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

Pro Sound Effects is hosting a webinar called “Why Sound Matters” (part 2), presented by sound designer Stephan Schütze. It’s tomorrow, no cost.

After high demand, Stephan Schutze of the Foundation Sound Effectst Libraies and PSE are hosting a second webinar about the importance of sound in education. This webinar will focus on sound production in the field, and is geared towards educators in media production. However, anyone interested in sound recording techniques will learn a great deal as well.

Register

Recording of the sound design panel at Moogfest 2011, with Richard Devine, Diego Stocco and Scott Martin Gershin. Moderated by Eric Persing. The recording is divided in 6 parts, which you can watch here.

As early as the Apocalypse Now movie in 1979 when Francis Ford Coppola and sound designer Walter Murch pioneered a quadraphonic sound system for the film tour, Coppola has made sound and audio technology an important part of filmmaking, including building a dedicated mixing facility, American Zoetrope. In 2010, under the direction of Coppola, Zoetrope was turned into one of the first post-production facilities to install a Meyer Sound EXP cinema loudspeaker system on its rerecording stage and has since upgraded the other rooms to EXP. Tetro and Twixt are two of his movies that were mixed on an EXP system.

In this video, Coppola chats about the evolving role of sound in his storytelling and his sound facility in Napa.

via musicofsound

Fantastic broadcast by BBC Radio 4 on the sound of fear.

A door creaks, footsteps echo, someone’s breathing – and we are terrified. But why? Sean Street investigates the psychology of fear, so potently sensitive to sound.

He hears from musician and writer David Toop and film-maker Chu-Li Shrewring how sounds trigger fear and the way this inspires them. The neuro-scientist Sophie Scott explains how our brains process terror.

Context is important: anomalous noises, disembodied voices and sounds whose origins are mysterious – all these frighten us. David Hendy reveals that, in its early day, radio itself was alarming. Louis Niebur, author of a book on the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop, reveals how in the 1950s, the advent of electronic sounds allowed programme-makers to use sounds that frightened people because they didn’t know what made the noises. Sound researcher Marcus Leadley explains how this triggers a state called schizophonia.

Listen

via @soundesignblog

New article by Mel Lambert for MPSE, talking about the sound of “The Thing” (2011) with supervising sound editors Scott Hecker and Elliot Koretz.

Serving as a prequel to John Carpenter’s classic 1982 film of the same name, The Thing is director Matthijs Van Heijningen’s feature-film debut and comes from the producers of Dawn of the Dead and In Time. It opens October 14 through Universal Pictures. Sound for the new offering was overseen by co-supervising editors Scott Hecker and Elliott Koretz, and re-recorded on Universal Studios Sound’s Feature Mix Stage 6 by Jon Taylor covering dialogue and music, with Bob Beemer handling sound effects.

“The opportunity to work on The Thing was a sound designer’s dream,” Hecker emphasizes. “To create sound for this creature that takes so many forms was a huge and satisfying job. Atmospherically, we considered the winds, literally, as a character––what would the wind be saying right now? The film takes place in one location with just the wind; no birds, no traffic and no crickets.”

Koretz and Eric A. Norris oversaw sound effects design, with Rick Hromadka working with Hecker on creature sound effects design. Other crewmembers included supervising dialogue/ADR editor Thomas Jones, dialogue editor G.W. Brown, ADR editor James Simcik, Foley supervisor Derek Pippert, Foley editor Michael Dressel, and assistant sound editors Bruce Barris and Josephine Nericcio. Gary Hecker and Katherine Rose served as Foley artists, with Nerses Gezalyan as Foley mixer.

Continue reading…

via epicsound

We love sound. Hear from sound experts and friends of SoundCloud why sound is so important to the way we connect with the world.

Despite the very different ways they think about and work with sound, they all converged on the idea that sound is incredibly important, often neglected and that if you listen better, there’s a whole new way to experience the world waiting to be discovered.

In the coming weeks, we’ll post lots of amazing footage from the interviews on http://soundcloud.com/sounds

If you want to share about what sounds mean to you tell us here http://soundcloud.com/groups/why-sound

SoundCloud

October’s issue of AudioMedia has two interesting articles, one about the sound of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and other one about the sound of Batman: Arkham City.

AudioMedia – October 2011

There is a strange and porous border in film sound and that is the one that exists between music and sound design, it is not a sealed and clearly defined boundary, but an open, shifting and nebulous one, easy to cross over back and forth, sometimes inadvertently and other times boldly and deliberately, by both the composer and the sound designer.

One might ask what is the difference between music and sound design? A flippant answer would be royalties. A better answer would be at times a great deal and at others not much at all. For the most part the roles of music and sound design are clearly defined, music in film continues the role of the “pit” orchestra from the days of silent cinema, commenting, narrating and guiding the audience emotionally through the action.

Sound design mostly exists within the world created on screen, but from time to time it steps out from this perhaps “functional” role and crosses over the borderline into music, and it is this area of overlap and blurring of distinction between the two that I find increasingly interesting. The films of David Lynch and the work of his sound designer Alan Splet are good examples of this ambiguity and were an early inspiration for me, their early film “Eraserhead” in particular.

Most sound designers have a musical background, which may be a formal one or perhaps, like me, their love of sound started in manipulating electronic instruments and discovering the wonders of the recording studio. The reason I call the supposed divide between music and sound design a strange border is because it is often an arbitrary one, for example an atmospheric drone can be created by a composer and it is a music cue, similar material created by a sound designer is a sound effect.

In the past I have contributed sound design elements to films that I felt had crossed that border from sound design into scoring, I’m thinking in particular of moments in the films Love Is the Devil and Chatroom. I used to have a rule for myself that I restricted what I did to utilising un-pitched sounds – pitch and rhythm being the province of the composer. However, I have recently crossed over this border and, I must hasten to add, did so by the invitation of the filmmakers themselves.

One such film was The American, another is the most recent Lynne Ramsay film We Need to Talk about Kevin. In The American I was asked by the picture editor Andrew Hulme to supply for certain sequences in the film, “compositions” formed from what might be termed atmospheric sound design elements, that he felt would be better able to convey the tension in those scenes then perhaps  “traditional” music cues would.

In Lynne’s film, because I had started work early in the film editing process, I supplied a few music/sound design pieces to Lynne and the picture editor Joe Bini to help them with the cut, a composer hadn’t been chosen at the time, and I also provided them with some further pieces from other composers and sound artists. About four of my cues found their way into the final mix and some others exist as underlying tonal elements. The score was written by Jonny Greenwood and my elements and his music seemed to combine in a unique and fortuitous way.

I’m not trying to set myself up as a film composer I don’t have the necessary skills and I have too much respect for the craft of people like Jonny Greenwood, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Adrian Johnson, Dickon Hinchliffe amongst the many composers I’ve worked with, but I think what skills I do have are suited to those occasions and those films that sometimes require sound/music elements that lie “in-between” the border of music and sound design. The “compositions” may contain little traditional musical material, but they somehow convey emotion and drama more than just a drone or atmosphere sound would do, perhaps they do this by shifting and transforming themselves through the scene, and if they do have a musical element it is a very simple one.

I realise that I can only speak for myself and my own experiences, but it’s interesting to note that one of Hans Zimmer’s collaborators Mel Wesson has for a long time provided similar elements on films such as “Inception”, “The Dark Knight”, “Michael Clayton” and many other films. Mel’s term for this is Ambient Music Design (and further information can be found at his website with the interesting caption on the main page “music is noise”). So I’m sure that I’m doing nothing new here, and I wonder how many others find themselves contributing “music” cues through sound design, whether that is acknowledged on the cue sheet or not.

In terms of technology, I love using the midi functionality of Nuendo, as well as having a liking for Mackie’s sequencer Tracktion, which features very impressive time stretch and pitch shifting capabilities, software instruments and effects from Native Instruments and Waves diamond bundle and GRM Tools for processing, I regret to say I haven’t plugged in my hardware synths and effects for some time, but keep on meaning to getting around to it.

For those who may be interested examples of music/sound design I’ve contributed to films and other bits and pieces can be found at SoundCloud

It’s still Paul Davies’ month here at Designing Sound and now is the time to dig into one of Paul’s most celebrated works: Hunger.

This 2008 film tells the story of the fierce battle between the Irish Republican Army and the British state, which in 1981 led to a hunger strike in which 10 IRA prisoners died. A haunting, intense drama that has received worldwide acclaim – it premiered at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, winning the prestigious Camera d’Or award for first-time filmmakers. It was also a major breakthrough for the lead star, Michael Fassbender. Paul Davies talks about the film’s extraordinary stark soundtrack:

Designing Sound: How did you get involved in Hunger?

Paul Davies: My initial contact for the film was the producer Laura Hastings-Smith, who I’d worked with before, on a film called The Lives of the Saints, directed by Rankin, the well-known British photographer. Laura, because of my work on this film, suggested me and Richard Davey (who had been the re-recording mixer on Rankin’s film) as the sound team for Hunger. I went for a meeting with Steve, which went well, and subsequently we were appointed as the sound post team for the project.

DS: The director Steve McQueen has a background in video art. How did that influence his filmmaking, particularly the use of sound?

PD: As you say Steve has a background in film and visual art, however my relationship with him was no different than with any of the other directors I have worked with in the past. Steve related to me as a narrative filmmaker, and not as a fine artist. The only time I was really aware of Steve’s fine art background was in our initial meeting which happened before the film had been shot and he showed me his visual reference book, which contained images of renaissance paintings and contemporary photographs from the period of the hunger strike. After this Steve’s concerns were with narrative and atmosphere, and how we were going to convey the emotion of the story in sound and images.

DS: How was your working process and your schedule on the project?

PD: As I indicated in the earlier section I had read the script and had a meeting with Steve about the conceptual approach before filming began. After this, because the film was actually shot in two sections three months apart, to allow Michael Fassbender the lead actor to lose weight, I saw a cut of the first two thirds of the film, before the second shoot and then saw a couple of versions of the complete film before starting work on the sound design with my assistant sound designer Chu-Li Shewring.

The sound post process started with a detailed spotting session with Steve and the picture editor Joe Walker, Joe had also compiled his own sound notes which acted as a basis for the sound design. Already from the cutting copy Steve and Joe’s intentions regarding the minimal use of music and the use of production sound effects recorded by Mervyn Moore the location sound recordist, provided a clear template for us to follow. The actual time we had for sound editing was actually quite short, four weeks each for me, Chu Li and Peter Shaw the dialogue editor. Fortunately Mervyns’ tracks were very well recorded and provided a firm foundation for us to build the sound design upon and also meant that we only had to record minimal ADR. Tim Alban recorded and edited the foley, which also provided a crucial element in the sound design. We knew that much in the way we had worked on Lynne Ramsay’s films we would want to be able to foreground well recorded Foley in the mix so as to “zoom” in to the characters in the film, to draw closer to them and feel their physical presence.

DS: Dramaturgically, it’s a very interesting movie. The film focuses on different characters throughout the film and the first half feels very realistic whereas the last part is often very subjective. How did this influence the sound design?

PD: Steve was very clear in our first meeting after we started on the sound editing that he didn’t want a conventional prison film i.e. all slamming doors and keys in locks and a busy crowd track shouting throughout in the background. I had laid up some initial tracks of “typical” prison atmospheres, Steve came in and listened to this and said that this was precisely what he didn’t want. We then started discussing the conceptual approach that he wanted for the film, he mentioned the work of the French director Robert Bresson, and his film A Man Escaped in particular. I hadn’t actually seem this film, and it wasn’t available on DVD in the UK at the time, but I was familiar with Bresson’s work from Film School and my involvement with Lynne Ramsay, and I had also read his excellent book on film making (which is essential reading for all film practitioners) “Notes on Cinematography”.

So I knew from all this that we would be adopting a very spare sound style, focussing on one thing at a time, in a very controlled and precise way. So although the film may seem “realistic” on the surface, it is actually quite stylised underneath, and you are right about the change in the final third, this was a conscious decision I made that as Bobby is moving closer to death the atmospheres changes and there is even the subtle inclusion of electronic sound design elements. From the way this final third was shot, it felt to me that Bobby was already in the ante room of the afterlife as it were, and so the sound becomes more esoteric, nebulous and floating.

DS: There’s a lot of extremely intense sequences with Bobby Sands at the end where you really feel the starvation he’s going through. How did you work with the sound to get close to Bobby? Did Michael Fassbender do a lot of breathing ADR? And did you go through a lot of passes to create something like the imagined childhood dreamscapes?

PD: We used foley as a device to draw us closer to the characters as mentioned earlier, focusing on small movements etc. But I had also decided fairly early on that we would need to bring in Michael Fassbender to the ADR studio to record breaths. Normally on most films, breaths are re-recorded just to cover a few scenes, if at all. However on Hunger we spent about 3 hours in the ADR studio with Michael covering breaths pretty much throughout his scenes in the film. This again has the effect of pulling in the viewer closer to the character. It was important to get the original actor to record these breaths by the way, as the performance of these breaths was just as important as any scripted ADR, this was a point that Michael understood straight away, and he gave his full commitment to the process. It was also the reason why I supervised all the ADR recording for the film, as I knew that it would be a vital component of the sound design, we recorded breaths for the other main characters in the film as well.

DS: There’s an impressive use of dynamics and often some quite hard cuts between scenes throughout. Was this something you developed in the sound editing or was it more of a mix thing?

A: This was something that we developed during the sound editing process, and the was further refined during the mixing stage with Richard Davey, the re-recording mixer who did a good job of creating such a precise yet emotionally powerful mix.

DS: How much effects recording did you do? How big a factor was realism for you – did you use the factual sounds for the prison and cars etc.?

PD: Unfortunately, because of the tightness of the sound editing schedule we had no time to record bespoke sound effects for the film, however very kindly a French colleague Vincent Hazard gave me access to a library of sound effects that he had recorded in prisons and hospitals and these proved invaluable in constructing the unique atmosphere of the film.

DS: Did you research a lot to find the proper sounds and props for the foley? The baton banging on the plastic shields is one particular sound that comes to mind.

PD: Again lack of time was a restriction in this regard, and in fact the baton and shield banging is pretty much all original location sound built up and layered.

DS: What’s your own favorite sequence of the movie?

PD: The sequence of Bobby dying in the hospital bed being visited by his mother and then the bearded man, the subtle stylisation of the sound design creates a very powerful effect, especially as this is something new in the film, a technique which we hadn’t used previously – it was more effective when it was introduced as a new element. The sound here becomes very interior, it is all from Michael’s point of view, we see the bearded man speaking, but the sound of his dialogue is very muffled and unintelligible.

DS: I read an interview with Steve McQueen where he said: “Sound, for me, was the most important part of the film because it fills the spaces where the camera just can’t go. A sound can give you the dimensions of a room. It can give you smell, it can give you tension. In some ways sound can travel itself into other areas of our senses, other areas of our psyche that unfortunately cannot be just viewed.” How did these thoughts influence your collaboration?

PD: Steve made it clear right from our first meeting that the sound would really form 50% of the impact of this film. Steve had a very clear concept in this respect. I think that part of the reason that people have always commented on the sound in Hunger is that because there is very little scored music in the film so the focus of the audience is naturally drawn to the sound design, and because the soundtrack is so stark and each sound so carefully chosen it resonates in the viewer’s mind.