Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1500189
30 M PS E . O R G (Besides telling them to watch the great documentary that we are both in—Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound, directed by sound editor and the Kay Rose professor at USC, Midge Costin.) GYW: I tell them to imagine shooting the scene of wherever we happen to be, then I say that when we shoot the close-up, it may be shot two weeks later on a sound stage and all the background sounds and air have changed, so we need to make sure that all the air, crowds, etc., all blend seamlessly as if it was shot at the same time. Then I add, if it is a period-piece movie, what I like to call a 'corset' movie, then you can't hear an airplane! It wouldn't be century- accurate, but the performance is perfect, and if there were no other takes with the same performance, we would have to re-record the actor on an ADR stage. Sometimes we replace the actor's voice or re-record it if we change the line content in any way. Or add additional voices. VRS: Do you ever get to take on interns at the ranch? GYW: In the beginning, we could and did. But we had a bad run-in with an apprentice. And now all the choices have to go through the administration. While I was in New Zealand working on Avatar, there were so many new people who came in to work at the ranch—more women, Asian women, Black women, Black men, all different. The diversity of the ranch is massively better than when I left and they're really putting a huge effort into it. I was walking past a conference room near my edit room and the head engineer, a man named Steve Morris, who is a brilliant man, was having a meeting with the other engineers. And every single one of them was a woman! That was such a cool thing to see. Not that it's against men! I love working with men, too. There are many brilliant, brilliant men. But I think it was Victoria Alonso at Marvel Studios who said if you don't get women started, they'll never get to where we need them to be. So Lucasfilm is really supporting and getting people in on the ground floor and nurturing them and giving them ways to move through to the hierarchy so that they can be on par with the men and women who've been there for a long time. VRS: Let's get into your amazing work on Avatar: The Way of Water. You worked on the first Avatar, too. What was that like? GYW: Chris Boyes asked me if I would co-supervise. Of course, I said YES! Everyone was talking about it. We didn't have the same technology the first time around. But for The Way of Water, technology had caught up to Jim Cameron's visions. This Avatar had new worlds and new creatures. Chris Boyes did all the sound design but I also worked on some of the characters. Payakan, the whale character, needed an aquatic language. Chris said, 'Maybe he's like an antsy teenager.' So I asked the teenaged boys next door if they could make up a language and have a conversation. But they just sounded too human so we went back to a more aquatic language. Breathing was a very important part of Avatar 2. The Sully family had to learn to control their breath underwater. We did a lot of ADR just for breathing. The pool they shot in was 30 feet deep but it was filled with these plastic balls to get rid of the glare for the cameras. It was all motion capture—so the actors had mo-cap suits on. But through a lot of ingenuity, we were actually able to use a lot of the production sound! The official Avatar twitter page offered an explanation for "why Saldana, Worthington, Winslet, and Curtis were surrounded by white balls while wading in the water. In water, the clash of air and liquid can create reflections that create false markers for the motion-capture Breathing was a very important part of Avatar: The Way of Water. The whole cast had to learn to control their breath for long periods underwater.