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Sunday, July 27, 2008

Required (Re)reading

A short essay can turn you into a better filmmaker.

What do Ratatouille, The Simpsons Movie, What Lies Beneath, Cast Away, and Forrest Gump have in common? You can add a couple of dozen other titles to the list, including Howard the Duck and some of the Harry Potter movies, if that’ll help. Give up?

It’s Randy Thom. He’s credited as Sound Designer on those films (and a bunch of others, according to IMDB), and has done just about every other sound job in films, starting with recording sound effects for Apocalypse Now. The man is a genius.

I’m not writing this to sing his praises - his work stands on its own - but to point you to an essay he wrote about ten years ago. I read it then, but recently a friend reminded me of it. So I re-read, and got even more from it.

“Designing a Movie for Sound” lives at FilmSound.org, and despite the title, it’s not about how to be a sound designer. If anything, it’s about how to be a screenwriter and director, and how to understand what sound can do for a film… before you even start shooting. If you make narrative films, you should read it. In fact if you make training or corporate or event films, there’s something in there for you also.

My friend, who taught sound in a pretty good film school, made this essay required reading for all his students… and promised to flunk anyone who skipped it. I can’t hold a similar punishment over your head. But you will get a lot out of Randy’s essay.

Audio •

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Apocalypse Now is a stunning example of deep sound design. They even pitched the ‘copters to match the soundtrack (the blade noise was created on synthesizers, making it easy to do so).

Posted by Chris Meyer  on  07/27  at  05:55 PM

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Excellent article, thanks for pointing it out.

Posted by Mark Spencer  on  07/31  at  05:07 PM

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and they sync’ed the single shots of blades spinning in slow motion to the sound coming out of the speakers…
left front to right rear…
sound hitting the same timing as the blades ... 
in the redone dolby surround release A.N. Redux

Posted by billS  on  07/31  at  11:23 PM

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