Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1500189
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S 59 problem sonically, as far as leakage, not water, just sonically sound-wise. There we had a working firehose on the stage, and let me tell you, you don't want to ever treat that thing like it's no problem and can just pick it up and turn it on. You have to have two people on it at all times because of how hard the water comes out of it. In fact, there's a section in the picture toward the end where Mel Gibson is trying to stop the flow of water starting to come through this dam that he's put up, and it's really starting to get the better of him and it's hitting his poncho. Well, there I am, trying to just have a little water on the poncho and it was splashing water on myself, and I said that's not going to work. So, we said okay, time to get the firehose. We have the firehose and, this is great, the firehose is hitting me, but I wasn't presenting a big enough of a target. We were hearing the water drip into the Doughboy louder than hitting me. We stopped everything, I had a huge down Arctic parka, so I put that on, then put the rain poncho on over. So now I looked like the Pillsbury Doughboy, a huge target! Man, that went great. Did a take. Okay, I didn't really turn this way right, so we had to do a second take. Second take starts and all of a sudden, the water goes to a dribble out of the hose. We were all looking at each other, I leaned forward to start looking at it and all of a sudden, the hose came back on and it almost came out of the guy's hands! With such force, it hit me right in the face. I flew backward into the Doughboy pool, I'm now underwater, I don't have my glasses, and this down parka has soaked all the water up. I'm now like 300 pounds, I can't get out. So I started to thrash around. Fortunately, Kevin Bartnoff, who was helping with that, realized what was going on and he chucked the hose off, jumped over the side, grabbed me and pulled me out! So whoever says Foley can't be dangerous [laughs], not that we want it to be, but it was that day! It was crazy. But all told, everything went well. We got what we needed. I was thrilled that Kay Rose won the Academy Award, and mind you, we had just a very, very, very small part to play in her very large palette. SSS: Kay Rose is the first woman to receive an Academy Award in sound editing. She was the first. So very proud. Very proud. All right, that is quite a frightening story. Thank you, and I'm grateful you survived. The next feature is called The Abyss, 1989. JR: The Abyss. All right, well, this is James Cameron and, of course, you do not want to disappoint James Cameron. We used the Doughboy pool, which had proven itself on The River, and now here, we had to do a lot of underwater effects. By this time, I realized well, of course, water soaks all frequencies up, so how the heck are we going to approach this? Ed Bannon and I chatted, he said, "I tell you what, John, I'm going to build a custom underwater mic for you." Now the reason why that is, of course, there are underwater microphones, but unfortunately, the way they operate you cannot put them in a very small area because of the way sound propagates, it just sounds terrible. It overloads the mic, at least in my experience. So he took a PZM and enclosed it in Lucite in a very specific way, where it sounded incredible. And there again, I drew on my experience from The River, thinking well, when the craft is going by, it has all the divers on it, so I'm going to do the craft feeling and movement-by first, that'll be "the background." Again, harkening back to The River, let's do the background stuff first, and then we'll fill in the foreground. So we would do that and then I would start to do more of the foreground stuff, of which it would be maybe the bubbles bubbling-by, and of course, the propeller of their various propellers, which by the way was great. All I had to do was go to the hardware store and get one of those spray attachments for your shower, which goes around in circles. That's what I used underwater to have the propellers go by. But we also figured out a technique because we knew we needed to make sure what's in the foreground is going to peak out to us, so we did something which we termed "above water, underwater prop movement." What does that mean? Well, once we did everything in the water tank, then we would take items that we did on the regular Foley stage, but Tim would take them down in pitch a little bit to make them more underwater. Then, we could play them against what we had actually done in the tank. So all those John with the MGM hoofs he used in the 1979 movie The Black Stallion taken years later for a Finnish newspaper article.