“When I saw it, I was amazed how old-fashioned it felt, in a good way,” comments Gary Rydstrom, who was co-supervising sound editor (with Richard Hymns), sound designer and FX re-recording mixer for the film. “So many modern movies tend to have more edge or sarcasm or self-awareness, and this is telling a very big story in an episodic way. It’s traveling long distances and meeting a lot of different characters. It has a David Lean grandness.

“It’s a story about humanity surviving in the midst of war, told through how people relate to horses, really,” he continues. “It has a beauty to it that’s fitting and also a real emotional power. I had never worked on a movie quite like this. For me, it felt like I was able to get into a time machine and do a movie in 1960, but with Pro Tools and digital consoles.” [Laughs]

Continue reading…

New profile by SoundWorks Collection, featuring sound designer Gary Rydstrom and composer John Williams talking about the sound and music of “War Horse”.

From director Steven Spielberg comes “War Horse,” an epic adventure for audiences of all ages. Set against a sweeping canvas of rural England and Europe during the First World War, “War Horse” begins with the remarkable friendship between a horse named Joey and a young man called Albert, who tames and trains him.

When they are forcefully parted, the film follows the extraordinary journey of the horse as he moves through the war, changing and inspiring the lives of all those he meets—British cavalry, German soldiers, and a French farmer and his granddaughter—before the story reaches its emotional climax in the heart of No Man’s Land.

In the exclusive SoundWorks Collection video we talk with Sound Designer and Re-recording Mixer Gary Rydstrom and Composer John Williams.

Gary Rydstrom was born in 1959 in Chicago, IL. He graduated from the University of Southern California – School of Cinematic Arts in 1981. He began his career at Sprocket Systems, formerly Skywalker Sound, in 1983. Offered the job by a college professor, Gary received the opportunity to work with his mentor, Star Wars sound designer Ben Burtt. He created sound for numerous successful films including Backdraft, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Jurassic Park, Titanic, Saving Private Ryan, Minority Report and Finding Nemo. Through this work he has won 7 Academy Awards.

Rydstrom did his first work for Pixar on the short film Luxo Jr.. John Lasseter has said it was Rydstrom’s work on Luxo Jr., such as creating the lamp’s voice from the squeak of a lightbulb being screwed in, that taught him how sound can be a partner in the storytelling of a film. In 2006 he has made his directorial debut with the Pixar animated short Lifted. He recently jumped again into the director’s chair to create his second animated short Hawaiian Vacation, set to play in front of Cars 2.

(A tribute to Gary Rydstrom, by Matteo Milani)

Full interview here.

“There’s no excuse for having a mental or creative block in sound. You can just go out and collect things in the real world – they make the sound, not you. It’s very restricting to always use a library for sound effects. It’s much more interesting and freeing to go out and record new sounds because you never know what you’re going to get.”

- Gary Rydstrom

Dolby has published a series of video interviews on his YouTube channel, featuring interesting talks with Gary Rydstrom, Tom Myers, Jeff Haboush, Erik Aadahl. I’ve published the videos on Designing Sound TV:

• Sound Designer and Mixer Gary Rydstrom Talks About Cinema Sound
• Sound Mixer Jeff Haboush Talks About Cinema Sound
• Sound Mixer Tom Myers Talks About Getting Into Cinema Sound
• Erik Aadahl and Dolby’s Craig Eggers Talk Dolby TrueHD 7.1 on Megamind | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Vía: @usoproject/ and @StephenSldanha

“Sometimes in the creativity area like sound, my instincts tell me to do one thing, but I do exactly the opposite and see what happens. For example, if you’re designing a scary weird creature, try putting in a high-pitched, low-level sound. Who knows, maybe that will be scarier.”

- Gary Rydstrom

Time to get yourself a new book, huh? Look at this:

“A fascinating behind the scenes look at the previously unexplored territory of horror film sound..
Through in-depth analysis of sound in the films of Dario Argento and discussions with leading practitioners, this book explores our inherent relationship with sound; examining how and why specific sounds are chosen and utilised to express and manipulate human perception and emotion.”

“Talent, initiative and attention to detail”

“Interesting and provocative”

SOUNDS TO DIE FOR – SPEAKING THE LANGUAGE OF HORROR FILM SOUND

Part 1 - Discussions & Interviews

• Walter Murch
• Antonella Fulci
• Michel Chion
• Claudio Simonetti
• Claude Letessier
• Gary Rydstrom
• James Bernard

Part 2 - The Sound World of Dario Argento

• Deep Red
• Water:Bringer of Death
• Beware the ‘Raptus’
• Watcher in the Wind
• Symbolic Roots

• Suspiria
• Voice Behind the Curtain
• Great Wall of Sound

• Conclusion
• Footnotes
• References
• Recommended Reading
• Filmography
• Index

Via U.S.O Project

Charles Maynes sent me this video of an scene from Saving Private Ryan (which by the way is one of my favorite scenes in films ever) and asked me if I could hear some cool chicken clucks included in a particular moment of the scene. And he adds:

This would be a great example of Gary Rydstrom doing a Warner Brothers Cartoons homage to Treg Brown, who always tried to never use an appropriate sound in a sequence.

So, let’s play something: Who would be the first one to find the chickens in the video? (I know where the chicken clucks are but… it’s friday! so let’s have some fun).

I can hear those sounds quite clearly, however we can’t confirm that those sounds are true chicken clucks. What do you think?

Thanks to Charles for the link.

“The thing you learn in film sound over the years is that if you have it being loud and chaotic over a long period of time it starts to lose impact, no matter what you do.”

-Gary Rydstrom

In the films “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letters from Iwo Jima” the challanges were different but not by a huge margin- Alan Murray, longtime Supervising Sound Editor for Clint Eastwood, was very committed to making an accurate and dynamic track for the Battle of Iwo Jima, and had a special investment in the effort since his father was a USMC tank crew member in the battle. Alan is well used to going about making high quality sound tracks for the films he has worked on, and this was certainly not an exception to that- We (Alan, myself, and the ever talented and affable John Paul Fasal) were able to do a number of recording sessions for the films- recording the small arms used in the film with Dave Fencil, the key armorer here in Los Angeles, we also recorded bullet impacts and grenade explosions with armorer Gary Harper down at the Maupin Ranch in San Diego (with a hand cranked 1890’s Colt Gatling gun) to recording tanks, artilliery and explosions with the First Marine Division at 29 Palms Marine Corps base in the California high desert, and finally, also recorded an F4U and P51 Mustang in Paso Robles for the film.

Flags of Our Fathers

Letters From Iwo Jima

One thing about the overall landscape of war films (at least as far as I am concerned is the notion of “high” and “low” fidelity sounds, and the extreme usefullness of archival recordings as a legitimizing sort of element to sell the reality on screen- Gary Rydstrom echoed this notion in the commentary he did for the soundtrack he developed for the seminal “Saving Private Ryan” throughout that film, archival recordings of World War 2 combat were used as background elements for the battle sequences- you can hear him metioning it here….

“He found real recordings of World War Two battles and discovered they had the ‘storm’ quality to them. When he added the final layer of this distant rumble, he felt he had achieved a sense of reality and depth with the intricacy of the war in close perspective and also the sounds of the war on the horizon.”

Another thing I was ablel to take away from Gary’s work on this was the use he made (though according to him it was not entirely intenetional) of Distorted sounds and non distorted sounds to imply danger- My favorite example of this can be seen here, where the Camera POV is in one of the German machinegun bunkers on the Omaha beachhead where we have 2 German gun crews firing MG42 Machine guns at the American assault teams- we can hear the buns in a very sort “high fidelity” quality, with the accompanying details of shell casing drops and the guns action. and in the midst of it, a shell impact happens which is somewhat distorted. This implies a power which the dynamic range of the medium cannot contain, and allows a sharp, though subliminal impartation of the violent forces which are confronting our heroes- I personally feel it to be a quite significant and marvelous technique for making the landscape extremely dangerous and real….

Take a look at the 2:30 mark….

One of the things I have noticed is that there is a certain adherence in that track to Walter Murch’s “Rule of Two and a half” which really sort of puts to paper the concepts of modern “Hyper-Real” sound design- Using that rule, the landscape tends to favor the principal characters POV, vs a third party “God” perspective to whats happening on screen- so in those cases, it tends to be a little less cluttered with surrounding sounds vs the most obvious sounds on screen- Gary elucidates this notion in the SPR commentary as well-

“In the beginning of the film, in the Omaha Beach scene, Rydstrom wanted to recreate the experience of being shot at. For this scene he broke the scene into important elements. The most important elements were bullet impacts. For the pre-mix of the bullet impacts he had cue sheets stacks thick as phonebooks.”

Though it might seem obvious after viewing the film, the danger on the beach wasnt from the guns, or artilliery being fired at our heroes, but the small bits of metal travelling at supersonic speed that ripped the Americans bodies apart. The noise is surely immense from those guns and cannons, but when we carefully look at the mix decisions that were approved by Steven Speilberg and the producers we see all sorts of interesting decisions which might not seem entirely obvious.

The first fo these that I noticed in the theatre were the relative levels of the guns used by Captain Millers’ squad- the first, is the exceptionally iconic sound of Tom Hank’s Thompson M1 sub machine gun- it is, in my opinion, the coolest sounding gun in the film, and perhaps one of the coolest sounding guns ever… It is bold, and loud, and just is entirely awesome sounding almost evertime we hear it- oddly though, when we have the squads M1 Garand’s and Private Jacksons’ (Barry Pepper) Springfield 1903 shooting alongside it, they seem quite small and unimpressive considering that they are MUCH more powerful, and louder weapons. There are some moments when Peppers’ Springfield are huge sounding, as it is in the Romelle bell tower, but for the most part, Hank’s Thompson is the King of the battlefield.

I am hoping I havent lost anyone on this, but I think it is of some value to take a brief geeky detour and look at the gun that Hanks’ used, why it might have been addressed in the manner that it was…. (and since I do consider myself a military history buff, it is something I have spent some time researching)- the Thompson Submachine gun has a unique and iconic history in American culture- It was developed at the end of the first World War as a “trench broom” much like the nearly as iconic Browning Automatic Rifle that Ed Burns’ character Private Rieban carried. It was designed to be a fast firing close quarters weapon which could stop MANY men at once- (as illustrated in SPR when Ted Dansen and his squadmate laid waste to the German squad which were surprised by the wall collapse in the first village battle in SPR-

View at about 6 minutes to see what these guns are designed to do….

That sort of effect was first brought into the collective attention of the population with the Saint Valentines Day massacre in the 1930’s and the Thompson earned the nickname of “The Chicago Typewriter”. Interestingly- the Thompson in real life is a quite UN-remarkable sounding gun, due to it firing a pistol caliber cartridge- “Typewriter” moniker came from it sounding, well, like a mechanical typewriter… It is very “clacky” and not huge sounding…. like most pistols actually. Yet, due to the kind iconic reputation the Thompson legend has forwarded, we sound folks HAVE to make it THE baddest ass sounding gun ever. The one Thompson we had in Flags, was built to sound bad-ass as well, and in its case, I used a two gun layer to make it sound appropriate- mixing a Thompson 1928, with an English Bren Light Machinegun to bigify it…

The battlefield challanges on Flags and Letters were massive- and had a huge amount of talent and creativity applied to them by the sound team doing the editorial led up by Alan and Bub Asman, and the foley and fx crew built an amazing tapestry that immersed the audience. the FX crew consisted of Jay Jennings, Jason King and Steve Mann and the Foley was directed by Michael Dressel with editorial support by Valerie Davidson- the Foley was done by the insanely great Dan O’Connell and the team at One Step Up, who have surely run out of wall space to put all the onesheets of the films they have worked on….

I could go on for hours talking about that experience, but perhaps if anyone wishes to hear anything specific, I can try to address it in the Q & A.

SOUND EXAMPLES

DISTANT WAR – These are similar (or possibly the same) distant battle sounds used in SPR for the backdrop on the Omaha Beachhead

GREAT RAID • DESIGNED • BROWNING AUTOMATIC RIFLE • 30.06 • THE GREAT RAID – Here is one of the final weapons from the Great Raid- the PFX is evident, but a more explosive muzzle blast and bolt cycling layer has been added to create a mre dramatic closeup weapon sound.

Production Browning Automatic RIfle from The Great Raid- (PFX – GREAT RAID • B.A.R. LONGER BURST) - This recording, done by Paul “Salty” Brincat, is a wonderful thing- the ambience around the gunshot sounds fantastic, and it was the foundation for the designed BAR’s in the Great Raid.

PRODUCTION FX • DISTANT GUNFIRE – Distant gunfire Production Recordings from the Greaat Raid- When your PFX team is making such extraordinary effort the post sound team has a real obligation to make the sound of the film awesome- Again a tip of the hat to Salty and his crew as they provided an ocean of great material. He also was the Production Recordist for “The Thin Red Line”

Written by Charles Maynes for Designing Sound