As always, fantastic article by Sound and Music.

Robert Barry explores the soundtracks of Eduard Artemiev, best known for his work with Andrei Tarkovsky, whose films are among the many celebrated at BFI’s Kosmos season of Soviet SF films.

The Sound of Soviet Science Fiction

(Warning! High level of nostalgic content) In the 6:05 mark of this video, you can see three great minutes of sound designer master Ben Burtt showcasing some of the source material he used for the layering of a sound for Star Wars.

The video is a part of a rare documentary about John Williams and the music of Star Wars published between 1989-1990. You can see the rest of the parts on YouTube.

Via The Sonic Spread

The July’s Issue of Mix Magazine includes an article about the sound of “Inception”, the upcoming film of Christopher Nolan. The article contains some spoilers, so maybe would you like to see the film first.

Becauseof the overwhelming success of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan is viewed in popular circles as a premier “popcorn movie” director, delivering crowd-pleasing action flicks for summer crowds. But even the least discerning movie-goers can’t miss the darkness and weirdness that courses through both of those films (especially the latter), as well other Nolan works, including The Prestige, Insomnia and especially his brain-twisting early masterpiece, Memento. Nolan has become a brilliant visual artist, but he has also always been skilled at depicting the strange interiors of the human psyche, and that would seem to be his main motive for making the films he does.

In Nolan’s latest thriller, Inception, he gets to delve into the human mind in a different way: The contemporary sci-fi story—details of which have been closely guarded prior to the film’s July 16 release—revolves around a character (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) who is adept at entering, sharing and even manipulating other people’s dreams, and then extracting information from those deep subconscious states for nefarious commercial exploitation. In Nolan’s inimitable way, he blurs the line between dreams and reality, memory and imagination. The film contains a number of depictions of often fantastical dreams (aided by a combination of CGI and some specially designed sets), which Nolan treats as current reality rather than as strange, hazy, barely recollected visions we faintly recall the next morning. “You don’t question the reality of a dream while you’re in it,” explains supervising sound editor and sound designer Richard King, who is making his third film with Nolan after The Prestige and The Dark Knight (for which he was awarded a Sound Editing Oscar). “So that’s how we approached the soundtrack. You don’t always want to point out the fact that they’re in a dream while still being true to the story that’s unfolding and the visuals we’re seeing. A slight shifting of reality is appropriate, but we didn’t want to make it too obvious.”

Download: Mix Online – July 2010 (Inception’s article is on page 28)

Via @lydrummet

Joystiq has published a very cool interview with Kristofor Mellroth, Audio Director of Crackdown 2.

In the first game, I actually did all of the explosions, weapons, and then my teams here did all the physics stuff. And one thing that I knew I wanted to improve on this one was the fidelity and the punch. We had a very specific sound last time, and the way you would normally design weapons and explosions, we had a real-time reflection system, so it would cast rays out onto surfaces and then filter them off of those surfaces, and they gave it a real authentic, on the street sound, but it also made it so that you had to design your sound types in a very specific way. So one of the things we did this time is we switched to an all-new audio engine. Ripped everything out, and I wanted higher fidelity guns, and I wanted more punch out of everything. I’m a huge online gamer, I play a lot of Call of Duty, I play a lot of Battlefield: Bad Company 2 — those were the games that I set my sights on as far as what I wanted to compete with. So we did a gun shoot, every weapon that you hear in the game is an original recording, all new, only for us. That’s how you get your gun sound is you go to a location. We went to a couple of places — we went to the desert once and got blown out by the wind, and then I had the guys that we were working with on that session go to a specific canyon and they recorded an arsenal, everything from belt-fed machine guns to 8 gauge sawed-off shotguns. And when we worked on the sound design for the weapons, I used almost the exact same design that I did last time, as far as structure.

We do some subtle things over time, so as you level up your weapon skill, the sound design changes. I don’t know if you noticed that on the first one — it stretches out over such a long time. But if you play a level 1 agent’s firearms versus a level 5 agent’s firearms, they sound very different. On this one, we did a few subtle tweaks to that, we added another layer of weapon, we were able to refine it a lot more.

Our distant gun sounds last time worked out really well — it’s all simulated, we don’t fake any of our battle ambiences, so that’s all generated by the game.

Full Interview Here

Nice read on Variety about the importance given today to the soundtrack’s volume and density when voting for the Academy Awards, with some thoughts of sound guys such as Tom Myers, Cameron Frankley and Michael Keller. The conclusion: Times has changed and louder isn’t always better.

Once it was a given that a soundtrack’s volume and density wowed Academy voters. But no longer.

Indeed, in recent years, voters have turned away from loud, obtrusive efforts to honor soundtracks that blend nuance and emotion.

Just last winter, Academy voters turned to “Slumdog Millionaire” over “The Dark Knight.” “The Bourne Ultimatum” earned the honor rather than “Transformers” in 2007, and in 2006 the musical “Dreamgirls” trumped four more action-flavored offerings.

Sound mixers and designers like the shift. “It’s great to see perception (of award-winning sound) being broadened,” says “Up” sound effects re-recording mixer Tom Myers. “Just because something is loud doesn’t necessarily make it a good soundtrack. It can be, but there are shades and subtleties that I think people are starting to recognize.”

Cameron Frankley, who most recently served as the supervising sound editor on “Terminator Salvation,” believes the Academy’s general membership is awarding the entire experience of a film. “When they think about a musical, they say, ‘That sounded good, that was good music,’ as opposed to the nuance or detail that goes into another picture,” he says. “So, they are not necessarily judging (a film’s sound) on its complexities, but on the overall feel of the sound.”

Of course, beauty is in the ear of the beholder, but that doesn’t take into account the work that sound designers put into a film like “Terminator Salvation” or “2012,” each of which features approximately 1,300 visual effects shots that needed matching sounds.

On the original “Transformers,” the team created and mixed more than 1,000 sound effects for the film. An average drama uses about 100 tracks of sound.

Continue reading…

Via @lyndrummet

With a $68.2 million opening weekend and a beautiful story, UP has become one of the most representative Pixar’s movies. Here we have grouped some information about the music and sound of the film.

Staff

• Directors. Pete Docter and Bob Peterson
• Music Mixing – Michael Semanick
• Effects Mixing & Sound Design – Tom Myers
• Sound Supervising – Michael Silvers
• Sound Mix: SDDS | Dolby Digital EX | DTS
• Studios - Skywalker Sound
• Soundtrack – Michael Giacchino
  

“UP” Sound for Film Profile from Michael Coleman on Vimeo.

Contra Costa Times take a look at the Police Dogs that makes the “voices” of the dogs that could be hear in UP. You can read the full article here. And you can find at The Washington Post, a fantastic interview with UP animator Bob Peterson of Pixar.

The soundtrack was released by Walt Disney Records featuring Michael Giacchino (Ratatouille, Star Trek 2009, The Incredibles, etc). The album can be purchased as Digital Download only.

UP (Official Site)