Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1448505
the surface. There's a great poetic story there. EM: After 18 years, what was it like hopping back into the driver's seat of The Matrix universe? DD: I started working on the first movie in 1997. The idea of going back into that world was seductive and scary. Here I am reading the new script and my jaw is on the floor again, I see all the possibilities. It was daunting, but so inspiring. The Matrix Resurrections is a very different movie. The story straddles the previous stories in various ways, so I had to do a lot of archaeology. If you go back 24 years, all our digital files are destroyed or unusable. Ten years is an eternity. Fifteen years— nothing will exist. Nothing. It's a fact that most people do not come to grips with. In 2003, we migrated all the original materials to a couple of "backup" formats, but now all those backup formats are dead because software disappears, operating systems and hardware all disappear. All the tape drive bearings and little, tiny parts… very, very vulnerable to time. For the new movie, I needed to recreate the original world that I built in 1997 and 1998, but also the world that evolved from that world. And also the present day. In a way, it was three different movies —the original, the present, and all of the transitional worlds. For years I had tried to restore my original sessions, but it was an absolute nightmare. Eventually we were able to restore about 30% of my work on the original films, including sessions and audio files. That's after many, many restoring stages. Just getting that 30% was something, but it included none of the underlying layers. To tell the new story, I needed all the evolutionary steps of the development of the sounds, but they were long gone. The ships and the Sentinels in the original movies were created using digital sampler cards, loops and midi automation. I performed and recorded all those components using a program called Studio Vision, which was one of the big midi sequencer programs of the late 1990's, but it's gone now as well. I wanted what evolved from Sentinels and other ships to feel like the same technology, because humans and machines don't waste. There was a sound in my library of rain in a metal barrel. It had a certain metallic resonance and rhythm to it. When I started to deconstruct that sound using Metasynth, there was a moment where I said, "whoa, this is it." Something about that one recording captured it. There were metallic harmonics in there that I could play with. I stretched it a few ways. And then I would put it into DNR, the very first digital noise reduction program from Digidesign, but I used it in reverse, keeping only the "noise." Every iteration it went through, I would use noise reduction to remove harmonics and frequencies that were common. Then I would reverse it, and then I would stretch it again using different numbers and functions. I did that four or five times, at least. Doing all that created this texture that was unreal, but it still had that shape of water dripping. The metallic harmonics were now very short—the noise reduction pulled everything out. That became the mother of code. That vocabulary alone became critical because the title sequences were all code, and I handed my library of those sounds to Eric Lindemann. He built the most magnificent design of those title sequences by doing slight dopplers of all these materials, so that the code elements come and go away. Eric did it for all the movies, including on The Matrix Resurrections. He created all that shape, variation and movement. It just hit me yesterday… when I'm designing sounds for these movies long before there are VFX, it's exactly like the characters in The Matrix "real world" reading code. They're reading green code on monitors, and on a visual effects movie I am just seeing green screens too. That's very interesting—I'm reading through the code, seeing something beyond what just happens to be green on Dane Davis recording car tires for The Matrix Reloaded.