Shaun Kelly has published a transcription of a very cool interview he had with Dane A. Davis.

Shaun: How do you go about putting sound to film?

Dane: Sound editing is really all about, you watching the film not as an editor but as the audience. You have to follow the sound in your head. what are you hearing in your head? If you are hearing what is coming out of the speakers and it is different from what is in your head you have some work to do. You have to follow what is in the story. There are emotional needs of the story  telling. Then there is the willing suspension of the perceptual  point of the storytelling. Meaning  if somebody is standing on the street corner in a movie and a car drives by, does that character perceive the sound of that car going by? If so you need to put a sound there. If not then you don’t. If that character is totally lost in thought, you might not want to have the sound of the car going by but you don’t want to make the audience think there is a mistake. So it could be portraying the sound of the car going by as a whooshing sound because that is the emotional experience of that character standing next to the car going by. First it is emotionally what sound is necessary then  in terms of the perceptional reality what rules are you following or not following. The best sound editing is the least predictable and the most familiar.  When I worked on the Matrix it was everyone’s intention to not put sounds in the movie that anyone has ever heard before, but at the same time there were requirements like doors that close and guns being shot. The modified reality of the virtual world helped but people still have to believe that the humans in the film believed the sounds they were hearing. Every movie has the same challenges. You have to figure out what the priorities are for the audiences experience.

Continue reading…

Via: Social Sound Design

“It’s all about the emotional associations of sounds. It’s not about whether they’re really technically correct or not. It’s about whether they’re scary or relaxing or threatening or whatever helps tell the story.”

- Dane A. Davis

Check this fantastic featurette on the sound of “The Last Mimzy”, with sound designer Dane A. Davis and some professors and physicists talking about some aspects of the movie and great info about the perception of sound.

Another great sound featurette, this time about the sound and music of Matrix, fantastic movie for sound design. You can listen comments from film editor Zach Staenberg sound designer Dane A. Davis, composer Don Davis, music supervisor Jason Bentley and more!

If you wnat more information about the sound design of Matrix, don’t forget to check the Dane A. Davis Special.

Blastwave FX has announced at AES, the results of the Sound Design Competition. The winner is Tobias Poppe of Dusseldorf, Germany. Congratulations, Tobias!! very good job!

Poppe and all other participants downloaded 50 free sound effects from www.blastwavefx.com and created a soundtrack to footage of water balloons hitting people in the face. The winning prize was a one-year Mix Magazine subscription and the BLASTDRIVE ($5,999), a 397 GB. Comprehensive Lifetime Sound Design Solution (CLSDS) featuring 31,700  sound effects on a Glyph Hard Drive, a sound effects search engine (Mac/PC) and recently announced Free Updates for Life.

The Winner

“After listening to the sounds provided by Blastwave FX, I  started manipulating in all directions”, commented contest-winner Poppe on his artistic approach. “Putting sound on slow motion gives you a lot of opportunities to go crazy, but I wanted to be a bit more simple, serious, refreshing, positive and open – like water. A little bit in conflict is the extreme slow motion of the footage, which I felt I needed to serve. To do so I used more segmented kind of sounds and slow, low bassy sounds to complement the slow visual motion.”

Notable Judges  for the Blastwave FX Sound Design Competition included 2009 Academy Award Winner Richard King (Dark Knight), 2000 Academy Award Winner Dane Davis (Matrix) and 2009 Golden Reel Nominee Charles Deenen (Need for Speed: Undercover).

Speaking to the quality of the Blastwave FX sound design entries, Dane Davis (Matrix)  said, “I found the selection process to be maddeningly difficult!  After listening to each entry several times, I then listened to my favorite nine over and over and over again.” Laura Sinnott, Blastwave FX’s contest director said,  “This competition was a success for Blastwave FX – we had an unprecedented number of contestants register and participate from all over the world. The quality of submissions were stellar overall, and the enthusiastic reaction to the sound design community we are building and Blastwave FX sound effects library was inspiring! We’re already looking forward to the next competition!”

2nd Place: Kyle Gray (Bethesda, Maryland), Sound Designer and Editor for Animation, Shorts and Film.

3rd Place: Michael Caisley, Sound Designer for Games

Top Twenty to be announced next week, and a video channel with the videos coming soon…

This is the end of the Dane A. Davis Special, finishing with another article about his masterpiece Matrix, this time with the second part of the trilogy: Matrix Reloaded. Let’s check another article at Mix Online with interesting info about the mix, the music and some sound effects of Matrix Reloaded.

CAR DROPPING

Dane Davis: “It was all about the angles that things would bounce. We had to drop the cars right in the middle of the microphone array, and then keep them from rolling over the mics or over all of us. We also had a couple of wrecking balls — including one that weighed 3,500 pounds — that we dropped through the cars. At one point, one of the balls went all the way through the cars, through the concrete under them, into the dirt and back up through the car, then rolled over a bunch of mic cables and came to rest on a PZM mic, completely crushing it. We got some really great sounds out of that.”

THE SENTINELS

Dane Davis: “The Sentinels had to be very monstrous-sounding, very alive and very lethal; yet we know that they’re machines. Each one has eight motor and gear tracks, plus about four Foley tracks that are done live [mostly for the tails]. Each track is a composite of a bunch of sounds, and every move that the Sentinels make has to be expressed in every one of those tracks. The dubbing mixers then had to carefully pan each element of each Sentinel as they moved through space to give them a very real, three-dimensional power and menace.”

WHOOSH!

Dane Davis: “A really key part of the sound of The Matrix is the way air is pushed out of the way. The whooshes are the power: all those molecules of air being moved out of the way so that fist or foot can connect with you in a bad way. It’s unlike a lot of Hong Kong movies that go ‘thuk’ — with no air. The way we approach it is that every limb is a combination of different whooshes. They’re very complicated, with a lot of sound manipulation, but they all start out with real sounds: me swinging things around my head as hard as I can — computer cables, phone cords, unraveled nylon rope, lots of odd things on the ends of rope — you name it, we flung it.”

Full Article Here.

September Special will feature a wonderful sound designer, considered by many as “the father of modern sound design”.

We had already seen the Gary Rydstrom Sound Show at “Big Movie Sound Effects: Behind the Scenes and Out of the Speakers”, an special Show Co-Produced by the Motion Picture Sound Editors and the American Cinematheque.

Now, let`s check the transcript of the Dane A. Davis Sound Show talking about his work, specifically The Matrix:

Hello, I’m Dane and I design and oversee the sounds in movies.Bill Pope, Director of Photography, told me after the premier of one of the Matrix movies that we were the “Invisible Crew” and that even if he turned the camera around 180° on every shot nobody would see us. So nobody knows we’re there. They just know that in the theater those Styrofoam and wood sets sound like heavy iron. You know that three-foot tall tower they crashed and blew up on the set and STILL looks three-foot tall in the dailies? When they go to the theater it’s scary and huge and heavy and dangerous. And they know that somehow those amazing visual effects people are cooking up monsters and spaceships and all these amazing things that don’t exist on earth, that somehow the sounds for all those visuals go through their light pens into the movie theater as well. But that’s not quite how it happens. There are people like Gary and me and all of the people on our teams and the people in the MPSE, and we have to cook up all of those sounds. It’s a little sad that all the people that create and edit and mix all these sounds for these movies to make everything feel real and exciting and dramatic are invisible. In fact, on most of the “making of” videos that you see, they’re still all invisible. We do our job so well we disappear.

So I had a hypothesis I thought I’d try out. Since turning the camera around 180 degrees didn’t really help, let’s try turning the projector around 180 degrees. Now let’s watch some highlights from “The Matrix.”

[Clip with no picture but the sound effects mix exactly as heard in the movie in narrative order.]

So, how did it look? You take away the actors that everybody can see and everything else on the set you can see and even the orchestra, which most people can pretty much imagine is there somewhere, and this is what’s left. What you just heard.

When we’re brought onto a project, we can’t always see a whole lot. It’s great that Gary played some of those animatics. That’s very often how movies like “The Matrix” look when we first see them.

Full Transcript of the presentation Here.

This is an article from Danetracks, published on Post Magazine on November 1, 2002. We can clearly see the Dane’s vision about “The Art of Sound Design” and see more about danetracks and its members.

… Dane Davis, president of West Hollywood’s Danetracks, Inc. (www.danetracks.com), doesn’t see himself simply “painting by numbers with sound” in the “see a bird, hear a bird” tradition.

Instead, Davis, who won the 1999 Academy Award for best Sound Effects Editing for The Matrix – on which he was sound designer/supervising sound editor – thinks about “what’s happening on screen and what sounds are created in the process of what’s happening. You want to find a way to put motivation in the sound, to suggest more is going on than just what you see.”

Davis and his Danetracks team had a special challenge in the new Disney animated feature, Treasure Planet, which transplants the Treasure Island tale to outer space where Long John Silver is a cyborg and his pet, Morph, is a shape shifter instead of a shoulder-perching parrot.

“It’s set in a future as it might have been imagined 200 years ago,” Davis explains. “It’s sort of retro-futurism, so we had to find the threshold of the old and the new.”

He notes that “Disney-animated soundtracks are usually somewhat simple compared to live-action features such as The Matrix. We create a level of detail that’s pretty extreme, so people were worried that our sound might overwhelm the animation.” Davis spent two years (with breaks for other commitments) as sound designer/supervising sound editor, working constantly to see how much like a live-action movie the animated feature could sound. In the end, “it surprised a lot of people” that his premise – the animation would be more real and plausible with detailed sound – worked.

The movie’s sound effects were recorded at the Danetracks facility using Pro Tools 24-bit systems with multiple plug-ins and stand-alone digital processing programs, including U&I Software’s MetaSynth and Sound Hack.

For Long John Silver’s mechanical prosthetic arm, which “can do just about anything,” Davis says he and sound designer Richard Adrian “tried a million things and picked what worked best [spinning and vibrating friction motors and mechanisms] without conflicting too much with the character dialogue.” The sounds were edited and processed to “grow the sound onto the picture” such as a sequence where the pirate’s arm whirs and spins furiously as he whips up a meal for the crew.

Supervising sound editor Julia Evershade handled many of the action sounds such as the wooden tall (space)ships’ explosions, gunfire and classic-yet-sci-fi swashbuckling, plus the mechanical robot Ben. Andrew Lackey and the rest of the design team devised sound to accompany the gigantic visuals of a black hole and solar storm. “They had to sound expansive, fun and dramatic without blowing the kids out of the theater,” says Davis. “We experimented with lots of growling and shrieking sounds for the threat of destruction that had to work with the whistling and howling of the ‘etherium’ being sucked in and exhaled from the black hole.”

He and the directors decided to use his own voice, sped up and pitched higher, for Morph, but he filled his mouth with Jello for gooey vocalizations with no consonants or vowels. Over time Davis developed an amazing repertoire of about 90 emotional categories for Morph with 10 to 40 variations in each.

Davis also squished, splatted and plopped Jello for Morph flying, flipping and melting. To avoid sounding wet and disgusting, he digitally stretched the sounds so they became very springy, “as if Morph’s molecules were always rearranging and bumping into each other.”

The second part of this special about the sound design of Matrix, awesome work by our August’s featured Dane A. Davis.

This time let’s check this interesting article from Mix Magazine featuring Davis and Danetracks:

The edgy, effects-laden feature-directed by the Wachowski brothers (whose directorial debut was the stylish Bound, also with sound design by Davis)-is a dazzling combination of traditional science fiction and new technology, and it provided Danetracks with budgetary and creative challenges that don’t come around very often.

From dripping computer code, alternative realities and machine monsters to kung fu, helicopters and even the sounds of silence, design for The Matrix ranged from classic to surreal.

Situated in West L.A., the Danetracks facility was formed in 1986 as a place for Davis to design elements for other sound editors. Davis, a supervising sound editor, re-recording mixer and sound designer with such smart movies as Drugstore Cowboy, Boogie Nights, Don Juan DeMarco, Romeo Is Bleeding, Your Friends and Neighbors and GO to his credit, began manipulating tape machines in high school. Recording pingpong games from the table leg’s perspective, taping backwards, turning reels by hand and running delay loops through the garage, he created soundtracks for his own Super 8 films. At the California Institute of the Arts film school, Davis honed his skills and learned studio engineering, tracking and mixing for his own films as well as other student projects. During a few postgrad years as a starving writer, he continued to create sound scores for short animated films and built up a client list of documentary, experimental and narrative feature filmmakers.

While not the biggest sound design house in town, Danetracks is extremely prolific. Part of what enables the staff to get so much done is their sophisticated communication system, which is unrivaled by much larger production houses.

“We did The Matrix with a very small crew considering how involved it was,” Davis explains. “About 12 people much of the time. It helps that we’re very heavily wired-all the Pro Tools, the Macs and the PCs are on the same Ethernet. We’ve been doing the wiring for this kind of thing in-house for the last ten years, pretty successfully, and then just recently we had a professional company come in and rewire everything from scratch.”

Danetracks uses a new server called Winframe on editorial databases, allowing onsite or offsite Macs or PCs to log into it. “That’s been terrific, because any of our Pro Tools stations can log into it directly and have it in the background. The servers all feed through the same wires, so there are some nice cross-pollinization possibilities,” Davis says. “Like on the stage [Warner Bros. Burbank's Dubbing Stage 6, newly renovated and fitted with a Neve DFC console], with my little G3 Powerbook I can log into anything [at Danetracks] or onto any of our Pro Tools stations on other dubbing stages. I can get onto any drive or database and grab the audio files I need, or I can go directly into the library, find a sound, assign it to a spot and print it up for the transfer department. They put it on one of the servers, and I siphon it onto my stage drives. The system paid off hugely on this movie, saving a lot of freeway drive time.”

The Danetracks library now has more than 90,000 sound effects. Managing all that information is key. “It’s tricky, and we use a variety of databases,” Davis says. “Primarily we use the Leonardo Professional Librarian system. We’ve been evolving with the writer of it, Louis Benniof, forever-in fact, he made a bunch of big changes for us just before we started The Matrix. We’re able to track what every editor has cut, which is very important to me, because on most movies, I’ll literally pull all the sound effects and make very specific cutting sheets for the editors. But on this movie, I had Julia Evershade helping me with that, which was terrific. Julia’s a powerhouse; she knows my library really well, and I know hers.”

The highly wired aspects of Danetracks have permitted Davis to centralize a project yet allow people to work independently. “For example, we discovered early on with Pro Tools that by having cloned drives, copies of the actual audio that people are working with, the edit sessions can float independently,” Davis explains. “We can have three editors using the same audio in three different places and they can interchange their sessions. One person can be working on reel 3 effects and can log on and get the reel 2 effects edit session from another editor. It gives us a huge amount of freedom in terms of scheduling people and resources.”

One of Davis’ best editors moved to Austin, Texas, in the mid-’90s and now receives reels via FedEx, then posts the sessions back to the server over phone lines. “Since then, we have a bunch of editors working on their own satellite systems,” Davis says.

Upstairs at Danetracks is Davis’ sound design studio, fitted with a Sapphyre console (now primarily a monitoring matrix), a Westlake surround speaker system, and a full complement of outboard EQ and effects. It’s a full-service room; depending on the project, he can do sound design for specific scenes or dub a whole film.

“I try to find character and logic for all the sounds that the audience experiences,” he relates. “I’m always looking for some justification or explanation of what the characters are hearing and why the audience is hearing it. It’s usually pretty subtle, but it’s really important to me to be correct about this-the logic of sound effects.

“Some directors will spot very specifically,” he continues. “‘This person’s house is close to that kind of factory, and it clanks and clinks. That person lives next to the refinery, and it goes boom, boom, boom all day long until 5 o’clock when the whistle blows and it stops.’ That’s integrated into the story, and it becomes part of the environs those characters interact within. There can be a lot of nondirect human noises that become the character of a place. I have to run it by the test: ‘Are these sounds going to help propagate the story?‘

“There actually have been times where I’ve stood up and said, ‘This would be a whole lot better without those sound effects!’ There are a lot of people who’ll fight for the effects to be as loud as possible at all times at any cost, and a lot of times those are the people who get all the attention because the audience is constantly aware of it. If your sound effects integrate seamlessly with the music, sometimes nobody notices them,” Davis explains. “I’ve had that happen to me hundreds of times, where I was being careful with the dubbing mixers to integrate the effects so that you didn’t notice when the score cues, or even source cues, were starting and stopping.”

Continue reading here…

The Matrix – Subway Fight

GRM Tools, plugins used by many sound designers out there. They had an article about Dane A. Davis featuring his company Danetracks. He spoke about the plugins that he use and some techniques or procedures with the processes. Even if you don’t GRM Tools, be sure to read, the article deals all kinds of interesting techniques.

Did you see the freeway chase scene in The Matrix: Reloaded? Or that gigantic sky crane helicopter in Swordfish? How about those nifty spaceships in Treasure Planet and the otherworldly screams and grinding gears in 13 Ghosts?

If you’re into movies as much as you’re into sound and you stick around for the credits, then you already know about the signature Academy Award-winning touch of Danetracks Studios. Every sound effect in Romeo Must Die, 8 Mile, and The Matrix trilogy — including The Matrix: Revolutions — was scored there. The passion for audio at this West Hollywood, California, sound design, editorial, and mixing company is matched only by the team’s boundless energy for improvisation.

Jamming On Sound Design

“We are heavily into experimentation with GRM Tools here,” says Danetracks owner and sound designer Dane Davis. “We play around a lot with the plug-ins to come up with different textures. Just throwing the simplest sound into Doppler, Pitch Accum or Shuffling gives us the ideas we need to derive things in unique and completely different ways.”

The Danetracks crew leaves no idea unturned when it comes to creating, recording, and building new sounds for film. They gather and record tons of original field content for every movie in order to remain unique. If a scene calls for mechanized sounds, for instance, they go out and find dozens of gears and levers to hand build their own apparatuses before instantiating GRM Tools in their Pro Tools systems back home.

“The depth of what you can do with all the GRM plug-ins is amazing,” says Richard Adrian, another sound creator par excellence at Danetracks. “There are so many different parameters that every time I use GRM Tools I find something new. It’s best to have as many sound design tools as possible, but these are the most useful tools that we have in our plug-in library.”

“The more tools the merrier,” Davis agrees. Danetracks team member Michael Johnson, who used the ST Bundle plug-ins extensively on The Matrix: Reloaded and The Matrix: Revolutions, feels the same way. “We couldn’t have done Revolutions without the ST plug-ins,” says Johnson.

The Tao and Doppler of Neo’s Matrix

Regardless of the movie, the goal of every Danetracks effect is to make every sound appear to have originated in a real acoustic Earth space. Their collective approach is to stay far away from static, synthetic sounds that sit motionless in a dry environment.

“We use Doppler constantly to counteract that quality,” Davis continues. “We use it for creating a liveliness to sound by adding a subtle, natural motion to things. I use it upstream from a lot of chains of plugins just to give it a little bit more shimmer, you know, a sort of ‘microphone realness’ quality in an acoustic space. We also do a lot of specific things, as well, such as the helicopter carrying a bus through downtown L.A. in Swordfish. 90 percent of that scene was created using Doppler with various wind and other natural sounds to create the swirling character of the blade wash from that gigantic machine.”

“The real helicopter in that scene sounded like a big vacuum cleaner,” laughs Adrian. “Doppler is extremely useful, especially when used subtly when we need just a little movement from things. It just gives the sounds more motion and far more of an interesting quality. A generic doppler effect is easy to recognize when applied liberally, but it’s better to go much more subtle with Doppler. Nobody will ever know you used a plug-in to make a sound come off as if it was a naturally recorded effect.”

The opening scene of Swordfish features the sound of a ton of ball bearing elements. Davis used an array of four microphones to capture the feel of motion in all those bearings bouncing about, but that wasn’t enough reality. He used Doppler here to further stretch out the sound of the motion of the bearings.

Adrian, who also worked on Swordfish, Matrix, and 13 Ghosts, explains some of his technique when working often with Doppler. “I used to use the circle frequency to let the circles go and create my doppler effect; you know, just put it in loop record and get several variations on Doppler. But now I do it all by hand. I put the circle amplitude to zero and loop it all by hand because there’s a lot more control that way.”

Shuffling Ghosts & Better Gears With Pitch Accum

The Danetracks team is also big on using the GRM Tools Shuffling plug-in to place sound elements into a more realistic setting. Again, they stress the subtle, intutitive use of this tool to enhance a sound’s stereo image and to make it sound more interesting. But what about all the cool granular distorted delays and other effects they can also create with Shuffling?

“Sometimes. Like some of the ghost things we did where we took screams and shuffled them around,” Davis recalls about working on 13 Ghosts. “We used Shuffling there to randomize those screams and for creating those ‘data burst’ sorts of sounds in The Matrix and other films we’ve worked on. Shuffling can produce a kind of very metric, almost musically-synthetic sound which we shy away from here. But I know people using it pretty heavily for that sort of groove making type of thing.”

“There’s all kinds of interesting things you can do with Shuffling,” Adrian agrees. “Shuffle it and then reverse it and you get this nice lead-in to certain things. But when I need to make something sound a lot bigger than it actually is, I always use Pitch Accum. In 13 Ghosts, for instance, the entire house is made of glass and metal and there are these giant gears everywhere.”

Giant gears and ghosts?

“Yeah, we just built and recorded various little gears,” he continues. “But in order to get that giant sound I ran it through Shuffling and Pitch Accum. There’s a certain recipe I have for using those plug-ins that makes everything sound much, much bigger.”

“That’s a very effective way of working,” says Davis. “It creates a totally different quality than just generating sub-octaves in a real-time harmonizer type of approach. Pitch Accum definitley gives you a different sort of grainy quality that’s very nice.”

Working subtly with the entire GRM Tools set is a Danetracks specialty. They’ll delve into more “obvious” sounds if that’s what a scene calls for, but using the plug-in suite in unique and creatively stimulating ways are a house speciality. Especially for Dane Davis.

“Now, I’m also a very dedicated mis-user of tools,” admits Davis. “I always did that with outboard boxes and I do the same with the GRM Tools plug-ins. I try to find things to do that they’re not supposed to do. I’ll place them upstream, sometimes downstream from other processors just for the slightest little movement. I’ll look at what they’re doing and it might be evolving very, very slowly, but if I bypass it, it just completely shifts the sum sound into a less natural kind of state. I love that kind of subtlety. The GRM Tools are enormously flexible. By shifting around what appears to be the harmonics of a sound, it makes it seem as if it is something real out there in the real world.”

GRM Tools Website