Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1314046
C A S Q U A R T E R L Y I FA L L 2 0 2 0 27 KEYNOTE ADDRESS Recap by Peter Kelsey CAS The Role of Art and Technology: WALTER MURCH Interviewed by Larry Blake This was advertised as a keynote speech, but it was in effect, an interview by Larry Blake exploring Walter Murch's history and contributions to picture editing and to sound. Murch is credited with inventing the term "Sound Designer" and is the only person to have Academy Awards in Sound and Picture Editing for the same movie, The English Patient. Larry opened by asking Walter about his early days at Zoetrope Studios with Francis Ford Coppola in 1969, working on the movie The Rain People. All editing at that time was done on a Moviola with a Steenbeck that was used, according to Walter, as a mini screening room. The editor handed Murch the movie saying, "Here it is," and Walter was on his own. He was in Los Angeles and not in any union and was afraid of getting sound effects from Warner Bros., so he went out and recorded all his own effects, including Foley on a Nagra machine. He was working in a house that belonged to George Lucas and set up an editing suite in an empty room there. He had an Omega transfer machine so he could do his own transfers from the Nagra. The movie was mixed in San Francisco on a Kem mixing setup that had the capability of being able to punch in. Prior to that, every mix would have to start from the beginning again if you made a mistake. The Kem also had high-speed rewind, which had to be synced up again after rewinding. He would premix six tracks down to one on a 3-track and then do that twice more to have 18 tracks premixed. The Kem was 20 input, four output. The Godfather: Part II, THX 1138, and American Graffiti were also mixed on that Kem board. Then Larry asked, if at that time Walter had had Pro Tools with 500 tracks, would he have done anything differently? Walter started his reply by stating that one of the founding principles of Zoetrope was that the person who cut the sound effects would also mix them. If one person cut and another mixed, the editor would "cover his ass" by adding track after track. One person cutting and mixing enabled the track count to be kept down. And all the mixing for the films mentioned above, along with The Conversation, were done by one person, Walter. The motto was, "Be bold, have an approach, stick to it, do it, and that's the mix." Because of that, he doesn't listen to those movies now and think "I wish I'd had…" He states, "If you go in with a concept behind what you are doing, it's as straightforward as it can be." WALTER MURCH Sound Designer, Film Editor LARRY BLAKE Supervising Sound Editor & Re-recording Mixer Larry asked, "With Apocalypse Now, how did you take that big leap from just a few inputs to many?" Walker replied, "It was terrifying because instead of 16 tracks, we had 256 tracks to premix." He regrouped them all onto two 24-track machines synced up by Minimag. He had an automated board and was mixing to 5.1, which was breaking new ground at that time. He said he was "in a pretty terrified happy state all the time" because he had to invent ways of doing things as he went along. He did a lot of premixing. Apparently, one of the peculiar oddities of Apocalypse was that they were using dbx sound processing, which has 20 dB or 30 dB of clamping for everything except the final mix—which was done using Dolby A, which has 6 dB to 9 dB of clamping. Conversely,