Dane A. Davis Special: MPSE Sound Show

We had already seen the Gary Rydstrom Sound Show at “Big Movie Sound Effects: Behind the Scenes and Out of the Speakers”, an special Show Co-Produced by the Motion Picture Sound Editors and the American Cinematheque.

Now, let`s check the transcript of the Dane A. Davis Sound Show talking about his work, specifically The Matrix:

Hello, I’m Dane and I design and oversee the sounds in movies.Bill Pope, Director of Photography, told me after the premier of one of the Matrix movies that we were the “Invisible Crew” and that even if he turned the camera around 180° on every shot nobody would see us. So nobody knows we’re there. They just know that in the theater those Styrofoam and wood sets sound like heavy iron. You know that three-foot tall tower they crashed and blew up on the set and STILL looks three-foot tall in the dailies? When they go to the theater it’s scary and huge and heavy and dangerous. And they know that somehow those amazing visual effects people are cooking up monsters and spaceships and all these amazing things that don’t exist on earth, that somehow the sounds for all those visuals go through their light pens into the movie theater as well. But that’s not quite how it happens. There are people like Gary and me and all of the people on our teams and the people in the MPSE, and we have to cook up all of those sounds. It’s a little sad that all the people that create and edit and mix all these sounds for these movies to make everything feel real and exciting and dramatic are invisible. In fact, on most of the “making of” videos that you see, they’re still all invisible. We do our job so well we disappear.

So I had a hypothesis I thought I’d try out. Since turning the camera around 180 degrees didn’t really help, let’s try turning the projector around 180 degrees. Now let’s watch some highlights from “The Matrix.”

[Clip with no picture but the sound effects mix exactly as heard in the movie in narrative order.]

So, how did it look? You take away the actors that everybody can see and everything else on the set you can see and even the orchestra, which most people can pretty much imagine is there somewhere, and this is what’s left. What you just heard.

When we’re brought onto a project, we can’t always see a whole lot. It’s great that Gary played some of those animatics. That’s very often how movies like “The Matrix” look when we first see them.

Full Transcript of the presentation Here.