MPSE Wavelength

28 M PS E . O R G ways to make this car be mean and in your face. TM: You mentioned how you were working on four-track Pro Tools and you mentioned the digital dubbers, the digital multitrack. Technology has obviously changed throughout your career, but how about the social interaction between working colleagues? In the '90s, we were all in a building together. That's not necessarily the case anymore. How have you noticed that a•ecting the industry? GH: Boy, that is a really good point, Tim. Because of that lack of social interaction, knowledge is not being passed down like it once was. Two of my best experiences were working at Weddington, with Steve Flick and Mark Mangini and Richard Anderson, and then working at Creative Cafe. In both those places, it was pretty much an open-door policy. If you were walking by somebody's room and you heard something that made you go "whoa," you'd knock on the door and open it up and say: "Hey! What is that?! That's really cool!" Because Pro Tools was new, we would show things to people. "Hey, have you seen that Pro Tools can do this?" There was a lot of exchange of information. When I was working on Twister for Steve Flick at Creative Cafe, there was a guy there named Charles Maynes. Charles did work for Pro Tools, and he ended up doing the waterspout tornado on that and then I did the rest. We were able to talk back-and-forth. Richard King was there. There were just a lot of great editors, and we had a lot of interactions. Being in that environment, we would talk about sound and talk about techniques and really exchange ideas back-and- forth. Whereas now, I don't think that happens so much. I was working at a facility recently, very nice facility, nice sound rooms, soundproof. When you walk around, it's very quiet. You can walk by a door, you don't know if anyone's in there or what's going on. People aren't exchanging ideas. Younger people in the business aren't getting the benefit of knowledge from older people, the techniques that we know about that they might not know about. Like, at Lucasfilm, I experienced what we call 'worldizing,' which is going out and recording sounds in the actual space. Then, when we did the crowds for Straight Outta Compton (2015), one of the things about that show is the sound of the crowds as the group N.W.A. moves up from neighborhood clubs to a huge stadium. We had to give a sense of space for each one of those locations. Telling that story about the space they were in told the story about how successful they were getting. The biggest challenge was the concert in Detroit at this huge arena. They didn't have time to record the crowds in production. We had a little bit of production sound, but we had to create the crowd. So instead of just taking a bunch of loop group people and putting them through a reverb and maybe doing several stereo passes of loop group and trying to pan it around us, I just decided that okay, we're going to record people on the ADR stage for the close environment when the camera is in the crowd. And then we also needed a bigger environment for the stadium scenes. So, we took the loop group up to the screening room, had them go around the room, leaning up Sound e•ects recording with Charlie Campagna. Greg (seated far right) with crew members for Straight Outta Compton (2015).

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