Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1544300
22 M PS E . O R G SSS: Well, like listening to one track at a time, conceptualizing how I was going to play with all the other tracks. It allowed me to learn how to listen. MM: Yeah, that's great. I always challenge myself when designing to see if I can do it all … with one track, one sound. That's the Holy Grail. That's a massive success for me. Mag was also analog, for which I have and had no particular love. There's little wonderful about its limited dynamic range, limited frequency response, or tape hiss. It was truly a miracle in 1950, when it replaced optical sound recording … but in 1980? I have nostalgia and romance for those old flames, like an old girlfriend, but I'm glad I didn't marry them. Similarly, I'm also not a fan of film prints or grain and the artifacts that come with them. I don't get vinyl (records) either. I mean I love watching movies and there is a certain "charm" to going to a classic movie revival house and seeing a film print but if I had a choice, I'd take a DCP over an old scratchy, dirty, jittery 35mm print with optical sound. SSS: What about watching video like a soap opera video? I find that very distracting, as opposed to film. MM: Well, certainly it's at a different frame rate and there's no rolling shutter, like a film camera, so you don't get the motion blur like you do in cinema and on film. So, it's a very weird antiseptic experience that works for some things, I guess for General Hospital. I don't think it works for a Blade Runner or a Dune. SSS: Do you feel that mag never changed in 40 years? MM: Mag did change. Remember, the first mag was single-stripe mono. Over time it evolved into 3-channel, then 4- and 6-channel media. These developments allowed us to embrace multi-channel audio and make immersive or surround sound in cinema de-rigueur. In that respect, it did change, but that was an evolution, not a revolution. The revolution in our community was losing the sprockets: mag to multitrack, and then multitrack to digital. When I started at Hanna-Barbera, I came into a department that had been around since the early '60s and the sound editors were trained on mag's predecessor, optical recording, the little squiggles on the side of an old film print. I remember being amazed that my mentors could read an optical track and tell you what was on it. They could look at the squiggles in an SVA track and tell you if it was a gunshot or a door close. I'm sure most of us could do this today on an Avid or Pro Tools by looking at the visual waveforms we see on our monitors and say "the sound starts … there" but these old pros could see the difference between the BANG! of a gun and the BANG! of a door close, without listening to it. To me, that was great craft. I admired those editors. SSS: Wow, that's amazing! So, with the technology changing after all these years since the 1990s, 35 years of technology, have you found the advancement of the technology to your advantage? MM: Short answer, yes. I love and use technology. Yet I have an odd relationship with it. Technology is essential to my job, yet I consider myself an artist, not a technician. Technology should live in service of artists … artists live in service of ideas. I want to live in that domain of ideas first, the domain of storytelling with sound. That's what makes movies not just sound great, technology can do that just fine, but sound right and sound complete and sound human. I remember being stunned discovering that, in 1976, 14 years before Avid and Pro Tools, Nieman- Tillar and Associates, a small post house in Hollywood, were using a digital sound editing and mixing tool … while I was still cutting on a tractor … I mean Moviola. This was a sublime Cargo Cult-like moment that generated no small amount of anxiety and defined my relationship with tools. I went to Neiman-Tillar for a demo and saw the future and thought, "I'm making buggy whips." I knew I'd be momentarily replaced. That didn't happen and the digital revolution took another decade Mark Mangini at his Moviola™ c 1979.