Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1448505
46 I M PS E . O R G In making Neo digitizing, I advanced the technique that I call "micro looping," which is making many tiny edits in shuffle mode and pulling them out and duplicating them. Digging into the waveform and finding ways to expand it. There's also a whole reverse delay thing that goes into the sound of his breath as we look into his mouth. Then I sent it off to Sydney, which in those days took seven and a half hours to send a 48k 90-second mono audio file to Sydney on a dial up modem. Another key program that I used for all pitch shifting and especially the pitch ramping was Sound Hack. It was written by a professor at Cal Arts, where I had gone to school. Everybody's used to breakpoint automation now, but you couldn't save it at the time. So I had to graph all of the little dots on 1/16-inch graph paper, and I would render it and go, "crap, it goes too low, too quickly." Or "it's not staying in that resonant subwoofer zone for long enough." Then in the app I remade all the dots back off my graph paper, but I would add five more horizontally before running it again. Every version took about eight minutes to render a very short piece of audio. Many of the key vocal ramps were made on the final mix stage as the Bullet Time shots would get finished! EM: Do you have a sound that you're most proud of amongst the vast library of sounds in The Matrix films? DD: The Matrix code is very special to me. It's a visual homage to Ghost in the Shell. It's a key material in the film—it's not something in our universe at all. The code had to sound completely fresh and unique in every way, and it also had to evolve. The Wachowskis had said to me "electricity" and "water dripping," but we wanted to go much further with it. but it terrified people because the potential was so immense. But the Wachowskis weren't afraid of it. I kept thinking about how you segregate the real world from the virtual world, which appears to be 100% convincing as a real world. And then bullet time, which is written in the script as Bullet Time. It seemed like a dream project for everyone. I was salivating, but I really never thought about having to actually do it. That was all in 1994 or 1995. Around two years later, I got the phone call saying "The Matrix is greenlit, but it's contingent on visual technology being convincing for Bullet Time," or something like that. They found John Gaeta, who had a company in Massachusetts. He and a programmer thought it up. They created a seven-second clip of Bullet Time—it was just a guy dodging a theoretical bullet going through the air, and they added this super crude animation of a bullet. They had me put some sound on it before showing it to Warner Bros. I think I had one day to work on it. The gun goes off and it's the dispersion of that energy. I cooked up this way to express the extreme energy state being expanded through time of a bullet traveling. That is the story—this guy has the ability to expand time so he can dance around the trajectory of the bullet. I was in the projection booth when we showed it to Warner Bros, on film, and the whole movie was hinging on those seven seconds. The studio execs were all wowed, I heard. They quickly figured out a way to do the film for a very small budget, 70 million dollars. It meant shooting in Australia. The first sound that I worked on once we began was Neo digitizing, his digital self as he gets reconnected to his body in the real world. Working on that one sound helped define the materials of the Matrix universe. I'd been experimenting a lot with a program called Metasynth. It's a visual graphics program and somebody had the idea to give it an audio output. Other digital apps all sounded ghastly, but Metasynth sounded rather beautiful. Those renderings, and monitor outputs that I recorded on a DAT, became the substance of or model for what I used to create a lot of the sounds. Dane Davis in 1998 working on the scene where Neo uses bullet time to dodge bullets in The Matrix, 1999, Warner Bros.