Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1541592
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S 41 PA: Afterward, one of your next films was REC, which was another Spanish horror film that achieved massive global resonance. It was a terrific early example of the found footage genre with really creative audio design. OT: Actually, I have to confess that these two projects were made at the same time. Not 100% overlap, but, you know, quite tight, and I was pretty stressed about this. Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza were the directors of REC, and they said, "Listen, we're going to do this movie on an extremely modest budget," and I loved the idea for the film. I thought it was so wild. The idea was to not have any score and just employ noise and distortion as the film's primary audio element. I gained profound insights into the dual nature of sound design—both diegetic and non-diegetic—and how to manipulate the audience's perception to make something feel real and not real at the same time. The directors were open to everything. I remember one scene with the police shooting a gun in a woman's corridor, and I was struggling to find the appropriate sound. At that time, we were mixing with DFC Neve equipment, and while mixing, I inadvertently routed the sound to the external reverb. I was using TC electronics, the one with the faders. By mistake, I sent the sound to the reverb, and it totally overloaded and sent back a super distorted sound, and they said: "YES! We like that!" So, this huge distortion of the shot is now in the film. As there was no score, I utilised noises and low-end vibrations instead of music. It never felt fake with all these crazy amplified sounds, plus I used animal sounds for the zombies. I'm so happy with that film, it was just so much fun. There are four REC films, and I did three of them. PA: The next film you did with J.A. Bayona was The Impossible, which is the story of a tourist family in Thailand caught in the tsunami back in 2004. Once again, the sound was a very big part of the storytelling of the film. How did you approach this? OT: For me, it's always crucial to not just understand the story but also understand the director's perspective, because any story can be told from different points of view. For the big tsunami sequence in The Impossible, Bayona told me that he didn't want music. He wanted it to achieve authenticity and instil genuine fear. I met the actual survivors, and I met Maria Lidón, the character behind Naomi Watts. I remember her telling me one thing that inspired me a lot. She told me, "Listen, I didn't understand what's happening because we didn't know what a tsunami was back then." So, she was telling me that she didn't understand what she was experiencing. She was lying down in a hotel and suddenly, she's in water, drowning. Her mind was incapable of processing the unfolding event for several minutes. That chaos, the feeling of being lost— that concept really hit me. But it was immensely hard to tell that story with sound. It was so difficult, and at one point, I actually suggested that we should go with music instead of audio effects. But then one day on the TV, I saw a programme about an earthquake in Spain, and a woman said that her memory of the experience felt chopped up and fragmented. At that moment, I understood that I could recreate that chopped-up and fragmented experience aurally. Every shot in that sequence has a different audio signature, and that's how I made this long sequence work. Different sounds for each shot, sometimes the water was low, sometimes loud, sometimes wide. Lots of different textures. It was like music, a rhythm—I made it work that way. With this scene, I discovered how Oriol, talking to all the team after a turnover during the final mix. Society of the Snow, Barcelona. August 3rd 2022. Oriol with Marc Bech sound designer, playing back a scene of Society of the Snow. Barcelona. August 3rd 2022.