Namaste Goa. Thank you to the IFFI for inviting me to speak with you today. It is an honor and a privilege to be chosen to speak about my thoughts on sound and their relevance in narrative filmmaking. It’s all I really know. I’ve been designing sound for films in Hollywood for 40 years…since I was 19. I’m much older now and I’m really no good at doing anything else. I had no “B” plan. If movies disappeared tomorrow, I’d be sweeping floors or waiting tables.

For the next hour or so, it’s my intention to share with you my observations, a lot of observations, on how I’ve succeeded and, by example, YOU can be successful as a creative contributor on the projects you work on and the filmmakers you work with. After that, I will open it up for questions and I’ll stay as long as you like.

While this presentation has been advertised as a “master class” in Sound, and I intend to give examples of technique for the sound “nerds” in the audience, my focus today is non-technical. It’s more of a meditation on skills that are not taught… but should be.

So let me ask, how many of you are working in or hope to be working in or are studying sound for film or television?

Before I get started, I need to also understand how many of you are familiar with this idea of doing a “preview screening” for a film? Show of hands? Is it done outside Hollywood? (where we show an invited audience the film as a work-in-progress, unfinished, to get feedback on what areas are problematic)

It’s an integral part of the filmmaking process at home  and I reference it twice in this presentation so I wanted to insure you understood what it was or how it worked.

Great…Ok... So for those of you who came for a master class in sound...

(image of WARNING)

  

Today there will be NO talk of Plugins, panners, or ProTools…

NO talk of cross fades, consoles or crossover networks….

In fact, today there will be very little talk of the technology of sound at all.

Today, I’d like to talk about us, those of us who work in sound for a living, as…

(card - ARTISTS)

Artists. Sound Artists. That’s the theme of this “master class”: to explore, examine and remind you of that touchy-feely side, the ephemeral side of our professional responsibility that is all too easily lost in these kinds of seminars. That this presentation is about sound does not change the message about the importance of being an artist. This is a universal theme, equally important to Cinematographers, Production Designers or Costumers.

I like the term artist. It evokes a universal image of an individual who cares deeply about communicating to others some deeper truth. I think that’s the fundamental responsibility of anyone working in cinema.

In the world of sound that usually starts with a…

(card - SOUND DESIGNER)

Sound Designer.

What is a Sound Designer? At home, it’s somewhat of a controversial term. It’s often the person who makes all the non-literal, never heard before sounds or, worse, the person with the most technology. It’s a discipline that has gravitated towards the sound effects aspect of a sound track. But doesn’t everyone associated with sound “design”? Isn’t design simply another word for intention? As such, isn’t the Production Sound Mixer a Sound Designer? Isn’t the ADR Editor a Sound Designer. It seems to me, if one is going to accord oneself such an all-encompassing credit, one should be all encompassing in ones responsibilities so,

In my, view you are a sound designer...

If you create. If you construct, maybe not.

If by your decisions sound tells a story on the screen, you’re a sound designer. If by your industry, sound that passed through your hands is on the screen, maybe not.

If you create foley for a character with squeaky leather shoes to tell the story of his recent economic distress, you’re a sound designer. If you made those footsteps sounds in sync, maybe not.

If you recommended mixing out all the sound in a scene to heighten the isolation of a character just told he has cancer, you’re a sound designer. If you tell your wife you got a compliment for a fade out on a music cue, maybe not.

And finally, if you convinced your director that sound can have a dramatic effect on the narrative and help the storytelling, you are a sound designer. If you brag about how many plugins you have, you probably are not.

Look, I’m not a Luddite or a technophobe. Plugins and consoles and speakers are as indispensable to a Sound Designer as a camera is to a Cinematographer. We cannot ignore technology but there is a right place for it. Just not in this seminar…

One of the new technological trends in sound for film, a buzz-word really, is…

(card - IMMERSIVE SOUND)

Immersive Sound. On it’s face, immersive sound is...

(Image - An array of speakers)

...an array of speakers in the theater that encompass and surround the audience bringing greater sonic verisimilitude and a more lifelike experience of listening. A powerful tool that aids the filmmaker in the suspension of disbelief. Invaluable as this tool is, I‘m concerned that a reliance on just technology distracts us from our goal as artists: that of telling stories with sound. So if “immersion” is, indeed, desirable how do we use it?

I think there's two primary ways we are immersed in sound:

(card - PHYSICALITY and EMOTIONALITY)

…the first is physically. To be physically immersed, means that we are surrounded by sound, as in real life, using speaker systems like these (gesture to theater). The second is emotionally, using thoughtful and narrative sound to engage the audience, not just surround them, to tell the filmmakers story.

To show you how much more powerful I think emotional immersion can be, think of what happens when you fall in love:

You meet at a beautifully romantic spot and your partner looks fabulous. The clothes, the hair, the smells are all perfect. As your conversation flows and you get to know each other, the “world”, this, (gesture to the theater) begins to disappear, doesn’t it?

The superficial trappings of your surrounding environment fades away and becomes unimportant…and emotionality takes over. You are engaged by …and here I’ll substitute “immersed” in the moment because the object of your desire was speaking to your soul, speaking to your more deeper needs….

JUST LIKE IN A MOVIE! That’s why we invest in a film. Because of some connection to the emotional side of the story.

We can be bombarded (immersed) with sight and sound, the physicality of a movie, but I don’t think that type of immersion is as powerful in engaging an audience emotionally. Sound can work on that emotional plane if you know to look for it.

I didn’t…at least at first.

Early in my career I had a maddeningly recurring experience that changed forever the way I work. I felt awkward at Preview screenings (these are work-in-progress versions of a film shown to an invited audience to get an honest reaction to its current state). Inevitably, after the scores were handed out, I’d find myself in a huddle at a bar with the director, editor, or producer talking about how we felt the screening went. The director would go around the table and ask for the opinions of his creative team. The editor would lament that character x came off poorly because the audience didn’t understand his/her back story. The producer would be encouraged that the audience laughed at the absurdity of the protagonists predicament. And when the conversation came to me, I would be dumbstruck and resigned to pointless inanities like:

“Uhhh…well… I think that the gunshots were too loud and we should ADR the scene at the beach.”

Having spent far too many conversations like this with nothing to contribute I had a simple realization: that until I had a better understanding of the storytelling (and a subsequent ability of how to leverage that understanding), I was less effective as a sound artist and, as a consequence, was left out of the “conversation” with my filmmakers.

I really wanted to be in that conversation but I didn’t know how to contribute. I didn’t even know the language. Having not gone to film school (where I assumed these things were taught) I set about teaching myself the fundamentals of story, structure, and character development, and learned to use arcane movie terminology like “the unreliable narrator” and “diegetic”. This self-education process took the form of studying allied disciplines such as cinematography, improvisational comedy and writing, all of which informed and improved my skills as a Sound Designer. I could see then, as I see now, the correlation between understanding the language of film and how that translates into effective sound execution and achieving true aural “immersion”. What became clear was that my success became less about the physicality of how I made sound and more about why I made sound.

So while it borders on the banal, my talk today is a small discourse and gentle reminder on the idea that:

Really great sound design begins with storytelling. Just like Film editing, Cinematography and Directing. Sounds obvious doesn’t it?

This may not be big news to many of you and, even if it isn’t, I think it is worth reminding and reinforcing on a regular basis. Like your mother reminding you to brush your teeth and get plenty of sleep.

Today, I’m going to show you four clips from films I’ve worked on. These films contain interesting narrative challenges that are instructive on how I tell stories with sound and contain themes that aren’t taught in film school. As we watch these clips, I will walk you through my thinking process, my belief and emphasis on the idea of sound as storytelling and why I did what did…..

…. and not how I did what I did.

I find all too often our work, and that of most of the other film-making disciplines, gravitates towards technical discussions of “how” we do things. For Sound Designers it is comprised of talk about plugins, sample rates and the mechanical attributes of sound. While clearly useful, I think learning how something is done creates the temptation to imitate. Imitation guarantees you will only ever be almost as good as the person or TECHNIQUE you imitate and it comes at the expense of developing a unique artistic voice. I’ll tell you anything about my technique because I know those ideas are project specific and transitory. How I designed sound on film A couldn’t be applied to film B and I don’t encourage you to think this way either.

When I start a new project, I prefer to explore the why of a film before I get to the how. The why begins with an understanding of the story from a dramatic standpoint. Before I create any sounds, I break down a script into story arcs, much like a director or actor might, to understand the films language. I then build this breakdown into a sound script that references dramatic beats, not visual cues. I can’t get to the “how” of  building a sound track till I understand why I’m building the soundtrack. The latter can’t exist without the former. When it does, we become this guy:

(image of Larson cartoon)

Do you see a sound person in this cartoon? Have any of you ever had that conversation with a director? If you haven’t allow me to have it for you:

(image of Larson cartoon)

“To make the scene scary, I’m going to record a monkey scream with a parabolic mic and then import it into Pro-Tools at 96kHz and use the quantization function in my pitch shift plugin to dither it down to 8 bit and then we’ll use the ATMOS panner to spacialize the divergence at the final mix.”

I think the director only heard “To make this scene scary….”

I fear the modern sound artist is, all too often, seen this way. It’s what keeps us out of the conversation, the one the filmmakers are having while we argue about sample rates and “floating point architecture”. It keeps us from being seen as authors and more like “technicians”.

It’s why we are all too often referred to by the many honorary and awards societies as a “technical award”. It’s why we’re all too often referred to, in Hollywood anyway, as:

(SOUND GUY card)

the “sound guy” …”Get me the sound guy…:  why can’t it be I need to speak with the:

(description card)

Sound Designer

Audiographer

Director of Sound

Sound artiste

Or my favorite…

Sonophile.

Or any one of a host of more dignified epithets akin to…say… Cinematographer… No one says “get me the image guy..”

Sound has come a long way in my 40 years in the business. But our image hasn’t. Let’s transcend “sound-guy” and “technician” by participating as the artists and collaborators we truly are.

I feel when we learn to speak the why of sound, we’re speaking the language of storytelling. In that process we become...

... authors of sound and we deliver a more valuable immersion in our films.

Look, technique is critical, admittedly. In fact, I don’t think you can get to the “why” without a full mastery of technique. But if we live in technique, we live on the boundaries of creativity, we live in HOW and on the periphery of an emotional immersion.

I’ve worked on 4 of the Star Trek films beginning in 1980 with STAR TREK - THE MOTION PICTURE. (who here knows the Star Trek films?) I’d like to show you a short clip from the 4th film, Star Trek - The Voyage Home made in 1987, that shows how I used sound as a simple narrative tool. Pay attention to the shot at the end of the clip as you see each characters head morph, one into the other.

(Watch Clip from STAR TREK – THE VOYAGE HOME)

Did you listen as you saw these morphing heads?

That’s an historically important shot as it was the 1st Computer Generated Image that Industrial Light and Magic, George Lucas’ legendary visual fx company, produced for a feature film. The excitement and expectation surrounding this shot by the filmmakers was huge. So sure were they that this revolutionary shot was a show stopper that they had ignored, I thought, it’s full potential…with sound. This is an unfortunate and simple mistake to make when film-making becomes about and infatuated with technology.

I saw it as an opportunity to advance the narrative. I took dialog from the principle characters heard much later in the film and added those constantly morphing voices over this shot to foreshadow events to come, as if to warn the dreaming Captain. This was not scripted or asked for by the director. The filmmakers were happy to allow this shot live only on it’s visual merits. Remember, this is at the beginning of the CGI revolution. I felt this shot was not very compelling and it inspired me to look for a way to make it look better with sound.

Look for your opportunities to tell the story with sound when you begin a project.

CGI is a tool, like any other. As I’m sure you know, it is often over used, like many other technologies, as an end but not a means. In my opinion...

(card - TRANSCENDANCE)

Tools cannot transcend themselves, only people can. People with ideas. And, ultimately, it is transcendence that we're looking for. It's the reason we go to be entertained…to transcend our every-day lives. To have an experience of the “other”.

Therefore it's incumbent upon us as artists to provide transcendence. How do we do that? We do that by asking why not how.

Plug-ins, camera lenses, or CGI do not provide a transcendent experiences. Ideas provide transcendent experiences. Aren't you better served exploring the importance of ideas over technology?

I don't mean to marginalize the importance of technology. I don't. In fact...

(card - IDEAS)

…there are certain ideas of mine that I couldn't achieve without state-of-the-art technology.

But my focus is always on the idea first. I must have the idea before I have a need for technology to service that idea. It doesn't work the other way around.

Technology lives in service of the artist. Artists live in service of ideas.

When I was a child…

(picture of Mark with first guitar)

I was mystified and frightened by art and artists. I didn't understand them and what their inspirations were, what motivated them. I saw them as mystical and divine individuals. I spent the rest of my life or at least my professional life desperately trying to find that inspiration, the music that motivates the artist. I think I’ve found some of the answers and one of them is:

(card) BRAVERY

… an unshakable belief in ones ideas and the willingness to risk ridicule to share them. That’s a defining characteristic of an artist: someone who seeks the truth and summons their bravery to share that truth. I think bravery is an exalted human characteristic that is in short supply and that modern culture breeds out of us. We’ve lost contact with our inner selves and our ability to tell our truth. We lack bravery. Perhaps this is why we so idolize great art and great artists. They embody much of what we aspire to. Because they are in this process, so uniquely human and so vulnerable. That vulnerability has a lot to do with the ability to ...

(card) FEEL

Another artistic pre-requisite that we are not taught or schooled in. But vital to understanding drama and the needs of a story. Actors understand this and study how to feel as second nature. Getting in touch with “feeling” is as reflexive to an actor as breathing or walking. …..Not so for the rest of us.

Sound Designers generally are technically disposed which, often, keeps us out of touch with our emotional side so necessary to understanding drama and feeling.

I came upon the idea that, if I could understand a film from the actors point of view, a feeling point of view, I could use those insights to inform my own work. So I started taking acting and comedy improvisation classes. And it has been a revelation and a huge benefit in my ability to communicate with my filmmakers as well as be a more empathetic sound designer. I recommend this path for anyone who wants to improve their storytelling abilities.

One of the valuable lessons I learned in acting class was that of…

(card) Commitment.

No idea will ever come to full fruition nor will a director ever fully invest in your ideas, or commit to your ideas, if you're not committed to them yourself. As a performer, it becomes clear quickly that if you don't commit to your choices or your role or your lines, the audience will lose interest in your character and you lose credibility. In that respect your director is your audience. If you don't commit, if you don't invest in your ideas….how can you expect them to?

The post-production supervisor called me on a Friday and asked if I would consider working on a short sequence in the new JJ Abrams directed STAR TREK. It’s now 2009. Furthermore, if I were interested, could I have it done in two days?

I must first make a disclaimer that I didn’t design this film, I only worked on this little two minute sequence I’m about to show you. Mark Stoeckinger, one the great Los Angeles based sound editors supervised the film and he and his team did a masterful job. I was called in the last week of final mix  to bring a fresh perspective on this one scene while Mark was doing all the hard work!

When I first listened to the mix of the scene (of Spock, the Vulcan, mind-melding with Kirk), I was perplexed because it sounded really good. But JJ wanted something …different. So I set about designing new “sounds”. I wasted a day creating things you’ve never heard before only to feel that what I had achieved was different… but NOT better. That night I had an epiphany.

(image of clouds and light)

The sounds themselves were not the problem, it was the “design” of the sequence. It was not telling the story JJ wanted to tell and I’m not sure even JJ knew it.

(Storytelling)

Having worked on three previous Star Trek films, I had a some familiarity with the Star-Trek narrative. I knew that  a Vulcan Mind meld was a tenuous method of communication not unlike calling the moon from Earth. The original mix of this sequence didn’t work on that level. It was bombastic and played like a trailer for the movie, in the middle of the movie. It conveyed no mystery and it underlined every story point. So I rung up my friend Mark Binder and we set about building the sequence from the ground up to tell a different story. One of a dream-like half-reality that teased and never pandered to the audience. We removed the score and built a more hypnotic “soundscape” from twelve-tone scale orchestral samples and orchestral percussion. Sound Effects were changed to be much more ambient and dialog was chopped up and processed to be considerably more unintelligible and less expository. Easily half of what JJ had written for the sequence was removed. We pretty much turned it on it’s head till it no longer resembled anything JJ would recognize. Here’s the final mix of that re-think.

(Watch Star Trek 2009)

This sequence is nothing like what the director had originally approved or given detailed notes on to his team…or us. The original score was gone. Most of Spock’s overly expository voice over was gone and most of the sound effects were different….

In a traditional paradigm, who should have been responsible for such a wide ranging change? Who should make the critical decisions about how a sound track works globally from a content and creative standpoint? And what if that isn’t the director? As our work has become increasingly compartmentalized, it seems we are content to worry only about our specialized domain in sound: dialog, music or sound fx. Sadly, the sound designer, the one person who should have dominion over the entire soundtrack has become known or recognized as only a sound effects creator. I contend that the true sound designer or sound artist is that person who has the WHOLE sound track in mind. The person who has the ideas and convictions to address the entirety of the track and and takes authorship of the creative decisions that serve the narrative.

JJ liked the work we had done and understood that we were simply telling his story with sound. His approval validated my belief in letting the narrative guide my sound choices.

While this validation was quite rewarding I think the best gift from this experience was my credit…

(screenshot of credit from movie)

Mind Meld Sound Scape by:

This is the coolest credit ever…. For now…

(card) RISK TAKING

My most satisfying successes have come as a consequence of being direct and honest with my filmmakers. I screw up my courage and take responsibility and creative risks by sharing what I think the story needs and how that translates into a sound approach. I fear that our sound culture hasn’t built a tradition of participating in these kinds discussions and, as such, we haven’t learned that language, or to be very direct with our filmmakers

Author Malcolm Gladwell talks a little about this notion of not speaking ones mind in his book, THE OUTLIERS, where he discusses this notion of:

(card) MITIGATED SPEECH

Mitigated speech is when we speak in a deferential way in order to be polite or show respect to authority often at the expense of telling the truth and problem solving. When we engage in mitigated speech we don’t communicate clearly, directly or truthfully about what we want or what we think works. It stops us from being honest with our filmmakers. This kind of speech is a Hollywood epidemic and, I would argue, a global one that should come as no surprise to anyone working in cinema. How often do we find ourselves searching for complimentary things to say to our filmmakers so as not to risk our political capital or alienate what we think might be an inflated ego.

As Pauline Kael (the well known NY based Film Critic) once said:

(card) with Kael quote

“Hollywood is the only place where you can die of encouragement”.

We don’t grow from being yes-men or women and art doesn’t get created without risk. It’s at the core of it’s creation or, as Francis Ford Coppola famously said:

(card) Coppola quote

“Cinema without risk is like having no sex and expecting a baby. You have to take risk”.

Part of my message today, my gentle motherly reminder, is “be courageous and speak your mind. We owe our filmmakers …and ourselves honesty and risk taking.

(card) HONESTY

The importance of honesty cannot be over emphasized. I've been hired because I was brutally honest with a film-maker on a project I didn't feel I was right for. Honesty is like a straight shot to the heart. It's immediate, effective and is unmistakable.

When we focus on the why of art we celebrate that which is uniquely feeling and human. When we celebrate the how of art we reduce ourselves to machines. It’s easy to resolve how to get things done, how to fix things. How to do things is vitally important. But the world is full of “how” people…they are what I call problem-solvers. The world is not in short supply of problems solvers. We are in short supply of...

(card) Problem identifiers.

Problem identification….that’s an interesting aspect to sound design. Identifying the problem sometimes is a mystery, you know something is just not right but you can’t put your finger on it. Sometimes, too, the answer is right in front of your nose...

I did a film 6 years ago called JACK THE GIANT SLAYER. Do any of you know it? It’s based on a well known English fairy-tale about Jack, the young son of a poor means who is sent to market ...

(cow and beanstalk)

to sell the family cow. Instead he trades it for a  handful of magic beans. Disgusted that Jack could not be trusted with the responsibility he was given, the father throws the beans out the window and a bean-stalk grows into the sky and into a magical land of terrifying giants!

There is a wonderful little poem associated with the JACK fairy tale that every child learns.  It begins: FEE FI FO FUM, I SMELL THE BLOOD OF AN ENGLISHMAN.

Think about this rhyme as we watch a short clip from JACK THE GIANT SLAYER.

(Watch a clip from JACK THE GIANT SLAYER)

When I first started work on the film, this was the first sequence I was given to work on. There was no sound to accompany the CGI created giant you saw in the clip. The animator had created a variety of facial expressions and mouth movements that suggested growls and roars but not the one behavior that defines the giants... and it’s referenced in that children's rhyme I mentioned earlier...

SNIFFING. (play video) The children's rhyme says FEE FI FO FUM I SMELL the blood of an Englishman. If there was to be one defining visual behavior of the giants it would be their sense of smell! Yet nowhere in the film was this idea utilized. So I created giant-sized sniffing and smelling sounds and cut them into the original shot that did not have this action of them smelling. I sent this sound mockup to the director asking why the giants were not embodied with this particular behavior. It explained alot about their character and gave them all sorts of other possibilities dramatically (like how to find the sneaky knights who were out to destroy them!)

It was so self-evident once I pointed out this shortcoming that the producer ordered all CGI shots with giants to be re-animated to include “smelling”. This came at great expense but was a necessary improvement to stay consistent with the story.

(card) HELP

I got the call on a Friday night and I was in Sydney, (Australia) the following Monday. No one knew quite why the film didn’t sound right but they knew it didn’t  and they needed help. Could I get them back on track? Could I put the directors vision BACK on the screen?

(and could I do it in four weeks)?

Thus began my six month odyssey of re-imagining the sound of MAD MAX - FURY ROAD.

The story of why MAD MAX FURY ROAD didn’t achieve it’s sonic potential is not made clearer by explaining the technicalities of what went wrong in Sydney, though a lot had. It just didn’t fulfill George Millers vision of the film. George had intelligently described to his sound team how to achieve success by using his

(card - TOP OF THE PYRAMID)

TOP OF THE PYRAMID analogy:

(image of white board)

White-boarded here, by our Aussie Dialog Supervisor Wayne Pashley, it describes a methodology of determining what, at any given moment in the film, is the narrative concept and focusing on what one sound best tells that story. That’s the TOP OF THE PYRAMID. All great re-recording mixers know this like their social security number. Its how to create focus and clarity in a mix. Every scene must have a...

(card - Point of View)

Point of view. Not just visually, but sonically. But unless the sound design has followed this concept from a content and organizational standpoint, success is mitigated and greatness is difficult to achieve. Yet everything was there, in fact an over-abundance of choice was available. So much so that, finding a point of view for any given scene made the final mix an agonizing exercise of sound design by process of elimination. This is not fertile ground for excellence.

The story of why FURY ROAD didn’t achieve it’s sonic potential is made clearer by understanding that no one wanted to speak the un-speakable to George: “This isn’t working”. That’s blasphemy…right! Tell one of the worlds greatest filmmakers the sound track was not tent-pole awesome...and should be!?

Part of the dilemma of mitigated speech is just this kind of abdication of responsibility.

(card - Honesty and Bravery)

Who would tell George Miller?

But we owe this…this honesty…to our filmmakers. I could see George’s mounting frustration and inability to get his sonic vision on screen. I knew the film could sound better and MAD MAX, any MAD MAX film just begs for jaw dropping sight and sound. But it wasn’t there. It was up to me, incumbent upon me as an artist, to tell George Miller his V8  needed an overhaul and not just a tune-up. No mitigated speech here. I felt the film needed a re-think that we just didn’t have time or money for and was ready to stand up for the consequences: telling the studio the film wouldn’t be finished on schedule, needing 12 more weeks of mixing and sound editorial and a sum with a lot of zeros after it to accomplish.

(image - Mark Depressed)

I had many sleepless nights in that first week in Australia where I imagined how my firing would look and feel.

But my pitch was received warmly and with encouragement from George who understood my sincerity, my vision and what it meant to his film. We agreed that we would finish a first pass of the mix in Sydney with what we had, anticipating a return to Los Angeles where, with the help of co-supervising sound editor Scott Hecker, we would improve the sound of the film.

(image - mixing Mad Max)

This meant giving every sound meaning and intention and using sound to tell the story, beat by beat. TOP OF THE PYRAMID. Making the vehicles, especially the war rig, the massive truck that Furiosa drives, recurring characters in the drama. They each needed personality, as unique as the actors. They needed to do more than simply accelerate or slow down, travel from right to left… and should be threatening at one moment, a haven for safety at another. Sound needed to convey this very ephemeral aspect of Max’s deteriorating mental state and convey at times, total isolation as when Max stumbles on the war rig during a massive chase sequence and all the sound gets sucked out of the track, only to be jarringly re-introduced as his consciousness returns.

We found allegory for action to inspire creative uses of sound.

(image - Moby Dick)

The chase across the desert became Moby Dick (a well know English literary masterpiece) with Immortan Joe as Captain Ahab and the war rig as his great white whale. The truck moaned with the sounds of humpbacks each time it was harpooned and the war rig hissed and fumed with bursts of whale blowholes. These were the kind of narrative decisions we made re-constructing the sound track to FURY ROAD to give it greater life and impact. The value was not in how we used sounds but having a why for them. This is what gave the track intentionality and, I think, a meaningful sonic immersion.

So I give you now, a small glimpse of our work on MAD MAX, FURY ROAD

(Run Clip from MAD MAX FURY ROAD)

I’m so proud of this film and what we accomplished narratively with sound. In quiet moments like the opening with the lizard and syncing radio static to its scampering, to the immensity of the War Rig and it’s bestial sounds as it dies. None of that would have been possible without the talents of Chris Jenkins and Gregg Rudloff, our re-recording team whom I spent 6 months with in a dark room mixing. But no story of FURY ROAD would be complete, nor would any discussion of success in a sound track, be without talking about my relationship with the composer Junkie XL aka Tom Holkenborg.

We would meet every morning before the mix for coffee to talk about the movie and find ways that sound and music could collaborate and work together to tell Georges story. We lamented that our departments rarely cooperated or collaborated. I have found that this is something of a universal truth in post-production. We began to develop this notion of “collaborative sound design”, a process whereby we would build the sound of the film together. As fate would have it, Tom and I would collaborate on our very next film, BLACK MASS, and we implemented this idea. Tom and I start a project in very similar ways, gathering a wide range sonic textures that will become of our palette from which to create. On BLACK MASS, Tom beat me to this and handed over 25gB of samples and said “do whatever you want with this”. And we accomplished, I believe, that oft yearned for goal of a seamless blend of music and sound effects and the holy grail: not knowing which was which.

(card - A Bed Time Story)

We sound artists have convinced ourselves of the importance of sound and it’s value to a film. George Lucas famously said “Sound is 50% of the movie-going experience”. But does anyone really believe it? Do filmmakers give this idea lip service to make us feel good? I am happy to report that MAD MAX - FURY ROAD has given us concrete proof.

The first time we previewed the film to an audience we got a decent but not great score. George Miller subsequently signed off on my ideas about re-designing the sound for the film. 12 weeks later we previewed the same film, no picture edits, no new music, and no new VFX. Really nothing material changed except for  our “new, re-imagined sound”. It scored 8 points higher! Let me say that again…it scored 8 points higher with nothing more than an improved sound track. George would later tell us as we completed the film:

(card - George Miller quote)

“Mad Max is a film where we see with our ears. … I had no idea the enormous extent to which sound could help me tell this story…I have never experienced such a potent effect by the well orchestrated use of sound.”

This from a director who has been making films for almost 40 years.

(card - COURAGE, STORYTELLING, HONESTY)

Sound Design is storytelling, regardless of your discipline in post. ADR Editor, Foley Artist, Re-recording mixer…Sound Design is an emotional space you should live in, as an artist, where you know why you want to go somewhere sonically rather than how you are going to get there. It’s about intentionality… and it requires courage, storytelling skills and honesty.

Fading out dialog fills is piece-meal work. Making sure the gunshot is in sync with the muzzle flash is piece-meal work. It is not my intention to minimize the importance of good craft. It’s how we learn what we do and gives us those crucial “10,000” hours so necessary to being experts in our discipline.

But in the rushed environment that is modern post-production, where time management is an art and we can only attend to so many aspects of our work, let’s shift the balance, let’s put our finger on the scale and tip it towards sound as narrative and story immersion.

I love the expression Tabula rasa. It means the blank page.

(image - THE BLANK PAGE)

Everyone in the creativity business understand this concept. It’s that awful , anxiety filled place we start from before we get “the idea”. The space you  and I want to live in, as much as possible, is on that page:

(image - mixing console)

Or on that console:

(image - Editing station)

Or on that workstation.

It’s that place where you make the leap from nothingness to originality.

That’s the place where you stretch your creative muscles and find new ways to tell stories with sound.

Exercise that muscle.

Ask why and not how

Seek Emotional immersion

Speak the language of cinema

Be the authors of content

Be honest and direct

Celebrate ideas over technology

Commit

Take risks….

(Image)

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