I was about 20 seconds into the first preview for the film last fall when it dawned on me that Cowboys & Aliens must have been really fun to work on sound-wise, and indeed, interviews conducted during the final mix in mid-June with supervising sound editor Frank Eulner, FX sound designer/mixer Christopher Boyes and sound designer Dave Farmer confirmed my suspicions. As Boyes puts it, “For both Frank and me, it was a gas because one thing about this film is it honors the Western tradition, and you are very much in a Western film when it opens and whenever we’re being cowboys in the West. We’re very true to the desert and the town. But then it’s this whole other thing, too.”

Neither Boyes nor Eulner had a pure Western under his belt (Boyes came close with the wonderful animated Rango earlier this year), but each brought extensive experience in different genres to this film—including work on the two Iron Man movies together. Multiple Oscar-winner Boyes’ CV lists the blockbusters Tron: Legacy, Avatar, The Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean series, and King Kongamong many others; while Eulner’s resumé includes such films asHellboy, Saving Private Ryan, The Village, Blue Velvet, Backdraft andMars Attacks! For Cowboys & Aliens, sound designer Farmer worked exclusively on the alien side, creating creature vocalizations and some alien crafts and weapon sounds. He is particularly well-known for his imaginative creature voices, having worked on The Lord of the Rings trilogy, King Kong, Red Riding Hood and Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, as well as videogames in the God of War series,BioShock 2 and many others.

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The first one is from MPEG, with comments of some of the sound editors with best sound nomination:

Though the movies they worked on were all unconventional, the 2009 Academy Award nominees for Best Sound Editing are all veteran names with long lists of impressive credits. Only two––Star Trek’s Alan Rankin, MPSE and Avatar’s Gwendolyn Yates Whittle, MPSE––are first-time nominees. However, in a far more unique situation, a pair of Guild members are up for Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing Oscars—Paul J. Ottosson, MPSE, for The Hurt Locker, and Christopher Boyes for Avatar—two films at opposite ends of the budget spectrum. We talked to a group of nominees to get their takes on what made their projects special, how their teams worked and, well, how it feels to be invited to the party.

Read it on MPEG Site

The second one is a nice article at The New York Times:

“The Hurt Locker” is a bomb movie that mutes its booms. It derives suspense by withholding the expected “boomala, boomala,” as an Iraqi kid puts it in the film while taunting an American bomb-squad soldier about the “cool” soundtrack of Hollywood war

“The Hurt Locker” is not cool. It’s hot and dry, a heaving desert parable with a mounting sandstorm howl at the center. The internal explosions matter more than the fireworks. Explaining the dynamics of roadside bombs in Iraq, Paul N. J. Ottosson, the film’s supervising sound editor, told Variety, “You die not from shrapnel but the expanding air that blows up your lungs.” The top notes in the soundtrack are arid metallic clicks, snips, squeaks and creaks, the chatter of wrenches and wire clippers, as bombs are defused in air so parched as to seem combustible itself. Men can hardly summon the spit or breath to speak. Much of the dialogue — which was almost all recorded on location in Jordan (and not looped in a studio) — is delivered in headsets, as soldiers hiss into one another’s helmets across desert expanses. To listen is to enter machinery, rib cages, ear canals and troubled lungs.

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Via: lydrummet | Yahoo Sound Design Group

Peter Canaricas has published a nice article on Variety featuring “The Hurt Locker” and “Avatar” sound, two films nominated to Academy Award for Best Sound Editing, but also two different worlds and different perspectives and ways to treat the sound. Check some excerpts:

“We absolutely invented sounds,” says Boyes, whose team created aural experiences that don’t exist on Earth, such as vocalizations for Pandoran creatures like the thanator land predator and the great flying leonopteryx.

Pandora’s rich, bioluminescent rain forest was another creative opportunity. Relying partly on recordings made in South American jungles, Boyes’ team strove to form sounds that were “beautiful, evocative and intoxicating,” he says.

Unlike Boyes, who invented new sounds, Ottosson’s mission was to re-create the gritty acoustics of the Iraq war as authentically as possible. “We didn’t want to have anything that sounds like it wasn’t real, like it didn’t come from there,” he says.

Ottosson relied on recordings made in Jordan by sound mixer Ray Beckett, who caught the aural ambience of cities, the desert, roaming goats — “whatever he could get his hands on to capture the texture of everything and give me as much to work with as possible.”

Full article at Variety

Via: @lyndrummet

New Avatar Sound Profile, this time by SoundWorks Collection, with great information about the sound of the film, given by Chris Boyes from Skywalker Sound.

The groundbreaking technical and directorial abilities of Director James Cameron can be experienced in his breathtaking visual world of Pandora in “Avatar”. This never before seen world is filled with landscapes, creatures, and civilizations that have also never been heard before by audiences.

Bringing to life the sounds of Pandora include the talent of Skywalker Sound’s Supervising Sound Editor, Sound Re-recording Mixer, and Sound Designer Chris Boyes in this SoundWorks Collection sound for film.

Avatar @ Designing Sound

Avatar again? Yes. This time on a video with some general info about the sound design and score of the film.

Sound design was key in making Pandora a believable, unique world. Sound editor Christopher Boyes explains how real-world sounds were manipulated in such a way as to make them unique to Avatar’s world.

More Avatar @ Designing Sound

Via Wired

AudioMedia has just published the January Issue of his magazine, featuring a cool article about the sound of Avatar, about which we had already read also in Mix days ago. This time we  have more info about the the main challenge of the sound team and how they work to get an amazing sound for an amazing film. You can also find nice articles about some products such as Sound Devices 522, Fostex FM-4, Sony Vegas Pro 9.

Link: AudioMedia January 2009

Avatar is one of the most impressive films I’ve seen. Amazing use of technology and a great story. Fantastic combination. The 3D experience there is totally amazing. The sound is really great… A good challenge with animals, sci-fi stuff and of course: create a new world.

The January’s Issue of Mix Magazine contain a fantastic article featuring Chris Boyes talking about the sound of “Avatar”. Let’s read:

If you’ve seen James Cameron’s epic 3-D fi lm, Avatar, or even just the trailers and commercials, you know that the director has gone to incredible lengths to create a visually and aurally sumptuous adventure set in a fantasy world unlike any that we have ever seen before. There are bizarre creatures, fi erce and friendly, that walk the planet Pandora or soar its skies.

There are futuristic machines and aircraft straight out of Cameron’s vivid imagination. And then there is the Na’vi, a peaceful race of tall, blue-skinned, long-tailed, humanoid tree dwellers who have their own customs and language and are now being threatened by an incursion to Pandora by people from Earth bent on exploiting the planet’s valuable natural resources. It’s a rich and very complex story I won’t recount here, but suffi ce it to say, it involved incredible feats of technical wizardry to bring it realistically to the screen, including improved motion-capture technology, next-gen visual FX supplied by the best digital artists, and newly designed 3-D cameras that allowed Cameron to see approximations of the story’s virtual world in the camera as the fi lm was shot. No wonder it took three years to make.

Not surprisingly, Avatar also required tremendous imagination and dedication from Cameron’s sound crew, which was spearheaded by supervising sound editor/sound designer/re-recording mixer Christopher Boyes (pictured on this month’s cover), who earned his first sound Oscar for Cameron’s Titanic in 1998, and subsequent trophies for Pearl Harbor (2001), The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) and King Kong (2005). He’s also had fi ve other nominations, the latest last year for Iron Man. In fact, when I caught up with Boyes in early December, he’d just started work on the sequel to Iron Man down at Fox in L.A.—this after a mere one-day break following the nearly 80-day fifi nal mix on Avatar (also at Fox).

Avatar was not your typical film where the “post” crew gets heavily involved once principal photography has been completed. Rather, Cameron brought in Boyes, who in turn called on sound editor Addison Teague to start working on sound design from the beginning of the shoot. “When Jim and I sat down in the summer of ’06,” Boyes recounts,” he said, ‘This is what I want to do: I’m going to shoot, then I’m going to go in and edit, and while I edit I want to be cutting sound eff ects that you’ve made, and then I’m going to go back to shooting’; and back and forth like that. And true to form, that’s exactly what he did. What we didn’t expect him to do was keep shooting as long as he did, but then all these big fi lms tend to do that so it wasn’t exactly surprising.”

Teague, who shares a supervising sound editor credit on the film with Boyes and dialog specialist Gwen Whittle, says, “Jim wanted to have a sound editor working in the picture department during editing, and I had done that before for Chris on the fi rst Pirates of the Caribbean fi lm. Avatar was going to be a multi-year commitment and involve relocating from Skywlker Sound to L.A. to work alongside Jim. It was quite a commitment for a sound editor, but seemed like an amazing challenge and experience so I jumped at it.

“In a way, working like that is a dream job for a sound editor,” he continues. “You want to be involved as early as possible because oftentimes as sound editors, we’re fi ghting what a director and a picture editor have been listening to for months, and in some cases, years as crude temp FX, and you want to get your own fingerprint on it. So for us, this was perfect. There were so many creative sound possibilities, and we were able to get in right from the beginning and work with Jim and try to get our ideas in there right away. But it also provided some interesting challenges, because since we were doing it as we went, the turnaround on these sound eff ects requests was actually much faster than it would be in a traditional sound schedule because we would need to provide something almost immediately for some scene he was shooting.

“Jim wanted the sound and picture editing always moving forward together so he could make creative choices that traditionally might be left for post-production at any point in the process. There was never a clear production and post phase on this movie; one was always informing the other. So his goal was to never have to start over building what he’d already worked out, but rather do it for real as he went—so a decision that he might make in 2007 was done and in place for the final mix two years later. Obviously there were changes along the way, but he really did keep some things that long.”Boyes recalls that the first design work he did on the film— based on memory of the script at that point—was on two of the flying creatures that inhabit Pandora: Banshees are similar to pterodactyls (and have a special function in the story because Na’vi warriors can psychically bond with the creatures and then ride them through the air), and the Leonoptryx is a bird-like sub-species of the Banshees.

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The Fellowship of the Ring

The Two Towers

The Lord Of The Rings Website

Also an Italian site ComicUS has an interview with the film’s composer Ramin Djawadi, HERE (scroll past the Italian version of the interview for the English translation.)

DOLBY: In Broken Arrow, there’s this scene where the A-bomb goes off and the ground sort of heaves up in a wave toward the audience.

CB: This kind of thing is always a big challenge, because so often the production wants to arrive at the major climactic moment, and they’ve already brought a freight train of sound. So I have to try to figure out a way to work against that. You can’t be in a battle that’s really loud, and all of a sudden introduce a cannon and make that louder.

There’s a great interview over at Dolby.com with Sound Designer/Re-Recording Mixer Chris Boyes. I have to tip my hat to this German blog for the heads up! Boyes is supervising and mixing next year’s “Iron Man”. Director Jon Favreau has mentioned a mid-air battle against F-22 raptors and Iron Man as one of the major set pieces of the film. It would seem that Boyes and his mics have a date with an airstrip soon.