At The Academy: MAKING WAVES: THE ART OF CINEMATIC SOUND

The Academy
Nov 1 · 6 min read

Though the term “motion picture” might indicate we’re focusing on what our eyes see on a screen, the sounds we hear can have just as profound an impact. The artistry of sound design takes center stage for this documentary featuring pioneers in the field as well as their innovative creative collaborators, and the Academy was pleased to hear from several of those who put it all together including producer-director Midge Costin, producers Bobette Buster and Karen Johnson, subject Walter Murch and editor David J. Turner.

As Costin explains, the point of this film isn’t to get you to focus on just the sound while watching a movie; after all, “We want you to notice the story, the characters, and you people say a lot to me, ‘Oh, it must ruin the movie for you because you must just be thinking about sound and be conscious of sound.’ But no, I’m not, unless it’s really, really good and something different maybe — or really, really bad! We don’t do sound for sound’s sake, like something like the radio, but we’re doing it with picture and you want it to work with the picture so well that you don’t realize what we’re doing.”

Three-time Oscar winner Murch, whose work begins during the postproduction process, has been a constant in the industry. After all, “The budget for post-production sound on films is a relatively small proportion, and when other things happen during the shooting, the budget for sound will inevitably diminish. So we’re always struggling. But it depends ultimately on the director and the director’s interest. Somebody like Orson Welles, who came from a radio theater background, brought it with him when he did Citizen Kane and all of his subsequent films; he was fascinated with the power of sound and the spatialization of sound, which had been almost completely ignored up to that point. Before Citizen Kane, people just depended on the picture to give you a sense of the space. What Welles did that broke new ground was to also involve sound in that spatialization, and Hitchcock was very fascinated by sound. So, it depends on the filmmakers themselves to be the forces that drive this.”

For Buster, this project was a long time coming. In fact, she explains, it goes back to her days in the Peter Stark Producing Program at USC when her film production teacher, Jay Roach, gave a sound design lecture. “It was The Elephant Man with Alan Splet, who was the sound designer with David Lynch, and it just blew my ears wide open that you could create such an inner life revealed of this monster who so hated his life; you felt his loneliness in the first reels, and then you brought in the Samuel Barber “Adagio” as he developed in confidence and love of life and we saw the immersion and the revelation of dignity. And that just blew my mind. So anyway, I went on to create a course on sound and storytelling, did it around the world. Pixar asked me to do it there, and who should be in my audience but Gary Rydstrom who’s won seven Oscars for sound design. I was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s Gary Rydstrom,’ I went up to him and I said, ‘Mr. Rydstrom, if you don’t agree…’ And he said, ‘I love this, let’s go to lunch.’ And so I got very cheeky and I said, ‘You know, how come you guys haven’t done a documentary? It’s about time.’ And he said, ‘Look, we’re very busy; it would take a long time.’ And at that time clips clearances was the big bugaboo. You know, it’d be too expensive. But I had been working with the USC Entertainment Law Clinic on fair use with Jack Lerner and Michael Donaldson, and I’d been actually to Capitol Hill testifying before the Librarian of Congress. He said, ‘You know, Bobette, if you do it I’ll back you and I’ll introduce you to all the major people. George Lucas, Spielberg, Walter Murch, Ben Burtt. But,’ he said, ‘you have to go to Midge Costin at USC.’ And that’s how we started it.”

Eager to do a project about this profession and its current impressive roster of female talent deserving of exposure (“If you can see it, you can be it”), Johnson got involved after doing a documentary about Hollywood stuntwomen. She had studied at USC with Buster, “so she was aware of my background and interest in that and described the project to me. I had a strong memory of having seen Visions of Light, which had come out in theaters at a time that you rarely saw a documentary in theaters, and so the idea of exploring the other half of the cinematic experience was appealing to me.” USC was also the connection for Turner: “We have a class where everyone kind of comes together and we divide up into different roles, and the sound is celebrated just as much as the other crafts in that. I actually was able to take that class with Midge at USC, and that was kind of how I got connected to the whole film.”

“We’re doing the same thing in documentary as we are in features,” Costin says of the format. “We’re helping tell the story, we’re thinking about character, we’re thinking about setting a mood and a tone, and you know, sometimes students come into USC and they might think like documentary is more truthful or something, but it’s like you’re passionate about something, that’s why you want to tell a story. When you’re recording somebody, when you’re recording on the set or when you’re recording in a location, you’re getting the voice mostly. So if somebody’s speaking, you’re really trying to get the voice. You miss all these other things so it’s not like real life, so we have to recreate that to make it seem natural. We’re always going for that kind of performance in fiction.”

Murch had his own analogy for the impact of motion picture sound that he calls the “dancing shadow.” As he puts it, “Before cinema, the world creates sound, but those sounds are inevitably accompanied by the thing that produced them, like when we walk around, our shadow just follows us. What happens in cinema is that we can detach that shadow of sound from the object that creates it, and we can create strange other shadows or we can make the shadow of sound dance on its own. It was an unprecedented liberation of two of the senses that had seemed to be inevitably twinned together, sight and sound. But cinema allowed us to detach those and give each of them a prominence when it was appropriate…

“There’s also a funny, particular alchemy of the way the human brain works. If sound is having an influence on you in cinema, by and large it’s flying underneath the radar of conscious perception how that is influencing you, and yet you are being influenced by it. But what happens is that you, the audience, re-project that feeling onto the screen and then you attribute how you’re feeling to what you’re looking at. But you’re actually being made to feel that, the alchemy between the sound and picture.”

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