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

- Dane A. Davis

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

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

Designing Sound: Let’s get started, tell us how did you got involved with sound design?

Andrew Lackey: Growing up I inherited old discarded audio equipment from my dad and grandpa’s dance band; The Don Roberts Quintet. As far back as 12 years old I wrote and recorded music with my friends. I went to college at Middle Tennessee State University where I learned how real music studios worked, and it was there that I got hooked on sound for film. I moved to LA in 1998, and started an internship with Dane Davis. I interned with him on two really small films and then one really big one…the Matrix. One day he handed me the Matrix script to read, and I remember thinking, ‘Wow this is cool….I’m being included.’ Throughout that project I was the do boy for the oddest of tasks. Dane would say something like, “Andy, we need to record every type of electricity there is.” or “I need fidgety machine sounds.” I would take some petty cash and search prop houses and industrial junk yards all over LA for random audio treasures.

The ones that stand out the most in my mind were a variable voltage DC power supply, a neon sign transformer, and 12 foot tall Jacob’s ladder. The DC power supply we hooked up to RC car motors. The awesome thing was that it had a huge knob that we could sling around to make the motors speed up and down really dramatically…like they were talking. The neon sign transformer was just plain trouble. We attached leads to it, plugged it and just arc’d it…occasionally to the mic…occasionally through Dane. Once we sent a voltage spike into the wall power and it shocked an editor through his headphones in the next room.

The Jacob’s Ladder was completely awesome. The arc traveled up the leads pretty slowly and ended up being about 18 inches long at the top. It had this amazing ereiorerwerary kinda quality. I got to watch Dane use all this material as ingredients for the squiddies, doc bot, fetus feilds and Neb (Morpheus’ ship). Years later on Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions he gave me the all the ships and squiddies to do….and there was alot of them.

DS: What was the hardest thing about starting out?

AL: The first few years in this business is grad school. Plan on going into debt, learning on your feet and burning some midnight oil. School or prior experience in a related field is important to getting started, but only gets you in the door. You gain skills and trust by doing…and its really important to make the most of your opportunities.

DS: What’s the most important thing about designing sounds?

AL: The most important thing is to keep in mind is why you’re designing the sound. This may sound simple, but knowing the answer will inform every creative and technical choice you make. When you ask ‘Why is this sound important or even necessary?’…the answer you get is the essence of the sound you are after. Another way to ask the question is “What is it about the experience the sound should reflect?” 99% of the time you are asking yourself that question, but if you don’t know the answer its time to call the director. The huge secondary benefit to this approach is that your work always stays fresh and interesting. Wind is never just wind. A footstep is never just a footstep. What is it about the character’s demeanor, size, biology or intention can be reflected. This doesn’t mean loosing your sense of scope though. Again, you are asking why this footstep is important to the experience. Is the character in a bathroom, in a cave, in space? Why is the sound you’re making or not making important to the experience?

DS: You’ve worked with the film and gaming industry for audio. If you had to choose only one what would it be? why?

AL: Games, but I love film too. They both offer great creative challenges, but games are also technically very challenging. A big part of a sound designer’s role on games is to help design the audio system and tools. The equivalent in film would be redesigning a new DAW and console to suit the needs of the film. In games you also tend to be more vertically integrated…as opposed to horizontally in film. What I mean is that one person can take a particular sound from the conceptualizing stages through recording, designing, implementing and mixing stages. In film, roles are more specialized, so that process would involve 3-5 people. The end result can be great either way, but personally I like wearing the different hats.

DS: Which implementation and project management tools do you use?

AL: What I use changes from project to project. For audio, I’ve mostly used proprietary tools that studios have written, but also packages like Wwise and Fmod. As far as game engines, I’ve used Unreal, Unity, Renderware and proprietary systems. I’ve worked on a few projects where the audio team has had either scripting capabilities or graphical programming environments. Sound designers these days are getting more and more exposed to runtime variables and audio systems that support customizable playback parameters controllable by these variables. This is blurring the line between programming and sound design.

DS: What are your main tools in the studio?

AL: My studio is set up so that it is just as easy to flip on a mic and record something as it is to instantiate a plug in or search in my library. I have a wireless remote and video monitor feed split to my live room so I can go in there and record to picture. Nuendo is my DAW of choice, but I use Protools on occasion.

DS: And for field recording?

AL: I use a modded R-44 with a sound devices mixer. My main mics are Neumann KM140s and an AT shotgun. I probably have 30 mics in all including hydrophones and contact mics, but these get the most use. I also have a Nagra VIs that goes with me to record guns. Another device I’ve been using in the field lately is my iPhone. I put video of what I’m recording for on it so I can reference it…or even perform to picture.

DS: A sound designer you admire?

AL: Well, I’m obviously very grateful to have had Dane Davis as a mentor. Most of what you read about his work on movies only scratches the surface of the thought and creativity he puts into every scene. Metaphorically speaking, sound is what you bring to the project at the end of the day, but you start the day as a filmmaker or game designer. This is the best way I can distill what I learned from Dane. You really have to understand what the project wants to be in order to do the most effective work. I probably absorbed as much from him about narrative structure, character development and scene pacing as anything else.

I also know that audio is a team sport, so I tend to keep the entire crew of a film or game in mind if I’m enjoying the audio. Even if its one lead consistently doing great work, its likely they have an awesome crew. The contribution of mixers, programmers, foley artists, field recordists and sound editors really should be included in any discussion about sound design.

DS: How much time do you spend playing games?

AL: Depends on how much I’m working. I play 5 or 6 games a year. Usually an epic AAA, a multiplayer co op, an RPG and 2 or 3 indie games. I’m really into independent games right now. I think we are getting to a point in games that I think of as the Nirvana moment….where the counter culture takes over as mainstream. Maybe I’m crazy, maybe its already happened.

DS: How do you see the current state of game audio? How do you see it in 5 years?

AL: Game audio is in a big growth spurt right now. The level of sophistication and creativity that’s going into sound is leaping ahead every year. Sound designers are pushing the bar aggressively, and the theoretical limits of what’s possible is still really far out there. On the other side of the fence, fans are getting more interested in the audio experience they’re having and reviewers are talking about sound with more and more sophistication. The internal support for audio departments seems to be increasing as well, and level of integration of audio into overall game development is growing.

In 5 years, I’d like audio to be used more intelligently in gameplay mechanics. The sound geek in me sees opportunities for audio to be used as a core mechanic at times. Maybe I’m the only one that would enjoy that though.

I’m also curious about all of the add on devices that are coming to the market now like Wii Fit, the Tony Hawk skateboard and Project Natal. These devices are getting people off the couch, and the physical gaming space is being expanded from the area around the hands to a larger area in the living room. I think its possible we’ll have sound coming from these devices pretty soon….makes sense if you think about Rock Band and Guitar Hero.

DS: You have been working on several projects this year that will be released in 2010… like Dante’s Inferno, BioShock 2, etc… Can you tell us something about what could we expect from those games?

AL: I was a supporting member of really talented audio teams. You can expect really great work, but its best to let the audio directors talk about their visions when the projects release.

DS: Finally… can you tell us about your future projects?

AL: I’m really looking forward to the coming year. It should be a great spread of AAA action and indie intrigue. Right now I have some gaps in my schedule so I have some pet projects in the works. One is a not for profit music release of tribal music I recorded near Mfuwe, Zambia. I also have some game ideas of my own.

And remember! If you want to ask something to Andrew, just tell me!

More game audio stuff for everyone with a new featured sound designer: Andrew Lackey. We’ll have several interviews talking about some games and Andrew’s career, and several articles exploring the world of sound design, foley with techniques, tips, and more!

Bio

Andrew Lackey is a Sound Designer at Wabi Sabi Sound, a company he started last year. Over the last 10 years, he has worked as a Senior Sound Designer or Sound Effects Editor at Danetracks, Skywalker Sound, and Electronic Arts. He has a diverse background in film, game and ad media sound design, working on projects that include Spore, Dead Space, Matrix 1, 2 and 3, 8 Mile, Treasure Planet, The Crossing and Go. This year he was involved with Dante’s Inferno, Bio Shock 2, and Left 4 Dead 2 as a contract sound designer.

Featured Work

• Dead Space (2008) – Sound Designer
• Spore (2008) – Sound Designer
• The Godfather Video Game (2006) – Sound Effects Designer
• James Bond 007: From Russia with Love (2006) – Sound Designer
• The Lord Of The Rings: The Third Age (2004) – Sound Designer
• The Matrix Revolutions (2003) – Sound Effects Designer
• Enter The Matrix (2003) – Sound Effects Designer
• The Matrix Reloaded (2003) – Sound Effects Designer
• Treasure Planet (2002) – Supervising Foley Editor
• They (2002) – Sound Designer
• 8 Mile (2002) – Foley Supervisor
• Red Planet (2000) – Sound Effects Designer

Awards and Nominations

• GANG Award for Audio of the Year – Dead Space
• GANG Award for Best Sound Design – Dead Space
• AIAS Qward for Best Sound Design – Dead Space
• BAFTA Award for Best Sound Video Game – Dead Space
• GDC for Developer’s Choice Award for Best Sound – Dead Space
• GANG Nomination for Audio of the Year – Lord of the Rings
• Golden Reel Nomination for Best Sound Feature – Matrix: Reloaded
• Golden Reel Award for Best Sound Animated Feature – Treasure Planet
• Emmy Award Nomination for Best Sound Editing – The Crossing

Wabi Sabi Sound Design, Inc.
Andrew Lackey at IMDb
Andrew Lackey at Twitter

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

CAR DROPPING

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

THE SENTINELS

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

WHOOSH!

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

Full Article Here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Full Transcript of the presentation Here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continue reading here…

The Matrix – Subway Fight

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

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

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

Jamming On Sound Design

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

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

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

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

The Tao and Doppler of Neo’s Matrix

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

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

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

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

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

Shuffling Ghosts & Better Gears With Pitch Accum

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

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

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

Giant gears and ghosts?

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

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

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

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

GRM Tools Website

The Sound Design of The Matrix has been one of the most famous in recent years. An awesome sound work by our August featured sound designer Dane A. Davis. Therefore, I decided to divide into several parts the information about the sound of The Matrix (1999), a famous science fiction-action film written and directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski.

In this part, I found two amazing articles at Filmsound.org with useful information about the Matrix Sound. The first one is an interview with Dane A. Davis who talks about the sound design of Matrix:

When did you get involved with “The Matrix”?

About three years ago, when almost all the same crew, including cinematographer Bill Pope, picture editor Zach Staenberg and composer Don Davis, made the first Wachowsky brothers film “Bound,” produced by DeLaurentis Entertainment. Even back then, the Wachowsky brothers actually had a finished script of “The Matrix” which we read, and while discussing the project we developed an overall concept for its sound design. They shot the film in nine months in Sidney, Australia. I went there in July on their last day of shooting, and worked on the movie until up to a week before its release. I created the sound effects on an Avid Pro Tools system here at Danetracks, Inc. with the help of effects editor Julia Evershade and Eric Lindeman who created many of the gun and helicopter effects. It’s actually a DigiDesign ProTools system (with many plug-ins), although the two companies merged a few years ago. I also used MetaSynth and SoundHack extensively on this movie. Then John Reitz, Greg Rudloff and Dave Campbell mixed the effects, dialog and music tracks on a digital Neve console in the brand new Stage 6 on the Warner Bros. lot. The entire final mix was a magless, tapeless and drive-based digital mix from original recordings to final printmasters.

Most importantly, there are a lot of fight scenes in “The Matrix” and I made a point of creating composite body-hit and whoosh sounds that had never been heard before, using meat hits and animal vocal sounds as sources. They also evolve from one combat to the next to become increasingly more animalistic and powerful. I don’t want to reveal the source for them in any greater detail, but I think it resulted in a sound effects experience that audiences really believed.

How did you help the Wachowsky brothers realize their futuristic vision?

As filmmakers, Andy and Larry are primarily concerned with storytelling through the characters, and although we knew a film like this offered a great potential for creative sound work, we never wanted the soundtrack to call attention to itself beyond the point that is being made in the story. We wanted the totalitarian computer the rebels battle against to present only enough detail in the reality they encounter to keep them believing in it. Both the visual effects and the sound had to support these shifting levels of credibility, so that when you went to the artificial world of the future there was a deadly, almost mundane detail to the sound effects which contrasts with the more contrived and deliberate ‘real’ world occupied by the rebels in their underground spy-ship headquarters, the Nebuchadnezzar.

One of the unifying concepts of the movie is that everything is motivated by electricity which results in a lot of sparking and zapping in the future scenes. For example, the Neb is driven by electromagnetic propellers so I rented a six-foot Jacob’s Ladder and ran 60,000 volts through it to create the basis for the sound of its engines.

Time shifting plays a major role in the story. How did you use sound effects to emphasize this?

We played a lot of games with the speed of the effects. There is a scene where the police have a tremendous shootout with the rebels in the lobby of a government building and we employed many different time rates for the sound effects to key the audience into how fast Neo’s brain is working as the bullets are flying all around. Off-screen, gunshots would pick up in speed as the visuals went from slow motion to normal, and the bullet ‘fly-bys’ would accelerate as they zoomed across the surround speakers. The idea was to play off the mental aspect of the scene rather than just the physical violence, so at different times different elements would be emphasized. Sometimes, you would only hear the marble columns being smashed by automatic fire and individual chunks of stone flying through the air, while in other instances you could merely hear the guns themselves. It was a tricky scene and we felt that it worked out really well.

Which scene was the most challenging for you?

There is a key moment toward the end where Trinity kisses Neo while a battle is raging around them and the problem was maintaining the romantic intensity without losing the dramatic tension of the background conflict. We tried a lot of different ways to keep the sound of the laser beams and metal rending and banging from stepping on the feeling of the kiss, and in the end, we came up with the idea of transitioning the full-on attack into a surreal, deep metallic booming like cannons in the distance while occasionally bringing some mid-range frequencies back in when Trinity pauses in the kiss. The scene was built very carefully in terms of where all these resonating metal hits are positioned throughout the action and it let the intimacy of that crucial kiss build while the battle continued.

Which sequence do you think would have been most different if someone else had been the sound designer?

There is a scene where Neo is being encased by what we called a ‘mercury mirror’ as the computer tries to take him over, andthe sounds of his own screams being digitized from his perspective was extremely time-consuming. I don’t think anyone else would have done it just the same way. There are also some evil creatures with mechanical tentacles called ‘Squiddies’ and we created at least 15 raw digital effects tracks for each of them, many involving techniques such as in-line pitch shifting and sequenced samples of screams, screeching bearings and ratchets among other things, to give the feeling of individual terror as they are burning their way into the rebels’ ship.

The second article contain information provided by the sound makers of Matrix, including Dane A. Davis, FX mixer Gregg Rudloff, Dialogue mixer John Reitz and Music mixer Dave Campbell. Some highlights:

‘Basically we wanted to create all of the sounds for the movie from scratch in order to give it a very unique quality, but we were also dealing with a lot of genres that we really wanted to transcend; martial arts scenes, gun battles, and so on,’ says sound designer-supervising sound editor, Dane Davis, who started full-time work on The Matrix project in July of 1998. This was about a week and a half before the completion of principal photography, which, although this is a Warner Brothers film, largely took place on the Twentieth Century Fox lot in Sydney, Australia. Thereafter Davis used his own Pro Tools-based Danetracks facility in Hollywood, while the mix took place on a Neve and Fairlight-equipped Warners sound stage in Burbank.

‘Pro Tools was used for recording, editing, processing and manipulating all of the sound in the movie–the music, the dialogue, everything–and, aside from some mag stems for one of the temp mixes, tape was never used for any of the post work. That kept everything flexible and efficient, and I also think it added a lot to the clarity.’

‘Another program that I used was MetaSynth, and that really defined the sound quality of a lot of things, giving them an extremely clean and distinct timbre while doing digital processing. I used it on anything that had to feel digital, not wanting to get grainy in an ugly way–except for five or six sounds in the movie that did have to be grainy in an ugly way. In some cases I had to create an audio file and import it to MetaSynth, export it back to Pro Tools and then let it continue with its linear progression.’

Configured for dialogue, music and effects, the all-digital, all-automated DFC console is set up in four tiers, with each fader capable of up to an 8-track pre-dub. ‘We did a 6-track mix, so all of my predubs were in 6-track form,’ explains Rudloff. ‘The six channels consisted of left-centre-right, a left surround, a right surround and the sub information. I wasn’t using the faders of each tier; just one layer had the 6-track predub, but I was using multilayers for other things. Depending on how you set it up and what you’re using the signals and routeing paths for, the board can provide up to 500 paths.

An approach that Gregg Rudloff refers to as ‘see a bear, hear a bear’. ‘Sometimes that makes a really big difference,’ Davis continues. ‘I don’t ever use synthesisers–whether we’re talking software or hardware, and even though I have tons of them–unless the thing on the screen is a synthesiser, and I apply that same principal to creatures such as the robots in this movie. I didn’t want them to make a sound that seemed like it was being made for the benefit of humans, and, while that’s guiding principle in all of my work, in this movie it was a law. If a sound makes the audience think about somebody creating that sound then it’s the wrong sound.’

Read Full Article Here.

The Matrix Official Website

The Matrix at IMDB

For August I decided to make an special of Dane A. Davis, an awesome Sound Designer, the maker of that Matrix sound, certainly a man with with a hudge of talent and creativity.

Biography: (vía MPSE)

Dane was born quietly in La Mesa, California, in the late fifties. From then on he was always noisy. In early adolescence Dane borrowed reel-to-reel tape recorders and experimented with ways to use them improperly. Other than his grandfather’s clarinet, his access to legitimate musical instruments was very limited so he built and converted various illegitimate mostly unplayable instruments to use in conjunction with partially disassembled tape decks. His mother moved him into the garage where he lived noisily for more than a decade. In high school he began making Super 8 movies, which became a good excuse to keep making seemingly purposeless audio assemblages that now had a purpose as movie soundtracks.

This took him to the California Institute of the Arts School of Film/Video, where he confronted modular synthesizers and many new noise-producing tools. While making his own films there he continued to create soundtracks for student films and eventually mixed most of the movies being made at the school. After matriculation into the real world Dane continued making mostly non-musical soundtracks for experimental short films and started working as a sound editor on various longer film projects.

In 1986 he founded Danetracks in Hollywood in a closet of the company he worked for during the day as a sound transfer operator. As more sound design and editing work for low-budget independent movies passed through his closet, he quit his day job, and continues today working primarily as a Sound Designer & Supervising Sound Editor on a variety of feature films.

Dane has received much recognition for his sound work, including an Oscar, a British Academy Award and several MPSE Golden Reels. With his company, he also creates sound design for commercials, movie trailers, games and public installation art projects. In addition to all that noise he has a family, plays several actual musical instruments and continues serious work as a photographic artist. (You can view his work at www.danedavis.com)

Awards & Nominations

• Academy Award for Best Sound, Sound Effects Editing – The Matrix
• BAFTA Award for Best Sound – The Matrix
• Golden Reel Award for Best Sound Editing – Direct to Video – Return to House on Haunted Hill
• Golden Reel Award for Best Sound Editing in Animated Features – Treasure Planet
• Golden Reel Award for Best Sound Editing – Effects & Foley - The Matrix
• Golden Reel Award for Best Sound Editing – Television Movies of the Week – Sound Effects & Foley – Gotti

Featured Work:

• Outrage (2009) – Sound designer
• Speed Racer (2008) – Sound designer and Supervising sound editor
• Ghost Rider (2007) – Sound designer and Supervising sound editor
• Lord of War (2005) – Supervising sound editor
• The Matrix Revolutions (2003) – Sound designer and Supervising sound editor
• Enter The Matrix Videogame (2003) – Sound Designer
• The Matrix Reloaded (2003) – Sound designer and Supervising sound editor)
• Treasure Planet (2002) – Sound designer and Supervising sound editor
• 8 Mile (2002) – Supervising sound editor
• Sand (2000) – Sound designer, Sound re-recording mixer and Supervising sound editor
• Red Planet (2000) – Sound designer and Supervising sound editor
• The Crossing (2000) – Supervising sound editor
• House on Haunted Hill (1999) – Sound designer and Supervising sound editor)
• The Matrix (1999) – Sound designer and Supervising sound editor
• Gotti (1996) – Supervising sound editor
• The Abyss (1989) – Sound effects recordist
• Alien from L.A. (1988) – Sound designer
• The Tomb (1986) – Supervising sound editor
• The Golden Sher (1981) – Sound re-recording mixer

Dane A. Davis at IMDB
Dane A. Davis Photography Website