad Animals" studio days, there was a time when "sound designer" was being put on our business cards instead of the usual "engineer." I thought that was a little pretentious, so, being a "smart-ass," I asked that the term "Audio Architect" be put on mine. I've also used the term "Sound-Wave Landscaper," and these days I've boiled it down to "Chief Noisemaker." Now, I'm working at a place where the guy across the hall works on various compression schemes to make mp3's sound good at lower band-widths (so you can stuff more songs into your Ipod) His title? "Audio Architect."

Funny old world, innit?