In our first lecture for Sound for Screen, Milo played us the first 50 minutes of ‘Making Waves’, a history of sound for screen.
This documentary focussed on work by Walter Murch, Ben Burrt, Robert Altman, Randy Thorn, Richard Beggs, John Lasseter & Gary Rydstrom.
“Ears lead our eyes to where the story lives.” – Spielberg on Saving Private Ryan saying “Sound is the scale, view is limited” on the open D-Day scene, where an incredibly intense and visceral sound scape of war was carefully layered together, between close, tightly filmed visuals with very little visibility of the landscape. The scene an approximation of the chaos of war yet “there is a rhythm to chaos”.
The film sites the war genre as a pioneering area of sound design within movies as means to drive the plot, explosion sounds or battle sounds were needed on order to get across what was happening. Monster movies like King Kong, and sci-fi radio dramas. Jack Foley, the first foley artist, started out making sound effects to enhance radio dramas which bled over to syncing to screen. Citizen Kane, supposedly at the forefront for uses of foley in film.
Use of reverb, crowd cheer, applause, shifted in volume when dialogue from Kane’s son.
Sound =/= Music
Too much music and there is no impact. These two elements must be balanced.
Walter Murch was influenced by Pierre Schaeffer, and the films of Jean Luc Godard, which broke conventions of sound editing, having dialogue un synced to the image.
Walter Murch’s work on THX 1138, George Lucas caught the attention of Lucas’ friend Coppola, who’s partnership went on to create this scene from Godfather, which revolutionised use of SFX in film, and went onto collaborate on Apocalypse Now.
Much claimed this was inspiration
Beatles early stereo experimentation. Stereo was accepted into screens by cinemas, due to Barbara Streisand’s insistence before the launch of A Star Is Born (1976) 9 Years after Stereo became used in recorded music. John Lennon was influenced by Yoko’s sound recordings and reportedly, Stockhausen’s ‘Hymnen’ – which notable for my other specialisation was performed in quadraphony.
The film then talked about Ben Burtt, sound designer on Star Wars. Ben Burtt was religiously recorded sounds off his television onto a reel to reel tape recorder. When recording Star Wars, he would plan expeditions to Garages, Factories and other locations to collect sounds for the film.
The documentary also mentioned Alan Splet, who considering I am a big Lynch fan, I wasn’t aware of. His eerie work on Eraserhead, has contributed to Lynch’s heavy use of atmospheric ‘room tone’.
Lynch talks about Sound like painting. “I used to say picture dictates sounds, but sometimes it’s the other way round”. – “50 percent of the picture and to get it to marry the picture is the trick…”
He’d described Alan Splet’s wind sounds as “maximum power”.
“Sound can create a big world”, this concept is the same for Eraserheads eerie atmosphere, and Private Ryan’s grounded action sequence.
“In every instance of every sound, there are 760 million sounds that are wrong and there’s 34 sounds that are correct. And of the 34, 27 are very similar, but 7 of the 34 are completely weird, but they still work.”
When talking about working with sound Lynch says it’s ‘Action and Reaction until you get what’s correct’
An interview with Anne Kroeber, Alan Splet’s wife. She talks about recording sounds with the late Splet, on Dune and other projects and capturing the ‘Lynchian World’ with flat response pick ups on metal walls in a steel mill, to give the wind sounds strange metallic resonance.
They met collaborating on the sound for The Black Stallion (1979), in which the horse recordings they captured are apparently still in circulation to this day, the film was directed by Coppola in order to source funds for Apocalypse Now.
At interesting video about the functionality of room tone.