M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S 51
So we hired this trainer, he brought
the five trained penguins, and we
put them in this air-conditioned,
sonically treated trailer truck in the
shipping yards in New York, where
the movie was shot. And then we
waited. We would attempt to tease
a penguin with a fish into the ADR
booth. Well, as it would turn out …
it's really hard to get penguins to say
anything. I didn't do that recording—
Ben Cheah did. Ben had to sit in 30
degrees for three days, eight hours.
That 24 hours of rolling tape yielded
five minutes of sequential penguin
utterances after being culled down.
I listened to 24 hours of recordings
into five minutes of <"SQUAWK!">
and then I made a vocabulary of
it—much like I did with the monkey
in Raiders—then assemble a
performance to make them quasi
or "pre-verbal," which makes it feel
as if they were sentient. It wasn't
just a <"SQUAWK!"> There was a
cadence, or there were syllables
involved. And, if you have really good
ears—I made one that sounds like
"F-you!" for one penguin who gets
mad at Jim Carrey.
SL: I would be remiss
if we didn't talk more about Good
Night Oppy. We mentioned it
before. I absolutely loved it. Let's
start with this … how did you
manage to get an actual recording
of wind on Mars…?
MM: So let's start by saying, if you
see Good Night Oppy, the very
first sounds in the movie are the
actual sounds of Mars. That gives
me goose bumps. Now, of course,
I started the film, and there were
no recordings of Mars then. And
(writer/director) Ryan White said,
"Mark, one of your challenges is to
bring Mars to life. We're going to be
on Mars for 32 minutes, with ILMs
visual effects. And I want this to feel
real. Like we're there."
SL: The way that they did it, you
feel like you WERE there. The CG
was fantastic.
MM: NASA has, you know, 4000K
imagery from the planet—ILM had
lots of great source material to
work with that is real! It WAS real,
for all intents and purposes! But,
we didn't have any sound. We knew
that Mars had atmosphere—it has
a very thin atmosphere—we knew
it had dust storms. I knew I could
rely on sounds that were familiar,
terrestrially. Wind recordings I'd
made in the desert, and those,
with some treatments to maybe
make it sound a little bit off. I had
built a set of "immersive Martian
atmospheres." And they were
working really well. I put them in
the temp mix. Until Ryan called
me and said, "Did you know that
Perseverance, the current rover on
Mars, has two DPA-4060s on it…?"
"WHAT?" "And did you know that
they just recorded the sounds of the
ambiance of Mars?" "WHAT?!?" So
he hooked me up with NASA, they
sent me their files, and I received a
fairly short couple of clips of Martian
atmospheres, some Martian wind,
the helicopter probe, and the sound
of it driving around Mars. And
this was captured by the onboard
microphone on Perseverance. It's
funny, you think of NASA, you think
of hi-tech finely machined aluminum
… but if I played the driving around
sounds for you, and it's in the
movie—it's the actual sound it
makes—it sounds like an old jalopy!
It creaks, and groans, and scrunches
from rubber bands, and cords and
things being compressed. Anyway, I
took these little 10-second snippets
of ambiances and built them into
immersive atmospheres that
opened the movie and are heard in
all the exterior scenes while we're on
Mars.
Mark chats with Steve Lee at the 69th GRA
Winners Reception at the Bonaventure Hotel in Los
Angeles. Photo by Chris Schmitt Photography
