This is the end of the Dane A. Davis Special, finishing with another article about his masterpiece Matrix, this time with the second part of the trilogy: Matrix Reloaded. Let’s check another article at Mix Online with interesting info about the mix, the music and some sound effects of Matrix Reloaded.
CAR DROPPING
Dane Davis: “It was all about the angles that things would bounce. We had to drop the cars right in the middle of the microphone array, and then keep them from rolling over the mics or over all of us. We also had a couple of wrecking balls — including one that weighed 3,500 pounds — that we dropped through the cars. At one point, one of the balls went all the way through the cars, through the concrete under them, into the dirt and back up through the car, then rolled over a bunch of mic cables and came to rest on a PZM mic, completely crushing it. We got some really great sounds out of that.”
THE SENTINELS
Dane Davis: “The Sentinels had to be very monstrous-sounding, very alive and very lethal; yet we know that they’re machines. Each one has eight motor and gear tracks, plus about four Foley tracks that are done live [mostly for the tails]. Each track is a composite of a bunch of sounds, and every move that the Sentinels make has to be expressed in every one of those tracks. The dubbing mixers then had to carefully pan each element of each Sentinel as they moved through space to give them a very real, three-dimensional power and menace.”
WHOOSH!
Dane Davis: “A really key part of the sound of The Matrix is the way air is pushed out of the way. The whooshes are the power: all those molecules of air being moved out of the way so that fist or foot can connect with you in a bad way. It’s unlike a lot of Hong Kong movies that go ‘thuk’ — with no air. The way we approach it is that every limb is a combination of different whooshes. They’re very complicated, with a lot of sound manipulation, but they all start out with real sounds: me swinging things around my head as hard as I can — computer cables, phone cords, unraveled nylon rope, lots of odd things on the ends of rope — you name it, we flung it.”
September Special will feature a wonderful sound designer, considered by many as “the father of modern sound design”.