Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/407863
24 CINEMONTAGE / NOV-DEC 14 chip to render the sounds for the operator, so I used a very primitive audio synthesizer program to create all of those sounds on the final mix stage where I first saw the visuals." The first sound he recorded was to accompany what happens when Neo takes a pill that Morpheus offers to discover what lies beneath his perceived reality. "This scene is one of the most subjective because we are experiencing the connection process through Neo's POV while he becomes aware of himself," says Davis. "The key sound challenge was creating that transition point when the camera takes us into Neo's virtual throat, which is making the scream from his real body that he didn't know he had. My approach was to start with the apparent high resolution of his Matrix sensory inputs, and then degenerate into more and more quantized, granular bits of his own sound to simulate that transition of virtual sense breaking down, and then resolving into high resolution again once his eyes and ears were sensing directly and not through the wires and software of the Matrix." To do this, Davis used a technique he developed for an earlier experimental film. "I called it micro- looping, but it really was just making many, many tiny, nearly redundant, pieces of sound that together felt stuck and moving forward at the same time," he says. "I would go back and adjust where they started, to give the sense of scanning through a sound. It allowed me to absolutely control how sound transformed and gave a digital edge to it." He wired the file to the Wachowskis in Sydney (in 1998, it took eight hours to wire a one-minute file). "They liked it, so I kept going," says Davis. Another early sound he recorded was an "enormous vocabulary" of whooshes for the fight scenes. "It seemed to me that the only way to make it work was to go extreme with the approach," says Davis. "I had this theory that in the Matrix, the software didn't completely understand the physics of turbulence or get the scale right, so you'd hear absolutely every movement." He recorded specific whooshes for fingers, wrists, shoulders, hips and then, with sound effects editor Julia Evershade, MPSE, manipulated them to give them as much character as possible. One key sound in the movie was the "Keyauoww-w-w-www!" that Trinity, Neo and Morpheus would make when they slowed time down in the middle of a fist swing. "I took the actors' yells and, using SoundHack, slowed their voices down about six octaves — smoothly ramping down and then back up to the normal pitch by the end of their delivery," he explains. "I was able to make the room shake from just this one track! It took many attempts to shape the curve — each time taking 15 minutes to render — and I used graph paper to plot each step for each iteration." The sentinels — or "squiddies" — were the movie's flying killing machines, but Davis picked up something childlike in their "absolute zeal and dedication to killing humans." He used his children's malfunctioning toys to create scary layers of the squiddies' propulsion system, among them a blow toy that came with a McDonald's meal, and a child's space-shuttle transport truck, the six axles and tiny wheels of which made another high, strident, metallic sound. One of Davis' favorite scenes is when Neo is distracted by the sound of the window washers outside his boss' office. "Foley artist John Roesch, Foley supervisor Tom Brennan and I did several versions of the squeegee track for the Wachowskis," he says. "Because the scene is about the clarity that Neo is developing, the squeegee sounds become the real conversation with Neo's mind. This was probably the hardest scene to get right for Lana and Andy, but people love this scene!" Since The Matrix, Davis' career has been as busy as ever, but never too busy to take a call from the Wachowskis; he is just finishing their latest, Jupiter Ascending, another sci-fi, action-adventure film, due for a February 2015 release. "This was my sixth film for them," he says. "It was very crazy and great fun. Our shorthand communication has gotten really good." f CONTINUED FROM PAGE 22 The Matrix, Warner Bros. Pictures