The July Special of Gary Rydstrom ends here…  with more interviews!

Road Trip Nation had an interview with Rydstrom talking about his life and sound design work.

“Since he was twelve, Gary Rydstrom knew he wanted to work in film, but he was uncertain what he would specialize in. At USC film school, he found his passion with sound. Although the film industry is competitive and difficult to break into, Gary has had encouragement from his friends and family. After graduation, however, Gary had his own doubts. With a bachelors degree in film under his belt, and now perusing a masters in film, Gary got a stroke of luck. “It was just one of those out of the blue things. I was sitting in school and [the teacher] said, ‘do you want to interview for a job up at Lucasfilm?’” Gary took the interview, got the job, and moved to San Francisco to work at Skywalker Ranch. This all took place in three days. Gary has done work on dozens of films including Terminator 2, Backdraft, X Men, and Finding Nemo. Winner of seven academy awards, Gary is happy to find his niche.”

See it in the following video:

There is another interesting interview with Gary Rydstrom at Mix Online:

“It’s the rare individual who is able to go out on top, to walk away from a career while still at peak performance. It’s a move we tend to associate with star athletes, the Michael Jordans and Jim Browns of the world, and after the initial, “Oh, no, say it ain’t so” reaction, we generally greet their decision with respect and awe. They did the right thing.

And so it is with Gary Rydstrom, arguably the finest sound designer and re-recording mixer of his generation. At the ripe old age of 44, with seven Oscars (out of 12 nominations), a slew of BAFTA, Golden Reel and C.A.S. Awards, and a 20-year filmography remarkable for its range and quality, he is leaving Skywalker Sound. But rather than opt for the speakers’ circuit or the golf course, Rydstrom is headed for the director’s chair at Pixar, a company that he’s been associated with since creating the “voices” for Luxo Jr. back in 1986.

But we’ve come to praise Rydstrom, not to bury him, as there is no believable scenario in which he will be able to completely sever ties with Skywalker or the world of sound-for-picture.”

Read Full Article here.

Finally, Gary Rydstrom on voting on Oscars here.

And this is the end of Gary  Special. I hope you like it! In August we’ll have another awesome featured sound designer.. Ready to enter the Matrix?

Here is an interesting interview with Gary Rydstrom conducted in 2007 by Kboo Radio in his Words and Pictures Program. It’s About 28:16 minutes.

“Academy Award-winning sound designer Gary Rydstrom recently jumped into the director’s chair to create the animated short “Lifted” for Pixar.  Gary hosted a screening at this summer’s Platform Animation Festival in Portland, and has plenty of stories about finding soundtrack material in the strangest of places.”

Listen >>Download audio file

Gary Rydstrom wasn’t the main sound designer of Titanic, he worked as a re-recording mixer, making a wonderful work with the Sound Crew, and won an Academy Award for Best Sound.

I couldn’t let go this article that I find about the ound design of Titanic. Let’s read!

“What the extra time gave us,” says supervising sound editor Tom Bellfort, “was the ability to come to terms with all the material and try to articulate all the possible sounds that would create the sheer size and elegance of the ship before it hits the iceberg. It also gave us the time to approach the job [in the post-iceberg section] in less of a mechanical way. It’s easy to do a mechanical job as compared to more of an emotional and psychological rendering of what’s going on aboard the ship while it’s sinking.”

Of course, the later release also gave more time for the mix. Premixing began in early August and the final mix was finished in late October, in time for the world premiere at the Tokyo Film Festival on November 1. The schedule might seem luxurious in today’s film sound climate, but the length made it essentially two movies, and the complexity of the material (127 speaking parts, 4,000 principal loops, intricate water Foley, at least three big, protracted action scenes) was daunting. By all accounts, it couldn’t have been done without the stage setup on the new Mix A at Skywalker, which includes the 156-input AMS Neve Capricorn digital console pictured on last month’s Mix cover, along with two Pro Tools systems for effects fixes, two Studioframes for dialog and a Sonic Solutions system for music. Premixes and finals were recorded to Skywalker’s Sondor mag machines with Dolby SR.

“With a digital, fully automated console, we were able to audition alternate effects that we premixed, and we could cut elements on the stage,” says effects re-recording mixer Gary Rydstrom. “I could take those inputs to the board, and since it’s fully automated, I could pan it, EQ it, make it echo, and it sits right in. It’s almost like being able to edit, premix and final mix at the same stage. So it gave us a lot of flexibility.”

Working with Cameron demanded flexibility. He makes full use of the four outputs on his Avid system during the picture edit and creates a detailed temp mix (which was used at the first test screenings). The re-recording team would then solo those tracks before going into a reel to isolate Cameron’s ideas. Sometimes he wanted the single effect from his temp, sometimes he wanted a different sound or more fullness. And because he was so involved with other aspects of the film at the time, there was really no way of knowing before he sat in for the final, at which point he would inevitably ask for changes.

“Jim [Cameron] is very good about pacing when he does his temps,” says music re-recording mixer Gary Summers. “He is very conscious of where there’s going to be effects only, where there’s going to be music, the interplay of them, and how dense it is. When you say he likes effects big, well, he also likes music big, but he’s very, very selective. I remember that from Terminator 2–at any given moment, there’s only certain things you’re going to hear.”

Read Full Article here.

Titanic Official Website

Titanic at IMDB

The Hauting, a horror movie directed by Jan de Bont. The Sound Design by Gary Rydstrom, wich had a interesting interview at filmsound.org talking about the sound of The Haunting. Let’s see:

On a recording soundstage here at George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch, the movie’s sound designer, Gary Rydstrom, had just received an urgent call from a colleague. An image of the movie’s fragile heroine, played by Lili Taylor, was frozen on a movie screen and on two video monitors. Rydstrom and his two assistants looked almost as tense as the actress, who was cowering in bed, her eyes fixed on something on the ornately carved ceiling.

“That’s where the visual effect goes,’ said Rydstrom, advancing the film a few frames. “They’ve just added something new to it, so we have to come up with an additional sound effect.” Though the art of sound is often viewed as the last and hastiest element of movie production, Rydstrom has had two months to prepare, an unusually long time. For a suspense film about largely unseen forces, evocative sound is essential to the movie’s success.

“We had to find a way to give the house a voice, even before we began shooting,” said De Bont. “Normally, actors would be reacting to the director, who’s saying things like: ‘Now you hear a footstep! Now you hear a door creaking!’ And that’s horrible for them. They don’t know where the sound is coming from, where it’s going, or what it will eventually sound like in the movie. But if you can fix it for them there on the set, you get fantastic reactions.”

Soon after “The Haunting” was green-lighted by Dreamworks, De Bont took steps to insure that its actors (including Liam Neeson and Catherine Zeta-Jones) could react not merely to one another but to an invisible cast of thousands. His first choice for the job was Rydstrom, 40, who has shared seven Academy Awards for sound design and sound effects editing, most recently for “Saving Private Ryan.” Rydstrom’s resume is diverse. It includes “Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace,” “Titanic,” “The Horse Whisperer,” “Jurassic Park” and “Terminator 2: Judgement Day.” But he had done the sound for only one ghost movie, and that was the G-rated “Casper.”

” ‘Casper’ was a friendly ghost; this was going to be different,” Rydstrom said. “To me, a scary sound is one that you can’t pin down, or one that is behind you. Something we use a lot is the sense of space, the ghostly movements. The sounds spin around the room in a strange way. The movie is full of atmosphere and ambiences that have little whispery sounds. You’re always becoming attuned to these things that might be a distant voice in the wind.”

Inspired by the script and by preliminary drawings by the film’s production designer, Eugenio Zanetti, Rydstrom recorded — and then distorted — the sounds that would emanate from a place that Jackson called “a masterpiece of architectural misdirection.” (Exteriors were filmed at Harlaxton Manor near Lincolnshire, England, a Gothic-Jacobean-Baroque building; interiors were built near Los Angeles.

To insure a fresh approach, Rydstrom and his associates searched for new variations on the sounds that audiences associate with haunted houses. After that, he said, the biggest challenge was to come up with names for each sample. (The results, indexed on a computer, sound like a record company roster: Buzzmoan-ambience, Rumble-wave, Demon speed-by, Dreaded-booms, Thunder-switch.)

The team’s one concession to movie tradition, he said, was to record a magnificently creaky door that he found in the cellar of a Northern California winery. He also happened to have extensive recordings made inside an old hotel near Glacier National Park in Montana, where Rydstrom and his wife were stranded during a June snowstorm several years ago. “I spent three days recording gusting winds through the cracks of windows and doors, so that came in handy,” he said. “It sounds as though the wind has a child’s voice inside it — a little screaming, whispering human being in it.”

The first sound the audience will hear upon entering Hill House, however, is a slow, booming, rhythmic breathing. “When the front door opens for the first time, there’s also a sort of exhalation, an airy sound that takes you into the house,” Rydstrom said. To capture that sound, he set up a digital recorder in his Saab Turbo and risked becoming a ghost himself. “If you drive about 80 miles an hour on the freeway and open your sunroof, you get a great ‘bwaaa!’ sound,” he said. “It was dangerous, so I did it late at night so there was no one around to hit.”

But it was the booming sounds, not the breathing, that proved to be most impressive. During the filming, De Bont operated a digital audio player and used about 100 of Rydstrom’s sounds to inspire and surprise the actors. Ms. Taylor said that the sound cues had provided an integral part of her performance. “Shrill screaming, strange wild banging, children calling me lightly — all sorts of noises,” she said. “One time in England, when Jan didn’t have the sound machine, he started making sounds with pots and pans for us. I loved that.”

The most unnerving sound effects, Ms. Taylor said, were those that suggest a huge, unseen presence moving overhead. “It was low, reverberating, eerie sound,” she said, “like a giant sliding its feet, with a little noise in between the slides.”

The dragging sound, Rydstrom said, was derived from a recording of a 19th-century iron lung that he found in a San Francisco museum. “We slowed down the mechanical sound, and it turned into a rhythmic sweep-clunk, sweep-clunk,” he said. The sounds of rapping, booms and crashes came from some energetic recording sessions at several Bay Area houses, all abandoned and set for demolition. “We went in there with baseball bats and smashed the hell out of walls and doors,” he said. “But for the final mix, we almost always ended up using a sweetener of some distant explosion or artillery sound.”

Despite the pyrotechnics, Rydstrom believes that “sound is all about emotion, the way music is emotion.” “We don’t quite understand why rhythm and pitch and frequency stir us emotionally, but they do,” he said. “It would be hard to write a textbook and say: With a certain pitch or frequency, you will get a certain reaction in the listener. So a lot of sound work is to take a guess and continually gauge your own reaction.

“One of the great compliments I’ve ever heard was from a man who told me that his son loved to watch ‘Jurassic Park,’ but he was too frightened so he’d turn the sound off and watch. Without the sound, it was no longer scary to him, but he still loved it. It was good to know that that’s where the scariness came from.”

Minority Report, one of the most recognized sci-fi and futuristic films, another master piece directed by Steven Spielberg, with the sound work of Gary Rydstrom. A huge range of sounds, for a huge number of gadgets and devices that do not yet exist.

Let’s see this interesting article from Mix Online, with information about the sound of Minority Report.

The story revolves around the idea of police who are able to capture criminals before they commit their crimes. “They have this technology that’s able to plug into the brains of these genetic mutants that can see the future and put on a screen the images and sounds that they see,” says Rydstrom. “Tom Cruise’s character, who works for the government, is trying to find clues to a murder. Spielberg is clever enough to put a horse or a sprinkler in the scene so that it can show up as they scroll through these visions. It’s real montage-like. But it’s also playing with time, going backward, playing in different perspectives.”

Rydstrom’s response was like the age-old advice to writers, Start with what you know. “We were down in L.A.,” he recounts, in reference to an earlier project, “and they were recording all the digital sound sources onto Tascam MMR drives, but we were mixing to film. The sound that the digital audio would make as it tried to catch up to the film system, grinding to a halt or starting up, was pretty cool. So, I set up the same thing here [at Skywalker]. Then I put all these various sounds onto a drive, jogged through it, and made all these weird, sweeping sounds.”

“It wouldn’t have sounded cool enough if we were just using tape,” continues Rydstrom. “Digital has a stuttering quality as you speed up or jog through that’s very interesting.”

“Spielberg’s using very distinct visual moments to key these visions. So we’re trying to do the same thing with sound cues. There’s a merry-go-round that you see outside one of these murders. You scrub it and do things to it, and when you slow down enough, you start getting digital artifacts. We didn’t want it to sound like bad digital, but it creates a lot of interesting sounds.”

Full article here.

Minority Report – Trailer 2

Minority Report at IMDB

One of the most important Gary Rydstrom’s work was the sound of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, directed by James Cameron and distributed by Tri-Star Movies.

Terminator 2 won 4 Oscars and another 19 wins & 18 nominations. In sound won an Academy Award for Best Sound, Academy Award for Best Effects, Sound Effects Editing and BAFTA Award for Best Sound

Some time ago, Gary talk about the movie sound at filmsound:

Hyperrealistic sounds

Gary Rydstrom: In Terminator 2 Cameron’s approach to sound was hyperrealistic. Everything had to be so much bigger than life. Every sound effect in Terminator 2 had to sound like it was injected with testosterone, it had to be inflated to unworldly possibilities.

It is hard because when you get the mix, you have one sound after the other which you have designed from the beginning to be the largest sound ever heard. The challenge turned out be more in the mixing than the creation. You have the dialogue, the music and larger than life sound effects thrown together. James Cameron really shaped the mix. He had a very distinctive idea of how he wanted to feuture music and effects in each scene. He saw things in terms of rhythm.

Voice-type sounds
Gary Rydstrom: likes sounds that have a vocal characteristic. He loves real-life sounds that have the same emotional envelope a voice does. He says that there are so many sounds in real life – squeals, squeeks, and air hisses – that reminds him of a voice. Gary Rydstrom likes sweetening non-voice events with voice-type sounds to give them intelligence and resonance.

The transformation of T-1000
Gary Rydstrom: My first instinct was to put a goopy mud, liquid sound to the transformation of T-1000. It would sound very low tech and I did not want that. So my first attemps at transforming metal were very musical, taking a violin string bow and sliding and sliding it across different pieces of metal and coming up with very rich tones that evolved. It was a very beautiful sound, but it just did not fit for the director James Cameron.

There is a definable moment when the sound you are making just snaps onto the film and meshes with what it is representing. It had not happening yet. – I was making too etheral a sound. So I went back to record back recording liquid effects – but I tried to record them in a unique way.

Metallic, evolving quality
For the transformation sounds Rydstrom was spraying Dust-Off into a flour and water mixture, with a condom-sealed mic stuck in the goo. The Dust-Off would make huge goopy bubbles. The moment the bubble is forming, it has this sound that is similar to a cuppucino maker or a milk steamer. The slowly forming bubble has a metallic quality to it. It also had an evolving quality. The sound seemed to fit because it had beginning and an end.

T-1000 passing through steel
The basic element of the sound of T-1000 passing through steel bars is nothing more than dog food being slowly sucked out of a can.

Bullets hitting T-1000
For the sound of the bullets hitting T-1000 Rydstrom slammed an inverted glass into a bucket of yoghurt, getting a hard edge to accompany the goop.

The sound of the molten pit
Gary Rydstrom: I wanted a deep sound of something huge and hot – the high sizzle of something hot and the liquidy goop of something you could splash. That was made by compressed air into a lot of mud, but there were also boiling sounds which have been pitched way down.

Key sounds in T2 is metal
Gary Rydstrom: We did a lot of banging in all sorts of metal. The archive building at Skywalker Ranch was still under construction – all the girders were exposed. We recorded banging on big long girders in various ways so they would really resonate. I mixed together different piches of metal hits until they were matched and sounded like one metal hit. You would get the deep thud with a high ring-out. Some of the girder sounds were used for the rolling I-beam used to smash the Terminator.

The wind in the opening scene
The sound of the wind in the opening scene comes from a crack of an open door to main mix room at Skywalker sound.

The sound of the crushed skull
The sound of the crushed skull is actually a pistachio beeing crunched by a metal plate.

The silence and small sounds
When the Cyberdyne building blows up – when the big explosion of the building is preceded just by a long period of silence and the clic of the detonator.

When Arnold shoots the frozen T-1000 n the steel mill, all background ambiences fades out in the split second before the gun goes off.

When Arnold flies on Harley, the engine, the music, everything cuts out until he lands.

Foley
All the incedential movements have been replaced as the leather creaks on the Terminator jacket, the buckle clinks, and the footsteps etc.

Shining moment of foley is when Sarah is getting out of her straps in her hospital bed. She takes the paper clip, spits it out, it lands on the bed, she puts it in the buckle, she gets out of her strap, and she uses the paper clip to pick the lock of the door. The whole scene is nothing but Foley and music. And a lot of the tension is coming from focusing in on those little sounds from Foley – the paper clip into the tumblers of the lock. – What is foley?

ADR
70 % of the diaglogue and most of the breathing is ADR.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day – Trailer

Terminator 2: Judgment Day at IMDB

Let’s begin the Gary Rydstrom Special with Jurassic Park, an Academy Award-winning movie directed by Steven Spielberg and released in 1993 marking the debut of DTS in motion picture theatres on 876 screens.

There is an article at MPSE taken from a special event called “Big Movie Sound Effects: Behind the Scenes and Out of the Speakers” presented in Hollywood by Dane A. Davis and Gary Rydstrom, who spoke about the Sound Design of Jurassic Park.

“Sound effects, to me, are not just to make the unbelievable believable, or to make sounds that make the movie realistic. They’re really there for the sake of storytelling. And one of the key things I try to keep in mind when doing sound effects work is how can we use sound effects to help tell a story. For a dinosaur movie — for “Jurassic Park” — it’s going to give us a sense of fear, a sense of who these dinosaurs are, it’s going to tell us things that are happening off screen, it’s going to give us a sense of scale. It doesn’t really, to my mind, because I’m a sound effects guy, it doesn’t play all that well without sound effects. So I will demonstrate this… Steven Spielberg is not in the audience, right? So I’m going to play a clip from “Jurassic Park” with just dialogue. And we’ll get a sense of how that works.”

“It’s very important, I think, to plan ahead for sound. One of the things that good directors like Steven Spielberg do is they think about sound early on. One of the important aspects of the T Rex attack scene which I’ll show you on film at the end is that they decided to play it with no music. Which is great! It puts you there. It made it feel not like a movie but like real life. It became scarier. He planned to introduce the T Rex with the sound before you saw it, by hearing it off in the distance before you see it. His use of sound is great, I can’t take much credit for some of these great ideas which really come from the director.”

Read full article here.

Jurassic Park (1993) – Official Trailer

Jurassic Park Official Website

Jurassic Park at IMDB

For July I decided to make a special of Gary Rydstrom, a seven-time Academy Award-winning sound designer and director. Some info (Wiki):

Rydstrom graduated from the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts in 1981. He began his career at Skywalker Sound, Northern California in 1983. Offered the job by a college professor, Gary received the opportunity to work with his mentor, Star Wars sound designer Ben Burtt.

After gaining invaluable experience as a sound technician in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, he went on to do sound design for the comedy Spaceballs. The sound design for Backdraft, prepared from scratch, would become the precursor for his sound for Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The original sound effects from Backdraft are constantly referenced and have been used for numerous other films including the The Lord of the Rings film trilogy and Shrek.

Gary Rydstrom’s work on Terminator 2: Judgment Day is arguably his career crowning achievement where he pioneered original techniques still used to this day for creating realistic sound effects. Even to this day Terminator 2 is considered the benchmark for high-end motion picture sound design and Gary went on to win an Academy Award for his groundbreaking achievement.

Gary’s sound work on Jurassic Park was a milestone in terms of innovation as he and his team set out to create dinosaur sounds by mixing together numerous different animal vocalizations to make the audience feel as though giant bellowing prehistoric beasts surrounded them. The Oscar-winning film took a giant leap in being the very first motion picture to be presented in DTS.

He subsequently went on to work on sound for numerous successful films including Titanic, Saving Private Ryan (for which he won his third Academy Award), Minority Report and Finding Nemo. He won an MPSE lifetime achievement award for his stunning career and regularly speaks at various sound design forums sharing his extensive knowledge and enthusiasm with aspiring sound design artists.

He has recently made his directorial debut with the Pixar animated short, Lifted, for which he received his fourteenth Academy Award nomination. He is currently directing Newt for Pixar.

Academy Awards & Nominations

• Academy Award Nomination for Best Sound Editing - Finding Nemo, Minority Report and Monsters, Inc.
• Academy Award Nomination for Best Sound - Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace
• Academy Award for Best Sound - Titanic, Jurassic Park, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Backdraft and Saving Private Ryan
• Academy Award Nomination for Best Effects/Sound Effects Editing - Backdraft
• Academy Award for Best Effects/Sound Effects Editing - Saving Private Ryan, Jurassic Park and Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Featured Work

• Lifted (2006) – Sound designer
• Hulk (2003) – Sound designer and Sound re-recording mixer
• Finding Nemo (2003) – Sound designer, Sound re-recording mixer and Supervising sound editor
• Minority Report (2002) – Sound designer, Sound re-recording mixer and Supervising sound editor
• Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones (2002) -  Sound re-recording mixer
• Monsters, Inc. (2001) – Sound designer and Sound re-recording mixer
• Artificial Intelligence: AI (2001) – Sound designer, Sound re-recording mixer and Supervising sound editor
• Toy Story 2 (1999) – Sound designer and Sound re-recording mixer
• Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999) – Sound re-recording mixer
• A Bug’s Life (1998) – Sound designer and Sound re-recording mixer
• Titanic (1997) – Sound re-recording mixer
• Hercules (1997) – Sound designer and Sound re-recording mixer
• Mission: Impossible (1996) – Sound re-recording mixer
• Jumanji (1995) – Sound designer
• Toy Story (1995) Sound designer and Sound re-recording mixer
• Jurassic Park (1993) – Sound designer and Sound re-recording mixer
• Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) – Sound designer and Sound re-recording mixer
• Backdraft (1991) – Sound designer and Sound re-recording mixer)
• Spaceballs (1987) – Sound designer

Gary Rydstrom at Wikipedia
Gary Rydstrom at IMDB