Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/336911
46 Post • June 2014 www.postmagazine.com coming up with tools that recreate driving sounds so well you can actually use them for your film." Watkins also recommends having a sound recordist on-set to capture the vehicle sounds specifi- cally as they're happening in the scene. "They should send out John Fasal, an amazing sound effects recordist. He's one of a small few to say 'I'm not a sound design- er anymore, I'm a professional sound effects recordist.' And because of that specialty, there is no one better," says Watkins. "When you go out with John Fasal, you realize you're with the only PhD sound effects record- ist in the business. John can go out and record anything: a tank, a jet, a gun, a car, a baby, anything and he'll come back with the goods. That's what a professional sound effects recordist is all about." From sci-fi shootouts to realistic gunfights, Watkins really enjoys doing weapons design. For example, he's really fond of a mini-gun sound he created for Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2. His favor- ite film scene was the shootout in the rain in Inception. "I was a sound effects editor working under Richard King. Due to a tight schedule, that was one of the only scenes in Inception that I really got to carve out," says Watkins. One of his favorite effects he recorded was a long shell-casing roll for the film Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. "During the scene where Robert Downey Jr. is hiding under the bed, you hear this really long shell-casing roll that goes all the way around the surrounds and back to your left." Watkins recorded a 308 shell casing roll- ing on his floor at home using a Schoeps M/S set with MK4 and MK8 capsules onto a Sound Devices 722 at 96k. "It was one of those crazy moments where the recording worked out perfect the way it was," Watkins says. ETHAN VAN DER RYN AND ERIK AADAHL — GODZILLA Supervising sound editors/sound designers Ethan Van der Ryn and Erik Aadahl are co-founders of E² in Los Angeles (http://www.e2sound.com). This award- winning team has seven Oscar nominations between them. Recent projects include Godzilla, World War Z and Argo. Van der Ryn and Aadahl feel the move to digital audio has been the biggest change for the audio post industry. Working digitally, Aadahl says, gives them the ability to manipulate sounds quickly and easily and in the highest quality. For their recent work on the 2014 Godzilla remake, Van der Ryn and Aadahl recorded sounds at the highest resolution possible with a Sank- en CO-100K mic that has a frequency range up to 100kHz. Talking about the original 1954 Godzilla, they note that was the first film in Japan to use magnetic audio tape, an integral factor in creating Godzilla's roar. "With the magnetic audio tape, they could slow down sounds much easier," says Aadahl. "They slowed down a recording of a double bass played by a leather glove sliding on the strings to create that iconic shriek sound." Van der Ryn and Aadahl recreated the Godzilla roar and recorded it with a Sanken CO-100K. Accord- ing to Aadahl, "When we pitched down the sound into human range, there is this whole treasure trove of sound now at our disposal. The ability to have much higher resolution gives us a bigger palette of colors to work with." One challenge in sound design, the team notes, is putting sounds into the environment on screen, and then moving those sounds through the environment in a realistic way. For example, having a Godzilla vocal moving past camera with a realistic Doppler effect that bounces off the surrounding environment. While DAWs have unquestionably changed what we can do, and how we can work, designing sound is still not a fluid process, says Van der Ryn. "We have different little tricks, and use all these different tools, and have differ- ent ways of recording and processing," adds Aadahl. "That all happens on a computer screen." For the future of sound design, Van der Ryn proposes we get away from the workstation and instead create sound design in a virtual environment where swiping your hand 'past camera' would add a Doppler effect, reverb, and other effects to help put the sound into the film. He says, "Years ago, we set up an experiment on a film where Erik and I used a theremin to build this contrap- tion that we hooked up to plug-ins through Pro Tools. We were basically able to perform sound design by what we did in relation to the theremin, and how we moved around it. It translated our movements and recorded them directly into Pro Tools." Expanding- on that idea, Van der Ryn adds, the next step might be to eliminate the workstation entirely and somehow make the whole process, the translation between what you're imagining and what you actually create, more fluid. BENJAMIN COOK — BLACK SAILS SEASON 2 Benjamin Cook is an award-winning supervising sound editor/sound designer at the full-service audio post facility 424 Post in Culver City, CA (http:// www.424post.com). Cook is currently working on his second season of the Starz series, Black Sails. His recent film work includes: Heaven Is for Real, Muppets Most Wanted and Ride Along. The processing power of computers has gotten so massive, says Cook, that what seemed impossible, or was too cost or time prohibitive five years ago, you can now do relatively easily. From the types of plug-ins available, to workstation track counts, to how complex the mix is, that all comes back to processing power. "Everything happens much faster now," explains Cook. "There used to be built-in time to do certain things, change reels or do off-line processing, but all that downtime is gone. You just roll from one thing to the next. Speed is probably the biggest change for me as a result of increased computer processing power." One beneficial result of increased processing power, for Cook, was the creation of very powerful plug-ins, such as the iZotope RX3 audio repair toolkit, and Unveil by Zynaptiq. "Unveil actually removes reverb from a track, which was a bane for a lot of mixers," notes Cook. "Without the reverb issue, when you go from a wide shot recorded with a boom mic to a closer shot, the sound matches better without having to go to ADR." In addition to powerful plug-ins, increased process- ing power has led to more complex playback formats such as Dolby Atmos and Barco's Auro. For the future, Cook would like to see Dolby Atmos built right into the workstation environment. "It's just coming out in the higher-end consoles, but to have that built into the workstation itself, then you wouldn't need the con- sole," he says. As more theaters adopt Dolby Atmos, or Barco's Auro, the next logical jump would be to home the- aters. It's highly unlikely that a home theater would have a 62.2 surround setup, so how will consumers playback Dolby Atmos at home? Headphones are a good solution. Cook likes the idea behind the Realis- er A8 by Smyth Research. It's a standalone processor that connects to any audio system and emulates the playback of eight speakers through a pair of head- phones. Not only does it playback the surround mix, but it also emulates the listening environment. According to the Smyth Research site, any audio system in any room can be measured, stored, and emulated at will. According to Cook, "That means consumers would be able to vir tually hear things the way they were mixed in the room they were mixed in. That's a really interesting technology where I think we're going to see huge inroads." S O U N D D E S I G N [ Cont.from 30 ] At press time, Benjamin Cook was working on Season 2 of Starz's Black Sails series.