“Sound has a great power but it is a conditional power. It places the image in a physical and emotional context, helping us to decide how to take the image and how it integrates itself into everything else.”

-Walter Murch

Creating Echo Effects

Cubistic Sound in the Trial

Dynamic Range in the Rushing Hallway

Jet Car Sound Effects

Motorcycle Sound Effects

Music as Sound Effects

Music Box in the MRI Scene

Radio Chatter Voices

Room Tone in the Limbo Prison

The All-Pervasive Voice

The All-Pervasive Voice

Torture Scene

THX 1138 Website

The Walter Murch Special ends here, a very interesting journey through the articles of one of the most important men in the history of audio and video creation. November will be a great month for the blog… If you were hoping for game audio articles, you’ll love the November Special!

Finally, let’s read a nice round of interviews of Walter Murch selected form several webs:

#1 WALTER MURCH – THE GODFATHER OF MOTION PICTURE SOUND

I noticed a picture in a recent interview of you in a small studio – is that your personal studio?

That was up in the barn and I was editing what you might call a Directors Cut of “Touch of Evil”, which Orson Wells directed forty years ago and any project that I take on, particularly short term projects I can just do them up in the barn, renting whatever happens to be the available and appropriate technology for that particular film. So what I had there was an Avid, which is a film editing machine, which has up to 24 tracks of sound that run along with it, but you can only actively work on 8 at one time. If you get a track the way you want it, you can make it one of the ‘Sleeper’ tracks, sort of ‘demote’ it to playback only, and then move another track up into the active area, so you can play back 24, but you can only actively work on 8 tracks. Everything just ran through a Mackie Mixer which was also feeding audio from CD’s and cassettes and DAT machines, and a DA88 which is an 8-track recorder which uses High 8 video tape.

How do you feel about working with a computer based system versus something like an analog tape machine?

Well, for me it’s fine. There are some people who claim to be able to tell the difference between professional digital equipment and analog equipment. I can’t. The advantages operationally of using digital are so great, I focus on that and not on what I guess might be the “digital” sound of it. “Touch of Evil” was a film that was done in 1958, so there wasn’t a wide range soundtrack to begin with.

Were you taking the existing sound track and mixing it with some sounds that were recorded now, or…?

Well no, we had separate dialog, and music and sound effects from the original magnetic masters, so we loaded those via DA88s into the Avid, onto the Avid’s hard disk, and I was editing them, supressing the music in some cases, lifting the level of the effects in some cases. All of this was following Orson Welles notes. Where we had to make changes, we simply stole (sound) from various places within the film. The goal was to make something that still sounded like it was all done in 1958 with a minimum of disruption of that particular kind of sound.

The English Patient. What process did you follow for mixing that?

I produced a ‘guide’ track on the Avid, and then that was taken and transferred at a higher quality, onto a Sonic Solutions system at Fantasy Records, and then coming out of the Sonic solutions, after it had been cut, we would make transfers either onto 6 track film, or DA88’s

What we just did on “Touch of Evil” because I was working on the finished soundtrack right from the beginning was to take my Avid sessions and re-create it, opening it up through an OMF (Open Media Framework) file and convert it into ProTools, which is another sound editing situation (Digidesign and Protools are both owned by Avid). That was a real timesaver, in the sense that all of my decisions cutting and fading in and fades out and level setting were maintained when the sound track was opened up in the ProTools environment.

So all they had to do was to tweak what I had done and refine it, because the tools that they have in ProTools are much more precise than what I have on the Avid.

On The English Patient all they really had to rebuild everything that I had done from scratch which was a time consuming process.

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#2 SOUND DOCTRINE: AN INTERVIEW WITH WALTER MURCH

Has film sound led us to hear the world differently?

Yes . . . sure. I hesitate only because Welles was doing the same kind of thing with radio back in the 1930s. Then he continued to innovate when he got into film. If you listen to many of his films, including Touch of Evil, if you don’t watch the picture, you kind of hear the sort of things that he was doing on radio, both with dialogue and sound.

Never before in history, before the invention of recorded sound, had people possessed the ability to manipulate sound the way they’d manipulated color or shapes. We were limited to manipulating sound in music, which is a highly abstract medium. But with recorded material you can manipulate sound effects—the sound of the world—to great effect. In the same way that painting, or looking at paintings, makes you see the world in a different way, listening to interestingly arranged sounds makes you hear differently.

Sound came to film in the late ‘20s, but when it arrived, it anticipated the even later arrival of tape.

That’s very true. Whenever you work in film, you’re working with tape. It just happens to be tape with sprockets on it.

You find things being examined in one discipline; people develop a facility within that area. When they suddenly can expand into another area, there’s a ready-made disposition. They already know how to do it, in a sense.

Touch of Evil recalls themes and approaches developed in your own work—the theme of surveillance, the use of source materials. Was working on it something like gazing into a mirror?

In a way, yes. It wasn’t a film with which I was intimately familiar before I began work on its restoration. I’d seen it a couple of times, but I hadn’t studied it the way some people have, on a frame-by-frame basis. Obviously, when you do a restoration, you really have to get down with the film on a very deep, technical level. But yes, I’d done work on The Conversation, which was all about surveillance, and American Graffiti, which was all about the creative use of source music. Welles had anticipated both of those things in Touch of Evil.

So Welles was less a direct influence than you both followed the logic inherent in recording technologies.

Once you take sound seriously—you think, “How can we use it to the best effect?”—it’s almost inevitable that you’ll start coming to the same conclusions as somebody else who was thinking along the same lines. I’d seen Touch of Evil. Who knows how subconsciously it influenced what I did.

Are there people in film, besides Welles, that you regard as anticipating later accomplishments with magnetic tape?

Certainly Murray Spivak, who was one of the premier and earliest sound editors. He worked on King Kong. You’ll find the most creative use of sound in films like King Kong or in Warner Brothers’ cartoons of the ’30s and ’40s—and Disney to a certain extent. They weren’t limited by reality, and so they recorded interesting, fantastic sounds and, then, arranged and combined them in interesting ways—more so than features. Features were late in developing that sensibility. I grew up on Warner Brothers’ cartoons. When I was five or six, I felt that they were fantastic. They laid down a very rich bed of information that I became aware of only much later.

By all accounts the division of labor at RKO, where King Kong was made, and at Warner Brothers, with Tex Avery, Raymond Scott, and Chuck Jones, wasn’t as strict as elsewhere. Ideas could circulate.

Exactly. Remember that sound alone, just the fact that there was sound at all, was a huge thing in the ’30s—for ten years. We’ve had Dolby sound in theaters for almost double that amount of time. You can imagine the sense of accomplishment in getting any sound at all and, then, to investigate stories with spoken word and a certain amount of sound effects? Plus, it was a corporate world in the sense that there were very few independent motion pictures, and those that there were made had tiny budgets. Sound was expensive; they couldn’t do much inventive work on that level. The push had to come from the director—somebody like Hitchcock or Welles—who said, “I am interested in sound.” Otherwise, the tendency was to do a journeyman-like job and not spend too much money because they’d already jumped over the post so to speak, since there was sound to begin with. The really creative use of sound was something that took time. But there are many exceptions to that rule. Renoir, for example, claimed to be the first person to record a toilet flush and put it in a movie. He strung a microphone from the studio’s sound department to a toilet, flushed the toilet, recorded it, and put it in a film he directed in the very early ’30s.

Taking an example from your own work, when you edited sound on American Graffiti, did you have an entire radio show recorded that you could reference as needed?

Yes. We produced a two-hour radio show with Wolfman Jack as DJ—with commercials, with the songs. George [Lucas] built that show himself. While he was editing the film, he edited the songs, the commercials, and the disk-jockey patter. That is what’s called a “B-track.” It ran alongside the dialogue during the editing of the film.

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#3 WALTER MURCH – THE SEARCH FOR ORDER IN SOUND & PICTURE (By Tom Kenny)

Let’s begin with a cliché question. What was your first experience with film that had an influence?

Well, the first thing that struck me forcefully was the invention of the tape recorder and its dissemination as a consumer item, which started to take place in the early ’50s. The father of a friend of mine owned one, so I wound up going over to his house endlessly, playing with this recorder. And that passion, which was a kind of delirious drunkenness with what the tape recorder could do–that it could capture an aspect of reality and instantly play that reality back, and that you could then reorder that reality by transposition, and that you could even do layerings of sound–was just intoxicating, and it occupied nearly the whole first half of my teenage years. So, my entry into the world of film is really through sound rather than image.

The moment that the whole idea of filmmaking hit me was when I was 15 and went to see The Seventh Seal [by Swedish director Ingmar Bergman]. I’d seen lots of movies before that, of course–the average number of films a kid growing up in New York City would see. But The Seventh Seal was the film where I suddenly understood the concept that somebody made this film, and that there was a series of decisions that could have been different if someone else had made the film. I really got a sense of a single person’s interest and passions through watching that film, which in fact was true. This was Ingmar Bergman, after all.

Then I became interested in architecture and oceanography and art history and French literature, and those were the things I mainly pursued as an undergraduate. It was only later on in my college years that I started to get interested and see the actual possibilities of working in film, which was largely through having spent my junior year in Paris in 1963. This was when the New Wave, the Godard&Truffaut style of filmmaking was at its peak. I came back buzzing with the idea of film, and then I found out that there were actually schools that you could go to to study film–graduate schools in film, which I found incredible. I applied to a number of them, and I got a scholarship at USC. Strangely enough, it was only when I got to school that I discovered the fact that films needed sound, and that somebody had to record it, and then you had to “cook it,” in a sense, in post-production. And I saw immediately that this was exactly what I had been doing ten years earlier.

You occupy a rare position of being a film editor and re-recording mixer. How does your involvement with the picture influence the final soundtrack?

Well, it goes very deep with me. I’ve been doing this professionally since The Conversation, which we started shooting in 1972. But I was doing it previously in film school. It’s a combination that appealed to me and appeared to be a natural thing to do at the time, and I’ve now been doing it so long that it seems second nature to me.

An illustration of one aspect of my approach is that when I’m first putting the images together–creating the first assembly of a film–I turn off all the sound, even for dialog scenes. What that does is focus me more intently on the visuals, because I’m reading them the way a deaf person does–I have to extract meaning, greater meaning, out of them because of a sensory deprivation. But also, paradoxically, I pay more attention to the sound because, although I’ve turned the speaker off, I’m still “hearing” sound; it’s just that I’m hearing the sound in my imagination, the way it might finally be. I’m lip reading the dialog, imagining the music, imagining sound effects, I’m imagining all these other things that, were I to turn the bare production track back on, would all disappear, kind of like fairies frightened away by the voice of an ogre. So, at the very first moment that the film is acquiring its shape, it’s already welcoming the influence of the final soundtrack.

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#4 WALTER MURCH: CUTTING FROM THE HEART

How do you apply your feel for the film’s rhythm to transitions and dialogue?

Ultimately, I want a dialogue scene between two actors to have the feel of a natural ebb and flow of exchanges of information, threats, love or laughter between two people.

Watch two people talking. As they talk, they reach a point where they’ve made their main point, but still continue. For instance, if I say: “It’s very hot out here today, don’t you think?” The portion “I think it’s very hot out here today” is really the key line. I’m just being polite by adding an extra phrase. You’ll find yourself looking at one person until they’ve made their essential point. Then you’ll find yourself looking at the other person, wondering what their response is.

The first person’s dialogue will overlap into the reaction shot of the second. Then you look at him until he’s had what he has to say and cut back to the first person reacting. So there’s this ebb and flow, the dialogue dances with the issues/31/images. This is a wonderful, often unnoticed-but critical-part of what makes a scene come alive.

In contrast to that would be holding on a person while they talk, then cut to the other person. You’re on them until they’re finished, and so forth. That produces a staccato; I call it “Dragnet Style,” after the old TV series, which used it very effectively.

Like any style, it can be overused and you have to find what’s appropriate. Under normal circumstances, your reaction to what’s being said has a much more fluid feel to it. We try to capture that fluidity in how we manage overlaps with dialogue.

How do you use sound overlaps in transitions?

We use that a lot. Look at how we use sound in The English Patient. Many times the sound for the scene that’s about to happen starts to bleed into the end of the earlier one. You are aware of something happening, but you don’t quite know what is is. Then, when you cut to the second scene, you find out.

It’s like what happens when the alarm clock goes off and you don’t wake up, but incorporate the sound of the alarm clock into your dream. Then you wake up and say “Oh, it’s just the alarm clock.” We used that technique a lot in how we moved from one scene to another.

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#5 WALTER MURCH IN CONVERSATION WITH JOY KATZ

The English Patient is a lyrical, non‑linear novel with an elaborate flashback structure. Can you talk about the freedom this allows in adapting it to the screen? Are people less susceptible to holding the visual images accountable to the story as they know it? Is there more room to interpret?

In any film with a flashback structure you do have an extra degree of freedom in the ways the “beads” of the story can be strung together. The connections from scene to scene, particularly the transitions into the past and back to the present, are more allusive than they are in linear material, where one scene seems to trigger the next, like billiard balls colliding.

On the other hand, that freedom exacts a price. The filmmakers must have a strong, intuitive feel for the rightness and the “ripeness” of those transition moments; there are fewer objective criteria for what will work or not – if the transitions feel awkward, premature, or intrusive for whatever reason, the film can quickly become confusing or tedious.

Anthony Minghella, the writer-director of The English Patient thoroughly reworked the time transitions in adapting Michael Ondaatje’s novel. But in editing the film, Anthony and I in turn revised Anthony’s revisions, such that only seven of the screenplay’s original forty transitions made it into the finished film. The other thirty-three were reinvented according to which scenes now found themselves adjacent to each other, and what worked in the language of film rather than on the page. Some things that look great in print fall flat when you see them up on the screen, and vice versa: Things that seem inconsequential on the page sometimes become luminous on the screen.

Can you talk about that process?

Even when you are shooting a film based on a “linear” screenplay, the challenges in structuring the material for the screen are similar to the challenges facing the translator of a text from one language to another. In the case of a film adaptation, though, it is the translation from the language of text into the new language of image and time.

There’s a different weight that a moment (of picture and sound) carries in film, compared to the same moment conveyed by the written word. Everything in film is specific: this person with this color hair, saying these lines in this way, dressed in these clothes, lit by this light slanting at this angle, with these sounds in the background, etc. These details are always on screen. Every time you see a certain character, you are reminded of his haircut, his gait, the color of his eyes. A novelist need mention eye color only once. The mass of all those details, and therefore the amount of processing that your brain is obliged to do, gives a heft to film that text, which is suggestive and allusive, does not command. So you can often “take corners” in text – make sudden leaps and transitions – at speeds that would wreck the film. On the other hand, sometimes the opposite is true: The old saw that “a picture is worth a thousand words” is quite valid under the right circumstances.

In the screenplay of The English Patient, for example, there was a flashback to the desert quite soon after Hana and the Patient arrive at the monastery. It seemed fine in the text of the screenplay, but when we assembled the film it was clear that we needed to stay in the monastery longer before departing into the Patient’s memory – to get our sea legs, so to speak, and familiarize ourselves with this new location and these two people suddenly alone together. But changing the placement of that transition meant that there were consequences down the line. We had to alter subsequent transitions to compensate for delaying the first.

But later there’s a momentary transition back to the Patient during the sandstorm, just a single shot of him, with a dissolve of Katharine’s hand seeming to caress his face. This wasn’t in the screenplay. If you were to try to convey the complex feeling of that image in words alone, it might take more effort than it was worth.

In addition, there was the simple question of length. The first assembly of The English Patient was four and a quarter hours, so more than one third of that material had to be trimmed away to get to the present length of two hours forty minutes. As a result, many scenes were eliminated, bringing the survivors into closer, unintended proximity. This was sometimes serendipitous. When it wasn’t, we had to discover other ways to structure the material, which in turn led to different interpretations, and so on.

Von Clausewitz, when asked to define war, said that “War is diplomacy carried on by other means.” Taking his lead, I would say that film editing is writing carried on by other means.

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The history of the disaster of the sovietic nuclear-submarine K-19 presented in theaters, with K-19: The Widowmaker, an independent film that cost $100,000,000 to make. It’s about the disaster of the sovietic nuclear-submarine K-19. An interesting film with a lot of work of foley and impressive recording.. Walter Murch worked as re-recording mixer. Let’s read this article on Mix Online, with several interesting notes about the recording and foley sessions:

“It’s very difficult to get a sense of space in an enclosed [environment] like a submarine,” says picture editor and re-recording mixer Walter Murch. “If it’s not lit and art-directed right, everything just sort of blocks up.” [...]

“When I started working on features,” says Walter Murch, “the idea of doing Foley was very exotic and nothing that we could afford. On The Rain People, Francis [Coppola] was shooting on location with the actors, and they were traveling across the country. At the end of the day, he would ask the actors to walk through all of the moves they made without saying anything. On THX [1138, George Lucas' first feature], I would put the Nagra somewhere and walk around duplicating the footsteps in a real space. We did versions of that on The Conversation and American Graffiti.

“On Godfather II,” Murch continues, “we’d figure out the rate at which the principal was walking, and we had a little portable electronic metronome, which we would set at that frame rate. I remember doing the footsteps for Fanucci where he comes up the stairs before he’s killed by DeNiro [young Vito Corleone], and we found the marble staircases in the old Zoetrope building were very much like the staircases in that actual location. So, I set the metronome and I had my assistant at the top. I walked a couple of flights up, so you hear these footsteps coming from far away. They get closer and closer, which is the whole idea of the scene, and then I stopped, as Fanucci stopped, at the top. I said Fanucci’s next line, and when we took the track and sunk it up, all of the footsteps sunk up. On the Foley track, you can hear my voice, and it exactly syncs with the lips of Fanucci.”

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K-19 The Widowmaker at IMDb

The Walter Murch Special continues! With more sound techniques and fantastic theories by the sound master Walter Murch. Let’s check two artibles of Filmsound. The first one is an interview where he talks mainly about Transitions:

At the basic level, a transition is simply the process of changing from some state A to another state, B. What we should examine carefully is the degree of change, and our awareness of it. Change is happening all the time, though we are not always conscious of it. But without change there is no perception. This is somewhat of a paradox. If you are staring constantly at a static object you would think that nothing is changing, but it turns out your eyeballs are constantly moving, though the movements are so tiny you are unaware of it. You might be stationary, the object you are staring at might be stationary, but your eyeballs are rapidly scanning the image in what are called microsaccades, at the rate of around sixty per second. It is this slight vibration the eyeballs are moving about 1/180th of a degree – that is keeping your perception alive, scrubbing the image across a slightly different set of rods and cones at the back of your eye. In a way it is kind of like the scanning electron gun in a video monitor. Fascinating experiments have been performed, neutralizing these microsaccades, and the result is that the vision of the subject quickly dims and then disappears entirely, even though his eyes are open and he is in a lighted room. At a very basic perceptual level, then, there has to be some kind of a transition, a change, for us to perceive the world at all.

1. In film terms, the smallest transition is the frame: this is the equivalent of the microsaccade that keeps vision alive, and we are unconscious of the shift as such from one frame to the next, though it is perceived by us as motion.

2. The next smallest transition is the cut between shots: this is the equivalent of a shift of attention of our eyes and we are intermittently conscious of this sometimes more sometimes less, depending on the nature of the cut.

3. And then a still bigger transition is the cut (or dissolve, or whatever) between one scene and another, and we are usually quite conscious of this. In fact it is the editors job to make sure that the audience is conscious of the transition from one scene to the next, otherwise there will be confusion.

4. Beyond that there are the major transitions between the Acts of a movie, but these are more difficult to qualify since cinema is unlike theatre: very rarely does a curtain fall in a movie! But we do occasionally get a sense of this end of act transition. For example, in The Godfather all the scene transitions up until Michael kills Solozzo and McCluskey have some action or story continuity. But after the double murder we get a somewhat abstract montage of various newspaper images, and the music changes from dramatic orchestral to tinkling piano, and it is by these means that the film is letting us know this is the end of Act I. Everything after these murders will be different.

5. Lastly there are the biggest transitions of all: the beginning and the ending of the film. The beginning is the transition from nothing to something, and the end is the transition from something back to nothing again. (In the technical sense, the film has not yet begun, and at the end, the shutter closes and the film stops. In the mind of the audience of course, this is not true. Whenever the audiences enter the theatre, they are full of thoughts and emotions. They come in with expectations about the film. (based on the star cast, the promotion, genre etc) It is upto the film to meet their expectations or not, in a sense to transport them into its own world and either meet or defy their expectations. The audience always enters the theatre full of thoughts and emotions, brimming with all of their past histories – love affairs, tragedies, disappointments, triumphs, etc. The film energizes and synthesizes these feelings, and hopefully transforms them in some way – makes them more coherent, meaningful, endurable, funny – which is one of the primary functions of dramatic art. Most films do not engage the audience, therefore either the audience get disinterested while watching the film or they forget about it the moment the screening is over. However, the few films that do engage the audience transport them into its world and the audience, collectively, experience the emotions in a coherent way. The way in which they were meant to experience the film in the first place. Whenever this experience happens, the audience carry the film with them. Depending on the impact, the film stays with them till they come out of the theatre or, in case of a great film, it remains with them for a very long time. Although this process of the film leaving the space of the screen and entering the minds/hearts of the audience is not a cinematic transition in the true sense it is, by far, the most important transition for every film. Because no matter what the filmmaker does within the film, if the film fails to reach the audience and make an impact (either by thought or emotion) then all that the filmmaker does within the film becomes useless.)

Within the shot, at the level of the transition from frame to frame, we are essentially cutting from one image to a very similar but not identical image. The mind tries to explain this slight difference, and the concept it arrives at is the idea of motion. Remember that motion does not exist on film, it exists in the mind of the perceiver as a way to explain the difference in adjacent frames.

At the point of a cut from one shot to another, the audiences attention is momentarily dislocated by this new visual, even though the new shot may happen in the same three-dimensional space as the previous one. Previously, the frame to frame changes within the shot were small and incremental. Suddenly at the cut the change is much greater like a break in time code: the change isnt motion any more, what is it the audiences mind has to resolve the sudden shift of geography, position, and other things and it takes a frame or so 50 to 100 milliseconds depending on the content of the shot for the audience to adjust to the new reality. Editors can use this brief disorientation to their advantage, because it proves useful in masking technical problems we might have, such as action mismatches. To the extent that they happen mostly below the level of consciousness, cuts between shots are not strictly speaking transitions. This is why where you make the cut is crucial. If the audience is ready for a new idea, their minds will be receptive to a new shot when it occurs. And there are certain places in a shot where that readiness is more likely than others, just as there are places on a tree where branches will form and not others. If the audience is not ready, the cut will feel awkward.

Depending on the size of the transition whether it is the microscopic one of the frame, the larger one of the shot, or the even larger ones of the scene or act we can expect the audience to be increasingly alert to the differences in the transition. And the more alert the audience is at those moments of transition, the greater the opportunity we have to reveal things to them. In fact the more we do this, the more it helps to sensitize the audience to the changes, so it is a chicken/egg kind of a thing. Change is essential for perception, and greater change can lead to greater perception, if handled right.

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The second article is called “Stretching Sound to Help the Mind See” and is about the role of sound in the image interpretation.

IT disappeared long ago, but in 1972 the Window was still there, peering through milky cataracts of dust, 35 feet above the floor of Samuel Goldwyn’s old Stage 7. I never would have noticed it if Richard hadn’t suddenly stopped in his tracks as we were taking a shortcut on our way back from lunch.

“That! was when Sound! was King!” he said, gesturing dramatically into the upper darknesses of Stage 7.

It took me a moment, but I finally saw what he was pointing at: something near the ceiling that resembled the observation window of a 1930’s dirigible, nosing its way into the stage.Goldwyn Studios, where Richard Portman and I were working on the mix of “The Godfather,” had originally been United Artists, built for Mary Pickford when she founded U.A. with Chaplin, Fairbanks and Griffith in the early 1920’s.

By 1972, Stage 7 was functioning as an attic — stuffed with the mysterious lumbering shapes of disused equipment — but it was there that Samuel Goldwyn produced one of the earliest of his many musicals: “Whoopee” (1930), starring Eddie Cantor and choreographed by Busby Berkeley. And it was there that Goldwyn’s director of sound, Gordon Sawyer, sat at the controls behind the Window, hands gliding across three Bakelite knobs, piloting his Dirigible of Sound into a new world . . . a world in which Sound was King.

Down below, Eddie Cantor and the All-Singing, All- Dancing Goldwyn Girls had lived in terror of the distinguished Man Behind the Window. And not just the actors: musicians, cameramen (Gregg Toland among them), the director, the producer (Florenz Ziegfeld) — even Sam Goldwyn himself. No one could contradict it if Mr. Sawyer, dissatisfied with the quality of the sound, leaned into his microphone and pronounced dispassionately but irrevocably the word “Cut!”

By 1972, 45 years after his exhilarating coronation, King Sound seemed to be living in considerably reduced circumstances. No longer did the Man Behind the Window survey the scene from on high. Instead the sound recordist was usually stuck in some dark corner with his equipment cart. The very idea of his demanding “Cut!” was inconceivable: not only did none of them on the set fear his opinion, they hardly consulted him and were frequently impatient when he did voice an opinion. Forty-five years seemed to have turned him from king to footman.

Was Richard’s nostalgia misplaced? What had befallen the Window? And were sound’s misfortunes all they appeared to be?

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Another amazing work by Walter Murch, with the sound and picture editing on the remake of Touch Of Evil. Really interesting techniques applied in both sound and picture. And as usual in Walter Murch articles… you can’t miss this!

Orson Welles’ 1957 film noir masterpiece, Touch of Evil, has recently been re-edited and released to enthusiastic reviews–many revolving around the film’s meticulously re-worked sound track, and the real, behind-the-scenes drama that deeply affected Welles’ life and career.

The re-editing project grew from a 58-page memo Welles had sent to Universal studios just prior to the film’s original release. Welles had been absent for the final editing of the film, and Universal had finished it in ways that disturbed the director enormously. The memo, and nine pages of “sound notes”, describe in exquisite detail the ways Welles most passionately wanted the film to be re-edited. Unfortunately, Universal implemented only a very few of Welles’ suggestions, aborting the director’s vision of a film into which he had poured his soul, in the hope it would revitalized his doomed Hollywood career [...]

The Tools:

• Walter Murch edited picture and sound on an Avid Media Composer. He exported his sound files in Avid’s Open Media Format (OMF) format and sent these to his editors.
• Sound editors Richard LeGrand and Harry Snodgrass imported Murch’s OMF files into Digidesign Pro Tools audio workstations. They used Pro Tools plug-in software both to process certain segments of the audio and to clean up pops, clicks, snaps and other noise.
• Their primary cleanup tool was the DeClicker from Steinberg www.steinberg.net/
• For processing, they used the d2 equalizer from Focusrite www.focusrite.com and the Lexiverb from Lexicon www.lexicon.com
• They laid their finished audio back to Tascam DA-88s which they took to the mixing stage to create the final analog master.
• To re-record the sound of the radio news broadcast, they used Sennheiser CM-50s and a CM-60.

Continue reading at Filmsound…

There is an extensive interview at Parallaz View, with Murch talking about all the info about Touch of Evil.

What does Touch of Evil mean to you as a filmmaker?

It had a large indirect influence on me because the filmmakers who influenced me directly were the French New Wave – Godard, Resnais, Truffaut and Rohmer. But it turns out that as young men they were all heavily influenced by Orson Welles and particularly by Touch of Evil, which came out in 1958, just as they started making their own film, and was much more warmly received in Europe than it was in the United States.

In addition, when I went to film school in 1965, Touch of Evil was only seven years old and was studied directly by all of us because of Welles’ use of composition, camera angles, sound, and staging. It’s a tremendous piece of filmmaking.

Do you find Welles’ sensibility to sound unusual?

It was very unusual then, and it’s still unusual today. I’m just flabbergasted when I read his memos, thinking that he was writing these ideas forty years ago, because, if I was working on a film now and a director came up with ideas like these, I’d be amazed – pleased but amazed – to realize that someone was thinking that hard about sound – which is all too rare.

Do you think that we are culturally trained to have more ability to manipulate the visual for artistic purposes rather than sound?

Not really. If you think about classical music, for example, that’s all about the manipulation of sound for creative purposes. Arguably, the creation of music is on a parallel with, if not even superior to, our abilities to manipulate the visual. It’s when the two are combined that the visual tends to highjack the sound and co-opt it to its own agenda. It’s a fascinating subject to think about. The remarkable thing about Welles’s films is that you can turn off either the picture or the sound, and the films are still understandable. If you listen to just the sound, you’re listening to a radio play – with all of the complexity and overlapping dialogue and overtness of a radio play. On the other hand, when you look at the images, you see what a genius he was at visual storytelling. Usually with directors, it’s one or the other, but not with Welles.

What about the overlapping dialogue technique?

The rule book says don’t overlap dialogue. But in Touch of Evil, there’s sometimes three levels of dialogue going on simultaneously. The result is that you can’t quite catch everything because things are stepping on each other. On the other hand, it gives you the sense that events are really unfolding in front of you, because real life is full of overlaps. When you combine that level of overlapping, as Welles does, with one continuous scene that it is unbroken for five-and-a-half minutes, moving from room to room with actors choreographed in complex staging, you get staggering results. I am referring to the sequence where Hank Quinlan [portrayed by Orson Welles] interrogates Sanchez [portrayed by Victor Millan] at Marcia Linnaker’s [portrayed by Joanna Cook Moore] apartment and then plants the dynamite in the bathroom.

Where are you in the re-editing process?

Well, I’ve been editing the film on an Avid, which also allows me to run eight sound-tracks simultaneously and to mix them all digitally. And so that’s what I’ve done to this point. Those decisions have now been transferred to a hard disk, and that’s been sent to Los Angeles, and they [Universal Studios] will then take what I’ve done on the Avid and will open it up in a ProTools digital workstation. They will then be able to refine what I’ve done even more. I’ve given them a basic landscape to work from. Then we have the final mix and the final print out of the lab. Then we’ll be done!

Full Article here.

Touch Of Evil at IMDb

Walter Murch has created for an essay called Womb Tone as a companion to his lecture, Dense Clarity – Clear Density, published at Transom. The article is illustrated with sound and film clips, detailing all the process. Don’t miss it!.. is very interesting.

Womb Tone

Hearing is the first of our senses to be switched on, four-and-a-half months after we are conceived. And for the rest of our time in the womb—another four-and-a-half months—we are pickled in a rich brine of sound that permeates and nourishes our developing consciousness: the intimate and varied pulses of our mother’s heart and breath; her song and voice; the low rumbling and sudden flights of her intestinal trumpeting; the sudden, mysterious, alluring or frightening fragments of the outside world — all of these swirl ceaselessly around the womb-bound child, with no competition from dormant Sight, Smell, Taste or Touch. [...]

Continue reading…

Dense Clarity – Clear Density

Simple and Complex

One of the deepest impressions on someone who happens to wander into a film mixing studio is that there is no necessary connection between ends and means. Sometimes, to create the natural simplicity of an ordinary scene between two people, dozens and dozens of soundtracks have to be created and seamlessly blended into one. At other times an apparently complex ‘action’ soundtrack can be conveyed with just a few carefully selected elements. In other words, it is not always obvious what it took to get the final result: it can be simple to be complex, and complicated to be simple.

The general level of complexity, though, has been steadily increasing over the eight decades since film sound was invented. And starting with Dolby Stereo in the 1970’s, continuing with computerized mixing in the 1980’s and various digital formats in the 1990’s, that increase has accelerated even further. Seventy years ago, for instance, it would not be unusual for an entire film to need only fifteen to twenty sound effects. Today that number could be hundreds to thousands of times greater. [...]

Continue reading…

I found at USO a really interesting lecture of Walter Murch at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in 2003. He talks about picture and sound. If you are interested in film/sound editing, this will be very interesting.

Walter Murch in conversation at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in 2003. Winner of 3 BAFTA Awards and 3 Oscars for picture editing and sound mixing. His credits include Apocalypse Now, Godfather II and III, American Grafitti, THX-1138, The Talented Mr. Ripley, The English Patient and Cold Mountain. Among the Directors he has worked with are Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Anthony Minghella and Fred Zinnemann.

Part 1 (Video)

The lecture gives an insight behind the scenes to showcase the work of this master of film and sound editing describing not only the techniques used in his craft, but also the creative inspiration behind in the choices he made in the editing room. Murch also notes that film editing is now 100 years old, and recounts achievements from the history of the craft.

Part 2 (Video)

In this part, Murch notes that film editing is now 100 years old, and recounts achievements from the history of the craft and discusses his own body of work.

Walter Murch was the sound designer and sound editor for the known film Apocalypse Now, a classic film with fantastic sound editing and magical sound design. There is an interview at Salon.com with Walter Murch, who talks about the sound of Apocalypse Now and the techniques he used.

When did you and Francis know that you would key so much of the movie off the sound of the helicopters?

It was something that came up long before the film ever got made — back when George [Lucas] was going to direct it. There was a lot of discussion between George and me, and between us and John Milius, who was writing the script, that what made Vietnam different and unique was that it was the helicopter war. Helicopters occupied the same place in this war that the cavalry used to. The last time the cavalry was used was in World War I, which demonstrated that it didn’t work anymore. In World War II there was no cavalry. Then we got the cavalry back, with helicopters, to a certain extent in the Korean War, and really got it back in the Vietnam War. The helicopters were the horses of the sky — the whole “Valkyrie” idea came out of that discussion. And, of course, we thought of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. The cavalry-horsemen-Apocalypse thing was bred in the bones of the project.

The beginning of the film was a trigger for the psychic dimension of the helicopters. Later on, when you get into the attack on the village [when Robert Duvall's ramrod Col. Kilgore tries to clear a VC-held coastal town], it’s dramatic and it’s fantastic, but it is fairly much “what you see is what you hear.” Whereas at the beginning of the film it’s some drunken reverie of this displaced person, Willard, who is trying to bring himself back into focus. There are fragmentary images of helicopters, then he comes more and more back into his abysmal reality — this stinky hotel room in Saigon — and we get the fan. [...]

Even the most realistic sounds in the film are sometimes hard to identify; they come at you as part of an integrated scheme.

That’s partly because we took those realistic sounds and deconstructed them on synthesizers. One more wonderful thing about the way a helicopter sounds is that it has a different articulation as it passes by. You’ll hear five or six different things going on when you get into different spatial relationships to it — sometimes you’ll hear just the rotor, then you’ll hear just the turbine, then you’ll hear just the tail rotor, then you’ll hear some clanking piece of machinery, then you’ll hear low thuds. The helicopter provides you with the sound equivalent of shining a white light through a prism — you get the hidden colors of the rainbow. So we would hear a real helicopter at any point and say — listen to that! Let’s see if we can synthesize just that! And using a synthesizer we created artificial sounds to mimic the real sound.

We formed what became known as “the ghost helicopter” out of this, which was sort of an aural Lego kit. You could put the helicopters all together and they’d sound very realistic. But then you could take them apart and play any one of them individually, a single helicopter on multiple tracks, and that’s what the film begins with. That sound — that whoop-whoop-whoop-whoop-whoop sound — is the synthesized blade sound. And in isolation it had this dream-like quality.

We used lots of isolated sounds in various places, wherever we felt we needed to color the realistic sound and make it hyper-real. Throughout the movie, the helicopter is positioned between realism and hyper-realism and surrealism. It can slide anywhere on the spectrum. In musical terms, we thought of the helicopters as our string section.

Small arms fire would be the woodwinds, I guess. The “Valkyrie” scene has the Wagner music in it. It has choppers in it. And it also has the small-arms fire, which occupies a different region. Then there are the artillery sounds — the mortar fire — and a vocal part of the sandwich, from the sounds the people are making. Another layer is the clinkity-clink sounds of people moving around. Then there’s a layer of winds and fire and leaves blowing.

There were a lot of instruments in the film. The soldiers we talked to said that anywhere you went in Vietnam you could hear some low artillery going on. Thunk-a-thunk-thunk-thunk. That has a kind of timpani quality to it. But it also sounds like a heartbeat. We positioned it “way over in the next valley,” so to speak. We put it in when Willard and Chef [Frederic Forrest] were coming in on the tiger. Before you know that there’s a tiger in the jungle, you hear naturalistic sounds of the jungle. But underneath it is this thunk-a-thunk-thunk, thunk-thunk-thunk. [...]

Even the original music by Carmine and Francis Coppola recalls musique concrete — music made of sound.

I was greatly influenced by musique concrete when I was, like, 10. I was completely mesmerized by the idea that you could make music out of sounds. So that’s been a constant influence on all my work. But the films I’d done before “Apocalypse Now” had all been mono films ["American Graffiti," "The Conversation"]. Here was not just a stereo film but a whole new format. It was like jumping from a Stone Age tribe into, say, Wall Street. I was terrified of misusing the palette; I thought the worst thing to do would be to overuse it. I thought, instead, what you had to do was shrink the film down to mono at times, and let it be there quite a while. People without knowing it would think, “This is mono.” And then, at that moment, you could make it a stereo film, and that would be impressive because now it was different.

And when people got used to that, you could make it quintaphonic or six-track — at the right, the necessary moment. I wrote down a master chart of the scenes in the film with two timelines running alongside it. The results were like four-dimensional Einstein drawings. Sometimes there were single lines, and sometimes triple lines, and sometimes sextuple lines. When we were mixing the sound it showed us when the sound effects were mono and the music was in stereo, or when we should open the sound effects to stereo and close the music down to mono.

It kept us from losing perspective. It was the equivalent of what mural-makers do by breaking a huge mural up into a grid pattern. You only work on one part of the grid at a time. But because you have visualized the whole thing in advance and broken it down into pieces, you know what to do when you’re working on any one piece. When I think about it, my unique contribution to the film was this concept of “sound design.” It was the working-out of the mural grid that underlay the structure of the film, which was being developed with a dimensionality that hadn’t been attempted before.

Read full article here.

Databaseo? Library? Check this video of Walter Murch talking about the use of Filemaker Pro to organize his database:

Let’s see another interesting article at Mix Online with more info about the making of Apocalypse Now Redux, including video sync, sound editorial, ADR, mix, and more:

Sound Editorial on Apocalypse Now Redux

The first order of business for sound effects editing was to load the dbx-encoded premixes and effects combines, plus the 1997 SR-encoded 5.1 master, into master Pro Tools sessions. Assistant sound editor Erich Stratmann found to his surprise that there were some digital overs, in spite of the fact that the 0VU reference level on the mags matched -20 dBfs on the Pro Tools. Although small overs are often unnoticeable, Stratmann says that there would often be many of them in succession, rendering the added distortion quite audible.

The offending sections were re-transferred at a lower level sometimes as much as 6 dB below the -20 standard and using the “Find Peaks” function in Pro Tools (which only worked for peaks longer than 10 samples; the others he found by hand), Stratmann would do precise volume automation to bring only the offending peak down, raising the rest of the material back to the reference level. He would then do a bounce of the section in Pro Tools incorporating the fix.

Stratmann created a master session comprising all extant material from the 1979 mix, with the 1997 5.1 printmaster and the original 6-track M&E, the only elements that were available for the whole film. Effects combines and premixes were available for most reels, although they could find nothing from reel 8 (the Hau Phat scene with the Playboy Bunnies). As “blind luck” would have it, according to Kirchberger, they were always able to find a way to make the joins work.

The crew used a “donut and holes” metaphor to guide themselves in communicating what they were doing. The area outside the donut was the original printmaster alone, while the donut rings were the transition points where effects premixes and combines and new material would be added to the printmaster in order to get to the “hole,” which was the completely new material. The intention was to make the donuts seamless, which usually translated to as short as possible, as in a hard scene change. But fighting against this goal, to some extent, was the brilliant way in which effects and music in Apocalypse effortlessly weave in and out of each other across scenes. Kirchberger remembers that one of the cooler transitions was during the Kilgore landing scene when the decay of the mortar covers the transition point. “Masking was our favorite friend,” Stratmann notes. “In many cases, the predubs were used as source material for the new scenes, but also to help us feather back into the printmaster when the combines didn’t provide enough separation.”

There were three other Pro Tools sessions in addition to Stratmann’s master: Foley, which was cut by Jeremy Molod, dialog, which Kirchberger cut himself, and sound effects, which were cut by Kyrsten Mate Comoglio and Pete Horner, including both old and new material.

Kirchberger says that “this show couldn’t have been done without Kyrsten; she’s an unbelievably talented effects editor. She did a cut of the ‘Conex’ scene [when Kurtz reads to Willard in the storage container], where she presented Walter with two scenarios, and he heard the first one and didn’t even listen to the second.”

Comoglio says that the second version contained “highly EQ’d sounds made to disorient the viewer, plus air movement sweeps and odd jungle calls that I volume-graphed in Pro Tools to then evolve into a more typical, grounded jungle BG after Brando opens the doors and we know where we are.

“In general, I tried to volume-graph premix all my sessions to cut down on tracks and on mix time up in Napa,” she continues. “This worked especially well for the Monsoon Medevac scene, where Walter wanted a different rain sound for each of the different materials oil drum, mud, helmet, tent, helicopter, PBR, etc. all coming and going as Willard walks through the camp. It was lots of fun.”

The effects for the French plantation were cut by Horner, whom Aubry says worked “in the original Zoetrope spirit on many different capacities on ANR. In addition to cutting effects and recording ADR, he worked side-by-side with Walter at the mix as the second engineer.”

Apocalypse Now at IMDb

Worldizing, an amazing sound design concept created by Walter Murch. Watch the video to know all about that process. There are at Filmsound one interesting article about Worldizing; Walter said:

George (Lucas) and I took the master track of the two-hour radio show with Wolfman Jack as DJ and played it back on a Nagra in a real space – a suburban backyard. I was fifty-or-so-feet away with a microphone recording that sound onto another Nagra, keeping it in sync and moving the microphone kind of at random, back and forth, as George moved the speaker through 180 degrees. There were times when microphone and speaker were pointed right at each other, and there were other times when they were pointed in completely opposite directions. So that was a separate track. Then, we did that whole thing again.

When I was mixing the film, I had three tracks to draw from. One of them was what you might call the “dry studio track” of the radio show, where the music was very clear and sharp and everything was in audio focus. Then there were the other two tracks which were staggered a couple of frames to each other, and on which the axis of the microphone and the speakers was never the same because we couldn’t remember what we had done intentionally.

Sometimes, Wolfman Jack would be on axis on one track, but he would be off axis on the other track. I was able to blend those three tracks to get the right amount of atmosphere. I could make transitions from a live, very present sound to something that sounded like it was very distant and bouncing off many buildings. I could create a sense of movement too – hence, the moving microphones.

Read the full article here.

Video vía usoproject