This article is the follow up to Part 1 of Ideas in Sound Design: Deprivation and Barriers. I’ve gathered a selection of media to discuss the ideas presented in the original article. I will focus on three films and one video game trailer: Saving Private Ryan, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Fight Club and Mass Effect 3′s Take Earth Back (extended version). I’d first like to state that the interpretations I’ll be outlining simply reflect my personal perspectives on the films and/or scenes in question. I do not present the single interpretation, merely a single interpretation. If you have an alternative view that adds to or diverges from mine, then I encourage you to say so and share with the rest of the community. Second, I do not mean to exclude mediums beyond the linear cinematic (hence my attempt, perhaps a weak one, to include games by the inclusion of the Mass Effect trailer). My selections were based on pieces with which I was familiar enough with to allow me to coalesce my thoughts in an expedient manner.

Finally, the ideas of “deprivation” and “barriers” are not exclusively the purview of sound editing or design. They belong to the mix as well. And beyond that, the director, the DP, the scriptwriter, etc…but that broad a swath is beyond the scope of this article. The point is that contributions to a piece’s depth come from many places. So, I credit the below examples to all of their respective principal sound artists (Supervising Sound Editor, Sound Designer, Re-Recording Mixers), to the best accuracy that I can.

Saving Private Ryan: Gary Rydstrom, Richard Hymns, Andy Nelson, Gary Summers

Let’s begin with the storming of Omaha Beach scene from Saving Private Ryan (Spielberg, 1998). This scene gives us the opportunity to look at deprivation from both visual and acoustic perspectives, and gives us two very overt acoustic barriers to examine.

The scene opens with, and sustains, close-up shots of the soldiers in their landing boats. We hear the sounds of artillery firing from a distance, and occasionally hear heavy splashes with water spray entering the shot. The closeup shots lock our perspective to the men in the boat. Those heavy splashes could just be the waves crashing against the boats, but they could also be the artillery shells landing in nearby water. Not allowing us to see the cause of the splashes adds tension to the scene. There is a perspective being established for the viewer that is going to carry through a large portion of this upcoming battle. A narrow field of view and a measure of immersion, a sense that we are subject to the whims of the setting…we have no control.

There are occasional ground eruptions, bullet trails, and injured men scattered about the beach. But for most of the scene, the audio is relied on to create the chaos of the battle. Simply look at the picture above. Imagine the soldiers moving through the water, simply wading onto the beach, with no gunfire. Most of the shots have a quality similar to that picture; similar composition (low to the water/ground, constricted field of view), and little to no visual evidence of the bullets cutting through the air. Yet the film presents constant gunfire, ricochets and explosions. Cluttering up the visual field on top of this auditory density would be too much data, but it goes beyond that. The bulk of our information about the environment is presented through sound, adding weight to two moments of auditory deprivation.

The first instance occurs after the soldiers escape over the sides of the boats. As they make their way to the beach, the camera moves in and out of the water. When the image drifts below the surface, the water becomes a physical barrier to the sound of the battle. That barrier helps to shield us, albeit briefly, from the surrounding chaos. Above the water, the number of threats is so great that they cannot be tracked…especially given the field of view with which we are presented. When submerged, the decrease in sonic activity gives the impression that the threats are mitigated. The water seems like a haven when compared to what awaits on the beach (despite the fact that people are dying in the water as well).

The second moment focuses on Captain Miller (Tom Hanks). A shell or mine explodes in the foreground of the frame, spraying dirt and bodies. As Miller stumbles in to dominate the frame a low-pass filter veils the sound of the battle, and we also hear a steady bed of sound, similar to what might be heard if you were to simply place your hands over both ears. The barrier here is physiological in nature; a reaction of the body to pressure of the explosion. You can even see the blood trickling out of Miller’s ears. This represents a dramatic shift in perspective for the viewer. Up until this point, we are a participant in the battle…situated immediately in the chaos. Now we enter Miller’s perspective, and personalize the experience of this terrifying scene. The timing is everything here. If the sonic barrier went up prior to Miller’s entrance, we would continue to be participants and have less understanding of Miller’s psyche. The sequence becomes a testament to his resolve, as the frequency spectrum comes flooding back with a soldier’s demand for orders. That soldier provides a focal point for him, one that allows him to reconnect with the surrounding events.

The barriers are given a presence within the narrative, they are tied to the events in the scene. Here the combinations of visual and acoustic deprivations, along with the nature of the acoustic barriers, afford us the opportunity to comprehend the terrifying nature of the battle and characterize a central figure in its narrative.

Mass Effect 3 – Take Earth Back (Extended Trailer): Sound team unknown [If anyone knows who handled it, please let me know so they can be credited.]

Click here to view the embedded video.

Because it also focuses on battle, this seems like a good time to examine the Mass Effect 3 (Bioware, 2012) cinematic trailer. The similarities between them, obviously, are passing and general in nature only. Both depict war, but the scope of perspective is different…and the sound designs establish discrete connections between the viewer and respective narratives. Here we are not meant to feel terror or understand the personality of a central character. This is an advertisement meant to create excitement for a product; excitement that is expected to lead to sales of the game.

When the attack begins, nearly 1 minute into the piece, we are presented focused sound elements that tie to specific moments in the visuals. The aural landscape is filled out with a montage of human reactions, news and radio report style dialog…none of which we see on screen. As the visuals continue, we begin to hear some of the same distancing and filtering that occurred with Captain Miller. We are given a brief aural cue of breathing as a pair crosshairs becomes the lens through which the action is viewed (1:02). We are temporarily being placed in the perspective of this lone sniper up in the Big Ben clock tower. Shifting to this perspective, however briefly, distances us from the struggle below…just as he is. Once we return to third-person, when this sniper occupies the frame, the visuals begin to immediately pull away from him as well. The sound design follows suit.

The density of aural activity increases greatly, coming closer to matching the density of visual activity. Simultaneously, the filtering becomes more pronounced…further distancing us from what is taking place. As I mentioned earlier, this deprivation is not meant to induce terror. The barrier, in this case, is an arbitrary construct created by the story-tellers. There is no justification within the narrative as there was in Saving Private Ryan. We are not placed in the events with these victims; we are meant to feel separate from the events. So we watch, and listen, from afar. The sensation created then is shock and horror. A horror that can then be heightened when we return to the little girl in the field of sunflowers (1:36)…the tranquil sound of insects, and the silent Reapers (alien warships) approaching. The Reapers are not truly silent. We already know what sound accompanies them. Depriving us of those sounds leaves us the ability to imagine what comes next; a far more powerful and personal interpretation of the coming violence.

The combination of presented and imagined atrocities leads way to anger, as a time lapse brings us to the aftermath in that field (2:03). Those sensations are what gives the ensuing battle weight and excitement. It creates a need for the battle to happen, a need for participation. That’s what is being offered to the viewer…a chance to participate. “Buy the game, and you can fight this battle…become salvation.” A similar setting, and even some similar techniques, to that in Saving Private Ryan, but a different purpose. What differentiates the two is how those choices in deprivations and barriers complement the visuals…how they tie to the narrative.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: Francis Wargnier, Damien Bera, Dominique Gaborieau

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Schnabel, 2007) presents something wholly focused within one character’s perspective. With two brief exceptions (one a dream, and one a flashback), the film spends the first 17 minutes in a form of perceptual purgatory. The effect is to lock us into Jean-Dominique Bauby’s (the main character) perspective and emotional experience. The camera frame never contracts or expands. We are subjected to viewing close ups and medium shots of characters that barely come into focus, and never quite become entirely visible within the frame.

Jean-Do is confused and struggling to establish a cognitive awareness of his surroundings. This barrier that both he and the viewer are fighting with is a mental and physiological one resulting from the stroke he recently suffered. The movement of those outside of his being exert control over the sounds we hear. As one character asserts dominance over the image, so too does he claim ownership of the aural. We hear the voice and movements of only that one character at a time. There are no background sounds, no room tone, barely perceptible sounds of that person’s clothing…only the figure in the foreground and Jean-Do’s voice. His voice is its own point of interest as well. He goes so far as to say, “I just did,” in response to a doctor’s repeated requests for him to name his children. The fact that he is not speaking had escaped him, for he seems to be able to hear his voice as clearly as the viewer does.

The effects of this restricted perception are extremely uncomfortable. The narrow field of vision, the depth of field, and the perception of only one acoustic being at a time firmly seat us within Jean-Do’s mental state. We are alone, tortured by a state of sensory deprivation, where the only tangible pieces of reality are those that come to the foreground of our limited vision. If we cannot see them clearly (as clearly as he is able to, that is), we cannot hear them. This combination is so effective that it is a noticeable relief when we are finally given a third-person view of his hospital room. Room tone and ambience suddenly appears, and the environment comes to life with the voices and bodies of health-care workers. There is a sense of release; and, in a way, the return of the acoustic world is a bit cathartic. This sudden re-emergence of sound signals the beginning Jean-Do’s new journey in life.

Fight Club: Ren Klyce, Richard Hymns, Michael Semanick, David Parker, Todd Boekelheide

Up to this point we have been discussing deprivations and barriers that have either solely affected the viewer’s perspective, or those that have connected both the viewer and the characters within the film. While it provides a number of similarly natured examples, Fight Club (Fincher, 1999) also gives us the opportunity to examine these ideas from exclusively within the diegesis. Our focus here is on Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter).

The two central characters are the narrator (Edward Norton), a character many people refer to as “Jack” (a convention which I will adopt here for simplicity’s sake), and Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt). As the central perspective of the film is the collective experience of Jack and Tyler, the viewer sees and hears from a position relative to them. Marla, as the third main character of the story, “suffers” from a barrier that deprives her of understanding the perspectives of Jack/Tyler and the viewer. This barrier is sanity. Marla is Jack’s “power animal.” She is both the trigger that spurs Jack and Tyler’s meeting, and the voice of reality attempting to enlighten Jack to his duality. The clues she gives come from apparent gaps in their perspectives of sensory information, the most overt of which are auditory…though “overt” may be too strong of a word.

I’m going to point out two examples. The first of which is when Jack is caught peering, through a cracked door, into the room where Tyler and Marla are having sex. Tyler whips open the door to tease Jack. The scene ends just after this conversation, but we are given one important exchange before it does. As Jack walks away, and Tyler turns back, Marla’s head pops up and asks, “Who are you talking to?” Tyler’s response? “Shut up.” Her question raises the spectre of revelation that Tyler is not yet willing to allow. It’s an innocuous enough question, but Tyler is the only one that understands what is going on. If he allows her to persist, it could lead to further questions from both her and Jack. It is one of the reason he forces Jack to swear never to talk about him with Marla.

The second example is when Jack and Marla are conversing in the kitchen. Jack asks her, “What are you getting out of this?” It’s a question that skirts along the edge of the forbidden subject matter…Tyler. As their conversation continues, spiralling directly towards the nature of their relationship, Jack begins to hear the sounds of construction from within the basement. They become an increasingly insistent distraction. He asks Marla if she can hear the sounds, but her response is a quip about “changing the subject.” Of course, to Marla it seems to be nothing more than a cheap excuse to do just that. She can’t hear the sounds that Jack can. It is a dangerous tactic on Tyler’s part to derail the conversation, as it highlights the gap in perception. Tyler needs the conversation to end quickly. He does not want them discussing him or their relationship, and he does not want the fact that only Jack can hear these sounds known. The latter may be a bit of a stretch in the context of Tyler’s self-assurance, but it is essential in terms of the narrative. The nature of Jack/Tyler can’t and shouldn’t be revealed just yet.

Marla’s sensory deprivation (albeit a subtle one) provides a series of clues to the viewer and Jack, leading to the revelation that Jack and Tyler are the same person. Jack remains oblivious to these clues until Tyler’s ambitions overwhelm his ability to manipulate Jack. As more people enter Jack’s life through Project Mayhem, the number of clues begins to increase rapidly. When Jack finally begins to understand what Tyler is, it is Marla that provides the final proof. She confirms his belief, and their history of shared experiences (including her expressed perceptions) takes on a different level of significance and impact.

Wrapping up…

I’ve gone through a number of examples, but I wish to reiterate a few points. Few of the elements in any of these examples operate independently as sonic experiences. They need help; from the visuals, script, the story and from the direction. The deprivations are complimentary of the inclusions, as they only gain meaning within the context of what is shown. The ideas of deprivation and barriers are a means of adding depth and dimension, imbuing meaning, within a narrative. Also, as I mentioned in the previous article, those meanings are personal in nature. If you do not “lay everything out” exactly as it should be, then you leave room for the viewer to interpret (I consider this a good thing). In light of that, I do not present the interpretations in this article to be hard and fast truth; these are the meanings that I derive from the editorial choices embedded within the films. I hope you will take the time examine these examples from your own perspective, and share your thoughts.

If you decide to write up your own thoughts on these scenes, or others, from the perspectives of Deprivations and Barriers, please let me know. I will happily compile a list of abstracts and links into their own post here in the future. I would love to see these ideas applied to other mediums as well. In particular, if any game audio gurus out there feel the desire to cover them from the aspects of interactive narrative and story-telling (and not game-play mechanics…unless it relates directly to the story, of course), I think that would be an article well worth reading. It would seem to be an enormous challenge though, since gaming by nature allows for less rigid control of the individual experience and requires far more active participation than film viewing. Impossible, no…merely difficult. Then again, perhaps that is merely attaching the tropes of another medium to one that is still developing its own language. Perhaps the “experience” is a more appropriate aspect to discuss. I look forward to any and all responses.

With the Academy Awards just days away, we’ve started working on our Oscar pools and that got us to thinking: what is sound design, really? We know that sound is so integral to film. It creates emotion, fills empty space, and adds context and texture to the picture. The problem, of course, is that, like editing, good sound design is almost indiscernible to the uninitiated. And it’s one of those categories that yield a best-guess vote in Oscar-night polls.

So we decided to get the skinny on sound by consulting one of the field’s leading artists, Ren Klyce of Mit Out Sound. Klyce is nominated for Sound Editing and Sound Mixing Oscars for his work on Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and is one of David Fincher’s longtime collaborators. His other film credits include Fincher films The Social Network, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Fight Club, and Se7en, plus Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are and Being John Malkovich.

Interview

In this SoundWorks Collection exclusive we talk with Composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, Sound Re-recording Mixer Michael Semanick, and Re-recording Mixer, Sound Designer, and Supervising Sound Editor Ren Klyce.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a 2011 English-language drama/thriller film. It is the second film to be adapted from the Swedish novel of the same name by Stieg Larsson. The first was a 2009 Swedish-language/English dubbed film. The 2011 film was written by Steven Zaillian and directed by David Fincher. Daniel Craig stars as Mikael Blomkvist, and Rooney Mara stars as Lisbeth Salander. In essence, the film follows a man’s mission to find out what has happened to a girl who has been missing for 36 years, and may have been murdered.

SoundWorks Collection

We got to sit down with Ren Klyce, Oscar-nominated sound designer (Social Network, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), to ask a few questions about the technical and creative sides of the sound design process for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

We learned how Klyce (pictured below) and his team created the soundscapes of freezing cold and blind terror for the film. Here’s how it went

Continue reading at Post Magazine

Let’s start with talking not about choice of sounds but choice of words.

In the US, background ambiences are called backgrounds – or just BG’s. In Denmark, though, we call them atmospheres. For me, that’s actually a better word to describe this part of the soundtrack, as background sounds can add so much texture, feeling and – yes – atmosphere to a scene. It’s an amazing tool to shape a scene, not just mapping out the geography and time of day, but also setting the mood, creating a vibe and building an underlying rhythm. It’s one of my favorite sound design tools because it works quite subliminally and can be extremely effective, nevertheless.

I want to start out showing a commercial I did a couple of years ago, which I think showcases ambiences in an interesting way. It’s an IKEA commercial directed by a very visually and aurally imaginative Danish director, Martin de Thurah, who really created this commercial with sound in mind. Here it is (even though this youtube-link isn’t exactly the greatest quality, sorry):

Click here to view the embedded video.

First of all, I need to point out that the sound design of this commercial wasn’t just done by me but by two talented colleagues as well, sound designers Morten Green and Mads Heldtberg, the latter also being a very skilled composer. It took a lot of experimentation and building of sounds to establish the very different universes and small tales that unfold very, very fast in this commercial.

If you’re very strict in the way you describe the layers of the soundtrack, some would probably point out that several of the sounds you’re hearing in this commercial aren’t really background sounds but foley and effect sounds. But still several of the small scenes are utilizing these foley and effect sounds like they’re part of a background ambience track – like the typewriter on the boat, the radio program at the apartment buildings or my toothbrush rattling in a glass at the end. This is not the point for me, though. What I find interesting is how the sound sets up a world of each image that goes beyond what the eye sees. The backgrounds really set the tone and the background sounds are in that sense very much in the foreground.

Actually, when I build up background ambiences I pretty much always use effect or foley elements to make the backgrounds come alive in more specific ways. These sounds can add some cool additional elements and textures – all the way from wind in grass to rattling cutlery in a restaurant to the sound of an alarm going off in the distance. I use impulse reverbs all the time – especially Altiverb – it’s a great, easy way of making sounds seem like they come from the same acoustic environment, even though they are recorded close up or in several different rooms.

I want to be able to rearrange the backgrounds in the mix and that’s also why I use a lot of different elements. If suddenly a bird seems out of place I don’t want all birds to be included in just one sound file. Actually, talking about birds: I love building up bird tweets that are precisely fitted to each scene – like having a black bird coming in just after one specific line of dialogue.

Everything is orchestrated and layered and this means that you can control each specific sound and each specific emotion and even the frequencies in the sense I usually make sure that I’ve got some lo-frequency stuff, some mid frequency-stuff and a bit of hi-frequency stuff as well. You can even pan out elements, which I also love to do – have different things happening in the left and right speaker while also leaving space in the center for the dialogue. Another panning trick, which I heard Gary Rydstrom talk about in a lecture about Jurassic Park, is using quite different ambiences for left surround and right surround when you need the feeling of being in a big place, like in the jungle or something like that.

Getting back to the birds, a good example of these would be The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. In the film (and book), most of the action takes place at a fictional island in Sweden but me and the supervising sound editor, Peter Schultz, sat down with a map and found out where this island would be placed when following the directions mapped out in the book. Then I found out exactly which birds lived in this place and got hold of these, individually recorded. This may sound like restricting yourself but actually it was very inspiring because it gave me a specific palette of sounds to choose from and I used the bird sounds almost as musical instruments coming in at certain times – like early on in the movie when Mikael Blomkvist is introduced to the family living on the island and the bird sounds both underscore the uneasy mood and at the same time underline the tempo in the scene.

(A funny aside: The sound design for the upcoming US remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is done by Ren Klyce who is actually one of my biggest influences when it comes to utilizing background sounds. His mighty, mighty work in Se7en is a master class in ambiences (they even wrote a script for things happening off screen!) and one of my favorite sequences in recent films when it comes to ambiences is the factory interrogation scene in Zodiac. Zodiac, on the other hand, was a main inspiration for the director of the Swedish version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo – yes, it’s a small world, and it’s even smaller on film.)

I want to share a couple of examples from another film I worked on just last year, Nothing’s All Bad (in Danish: Smukke mennesker). The movie is the feature debut of director Mikkel Munch-Fals who is really into sound and always extremely open for input which is always wonderful – it inspires you to do better. It’s interesting ‘cause visually the film has very few wide shots and instead uses a lot of close-ups which usually means that sound-wise you’d like to focus on just the actor’s voices and not the locations surrounding them. But Munch-Fals is using this visual style to get as close to the characters as possible and be as subjective as possible, especially with the sound design. He wants the sound to mirror the interior landscape.

I was the re-recording mixer of the film while the sound designer was the immensely talented Thomas Jaeger. The two of us have collaborated on a lot of films by now and actually you couldn’t really say who’s doing what in the mix. We go back and forth, try lots of different approaches for scenes and often reshape the sound design quite significantly on the dubbing stage.

It’s a constantly creative process and ideas are bounced back and forth all the time. This upcoming clip is a good example of this, as this whole sequence was actually filled with sound all the way through but on the stage we got the idea of turning things down halfway throughs the sequence. There’s a lot of ambiences and background sounds in the first part, which makes the silence at the end way more effective and evocative, I think. Thomas and I collaborated on doing the abstract ambiences at the end, as well – there’s no music in this sequence, only sound design:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Whenever I work on school ambiences like those featured in this clip, I always think of Dead Poets Society, which had brilliant sound design by the late Alan Splet, another maestro of ambiences (check out Eraserhead and Never Cry Wolf, it doesn’t get much better). In Dead Poets Society the classrooms have tiny, small squeaks, creaks and movement all the time and whenever you’re in a hallway the sound of the pupils is everywhere – they did a lot of location foley and school recordings, apparently. It’s one of those subtle soundtracks that you don’t really notice first time around but nevertheless it’s been a significant inspiration to me.

A small sound joke: In Denmark, the schools are experiencing a lot of cutbacks and as I’m the son of two teachers I thought it was quite fun to include a bit of an in-joke here. What I did was putting a lot of old office equipment sounds in the background when the headmaster is talking to the teacher, like vintage matrix printers, to make it evident that this school desperately needs an all-around upgrade.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This second clip from the same film is very much a salute to train sounds. One could almost write a thesis on train sounds in film, as they’ve featured prominently in key sound sequences in milestones like The Godfather, American Graffiti and Rumble Fish. The train sounds in the above clip start out as background sounds and at the end they jump to the front of the mix and very much become the driving force of the climax. I love train sounds because there’s so many different textures to them, weird screeches, heavy rumbling and cool rhythms – and so much energy!

This was another sequence that changed a lot on the dubbing stage and there was actually a lot of discussion about the use of train sounds because you never ever see a train in the picture. I’d argue, though, that most of the people watching this scene in the film will never really think about something fishy going on with the train sounds. We tried lowering the trains in one of our mix passes and it really didn’t work – the scene lost a lot of its impact and power, not just sound-wise but emotionally, which is the absolute main thing.

I just recently heard about an interesting approach when it comes to backgrounds – when supervising sound editor/re-recording mixer Craig Henighan worked on the awesome Black Swan he would play all the design/fx for director Darren Aranofsky, without any music or dialogs – the two of them just listened to backgrounds/ambience/fx/design. They’d play through the reels, discuss vibe and mood, pick up on what was working and what wasn’t. On Danish films, this approach may prove difficult, as we’re often fighting very tight schedules and it really takes a very seasoned and open-minded director to listen to a film this way. But no matter what, I think it’s a fascinating way of letting backgrounds come to the foreground.

As they should.

The New York Times has published an article featuring Ren Klyce, who shares how was his approach on mixing an  important scene of “The Social Network”.

As part of our continuing quest to help you win your Oscar pool – and again, not at all as part of an end-of-season notebook dump – the Bagger returns to the hard-to-predict sound design category.

When we spoke with Ren Klyce, an Oscar-nominated sound guy behind “The Social Network” we asked about a scene that has been drawing an unusual amount of attention for its mix; even The New Yorker commented on it.

The scene is a pivotal moment in which Justin Timberlake, as Sean Parker, and Jesse Eisenberg, as Mark Zuckerberg, are talking in a loud club, and – in perhaps the movie’s gravest departure from reality – you can nonetheless hear everything they’re saying.

“That was a very difficult scene for us to mix and create,” Mr. Klyce told us.

(Warning: audio nerding ahead.)

Do tell!

“When we mix films, we know as part of our job, that we have to make sure that no matter what happens, that we have to have the audience hear everything that’ s being said,” he explained. “There’s nothing worse than missing a word in a film and being frustrated by that, particularly if it’s very important to the plot or what’s happening in the scene. So when we first mixed the scene, we did what one would expect. We had the music very loud at the beginning before people spoke, and as the camera cranes across the room, we pulled the music down to hear the dialogue. We had the music playing very low under the dialogue and it worked and it was fine.”

Mr. Klyce and his colleagues – David Parker, Michael Semanick and Mark Weingarten – invited the movie’s director, David Fincher, in to see their work.

“We called him in and he was very unhappy with the scene,” Mr. Klyce said. “He said it doesn’t feel realistic to me, it doesn’t feel like I’m in a club; I just feel like I’m watching a movie.”

This meant: back to the drawing board.

Continue reading…

Via @soundesignblog

SoundWorks Collection has published a new video featuring sound re-recording mixer/supervising sound editor Ren Klyce and music composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross discussing their work on “The Social Network”. The 45 minute discussion was moderated by Bruce Carse.

Ourstage.com has published a nice interview with sound designer Ren Klyce, talking about his work on “The Social Network”.

OS: What were some of the biggest challenges in recording for The Social Network?

RK: There’s two big scenes, in terms of mixing…the opening sequence, which takes place at a bar between Mark Zuckerberg and his girlfriend Erica Albright and them breaking up…Fincher really wanted to have the sound pressure level of the bar overtake their dialogue. Traditionally when you mix a film, you err on the side of caution, you generally have the dialogue very loud and the sound effects very low, so that you can make out all the words that are being said. Particularly with the script that Aaron Sorkin has written, it’s really rapid-fire, quick-paced, and you really have to pay attention to it. Our initial mixes of the film were very conservative, in terms of suppressing the background, suppressing the music and turning up the dialogue. But Fincher really wanted to turn that on its head and say, “I want this to feel edgy, I want this to have a sense of urgency to it and I want people to struggle to listen in and struggle to hear the dialogue because that’s more realistic.” And he wanted the experience for the audience to be a realistic portrayal of people in a bar. So when you watch the film, it’s almost impossible to make out the dialogue for the first few seconds of the film. It’s sort of David’s way of saying “Pay attention and hang on for the ride, because there’s going to be a lot  of dialogue being thrown at you.”

And the second scene that was difficult was the Ruby Skye sequence, in which Mark Zuckerberg has a business meeting with Sean Parker, who’s played by Justin Timberlake. It’s in this loud club called Ruby Skye, which is an actual club in San Francisco and it’s one of those clubs that has the loud, throbbing subwoofer with the house music blasting on 11. David, again, wanted to have this music overpower the scene and have the dialogue just on the edge of intelligibility. So those were very challenging scenes for us to mix and to work into the soundtrack.

Continue reading…

Via @lydrummet

New great video from SoundWorks Collection, featuring Ren Klyce and Michael Semanick talking about the sound of “The Social Network”.

In The Social Network, Director David Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin explore the moment at which Facebook, the most revolutionary social phenomena of the new century was invented – through the warring perspectives of the super-smart young men who each claimed to be there at its inception.

Two members of Fincher’s talented sound team, Sound Re-recording Mixer and Supervisor Sound Editor Ren Kylce and Sound Re-Recording Mixer Michael Semanick take the viewer through the creative and technical process for crafting the audio soundscape in this exclusive SoundWorks Collection video profile.

As I told in my previous post, I would like to talk about my experience with setting limitations on my work, something that has helped me a lot since I’m on this sound world.

Setting limitations is a really great exercise both for newbies and professionals. It’s a fantastic way to improve your skills and learn new things and new ways to do the stuff you normally do. Also, in the future when you have less limitations, your work will be even better because you already learned how to do the right thing with a few resources. It’s great!

I always remember a quote from Ren Klyce, one of my favorite sound designers. He said:

“If you have all the toothpaste or shampoo in the world you’d probably use it up much more quickly than if you only had one. You’d learn how to really conserve and make that work, and get just using the right amount of shampoo, not too much and wasting it.”

So, here are some of the limitations you can set for your work:

– Limit the number of tracks of your layering structures
- Limit the number of plugins you can use in a session
- Design some sounds using just a limited sound sources
- Try to design some kind of sound without going through your typical way
- Set time limitations for doing some sound or getting a mix done
- Try to re-create a sound using several different sources

This method of limitations works really well not only in creative decisions, but also in the real life, with all the things you do everyday. It’s a really constructive process, which makes us better in everything we do.

Do you set limitations yourself? What kind of methods would you recommend?

Image credit: Speed Limit on Flickr (CC)