Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1448505
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S I 43 acoustic properties of that material, both in terms of how the human ear hears it and cannot hear it?" When I've reduced it to that material, then I start with collecting those materials and doing everything I can—submerging it, exploding it, shooting bullets through it, dropping it from towers, stepping on it, squeezing it, hitting and spinning it while suspended on monofilament, putting it into liquid nitrogen... whatever it takes to bring out all the potential properties of that material. I was the effects recordist on The Abyss. We had to experiment with what things sound like underwater. Blake Leyh, who was the sound designer of that film, he and I wrecked some great mics by testing them in the ocean—in condoms and all kinds of approaches. We ended up making our own underwater mic to better capture water. Some movies are about metal. Some are about wood. Metal is an infinite material. Sand sometimes becomes that material. Fire is another one. The Matrix is a great example. It was clear to me that the primary material was glass. This isn't the kind of stuff I talk with directors about, but the movie is about "transparency" on so many levels, and there are scenes to indicate it such as the window washers, the mirror as a portal, or crossover point. So I got a whole bunch of glass and I thought, "what can glass do that we don't think of glass as doing?" One night, everybody else had left and I had this big shard of glass that was two and a half feet long and under a quarter inch thick, with about seven sides that had been broken off. I stood it up on a corner with one finger, so it was free and not dampened in any way. I hit it with my Schoeps mic and then scanned over this resonating glass with the microphone. I found that the energy of hitting that glass was dispersing along some really clear straight lines within the glass. There were these veins between the corners. I didn't know that! I never thought about what the physics would be, so I was just in there by myself and I kept banging it, which was horrendously loud and distorted on my DAT recorder. If you move the microphone really close to the glass without touching it, you could cross these veins and get a Doppler effect as the glass resonated by. That was a huge surprise. That three-minute recording that night became all of the wobbling sounds when Neo bends the world, and all the mirrors in The Matrix. Many, many sounds were made from those glass recordings because it has that feeling of bending in an unnatural way that is completely organic. That's what I go for. There's one other big material in The Matrix, which was simulated air disturbance, meaning turbulence. Very early on, I thought "what if while inside the matrix, the people in their pods in the real world experience the acoustics of turbulence in a very exaggerated way?" Like the computers had made a small error in their calculations that caused the sonic strength of oscillation in the air eight times stronger than it is for actual humans. When I told the Wachowskis, they said "let's hear it!" I went into a Foley stage next door in West Los Angeles and experimented with what would make whooshes with the most exaggerated feeling of turbulence. I found that nylon rope didn't snap like hemp rope, but I had to experiment with how frayed to make the ends. I kept melting the plastic and peeling it off to come up with whoosh instruments. I recorded all these whooshes going by the microphone—I spent so much time doing this. I wanted to know how big an event I could make out of a whoosh of a rope going by. The idea was to create a library or vocabulary of turbulence that scaled in a natural way. The climactic fight of the first film was where Smith and Neo fight in the subway. The visual effects people and the picture editor were having trouble selling the pacing of that scene. So John Gaeta, the VFX supervisor, and Zach Staenberg, the picture editor, asked me, "Can you dress this up?" I had Julia Evershade, who was the main sound effects editor as well as the ADR supervisor on that movie, take my material and build that fight with this super exaggerated turbulence. There's whooshes for pinky fingers, for the whole hand, for the elbows and shoulders, for the upper torso, whooshes for every part of the leg and the foot and a whole flying body. Julia and I just built this up and the directors said, "yeah, I see what you're talking about now." The VFX team played the exact same scene to the studio, but with our temp SFX, and they flipped out and said, "You tightened up that scene so much. It flows so much better now." It was the identical picture but it hadn't included sound before! As a visual simulation alone, you don't suspend your disbelief, so you don't buy it. Sounds suck you into that completely contrived reality. John and Zach thanked me and asked, "can you please build sound effects for every scene that we're working on before we present it?" Going back to water, in The Matrix Revolutions the climactic battle is between Smith and Neo in the air, and it's raining really hard. So that became about how the human bodies would interact with the water in the air in an exaggerated virtual world. Wet turbulence! We built this beautiful pool on a soundstage that was two inches deep, and 12 feet long. It had towels lining it and we filled the water right to the edge. The intent was to make pushes through water with no slapping or sloshing. It was this perfect, isolating water trough and we spent three days doing whooshes across the surface, just