Symbolic Sound has published on their blog called “the eight nerve”, an interview with sound designer Sylvain Lasseur talking about his use of Kyma system and several aspects about his work.

Sound designer Sylvain Lasseur is not just bi-coastal; he’s bi-contintental, working part time in Paris and part time in Los Angeles!  We recently had a chance to ask him a few questions about how he uses Kyma for 5.1 sound design and to explore some of the differences between post production work in Paris and Los Angeles.  By the end of the interview, the discussion turns to food, wine, and the Marx Brothers.  Read on!

In this exclusive SoundWorks Collection video profile, producer Michael Coleman sits down with the oscar nominated sound team of HUGO including co-supervising sound editor Philip Stockton, co-supervising sound editor Eugene Gearty, and re-recording mixer Tom Fleischman.

Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Brian Selznick’s award-winning novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret stars Asa Butterfield, as an orphan boy who lives in a Parisian train station. Sent to live with his drunken uncle after his father’s death in a fire, Hugo learned how to wind the massive clocks that run throughout the station. When the uncle disappears one day, Hugo decides to maintain the clocks on his own, hoping nobody will catch on to him squatting in the station.

His natural aptitude for engineering leads him to steal gears, tools, and other items from a toy-shop owner who maintains a storefront in the station. Hugo needs these purloined pieces in order to rebuild a mechanical man that was left in the father’s care at the museum — the restoration was a project father and son did together.

SoundWorks Collection

Set of 9 videos featuring sound designer Ben Burtt talking about sound and his work on “Super 8″.

Here is the first interview with this month’s special guest Elliot Koretz, talking about general aspects of his career.

How did you get started in sound design?

My first industry job was as an apprentice editor in the shipping room at Disney Studios. I was exposed to all types of editing (picture, music, and sound) but I was attracted to sound for not only what I saw as the ability to be very creative but for the autonomy of working independently of the director and producers who seemed to be always in the picture editors room. At Disney I met a sound editor who was also moonlighting at Neiman-Tillar, a leading independent sound house back in the day. He saw my interest in wanting to advance to editor a little quicker than what was the norm at Disney and offered to put in a good word for me there. I was offered assistant editors position and took it. While there I was first introduced to electronic editing. This was approximately 1980 and they had, as far as I know, the first system that was used for this, ACCESS. That’s really pretty amazing for so long ago. I think the first show I ever cut on electronically was a tv show, “Aloha Paradise” It was a kind of “Love Boat” on land and the sound needed was pretty straight forward fx. But I do remember one particular episode where the story line had a man who was interested in a divorced woman with a young child. The kid was opposed to this relationship and at one point bites the guy on the leg in kind of a comical manner. This lead to what I believe may have been the first “design” moment of my career. I layered a celery snap with some sort of other big crunch and………I was off and running as a designer.

After that I moved around landing at a number of post facilities for a while. I was an editor at Stephen Cannell, which turned out to be a great place to learn to cut action sequences. On shows like “The A-Team” you had a week to cut an entire reel (approx 12 min) of Dia, FX, BG’s and Foley. And inevitably you had a scene like this: Our heroes were in some sort of large vehicle, traveling pretty fast on a rough surface, being chased by a helicopter that was shooting at them. They meanwhile had constructed some sort of rapid firing gun that was shooting nails or some other projectiles……..and little to none of this could be created just straight out of the sound library.

These kinds of sequences needed multi-layered design and remember this was on film. Many units and also much of the final result of my work couldn’t be heard played together until the dub stage. On an old fashion film sync block you could only hear three or four “channels” at once. Anything wider than that and you had only your experience and imagination to visualize the combined sound.

I think doing this kind of design work way back then really helped me understand how to efficiently combine elements to get the sound I wanted.

I spent some time at Soundelux when the company was still pretty young and while there moved into cutting sound on features. (Still editing on film). I did return to tv editing and ended up working first as an editor then as supervisor on the show, “MacGyver”. It was another busy design show with the lead character always inventing something to beat the bad guys that required creative design work. After a successful first season the producers wanted to change to an all-electronic post. Soundelux at that time was not prepared for the huge investment in equipment and ultimately the show was moved to a newly created facility, Modern Sound. Over that summer they built a new mix stage, foley stage, and editing rooms using both Synclavier and 24 track editing systems. I was offered to continue as the supervisor of the show and accepted. After a very brief training period at the offices of New England Digital (the creators of the Synclavier) I jumped into the world of electronic post again.

The problems we faced were immense. This was 1986 and the technology was still in it’s infancy. There were not yet sound libraries that were “digital” and the decision was made to purchase a copy of the library of a leading sound supervisor at the time, Fred Brown. Then the issue was storage. The best we could do at the time was to digitize onto floppy discs. They could only hold a few seconds of sound each so you can imagine the challenges that caused. This was truly the bleeding edge of technology.

It was at times very exhilarating but often very frustrating to be at the forefront of this transition. There were times we struggled to achieve what was extremely easy to accomplish on film and other times we saw how cool it was to work in a non destructive environment with new tools to manipulate the sound.

After that season I moved around again to a couple of different facilities but then found what turned out to be a long-term home at Weddington Productions. The three owners at that time (Steve Flick, Richard Anderson, and Mark Mangini) were doing some of the most creative sound design anywhere. There is no question that was the turning point in my becoming a much more accomplished designer. Working with the talented people at Weddington constantly challenged me to step up my game and really think hard about what I could do to impact the movie sonically in every detail.

While there I made the full time transition to ProTools and it’s world of opportunities that cutting digitally has brought to all of us.

All these pieces of the puzzle have helped form what I do today. At Universal where myself and my crew have 5.1 editing suites and all sorts of plug in devices I reference all that experience from both the film and digital worlds when conceptualizing the design work I do.

How has been the evolution of your work and how your approach to sound has changed over the years?

Well, in some ways it’s changed dramatically and in others not so much. In a practical sense I mentioned the switch from film to digital. I really embraced it and all the flexibility it gave me while staying in my editing environment and not having to wait for a reprint of something or a specialist for processing. It’s just more efficient and much easier for me to experiment with sounds. In a more subjective perspective I think I grow after every film I do. I am a very hands on supervisor and I feel that one of the perks of being in charge is that I get to choose which elements of the project I will personally handle. I still try (time and budget permitting) to be very old school in my method. I like to pull and organize the fx and bg’s my editors will work from (I always encourage and give them the option of going beyond the pull) and give them a “cut list”. I think that method lends itself more to continuity and flow of the sound of the film. If I can’t do that then I meet with the editors, run the reels and give as much info as I can to them and review the work later. I think one of the bigger changes in my approach in recent years has been to make a concerted effort to co ordinate with the composer more. We all have been in the situation in a mix where we are fighting for the same sonic space with the music tracks. If I know where the music is working and in what frequencies and what type of rhythm I can attempt to compliment it and not fight it.

I wonder how sound design has changed the way you listen.

I think I listen and think about emotions. What are we trying to say to the audience? Like with music I don’t want to fight the dialog so I see fx, bg’s and design as a tool, sometimes very subtle other times not, to promote the directors’ vision. I listen for bridging opportunities to use sound to connect scenes. I always remember on the dub stage for the movie “Speed” Greg Landaker (not sure about spelling) the lead fx mixer suggested some great ideas to do just that. The frenetic pace of the film lent itself to fast whooshing elements to bridge cuts. It was just one more layer to make it a more finished and cohesive movie.

How has been your work with directors? any particular story on that?

You touch on a very important question. I think that just as important as my design work on the film or maybe sometimes even more important is my rapport with the director (and the picture editor as well). We as supervisors and designers need to be very politically astute and sensitive to the personalities we work with. Some clients like a “take charge guy” who they are counting on to lead the way in the sound post. Some want a person that gives them exactly what they ask for…and nothing more. I guess what I am saying is that we need to size up who we are working with and as early as possible give them what they need. As wildly creative as we are we can’t lose sight that we are a service. I don’t believe that one style will fit all.

I have been very fortunate to work with some amazingly talented directors. When people look at my resume they usually want to know about Michael Mann. In addition to working on and supervising some of his television shows I supervised and did the design work on both “Collateral” and “Miami Vice”. Michael is without question a creative genius and a visionary that has given us some amazing tableaus. The challenge is that he is so demanding of himself, often working 20 hours days for seemingly months on end and he expects his team to keep up with him at all times. I think he has his ideal of the visual and sonic harmony he wants and has little tolerance if you are not on board with him. If you understand that it makes your job less difficult. People always want to hear horror stories, the truth is that the hours were long and tough but as I was mentioning in the previous question when you understand who you are working with and what they expect of you then you as a supervisor can depersonalize challenging situations for you and your crew and keep everyone on point.

I did a film with the amazing Irish director Jim Sheridan. He was a very easygoing guy with me and my crew and regaled the dub stage with wonderful tales, as is the tradition for storytellers like him. His style was more to allow me the freedom to bring design ideas to the stage and then he would give input.

I love when a director really understands and supports what sound and sound design will bring to their film. I worked with Gavin O’Connor on the film “Miracle” a few years back. He wanted realism throughout his film. He wanted hockey players that could act as opposed to actors that could skate a bit and for sound he wanted the most realistic sounding sports movie ever. We did extensive recordings of skating and hockey crowds and then mixing with Mike Minkler and Myron Nettinga we got a terrific soundtrack. Gavin was so incredibly appreciative of the work we all did and that’s always refreshing and nice to have.

Another great collaboration has been with the director Thor Freudenthal. His name may not be familiar to everyone but I think it soon will be. He is a very talented young director. I worked on “Hotel for Dogs” and “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” with him. Both films presented unusual design challenges and Thor was very supportive to make that sonic space that we all hope for available in the final mix.

All these directors I just mentioned understood the value of doing field recording for their films. Whether it’s getting out to Miami and recording onboard speed boats at over 135mph (Yikes!), Directing a crowd of 5,000 people chanting “USA, USA” or dog ADR sessions (Story on that to follow), working with someone that gets the concept of what we can bring to the film by doing these things is always a bonus.

I wonder how you approach the different roles you can play on a film, such as sound designer or supervisor. Any preference?

I really enjoy them all. Unless a particular film is just too demanding a job for me to exclusively hold both titles I will try most often and handle those myself. To accomplish that I am fortunate enough to have worked with for almost ten years one of the best assistants (who also happens to be one of the best field recordists, great editor and also talented mixer) Bruce Barris. His wide range of skills allows me the freedom to be creative while he has handled some of the other aspects of the workflow. He has been an invaluable partner in the design process.

And speaking of that I do see the work we do as a collaborative effort. I am most definitely the point man with the client but it is the entire team that I count on. With the budgets so tight these days my crew is often small. Everyone has to be really capable. I try and spend quite a bit of time with each member keeping them up to date with as much info as I can.

On some of my films for one reason or another I have assumed the role of ADR supervisor as well. I do really enjoy getting the opportunity to work with the actors.

So I guess that although design is probably my favorite part of the job, as I like to say “it’s full service” and I’m good with hands on the other tasks as well.

What are your favorite tools to work with?

I think it’s rare that I use any effect out of the library without doing some sort of tweaking to it. I use quite a bit of the standard plug ins that are included in ProTools and also the Waves bundle, Izotope (particularly Trash), AltiVerb, and Speakerphone to name a few. Multiple layers of sounds addressing different frequencies are the key. I look for new plug ins and applications all the time as they are rapidly growing.

Do you have any special method for dealing with deadlines/creative challenges?

Well, that’s not very easily accomplished. It’s time management. I think one of the most important skills in that regard is having the dub stage experience to really understand what will play and what will be less important in the overall mix. Sizing up the key sequences and looking at how much time you have to spend on them is crucial. I find this does not come naturally to everyone and I help my crew know what areas to concentrate on.

Is there any of your projects that you remember for being the most challenging or favorites?

Which of your children do you like the best, eh? So hard to answer. I will pick out one but I probably could find examples in almost all my films.

A couple of years ago I did a family film, “Hotel for Dogs”. On the surface it seemed like a fairly simple movie to do. There were some Rube Goldberg like mechanical inventions to design but otherwise I didn’t at first see any challenges or possible difficulties. Was I off the mark…..by a mile. The movie had many dogs in it (it was titled Hotel for Dogs…..right?) a number of them feature performers. The conceit was that they sounded like normal dogs. Nothing comical or unrealistic in their performance. It turned out that in every single bit of production the tracks were filled with the sound of the various trainers urging on their dogs to perform with whistles, clickers, and other devices that basically made the original sound track unusable.

So now I was faced with the reality that I had to replace every single sound all the dogs made for the entire movie. There was no library in town that has such a variety and complete sets for all these dogs. I was in serious trouble until an incredibly serendipitous event occurred. Some of my crew members and I were walking to lunch. We were working at Universal and sometimes we would cut through the theme park to eat up above us at City Walk. As we walked through the park I noticed there was a stage with the sign that read “animal act”. There was a worker standing in front with a dog beside her. I told her I was a fellow employee and what I was working on and asked, “Do the dogs in the act follow commands to bark?” She assured me they did and led me to backstage to meet the trainers. Turned out they had worked on my movie and actually some of the same dogs were here in this live show. After discussing what was needed with the trainers we set up a date and brought the dogs down to the foley stage for a “doggy” ADR session. Each dog responded to silent commands and barked, whined, sniffed and growled as we recorded them. I now had my kits for each of the main dogs in the movie.

Cutting their tracks was like doing voice replacement for about eight actors throughout an entire movie. Dogs never stop making sounds. They are always panting and licking and doing something that required considerable thought. I would find the most evocative material while still “keeping it real”.

The satisfaction came that in the final product my work was truly invisible. The dog vocals fit perfectly (being from the same dog in many instances) and no one would ever suspect that what they were hearing was not production. The work did not call attention to itself but never the less was some of the best sound work I’ve done recently.

What are your favorite films for sound?

That’s another loaded question. There is such great work out there. I go all the way back to classics like “Shane” and “Forbidden Planet” as early examples. And certainly I used to try and destroy my speakers playing “Top Gun” and then “Days of Thunder” at dangerous volume levels. The work of Ben Burtt, Gary Rydstrom, Randy Thom, Ren Klyce….I could go on and on. When I worked with at Weddington the movies that we were doing, Die Hard, Apollo 13, Speed, all the Joe Dante films……..were so incredibly well done. And recently my colleague at Universal Scott Hecker has put out some of the coolest tracks (300, Watchmen, and Suckerpunch) with Chris Jenkins and Frankie Montano mixing. I thought Avatar was an incredible piece of work knowing the difficulties in having to conceptualize design when you may still be working against a storyboard. I love movies. Always been a film fan and it’s just too hard to narrow the field on my favorites.

This is a good point to mention mixers. To understand how to collaborate and help them do their job is huge. I can’t emphasis enough my belief that it’s a team effort and although I do plenty of premixing back in the editing room I love that another set of very talented ears listens to the material and can add their expertise to it. I always try and meet with the team as early as possible and include them in the process.

Is there any advice you’d like to give to other sound designers out there?

Well, I think the key is to think divergently. Outside the box. Don’t be confined by the laws of nature. That’s how little kids think and that ability seems to disappear as we grow up. I know that there are sounds that have to be exact and correct but emotional sound has a huge role in design. And the practical advise is to put your ego aside and listen to what the filmmaker is saying and present yourself in a manner that instills confidence that you are the right person for the job. One of my favorite stories that help bring that point home is this. Walter Murch and Randy Thom were participating in a forum about sound. When Randy was speaking he told a story of how when he meets with the director he regales him or her with visions of incredible design to come with all sorts of amazing nuance and the client is wowed. They know they have he right person. The the meeting ends, Randy goes into the privacy of his editing room and says to himself, “How the f*ck am I going to do it?”

So don’t let them see you sweat. Bring your best attitude to your meetings……and then go back to your room and start panicking!

Seriously, this has been a lot of fun. Thanks for the opportunity to share some stories. I hope this has been informative and a little entertaining.

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.

SPRINGS is a diverse new library of sound design source material released by HISSandaROAR and recorded by Tim Prebble.

Traversing from literal & very powerful trampoline springs & impacts through very strange bowed & manipulated extention springs all the way to abused outboard hardware (AKG BX5, Vermona Retroverb, Doepfer A199 with an Accuphonics tank) and of course, the classic slinky – but in this case stretched across a room and recorded with a contact mic at each end! Three sizes of thunder drums (long flexible springs attached to a drum resonator) were also hit, bowed & scraped to capture physically useful sounds as well as more evocative abstract material. This library is a diverse and inspiring collection of material that is incredibly fun to play with!

Available at $79 until December 25th (Regular price $99). Delivered at 24bit 96kHz. Includes 1,100+ sounds (6.9GB).

Below is a q&a with Tim, talking about the springs and some HISSandaROAR news:

What inspired the library?

Tim Preble: Being a bit of a dub-head I’ve always been into spring reverbs – I bought an AKG BX5 off ebay a decade or more ago, and I always remember almost blowing my speakers when I had it cranked up & accidentally moved my rack! But it was when I was working on the Cirque De Soilel 3D film that I had an epiphany. There is a scene in the film with some super hero characters doing totally outrageous moves on trampolines and despite being told the scene would be a music montage, I decided to try augmenting the rhythm with trampoline sounds. Next door to my studio is the rehearsal space for local circus group Fuse Circus, so I borrowed a small trampoline from them and recorded it using contact mics as well as normal mics. As soon as I listened to the contact mics I realised it was basically a large scale spring reverb – every hit made the all of the springs resonate! We did end up using some of the recordings in the final mix, and after I uploaded a video of recording those effects a few people contacted me, wanting access to the sounds. I couldn’t give them those particular sounds as they were specifically for the film, but I made a mental note to revisit that particular prop. And as always I started researching other elements I could record….

Click here to view the embedded video.

What else did you find?

TP: Good characterful springs are not actually that easy to find, but one source that proved useful was from exercise equipment – I disassembled a few chest expanders, and spent a bit of time attaching them to objects in ways that would encourage resonance… I also bought an old kids toy – a ride on horse, that was suspended by nice creaky springs. I explored other spring reverb outboard effects – I also own a Vermona Retroverb which is great – it actually has a ‘crash’ button on it that sends an impulse to the springs, but it also has a really nice resonant filter. My modular synth has a spring reverb, a Doepfer A199 module, so I bought an old Accuphonics 3 spring tank and used the module to get clean audio output from it, and I beat the hell out of that tank! I’m surprised it survived, but it was worth it. Some of the short sounds make me think of retro weapons, but some of the flickery sounds I got from it by applying friction along it, I have never heard before!

And of course I messed around with some slinkys – I hunted for the biggest/longest one I could find and then tensioned it horizontally across my studio, with a contact mic at each end, 20 feet apart. Another device I messed with are called Thunder drums – I bought one when I was in Bali a few years ago, its basically a long small tightly wound spring that is attached to the skin of a drum. If you shake it, it makes a sound a bit like thunder and hitting the spring has an almost flangey tone to it, but I discovered a few other interesting ways to extract sounds from it. Bowing the spring while varying the length created some really interesting pitch bends, but so also did rubbing or scraping your hand along the spring. A few times I’ve had to make sounds for someone suddenly abseiling or lowering down & I’ve always struggled for source material with that constant descending friction, but I’ve found a great element now!

Were they difficult to record?

TP: Some props really took some thinking about, because the sound they produced was acoustically very quiet but attaching a contact mic to the primary vibrating element meant the mic itself would absorb and/or stop the resonance. I think there is a concept in physics, where the act of making an experiment alters the circumstances or environment to such a degree that the experiment itself is no longer valid – it was a bit like that! I also soon learned that it is difficult to keep a contact mic attached to moving objects, so it took different setups and strategies depending on the specific sound I was after, even within the same prop. That little wood block with the tiny spring at the start of the video is a good example. I could get tone from it but I couldn’t record it – it just didn’t vibrate enough to excite the wood it was attached to. It was only when i clamped it down & actually attached the contact mics between the wood & the spring itself that I got interesting results. But, as you see (backwards) at the start of the video, it eventually flew to bits!

What are your favourite sounds? Any happy accidents?

TP: This library is full of happy accidents! Someone on my blog asked how I go about choosing what sounds to record, and I had to confess its half intent and half happy accidents – experimenting & being curious. The last prop I recorded for the library was when I revisited that trampoline, and having spent so much time recording other springs I had a few more ideas about how to get some new sounds from it. One aspect I now know is that to get ‘big’ dynamic sounds often requires gentle technique and hitting that trampoline gently with a gong beater, and being mic’d up and gain staged accordingly allowed me to get some huge subby sounding impacts, which feel more powerful than the hardest hits that I did later. But going back to that tiny spring, I now knew that attaching the contact mics on to the spring itself led to interesting sounds (it just couldn’t be the spring that was doing all the work, or the mic would detach) So the last sound I recorded was one of my favourites: attaching the contact mics directly to the springs and then very gently hitting other springs & elements of the trampoline. I swear there is an entire gamelan orchestra inside that trampoline when it was rigged this way – I could have sat & played it for hours. Over-recording was actually a real problem with this library, not over-level but content. I’d find a sound that I loved, that was really evocative or interesting and I could easily keep playing with it for hours! Must. Stop. Recording.

It’s been a great year for independent sound libraries – do you think its reaching saturation point with all these boutique library start ups?

TP: To be completely honest I think we’re barely scratching the surface. If you combined all of my libraries with all the great libraries released by Frank, Michael, Chuck & all the new sites, we would hardly match 5% in terms of quantity of the old school libraries such as Sound Ideas CD collections or whats on the Sound Dogs site. But in terms of quality, resolution and providing unique, characterful and interesting sounds I think at times we surpass them… Every time someone releases a new collection of recordings, whether you buy them or not, you know they are a resource waiting to be called upon. I sometimes dream about the huge library resources studios like Skywalker Sound must have, and while we’ll never get close to that, at least we’re slowly providing more diverse options, and they are options available to anyone.

Whats next for HISSandaROAR? Are you having a holiday??

TP: Indeed. This is my last library release for the year. As 2012 is a busy year with films for me I’ve deliberately been recording as much as possible and I have another couple of libraries recorded. The last task for me for the year is to finish the HISSandaROAR Christmas present, which is a free 24bit 96kHz collection of Tortured Cymbals, a preview of a library for next year. It will get sent out to everyone on the mail list next week, as a small gesture & to say a huge thank you for all the support this year. And thanks to you, Miguel and everyone at Designing Sound for an inspiring year!!
Happy Holidays!

DS: Like many other audio professionals that I know, you’ve got a background in music. Do you consider that the driving force behind entering an audio profession? How did that background in musical performance affect your first foray into audio production?

JS: Since musicians are attuned to their aural surroundings, either naturally or through training, they’re also instinctively aware of the importance and influence of sound in media like video games and film. This awareness led me to the field of sound design and that seems to be the case with almost every other audio professional I’ve met. It’s certainly helpful to work with other musicians because we’ve all inherited a vocabulary of articulation, dynamics and tempo that can be applied directly to sound design, editing and mix.

My sense of phrasing and dynamics in sound design is largely due to my background in music. Like many sound designers, when describing the design of a sound or scene, I often find myself “conducting” my way through a verbalization of what I’m hearing in my head. This is why sound designers don’t talk about their work in public; people might think we’re crazy. Most importantly, performing has given me a natural education in mix, especially my performances with orchestra and chorale.

DS: You’ve also studied computer science. What was the motivation for that, and how did you envision these two fields merging in your life?

JS: When I was preparing to enter the field of game development, I realized that many game audio professionals were expected to implement and troubleshoot their work at the code level. During my studies in programming, I concentrated on building a simple audio engine and then integrating it into a larger development project. Meanwhile, my friends in Berklee’s Music Synthesis program were using the Csound programming language and early versions of Max/MSP to create sounds unlike anything I’d heard before. I wanted in on the action and my studies in C/C++ and procedural programming helped me hit the ground running.

With the robust offerings in audio middleware available today, sound designers typically don’t need to dig down to the code level to get their work done. Still, game engines and tools are growing increasingly complex to meet the scale and scope of modern titles. I consider a strong technical background to be a huge benefit for keeping up with the constant changes and for interfacing with the tech team.

DS: How would you describe your transition from music into sound design? It seems like there’s been a fairly linear progression through the games you’ve worked on.

JS: To be honest, I was concerned that moving into sound design would be more of a fork in the road than a transition, almost as though I’d have to sacrifice music to pursue sound design or vice versa. This has proven true to some extent because on large-scale projects, no one person has the bandwidth to do it all. The good news is that the modern aesthetic in game audio and cinema is blurring the lines between sound design and underscore. It’s exciting for me to hear the fields of sound design and music complementing each other, playing off one another, and arriving at a soundscape that wouldn’t have been possible given a more traditional separation of the two disciplines. I’ve embraced this aesthetic entirely.

Day-to-day, I find that I create individual sounds, compose scenes, and mix in a very musical fashion. When I look back at the work I’m happiest with, it’s always a place where I’ve developed the sound or scene “musically” in terms of voicing, articulation, and timbre.

DS: What, or who, have been some of your biggest influences sonically? What do you bring from those influences to your work?

JS: Wow, there are so many personalities and projects that have shaped my sonic style. My strongest influences come from the worlds of music and film sound. On the music side, Björk and Amon Tobin have had a huge impact on my sound design and personal aesthetic. I love the way Björk’s songwriting and vocal performances drift between haunting and visceral. If I can capture that same emotional range in my work, I know I’m doing something right. I consider Amon Tobin to be equal parts sound designer and musician. Deconstructing his music is some of the best sound design education you can get.

In the field of film sound, I’ve been heavily inspired by the work of Ben Burtt, Walter Murch, and Randy Thom. All three of them are incredibly committed to detail and quality, but more importantly they design, edit and mix thoughtfully, always complementing the overarching narrative of their films. Another thing that draws me to these three is their ability to articulate how and why they arrive at their conclusions and practices. Their lectures and articles have proven more valuable than any other resource in my career.

DS: Is there anything you do to find new influences and inspiration? What do you prioritize in continuing to hone your craft?

JS: One of the biggest challenges for an in-house game audio professional is staying current in popular culture and in the trends of audio itself. In an age of unprecedented and convenient access to games, film, music and literature, that challenge gets a lot more manageable. I draw a lot of inspiration from music and film. Spotify and sites like nme.com help me keep tabs on the latest developments in music. Netflix is my go-to outlet for discovering independent and foreign films that are hard to come by in the theaters. Most importantly, my friends and colleagues who share those same influences keep me informed of their latest discoveries.

One thing I keep in the back of my head while working on a multi-year project is that the tastes and trends in audio are always changing. I know that the sonic expectations of the entire world are being shaped by the latest releases in gaming, film and music. If I hear something unique in a new game, for instance, I immediately ask myself “Could I create that if I needed to?” because chances are, that sound will be referenced by someone on a future project. If the answer to my question is even a “maybe”, I get to work trying to recreate the scene or individual sound effect. It’s not just a good exercise professionally, it’s the type of discovery and experimentation that keeps things interesting, challenging and fun.

DS: In your career thus far, what has been your favorite challenge?

JS: My favorite challenge has been developing and adapting my sound design to meet the needs of multiple game genres. So far I’ve worked in the genres of real-time strategy, city building, sports, fighting and first-person shooter. Each genre has brought with it a tremendous amount of discovery and a new set of audio challenges. The perspective shift from top down to first person, for example, has been a huge eye opener in terms of new avenues and constraints for audio.

One thing that I always enjoy is deconstructing the legacy of each genre and the expectations from core players of that genre. I like to identify those expectations early on to ensure I’m meeting, and hopefully exceeding, what fans have come to expect from the aesthetic and player feedback of each genre.

DS: What kind of things do you do to advocate for audio throughout the rest of the development team?

JS: I learned early on that without advocacy, audio can easily fall off the radar for the rest of the studio. It doesn’t help that the audio team is typically working behind closed doors. I’ve made a concerted effort to promote the audio team within each studio by reaching out to other departments and developing the mutually beneficial relationship that can, and should, exist between them and the audio team. The key here is that talking is not enough. I show artists and designers how audio can develop their ideas with prototypes rather than trying to explain it with words or on paper. And I’ve yet to meet an artist or designer who isn’t excited to see his or her work come alive after an audio pass. Many times those prototypes lead to iteration on the original artistic or design concept resulting in a stronger end result.

I’m also a strong promoter for audio being included in the concept and pre-production phases of a development cycle. Most modern game projects are too large for audio to be treated strictly as a post-production department. I feel that the most memorable and best sounding games are those where audio is a contributing voice from the start.

DS: What developments in game audio make you excited for the future of that industry?

JS: Two things: The availability of incredible middleware and the independent game development scene. With industrial-strength audio middleware freely available to professional sound designers and students alike, new discoveries are being made all the time in terms of implementation. It means that students are going to come into the game development field already trained up on the tools we use day to day. Middleware still comes with its own technical challenges, but for game audio professionals, I think the scales are now weighted much more heavily on the side of creativity.

The independent film scene has brought us some of the most experimental and creative audio in the field of cinema. I believe independent games are headed in that same direction. Just as independent film sound is informing the sound of major motion picture, I believe the sound of independent games will influence the work of game audio professionals everywhere.

DS: What are you currently working on?

JS: I’m working on Bioshock Infinite at Irrational Games.

DS: Do you have any advice for people interested in entering game audio as a profession?

JS: First and foremost: No reel, no deal. I’m consistently surprised when I meet people who want to get into the audio field, game-related or otherwise, and haven’t created a demo reel of any kind. You live and die by your latest work in this industry and a reel is required for even most internships. There are free audio/music apps available for download and there are plenty of places to host your content once it’s ready.

Next, and this might seem obvious, I advise aspiring game audio professionals to play games! Knowing both the pitfalls and the paths to success that have come before you is invaluable. More importantly, a sound designer well-versed and well-played in video games holds a common vocabulary that can be used to interact with all team members at a game studio.

And finally, I encourage aspiring game audio professionals to use the copious amounts of information and software available on the net to learn the tools of the trade. The same tools we use every day, both audio middleware and game engines, are available to anyone with an internet connection. Download them, start learning, and start experimenting!

TONSTURM‘s first ambience library Mountain Air is available now at $99 (Introductory offer until Dec 24th. Regular price is $119)

This ambience sound pack features surround sound recordings which were captured during an extensive field recording trip in the beautiful Alps of Austria and Tyrol. You get 7.12 GB of clear and wide sounding mountain ambiences full of air, birds, brooks, crickets and cowbells in 5.0 Channel Surround HD Audio @ 24 Bit, 96 KHz.

Below is a q&a I had with Tilman Hahn, who runs TONSTURM with Emil Klotzsch.

What was your inspiration for the library?

Right from the beginning when we started Tonsturm, we had planned to create effects and ambience libraries. The ambience libraries just needed a little bit more of research as we definitely wanted to recorded them in surround. We both have a lot of ideas and try to gather more information and experiences until some of these ideas seem to materialize into a topic for a sound library. Our ideas are also influenced by our work as sound designers and sound editors. This year I was asked to work on a film that is set in the Alpine Mountains. I have been hiking and recording in Austria two times before but these recordings were all done in stereo and not for library purposes. So this seemed to be the perfect moment to start what we were already planing since last year. From what I have seen and recorded on my previous trips we knew that Austria and Tyrol would be a great place for recording our first ambience release.

How was the trip and what places were you looking for?

I went on this trip together with Bennie Diez, a good friend of mine, who is a director and vfx artist. He did the wonderful photo- and video documentation. The trip was a great experience and the perfect compensation for the daily work in front of the computer. We tested the weight of our equipment bags before but did not think about the fact that we where hiking uphill most of the time. We were reaching our physical limit every day as we are not very trained hikers. During the trip we gained more and more endurance which made everything more enjoyable.

Before we started the trip we checked the air routes above austria to find the places with less air traffic to avoid as much aircraft noise as possible. mid-September seemed to be a good time for recording in the alps as most of the cows were not on the paddock any more and the tourist season was over. During our trip we obviously searched for places far away from the bigger roads. These were mainly conservation areas. In these areas we were looking for places like high valleys which seemed to be the best isolation from any civilization noise.

I’m curious about the quietest places you found?

As we went recording in september the nature was very quiet in general. The birds do not tweet like in the spring time. Everything sounded very distant and wide. Occasionally we heard a bird fly by or a distant crow. The only time where you could hear more birds was during dawn. But it was not easy to find these quiet spots as we very often had to interrupt our recordings because of air traffic or the sound of a motor bike. In the mountains these sounds can travel pretty far and it takes a long time until they finally disappear. So the main challenge of this trip was to find the right spaces and time frames to record just the sound of nature and nothing else. We are are very happy that we have found these really quiet places and daytimes where you could listen only to the sound of nature.

How were the gear setups?

The rig consisted of four omnidirectional Sennheiser MKH 8020 microphones, four single mic stands and a Sound Devices 788T multichannel recorder. We wanted to capture this impressive landscape as open and wide sounding as possible. Through four individual mic stands we were able to realize a big distance between the individual microphones. This distance and the omnidirectional pattern of the MKH 8020 were the key to this very pleasingly diffuse, wide and open sound field of these ambience recordings. We also chose the MKH 8020 for their very low self noise as we had to be able to capture very quiet and subtle sounds.

Any favorite recordings/places from the package?

One night we were recording on top of a hill, it was very quiet. Suddenly we heard footsteps of several deer. They seemed to be curious and approached from both sides. On the headphones it sounded pretty scary. We got a bit afraid as we did not know if they could get dangerous. So we stood up and started to talk to show some presence.
Then suddenly there was this big evil sounding grunt of a roebuck and we ran away… but I guess we were not in danger at all.

Another great moment was when this single bird flew by as we were recording in this beautiful valley. It was very early in the morning.

Designing Sound: The scene was very subtle and had a lot of quiet sounds. It also had a lot of tension. Was this a difficult scene to approach?

Harry Cohen: Technically the hardest part on that was all the production dialog arrived with a lot of hum on it from the generator. Luckily Izotope RX2 had a De-Hum plug-in in it that allows you to dial in the European frequency. That’s how I had to start, was by processing everything with that. You don’t try to get it all out, or it takes too big of a chunk out of the dialog.

After that, we wanted to come up with some background winds and tones that further helped mask that as much as possible…then do a lot of really detailed foley. We get into what we call hyper-reality, especially on a lot of the Tarrantino films. So, as the scene goes on, we start to back off on the backgrounds and the tones and stuff, and bring the focus in on the dialog We had to suck the air out of the scene a little bit, so that it gives you a little more closeness to the characters.

Mainly it was what Cristoph Waltz [ed. Hans Landa character] did with his performance, his eyes and stuff, as he turns from this bumbling almost Clouseau character into the menacing Nazi Jew hunter he reveals himself to be. It was riveting.

DS: It was a great scene. It really set the tone for the movie and grabbed you right from the beginning. It was awesome.

HC: You know, Quentin and his editor Sally Menke, who we’ve unfortunately lost, they’re so focused in on the tiny details…the sound of his pen, taking things out of his briefcase, and the smoothing of the paper. We agonized over every little sound in that scene.

DS: Well, it shows. You really had that emphasis on all of those movements and foley sounds. What do you feel that decision affords with respect to the dialog and visuals, when you’re getting that microscopic with the sounds? How does that affect the rest of the scene?

HC: My partner in crime…at least that’s how I refer to him…Wylie Stateman, worked on that. He’s a real master of that. He knows when to put the microphone further away from the source than you’d normally think, to get proper distance for marriage with production, and he knows when to go for that real close up detail. The embers of the tobacco lighting, or the cap on the ink bottle, the leather creak of the Nazi uniform, the creak of the wood of the chair, the slosh of the milk in the bottle…all so microscopically detailed out. The flow of the scene determines when we change the balance of those things. It was a very slow coiling of the change in the atmosphere throughout that scene.

Originally, there weren’t cows visually in the scene. But we put cows in the background [ed. referring to the audio], because they said it was a milk farm. Quentin liked the cows so much that he had them put visual effects cows in, after the fact. Then the very last cow that you hear as we’re leaving the scene is Quentin. He was saying, “No, I want one that goes like this.” He did it, and it was, “Well, we’ll just use that.”

DS: [laughs] I really like that. Going along with what you were talking about, as the scene progresses and making room for stuff…you mentioned these drones and other effects going on in the background. I noticed a point where there was a strong drone-like sound when Cristoph leans in and asks Denis Menochet [ed. Perrier LaPadite character] to have the girls step outside; there was something there that becomes much more present.

HC: Yeah, and while that may have worked artistically, it was probably brought up there because we were digging for the dialog track. The hum that was in there probably needed a little bit more masking. If that worked in a dramatic way, I’m glad. But it was probably for that reason.

DS: So a happy accident then, huh?

HC: Yeah. I can’t really remember, in detail, all of the decisions made in the mix. That movie was mixed in a relatively short time. As we’ve gone on with working with Quentin, we try to get it to a point where we start to…I don’t want to say we know what he wants…we start to learn what works for him and what doesn’t. We get things very much in shape; and again, Sally was a big part of it. We’d always run the stuff with Sally before Quentin would come for his playback. She was so tuned in to what we was going to like.

I don’t think we mixed final for even two weeks. I can’t remember, but it was something like that. Then they took it to Cannes and came back. Then we did, like, 4 more days of fixes…and that was it. That works for him, because he likes to keep editing and tweaking…and there was some discussion about some additional music being added. So, if he doesn’t have to spend a lot of time leading us through what he wants the soundtrack to do bit by bit, then he’s all the happier.

I think on Grindhouse, we only had him for five or six days on final “final,” but, again, Sally was there. Eventually, after enough films, we get to a point where he would trust us more; and we would send him more stuff, early on, for them to have in the Avid. When we first started working with him, we would get an Avid track that was fully built out, and it was real indicative of what he wanted. Then we would have to work to achieve the same thing, emotionally, that he did in his Avid track…with what we thought were better sounds. or he would just want to use his Avid track

Finally, we’d reach a point where…like the anime sequence in Kill Bill…when I got the Avid track back, there was nothing in there but what I had sent him. So it was, “OK! We’re starting to get the hang of it.”

It reminds me of the shoot-out scene in Inglourious Basterds. When I got the Avid track…production track…the gun shots that were in the production track were very unusable. It was just digital clips and smacks, and kind of ugly. But all of the really dirty, rough, sounds of the movement that were also in the track…I had a suspicion that they were going to be used to hearing that. I took that track, I cut out the gunshots, and I created a track of just the cleaned up production movement. Not totally clean, but cleaned up of anything that was obnoxious. Then I had Effects Mixer, Tony Lamberti, we were all done with the scene…and I said, “I got one more track. I just want you to prepare this and stick it in there. And just leave it until I tell you I think we might need it.”

Then sure enough when we were reviewing the scene, Quentin and Sally were saying, “It’s really good, but there’s something missing.” I said to Tony, “You remember that track? Turn it on now.” And that was it for them. They had gotten used to hearing all of that stuff. That was the final spice for them. I learned that, because I remembered back on the production of Kill Bill…the sound of all of the Crazy 88′s running around the club. I went through all of the wild tracks and collected all of that material. I created a supportive track for the foley, that ran around the way we did with the foley, but it all was production track. We used that to sweeten it, and, again, that was the final spice. Directors like him are very tuned in to their production, and they’re used to hearing what was there in the Avid.

DS: That’s not very surprising, considering all the things I’ve heard about him in the past. When this first scene opens, Menochet [LaPadite] is chopping wood, and it’s very rhythmic. Then there’s this pause that’s seemingly leaving space for the Nazi car to appear in the distance. And then we have the music that comes in, and the pitch of the car seems to blend in with that first chord of the music. How carefully was that moment planned out?

HC: The really cool thing about Quentin, from our point of view, 95% of the music he chooses from his own library. And he cuts that into the Avid. I suspect he also cuts some of the sequences to the music, and that’s why it works so well. So, when we get sequences and reels turned over to us with music in it, almost all the time, that’s the music that’s going to be there.

So, we can work against the actual music, and do things like tune elements in the effects track so that they’re constant with the music…or dissonant if that’s the point that we need. That’s something we do with elements like train whistles, and with that car engine as well.

DS: That music is kind of a “Spaghetti Western” adaptation of Beethoven’s Fur Elise, which is wonderfully absurd and crazy in a way.

HC: Yeah, I’m not sure where it came from, but that was the music that was in the temp track…and that was the music that was in the final. That’s such an advantage to us. Most of the time, the music that shows up is a temp score put together by the music editor. It just indicates what the director thinks the function of the music is…you know, the mood or what the density of it is. Sometimes when the composer takes their pass at it, they choose to go in an entirely different direction. Sometimes they’re correct in doing so. In any event, that means that sometimes I show up on the mix stage with a design sequence that’s very heavy and fat sounding, because I’ve been working against the temp music…but the composer has decided to do something really ethereal and wispy. So, my stuff is completely wrong, and I have to re-engineer it at the last minute. That’s not very likely to happen on a Tarantino film.

DS: Did the tone of that music affect the way you approached that opening scene?

HC: It did in both conscious and unconscious ways. When you watch the movie, and you’re getting the vibe of it, we’re affected by the music emotionally just like the audience would be. I affects the choices of everything you do. It even affects choices in what you’re going to go out and record…especially on this film, knowing that that’s going to be the final music.

I’m sure there are other directors that do that, but I can’t think of any other directors we’ve worked with…other than Quentin.

DS: I work primarily on television and documentary programming at work. It’s rare that we get stuff the way you are with Quentin Tarrantino there, but I do have the advantage that the music composer is in the room right next door to me.

HC: That’s great. So, you can have a dialogue with him.

DS: Yeah.

HC: We try to do that as much as possible on the films, but it’s successful to varying degrees. The composers are going through the same kind of thing that we are. They’re doing something, then going over it with the director, and making changes. The more I work on these films, the more I see that everything is prone to remain fluid later and later into the process. Visual effects are showing up at the last minute, final tweaks in the music are happening at the last minute, last minute ADR…the picture is often still being edited until the last day. So, the days when we used to be able to do something and consider it locked are long gone.

The more we can position ourselves to respond to the final shape of the film, of all the elements, the better off we are. And we make a point of knowing that’s what we’re going to go into there. It’s especially true on a lot of these big budget movies. With a solid release date and late breaking visual effects, lots of pressure from the studio… So, really what it means, is that no matter how long we work on a film, or how much lead time we have, there’s always a big crunch at the end. That’s just the nature of it. I bet it’s the same for you.

DS: Yeah. I just got a project this past week that’s already behind schedule.

HC: Yeah, as soon as you get it, you’re behind schedule. On Green Lantern, which I helped out with with some creature stuff, that fell into our laps at the last minute. It had nothing to do with the quality of what had already been done. Someone had been working on it for months, and they had been doing really good work. The project fell to Soundelux, and they made the decision to redo all of the sounds. My first day on the movie, was the first day of effects pre-dubs. So I was WAY way behind…crash and burn schedule. So, I see more and more of that.

DS: I don’t think that’s going to go away anytime soon. It’s probably just going to become the norm.

HC: The more they advance technically, the more that’s going to be like that. When they finally get to the point where we’re delivering the final directly to the movie theatres…with digital, where they don’t have to strike prints…we’ll be working until the day before it’s in theatres. You can see from the film-maker’s perspective…why not?! If you can make the film better, then why not go ahead and make it better?

DS: Let’s turn back to this opening scene that we were talking about. As far as the ambiences, we’ve talked about using the background sounds to mask noise from the production track, but these cows and roosters that pop in every once in a while… Were they primarily to mask noisy elements, or were they more? I feel like they accent certain moments in the scene.

HC: Yeah. Not so much story as rhythm. You might have a bird track, but go and put in certain spotted birds or something. In the opening scene, the backgrounds were done by Ann Scibelli. The individual spotted stuff is something that we went through and shifted the position of once Quentin was there. “Cut that one out. Move this one here. That one’s good.” You know, you put a cow moo in the wrong place and you make something funny where you don’t want it funny. And you put it in the right place, and it just accents the pause in between the dialog.

DS: The cow when Christoph pulls out that giant pipe was just perfect.

HC: [laughs] Yeah. It becomes about rhythm…the rhythm of the scene and rhythm of the dialog.

DS: Would you talk a little bit about your approach fro the spaces above the floor and below the floor?

HC: We wanted it to be a definite shift, and a subterranean feel, when we went below the floor. It’s kind of a cave tone, and we played with some more subjective things, almost haunted…it’s very light in there. It’s not a huge thing, it’s just enough that we’re closer to the ground and below the house. It’s very cool, because up until that point we didn’t know that anyone was under the floor.

DS: The rhythm of this scene just carries itself through so perfectly.

HC: That has everything to do with the edit and the dialog. I first watched the rough cut of that scene in Berlin, working on the sound of the movie within the movie, Nation’s Pride. We went to Berlin and actually posted that as its own movie, so that it had the soundtrack ready…so Quentin could project it in the theatre while he was shooting the rest of the movie. While we were there, Sally ran the opening scene of the movie for us. It was already 90 percent of the way there with its rhythm and spookiness. It was such a great performance from the actors, that it was very powerful even before we did anything to it. It’s really great when you watch a sequence, and just by watching it, it let’s you know pretty much what to do with it. That’s how that sequence felt. There wasn’t a lot of searching going on. It just kind of speaks to you, and let’s you know what is needed to do.

DS: And as it carries through into the climax, we’ve got the guns, and the music, and Mélanie Laurent [ed. Shosanna Dreyfus] escaping…

HC: And the guns. [laughs] Let me talk for a second about the guns.

DS: Go for it.

HC: I swear, we do new guns for every film. I start off thinking, “Are we going to have to do new guns? We’ve got so many guns.” You know, at Soundelux, we’ve been out to record guns, like, 45 times in the last years at least. And yet, when we get to the next film, and it’s got its own vibe and its own feel, I find that I wind up making new guns all over again.

In Inglourious it’s a “Spaghetti Western,” and I know Quentin was inspired by the vibe of The Dirt Dozen in some way. I went back and listened to that movie, and the effects didn’t sound great, but I thought that I wanted to get a real analog sound for the guns. The gun sounds have come a long way since the early stuff. You’d just over-record on Nagra and get that big powerful analog smeared sound. Now we have a lot more detail and a lot more transient, and low-end and size, the gun sounds have become a lot more realistic…in some ways. In this movie, I wanted to give a nod to that analog character that was in some of those movies.

The same with the soundtrack on Nation’s Pride. If you watch the movie within the movie, you hear late 30′s/early 40′s audio on the gunshots…but most of that is either production audio that I processed, or other gunshots that I processed to sound vintage, then added surface noise to take it the rest of the way there. Technically, that was probably the hardest part of the movie; creating a “vintage” chain that worked for us. In mixing, I think I had five versions of that chain going; one for dialog, one for backgrounds, effects and such. And we did that all in Berlin. So that was pretty audacious.

We weren’t sure. We had developed two approaches to “vintagizing” the sound for Nation’s Pride. One was that real extensive chain that I developed, and I think I even detailed everything that was in that chain in an earlier interview about the movie in the Editor’s Guild magazine. We also took this old Magnavox metal speaker horn, that Wylie had come across, and we brought that to Berlin with us. We finished the mix on the movie, and we looked at the engineers and said, “Now we want to run it through this.” They just thought we were out of our minds. [laughs]

But they did it. They had to remove panels, because they weren’t set up to do anything outside at all. We had to do some extra wiring and stuff, and we did it. We got the whole track coming through this ancient Maganavox horn, which I still have in my office. It sounded really cool, but ultimately we decided that it sounded maybe just ten years older. You know, maybe early 30′s rather than late 30′s/early 40′s. So it was kind of specific.

DS: With these guns that you just talked about, the moment of most tension is when Christoph is aiming at Mélanie…the gun doesn’t go off. But, we still we a gunshot like sound. Was that an effect, or was that part of the score?

HC: I can’t remember exactly. I think he does something with his mouth, and he chooses not to shoot her. He chooses not to, but he could have.

DS: Right, but there’s this kind of heavy sound that implies gunshot that cuts off the music…

HC: It was either music, or it was something that we did dramatically…just as a little stinger. Honestly, I can’t remember which at this point. Sorry.

DS: It’s been over two years since the film was released now. I’m impressed with how detailed your memory’s been so far.

HC: It’s been seven or eight films for me. It stays fresh when you’re working on it, but a few weeks after your done and it starts going away. So, I can’t remember all of the details of the mix. Do you get to go and sit in on the mixes of the documentaries you work on?

DS: Oh, I do the mixing as well. I have to do everything where I work, soup to nuts.

HC: That’s great. I was bringing it up, because some editors don’t necessarily get to be on the stage and hear how they’re sound is utilized…and see what works and what doesn’t. That’s a really important part for the education of designers and editors. We try to make the mix an additive process, instead of subtractive one.

We figured out a while ago that if we present too much stuff to the mixer, every eventuality, then we put the mixer in the position to have to figure out what they need to remove to bring clarity and focus to the scene. So, we’d rather work on the stuff that we know we want the focus to be on, and add stuff as we need it during the mix. That makes for a much more intelligent process.

I’ve seen a lot of mixes in the past where, especially if it’s a short schedule on a temp mix, the editors will cover everything and try to sort it out at the mix. But there’s never really enough time to sort it out in the mix. So, often times you end up with a mix that’s full of great sounds, but it’s so thick that you don’t really hear anything clearly. That’s a real shame.

DS: So you sat in on the mix during this film?

HC: Yeah, I’m there the whole way there; to help make all those billions of decisions…and to be the effects mixer’s wingman. Not to be obtrusive, or obnoxious, but to let the mixer know, “This track is supposed to do this,” “What you’re looking for is over here,” or “I gave you this, but you might not need it.” More than that , to at least influence the shape of the effects mix so that, as a starting point what I hear, represents my original intentions. Sometimes an editor will cut sounds, and when they hear the mix back, it will sound like the mixer has reinvented their sounds. I think it’s not a conscious reinventing of the material. But when the mixer hears those tracks, he’s got to listen to them one by one and make decisions right?

You life a fader and go, “Well, I like that.” You lift another, “I’m not so sure about that.” You make decisions as you go along, because you’ve got a lot of decisions to make. So, if I’m there, I can at least say, “Leave it up. It works with the other ones, and we can come back to it later.” That way, it presents itself from the starting point I wanted it to, then we go from there.

DS: So, what about the end of the scene. The ambiences come up heavily again, we get cicadas and insects that come in for the first time. Did that come out the way you had envisioned it?

HC: Some of that shaping definitely has to do with the mixers themselves. We didn’t necessarily sculpt the rise and fall of all those elements as much as they are, other than to prepare them and make them available there. I think on that film, if I’m not mistaken, I think Mike Minkler pre-dubbed the backgrounds. I can’t remember if he mixed them as well. Because he pre-dubbed them, he was very familiar and very tuned into them. If a mixer pre-dubs material, he almost assumes a little bit of ownership over them. Mike Minkler has a big voice in the shaping of the whole track. He’ll give me notes, and I’ve learned to take them very seriously, and try to figure out what he’s after with those notes.

It almost always makes the scene better. He’s thinking in terms of momentum, like in the last sequence…the burning of the theatre. He would come to me and say, “I think we need a long rising vocal thing that sweeps up through the whole thing to a crescendo.” That was something I hadn’t thought about, but when I prepared it to put into the track it worked really well as an element of the background crowd that’s screaming. There’s this thing which is rising in pitch, like a big choral swell, and that helps build the tension and the drama throughout that scene.

So, he was probably the one who said, “Let’s push the backgrounds at the end of that scene.” He was very familiar with them, and probably had a concept of what they might do for that portion of the scene.

DS: And is there any particular moment in this opening scene that you’re really proud of? I know you talked about the Nation’s Pride work as being the most grueling challenge, but is there anything in this scene that makes you say, “I’m really glad this came out this way.”

HC: All of it really. I, of course, love all the guns that are in the movie. [laughs]

Just the fact that we were able to effectively support the way that scene unfolded as a whole, and the way it just goes from benign to really threatening so subtly. It’s hard to pick a point where you realize that it’s gone from bumbling fool to real menace. Everything was just trying to be in support of that whole vision.

DS: The scene just works perfectly together. The dialog, the visuals, the editing, the sound…Of course, a lot of that credit goes to Quentin Tarrantino, but it also goes to the people he had working on it…pulling in the people that he did. I think it just came out beautifully.

HC: I agree. And, you know, it was funny. When we were working on it, they knew it was really different and unusual. But they weren’t sure it was going to find its audience. He gets to follow his muse.

A lot of films, they do screenings and reviews, and they change things according to the audience reactions. Quentin pretty much gets to make the movies that he wants to make, and his audience is there for him or its not. But it’s what he intended, so it’s not film-making by committee.

DS: Thanks for taking the time to chat with me.

HC: My pleasure. Thanks for taking the time to talk about the film.

On vacation in Los Angeles, Walter, the world’s biggest Muppet fan, and his friends Gary (Segel) and Mary (Amy Adams) from Smalltown, USA, discover the nefarious plan of oilman Tex Richman (Chris Cooper) to raze the Muppet Theater and drill for the oil recently discovered beneath the Muppets’ former stomping grounds.

To stage The Greatest Muppet Telethon Ever and raise the $10 million needed to save the theater, Walter, Mary and Gary help Kermit reunite the Muppets, who have all gone their separate ways: Fozzie now performs with a Reno casino house band called the Moopets, Miss Piggy is a plus-size fashion editor at Vogue Paris, Animal is in a Santa Barbara clinic for anger management, and Gonzo is a high-powered plumbing magnate.

In this SoundWorks Collection exclusive we talk with Director James Bobin, Film Editor James Thomas, Supervising Sound Editors Kami Asgar and Sean McCormack, and Sound Re-recording Mixer Kevin O’Connell.

Locate a theater to experience Muppets in Dolby Surround 7.1 at www.dolby.com

Via SoundWorks Collection