Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

On a related note, here’s an interesting recent interview with Coppola on Risk, Money, Craft & Collaboration.

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.

Continue reading…

Matteo Milani of U.S.O Project has published the first part of a fantastic interview with sound designer Richard Beggs. They talk about several things, including previous projects, specific sounds/scenes, and also technical/philosophical stuff.

Richard Beggs, sound designer and re-recording mixer, has worked in his career with directors like Francis Coppola, Ivan Reitman, Mel Brooks, Barry Levinson, Kathryn Bigelow, Sofia Coppola (including her latest “Somewhere” – Golden Lion for best picture at the Venice Film Festival 2010), and Alfonso Cuarón, among others.

He won an Academy Award for Best Sound for Apocalypse Now (1979) and has received many Golden Reel Award nominations as sound designer and mixer for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005), Children of Men (2006).

Beggs teaches film sound at the California College of the Arts, he is an associate fellow of Berkeley College at Yale University, and sits on the board of directors of the San Francisco Arts Education Project.

Trained as a painter, Beggs received a B.F.A from the San Francisco Art Institute and an M.F.A. from the California College of the Arts. He exhibited at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and at Oakland Museum of California. A native San Franciscan (1942), Beggs has his sound studio at the San Francisco Film Centre in the Presidio of San Francisco.

Continue reading…

The second part hasn’t been published yet, but the first one is long and very interesting. Totally recommended.

Walter Murch was the sound designer and sound editor for the known film Apocalypse Now, a classic film with fantastic sound editing and magical sound design. There is an interview at Salon.com with Walter Murch, who talks about the sound of Apocalypse Now and the techniques he used.

When did you and Francis know that you would key so much of the movie off the sound of the helicopters?

It was something that came up long before the film ever got made — back when George [Lucas] was going to direct it. There was a lot of discussion between George and me, and between us and John Milius, who was writing the script, that what made Vietnam different and unique was that it was the helicopter war. Helicopters occupied the same place in this war that the cavalry used to. The last time the cavalry was used was in World War I, which demonstrated that it didn’t work anymore. In World War II there was no cavalry. Then we got the cavalry back, with helicopters, to a certain extent in the Korean War, and really got it back in the Vietnam War. The helicopters were the horses of the sky — the whole “Valkyrie” idea came out of that discussion. And, of course, we thought of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. The cavalry-horsemen-Apocalypse thing was bred in the bones of the project.

The beginning of the film was a trigger for the psychic dimension of the helicopters. Later on, when you get into the attack on the village [when Robert Duvall's ramrod Col. Kilgore tries to clear a VC-held coastal town], it’s dramatic and it’s fantastic, but it is fairly much “what you see is what you hear.” Whereas at the beginning of the film it’s some drunken reverie of this displaced person, Willard, who is trying to bring himself back into focus. There are fragmentary images of helicopters, then he comes more and more back into his abysmal reality — this stinky hotel room in Saigon — and we get the fan. [...]

Even the most realistic sounds in the film are sometimes hard to identify; they come at you as part of an integrated scheme.

That’s partly because we took those realistic sounds and deconstructed them on synthesizers. One more wonderful thing about the way a helicopter sounds is that it has a different articulation as it passes by. You’ll hear five or six different things going on when you get into different spatial relationships to it — sometimes you’ll hear just the rotor, then you’ll hear just the turbine, then you’ll hear just the tail rotor, then you’ll hear some clanking piece of machinery, then you’ll hear low thuds. The helicopter provides you with the sound equivalent of shining a white light through a prism — you get the hidden colors of the rainbow. So we would hear a real helicopter at any point and say — listen to that! Let’s see if we can synthesize just that! And using a synthesizer we created artificial sounds to mimic the real sound.

We formed what became known as “the ghost helicopter” out of this, which was sort of an aural Lego kit. You could put the helicopters all together and they’d sound very realistic. But then you could take them apart and play any one of them individually, a single helicopter on multiple tracks, and that’s what the film begins with. That sound — that whoop-whoop-whoop-whoop-whoop sound — is the synthesized blade sound. And in isolation it had this dream-like quality.

We used lots of isolated sounds in various places, wherever we felt we needed to color the realistic sound and make it hyper-real. Throughout the movie, the helicopter is positioned between realism and hyper-realism and surrealism. It can slide anywhere on the spectrum. In musical terms, we thought of the helicopters as our string section.

Small arms fire would be the woodwinds, I guess. The “Valkyrie” scene has the Wagner music in it. It has choppers in it. And it also has the small-arms fire, which occupies a different region. Then there are the artillery sounds — the mortar fire — and a vocal part of the sandwich, from the sounds the people are making. Another layer is the clinkity-clink sounds of people moving around. Then there’s a layer of winds and fire and leaves blowing.

There were a lot of instruments in the film. The soldiers we talked to said that anywhere you went in Vietnam you could hear some low artillery going on. Thunk-a-thunk-thunk-thunk. That has a kind of timpani quality to it. But it also sounds like a heartbeat. We positioned it “way over in the next valley,” so to speak. We put it in when Willard and Chef [Frederic Forrest] were coming in on the tiger. Before you know that there’s a tiger in the jungle, you hear naturalistic sounds of the jungle. But underneath it is this thunk-a-thunk-thunk, thunk-thunk-thunk. [...]

Even the original music by Carmine and Francis Coppola recalls musique concrete — music made of sound.

I was greatly influenced by musique concrete when I was, like, 10. I was completely mesmerized by the idea that you could make music out of sounds. So that’s been a constant influence on all my work. But the films I’d done before “Apocalypse Now” had all been mono films ["American Graffiti," "The Conversation"]. Here was not just a stereo film but a whole new format. It was like jumping from a Stone Age tribe into, say, Wall Street. I was terrified of misusing the palette; I thought the worst thing to do would be to overuse it. I thought, instead, what you had to do was shrink the film down to mono at times, and let it be there quite a while. People without knowing it would think, “This is mono.” And then, at that moment, you could make it a stereo film, and that would be impressive because now it was different.

And when people got used to that, you could make it quintaphonic or six-track — at the right, the necessary moment. I wrote down a master chart of the scenes in the film with two timelines running alongside it. The results were like four-dimensional Einstein drawings. Sometimes there were single lines, and sometimes triple lines, and sometimes sextuple lines. When we were mixing the sound it showed us when the sound effects were mono and the music was in stereo, or when we should open the sound effects to stereo and close the music down to mono.

It kept us from losing perspective. It was the equivalent of what mural-makers do by breaking a huge mural up into a grid pattern. You only work on one part of the grid at a time. But because you have visualized the whole thing in advance and broken it down into pieces, you know what to do when you’re working on any one piece. When I think about it, my unique contribution to the film was this concept of “sound design.” It was the working-out of the mural grid that underlay the structure of the film, which was being developed with a dimensionality that hadn’t been attempted before.

Read full article here.

Databaseo? Library? Check this video of Walter Murch talking about the use of Filemaker Pro to organize his database:

Let’s see another interesting article at Mix Online with more info about the making of Apocalypse Now Redux, including video sync, sound editorial, ADR, mix, and more:

Sound Editorial on Apocalypse Now Redux

The first order of business for sound effects editing was to load the dbx-encoded premixes and effects combines, plus the 1997 SR-encoded 5.1 master, into master Pro Tools sessions. Assistant sound editor Erich Stratmann found to his surprise that there were some digital overs, in spite of the fact that the 0VU reference level on the mags matched -20 dBfs on the Pro Tools. Although small overs are often unnoticeable, Stratmann says that there would often be many of them in succession, rendering the added distortion quite audible.

The offending sections were re-transferred at a lower level sometimes as much as 6 dB below the -20 standard and using the “Find Peaks” function in Pro Tools (which only worked for peaks longer than 10 samples; the others he found by hand), Stratmann would do precise volume automation to bring only the offending peak down, raising the rest of the material back to the reference level. He would then do a bounce of the section in Pro Tools incorporating the fix.

Stratmann created a master session comprising all extant material from the 1979 mix, with the 1997 5.1 printmaster and the original 6-track M&E, the only elements that were available for the whole film. Effects combines and premixes were available for most reels, although they could find nothing from reel 8 (the Hau Phat scene with the Playboy Bunnies). As “blind luck” would have it, according to Kirchberger, they were always able to find a way to make the joins work.

The crew used a “donut and holes” metaphor to guide themselves in communicating what they were doing. The area outside the donut was the original printmaster alone, while the donut rings were the transition points where effects premixes and combines and new material would be added to the printmaster in order to get to the “hole,” which was the completely new material. The intention was to make the donuts seamless, which usually translated to as short as possible, as in a hard scene change. But fighting against this goal, to some extent, was the brilliant way in which effects and music in Apocalypse effortlessly weave in and out of each other across scenes. Kirchberger remembers that one of the cooler transitions was during the Kilgore landing scene when the decay of the mortar covers the transition point. “Masking was our favorite friend,” Stratmann notes. “In many cases, the predubs were used as source material for the new scenes, but also to help us feather back into the printmaster when the combines didn’t provide enough separation.”

There were three other Pro Tools sessions in addition to Stratmann’s master: Foley, which was cut by Jeremy Molod, dialog, which Kirchberger cut himself, and sound effects, which were cut by Kyrsten Mate Comoglio and Pete Horner, including both old and new material.

Kirchberger says that “this show couldn’t have been done without Kyrsten; she’s an unbelievably talented effects editor. She did a cut of the ‘Conex’ scene [when Kurtz reads to Willard in the storage container], where she presented Walter with two scenarios, and he heard the first one and didn’t even listen to the second.”

Comoglio says that the second version contained “highly EQ’d sounds made to disorient the viewer, plus air movement sweeps and odd jungle calls that I volume-graphed in Pro Tools to then evolve into a more typical, grounded jungle BG after Brando opens the doors and we know where we are.

“In general, I tried to volume-graph premix all my sessions to cut down on tracks and on mix time up in Napa,” she continues. “This worked especially well for the Monsoon Medevac scene, where Walter wanted a different rain sound for each of the different materials oil drum, mud, helmet, tent, helicopter, PBR, etc. all coming and going as Willard walks through the camp. It was lots of fun.”

The effects for the French plantation were cut by Horner, whom Aubry says worked “in the original Zoetrope spirit on many different capacities on ANR. In addition to cutting effects and recording ADR, he worked side-by-side with Walter at the mix as the second engineer.”

Apocalypse Now at IMDb

For Octuber, I’ll make an special of Walter Murch, a master known for his fantastic work as sound editor/sound designer for several years ago. He make a lot of innovations and has received several awards for sound of amazing films such as The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, The English Patient and many others.

Bio

Walter Scott Murch is an film editor/sound designer, the son of painter Walter Tandy Murch (1907-1967). He went to The Collegiate School, a private preparatory school in Manhattan, from 1949 to 1961. He then attended Johns Hopkins University from 1961 to 1965, graduating in Liberal Arts. While at Hopkins, he met future director/screenwriter Matthew Robbins and cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, with whom he staged a number of happenings. In 1965, Murch and Robbins enrolled in the graduate program of the University of Southern California film school, successfully encouraging Deschanel to follow them. There all three encountered, and became friends with fellow students such as George Lucas, Hal Barwood, Robert Dalva, Willard Huyck, Don Glut and John Milius, forming a clique of friends collectively known as The Dirty Dozen. All of them would go on to be successful filmmakers.

Murch started editing and mixing sound with Francis Ford Coppola’s The Rain People (1969). Subsequently, he worked on George Lucas’s THX 1138, American Graffiti and Coppola’s The Godfather before editing picture and mixing sound on Coppola’s The Conversation, for which he received an Academy Award nomination in sound in 1974. Murch also mixed the sound for Coppola’s The Godfather Part II which was released in 1974, the same year as The Conversation. He is most famous for his sound designing work on Apocalypse Now, for which he won his first Academy Award in 1979. In 1985 he directed his one film, Return to Oz, which he co-wrote with Gill Dennis.

Unlike most film editors today, Murch works standing up, comparing the process of film editing to “conducting, brain surgery and short-order cooking”, since all conductors, cooks and surgeons stand when they work. In contrast, when writing, he does so lying down. His reason for this is that where editing film is an editorial process, the creation process of writing is opposite that, and so he lies down rather than sit or stand up, to separate his editing mind from his creating mind.

Murch has written one book on film editing, In the Blink of an Eye (2001).Murch was the subject of Michael Ondaatje’s book The Conversations (2002); the book, which incorporates from several conversations between Ondaatje and Murch, emerged from Murch’s editing of The English Patient, which was based on Ondaatje’s novel of the same name.

While he was editing with film, Murch took notice of the crude splicing used for the daily rough-cuts. In response, he invented a film splicer which concealed the splice by using extremely narrow but strongly adhesive strips of special polyester-silicone tape. He called his invention “In-vis-o”.

In 1979, he won an Oscar for the sound mix of Apocalypse Now as well as a nomination for picture editing. Murch is widely acknowledged as the person who coined the term Sound Designer, and along with colleagues developed the current standard film sound format, the 5.1 channel array, helping to elevate the art and impact of film sound to a new level. Apocalypse Now was the first multi-channel film to be mixed using a computerized mixing board. In 1996, Murch worked on Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient, which was based on Michael Ondaatje’s novel of the same name. Murch won Oscars both for his sound mixing and for his editing. Murch’s editing Oscar was the first to be awarded for an electronically edited film (using the Avid system), and he is the only person ever to win Oscars for both sound mixing and film editing.

In 2003, Murch edited another Anthony Minghella film, Cold Mountain on Apple’s sub-$1000 Final Cut Pro software using off the shelf Power Mac G4 computers. This was a leap for such a big-budget film, where expensive Avid systems were usually the standard non-linear editing system. He received an Academy Award nomination for this work; his efforts on the film were documented in Charles Koppelman’s 2004 book Behind the Seen. In 2006, he was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Letters by the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, Canada.

Some Awards & Nominations

• Academy Award Nomination for Best Editing – Cold Mountain
• Academy Award for Best Film Editing and Best Sound – The English Patient
• Academy Award Nomination for Best Film Editing – Ghost
• Academy Award for Best Film Editing – The Godfather: Part III
• Academy Award for Best Sound and Nomination for Best Film Editing – Apocalypse Now
• Academy Award Nomination for Best Film Editing – Julia
• Academy Award Nomination for Best Sound – The Conversation
• BAFTA Film Award for Best Editing and Nomination for Best Sound – The English Patient
• BAFTA Film Award for Best Sound Track and Best Film Editing – Apocalypse Now

Featured Work

• Tetro (2009) – Sound re-recording mixer
• Seeing in the Dark (2007) – Sound mixer
• Jarhead (2005) – Sound re-recording mixer
• Dickson Experimental Sound Film (1894) – Sound designer
• Cold Mountain (2003) – Sound re-recording mixer
• Touch of Evil (1958) – Sound re-recordist
• The English Patient (1996) – Sound re-recording mixer
• First Knight (1995) – Sound re-recording mixer
• Crumb (1994) – Sound re-recording mixer
• The Godfather: Part III (1990) – Sound re-recording mixer
• Ghost (1990) – Sound re-recording mixer
• Dragonslayer (1981) – Sound re-recording mixer
• Apocalypse Now (1979) – Sound designer and Sound montage and Sound re-recording mixer
• The Godfather: Part II (1974) – Sound montage and Sound re-recordist
• The Conversation (1974) – Sound editor and Sound montage – Sound re-recordist
• American Graffiti (1973) – Sound montage and Sound re-recordist
• THX 1138 (1971) – Sound montage
• Gimme Shelter (1970) – Sound
• The Great Walled City of Xan (1970) – Sound
• The Rain People (1969) – Sound montage

Walter Murch at IMDb
Walter Murch at Wikipedia

Randy Thom spoke yesterday in the first keynote at the Siggraph Conference. Let’s read some notes and ideas delivered by Thom:

“creative use of sound is key to making a long-remembered film.”

Thom, who won sound editing Oscars for “The Incredibles” and “The Right Stuff,” said he is often asked about the difference between designing sound for animation and live action. “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,” he said, adding that this sort of interactive process rarely happens in live-action films.

Afterwards, Thom told Daily Variety, “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.”

Thom presented the openings of two movies he worked on, “Apocalypse Now” and “Wall-E,” along with video interviews with their filmmakers and his sound collaborators: Francis Ford Coppola and Walter Murch on the former film, Andrew Stanton and Ben Burtt on the latter. 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.”

Vía Variety | U.S.O