Minority Report, one of the most recognized sci-fi and futuristic films, another master piece directed by Steven Spielberg, with the sound work of Gary Rydstrom. A huge range of sounds, for a huge number of gadgets and devices that do not yet exist.
Let’s see this interesting article from Mix Online, with information about the sound of Minority Report.
The story revolves around the idea of police who are able to capture criminals before they commit their crimes. “They have this technology that’s able to plug into the brains of these genetic mutants that can see the future and put on a screen the images and sounds that they see,” says Rydstrom. “Tom Cruise’s character, who works for the government, is trying to find clues to a murder. Spielberg is clever enough to put a horse or a sprinkler in the scene so that it can show up as they scroll through these visions. It’s real montage-like. But it’s also playing with time, going backward, playing in different perspectives.”
Rydstrom’s response was like the age-old advice to writers, Start with what you know. “We were down in L.A.,” he recounts, in reference to an earlier project, “and they were recording all the digital sound sources onto Tascam MMR drives, but we were mixing to film. The sound that the digital audio would make as it tried to catch up to the film system, grinding to a halt or starting up, was pretty cool. So, I set up the same thing here [at Skywalker]. Then I put all these various sounds onto a drive, jogged through it, and made all these weird, sweeping sounds.”
“It wouldn’t have sounded cool enough if we were just using tape,” continues Rydstrom. “Digital has a stuttering quality as you speed up or jog through that’s very interesting.”
“Spielberg’s using very distinct visual moments to key these visions. So we’re trying to do the same thing with sound cues. There’s a merry-go-round that you see outside one of these murders. You scrub it and do things to it, and when you slow down enough, you start getting digital artifacts. We didn’t want it to sound like bad digital, but it creates a lot of interesting sounds.”
Minority Report – Trailer 2