Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/407863
22 CINEMONTAGE / NOV-DEC 14 Bound, where they, along with Zach, were sitting in the audience, making their own sound effects. They were wild, and we ended up talking and all fell in love. The tableau of sound was very creatively open; they wanted to exaggerate the sound in a lot of ways and expand the subjectivity. I had an excellent time doing Bound." The Wachowskis were also very loyal, so when The Matrix was finally greenlit, they brought along the Bound crew, including Davis and Staenberg (who would also win an Oscar for his editing), to work on it. Davis had already read the script for The Matrix when he worked on Bound, and was blown away by it. "I thought this would be so amazing from a cinematography and sound point of view," he recalls. In fact, a year and a half before The Matrix fully got the green light, Davis had been tapped to create a sound effect for the bullet-time sequence, which the Wachowskis were doing as a proof of concept. "Gunshots and F-22 fighter jets among other sounds that create turbulence give a sense of scale and create a feeling of intensity and terror," he explains. "Then I experimented until I found the right balance." Later, for the movie's real bullet-time shots, Davis re- created the sound effect in the same way. Although The Matrix was shot with film, other digital tools were used in the making of the movie, which Staenberg cut on the Avid. Davis used a version of DigiDesign Pro Tools, shortly after the company was acquired by Avid. "My idea was that because The Matrix is about the digital world and digital realities, I didn't want to use any of my outboard gear," he says. "I wanted to do it all inside the computer, in the box. "With this new TDM [time division multiplexing] version of DigiDesign's Pro Tools, I could open a session, close it and re-open it — and it would remember what all my plug-in settings were within the tracks; that was revolutionary," he continues. "Although Pro Tools wasn't that powerful or stable at that time, my plan worked. It was a giant breakthrough in terms of how I did my sound design." The Wachowskis didn't give Davis much concrete instruction on what they wanted. "We talked about everything but specifics," he says. "They had three requirements for the sound: to make everything as cool as possible, to make everything focused on the story and to make everything as cool as possible." They also gave him a list of Hong Kong martial arts films to watch. "They wanted me to take what was cool and exciting from those films but avoid the traps," he says. "There's a passion and powerfulness to the sounds in those movies. On the other hand, there's a repetitiveness that can come across as corny. I had to figure out a way to keep that power and passion without repetitiveness." One key instruction from the Wachowskis was that, in the "real world," they make everything they had out of spare parts left over from a century of warfare with the machines. "So their ships, communication devices, weapons and so on had to reflect that homemade quality rather than anything manufactured," he says. "This idea really helped me design those sounds." Davis made another aesthetic decision: to avoid making any sound feel synthetic. "I knew that all of our experiences would have to resonate as organic and plausible in our 'real' world so that we, like Neo, would never reject our aural experience as fake," he says. "To that end, we used only recordings of real acoustic events as sources to create all the sounds in the movie. The only exception was the hologram on their ship, which involved an audio synthesizing Dane Davis recording the hovercraft arcing rotors for The Matrix in 1998. CONTINUED FROM PAGE 20 CONTINUED ON PAGE 24