Continued From previous page.
Timothy Muirhead 5:07
I’m sure it was. You mentioned earlier that your job on the film is to kind of set the scene, set the environment for it. The opening shot of the movie is like a, I don’t know if it literally is a crane shot, but over the city over the ruins of all these buildings that have been destroyed. And throughout the entire film you have in the ambiences, this kind of feeling of decay going on? How did you achieve that? Was that something that Spielberg asked for? Where did that all come from?
Gary Rydstrom 5:36
It was pretty obvious when I you know, the way he set up the film was very clever. He and Kushner, Tony Kushner, who wrote the screenplay, used the reality of the urban renewal of the 50s in New York in the specific area that became Lincoln Center that was being demolished and made that the backdrop for these two gangs you know, fighting over territory that was essentially being disappeared. So the movie starts with a deconstruction, a demolition, feeling to it. And what I liked as a sound person what I think in Spielberg never never talked about this, but he’s a good filmmaker, and he counted on sound could continue that story. Off screen. He didn’t have to keep showing buildings getting demolished. So after the prologue, there’s a long scene with Krupke and, and Lieutenant Schrank and they talked to the gang members and you hear the city being demolished off screen. It’s good filmmaking to make use of something you’ve set up in the beginning. And then you can hear later on just keeps that going without having to show it in a mundane way. Here’s a building getting demolished. He’s using the soundtrack to tell that part of the story.
René Coronado 6:42
Was that noted in the screenplay?
Gary Rydstrom 6:44
Yes. I don’t know. Kushner was Definitely was you know aware of the demolition aspect of this because that was in his mind I think that was an undercurrent to the whole and added a tragic element if you think about it, these people these these kids are fighting over territory that they’re both losing. So there’s there’s a depth of tragedy to that that’s great.
Timothy Muirhead 7:07
Did you have to find construction sounds or demolition sounds I guess of that period? Or were you able to just kind of go with buildings falling in general?
Gary Rydstrom 7:16
Well, the the buildings falling stuff. Luckily, that sounds the same as it did in the 50s. Yeah, the it’s the motors you know, the a lot of what we do sound wise, and this kind of movie is find cars, and in this case, construction trucks, and cranes that have the kind of the 1950s Less muffler louder, rougher sound to them. So the cranes and that kind of thing, but the buildings getting demolished, that’s still a classic sound that will never change.
Timothy Muirhead 7:49
Let’s talk about in terms of sound effects and sound design. One of the biggest sequences is the big fight scene near Well, it’s not exactly the end, but maybe two thirds of the way through the sharks and the Jets meet in a salt storage shed. And one gang has chains and one gang has pipes. And anybody who’s ever had to cut Sound Effects For chains, knows it’s not a fun thing to do
René Coronado 8:13
They suck. They’re so hard.
Timothy Muirhead 8:14
We had done Sylvester on once and he talked about cutting chains and described it as all chain sound like potato chips to him.
Gary Rydstrom 8:24
What a great podcast because that is a detail that every sound person will recognize because things like chains, you think this is great. And you get you know the way it works and sound you get this great chain and you record it and you get back to your studio and listened to and it sounds “tinky”. Exactly. Literally “tinky” like jewelry like jewelry, if you’re doing a movie about women and you’re putting on costume jewelry, it doesn’t sound right. So here’s my trick.
Timothy Muirhead 8:46
Oh, we got a trick.
Gary Rydstrom 8:48
My trick was there’s a Sanken makes 100k Mic that records at 100 up to 100k and then allows you didn’t slow things down and get them they sound beefier, so recording chains even small chains at 100k and lowering an octave or even more than an octave then you get kind of the beef back. Otherwise you get just the tick so someone should write a book about all the dangerous sounds to try to recreate and record and sound chains one of them. Chains and fire and you know all sorts of tricky things that sound people will tell you “those are really damn hard” but Don is right.
René Coronado 9:23
If you are having to perform the change in tempo though and then you have the various beat them down are you just are you recording them at double speed and then slowing them down?
Gary Rydstrom 9:31
In this case the chain sounds themselves weren’t there’s so many sounds in this movies that were at tempo that had to be synchronized to action. The chains weren’t one of those things that chains could be a natural they were they were part of the fight but they weren’t even the main part of the fight. I mean, the main part of the fight are knives and punches. So much of the movie though as you point out, is sync dependent which is an editorial trick. And if you look at the what I’m really amazed by in the film has nothing to do with me but The way it was shot. The musical sequences, especially the action fits with the music. Now we’re still talking about the rumble. The rumble is a scene that in the ’61 movie was a choreographed dance scene. In this movie, in this version of the story, it’s it’s more of a real fight. But still choreographed, but there’s a rhythm to it, but it’s more brutally real than the ’61 version, which I like there’s a you really believe the Tony could kill a guy that he almost kills Bernardo, you really believe that with this new backstory that Bernardo is a professional boxer. So you know, we had to make sure the punches were both natural and big. The knife fight is, is you know, the swishes of the knives were, you know, realistic but scary. Just you just knew something bad was going to happen. I think that scene, which you point out is one of my favorite. It’s a great sound moment for us because we got to help tell the story, which was how dangerous this was. I mean, these after that scene and the story of West Side Story. After that scene, everything is radically different. I’ll point out a tricky transition for us was the scene after the Rumble is “I feel pretty”. And as I understand it, they they ordered the movie, our version of the movie, The scenes are ordered a little bit closer to where the Broadway version of it was versus the ’61 movie. “I feel pretty” on Broadway, as I understand it came after the intermission. So there was time to process the death of Bernardo and Riff. And then you know, second act, you would come in and get this kind of bounce from this great “I feel pretty” moment. And our trick was it very subtle thing for some people, we had to figure out how to go from the darkness of this death to deaths and transition to what is this very perky I feel pretty scene. And really, the only way we we did it was drop out natural sound. So you don’t hear the cops walking and you don’t hear the reality of stuff that all drops out and just hear church bells. And then we kind of come into the “I feel pretty” scene. That that transition turned out to be important emotionally, on the sound mix so that you would be kind of left, you know, to feel something about the rumble scene and then kind of gently brought into a very different scene with “I feel pretty”.
René Coronado 12:21
Can we talk a little bit about that process? When you first come on a project like this? What is your process? Like? How do you approach it from the beginning?
Gary Rydstrom 12:27
Well, you read the script and try to get a sense of the tone of it. I mean, this is new and existing material that we all know so well, the practical things, you start collecting things, one of the first things I did was I knew I needed 1957 believable New York sounds. Luckily, I have a lot of friends who do sound in New York, and happen to have libraries with older recordings. It’s amazing for us to think sound wise, you can’t really find good quality sounds in 1957, New York. Not really, you can find all the mono recordings, but you get close, you can get sounds from the 80s or the 70s. To get back into that era. Then one of the first things I did was get subway sounds, old sirens and things that were New York, I just wanted the sound in New York and I made use of my friends in New York to do that. So you start collecting. I remember Lou Goldstein, one of the great mixers in New York had an actual crank siren from the 50s. And he mailed it to me and we got to operate an old crank styling recorded at Skywalker Ranch. So you collect, you start collecting what’s going to be the sounds of the movie. The other thing we did, which is I think, turned out that we didn’t need to do it. But all of us on the sound side, Todd Maitland, who was the Production Recordist and Andy Nelson, and others, we put together kind of a letter for Spielberg saying, and here are the things to think about. He was way ahead of us. He obviously already was thinking about them. But you know, musicals. One of the things that everyone tried to make right from the beginning was the transition into singing and out of singing. So that it felt natural. It’s one of the giveaways and musicals and one of the times that people sometimes laugh at musical so we wanted to make sure the way it was recorded on the set, the way it was recorded in the same mics, were recording the singers in the studio for the pre records. And so we could seamlessly move between the songs and the production. So the so we did that kind of stuff. We started you know, Todd Maitland getting his gear ready and how things sounded on the production side. I was collecting sound effects and we were trying to think ahead, to do everything possible to make the singing in the music sound as much like they were in the movie as possible. My job in the mix though, was to help I got to help be part of that, you know, setting the singing into the location with ambiences and Foley and all the all the stuff that we do in sound to make you believe that something’s really happening. And you know, most of the singing that you hear is pre recorded. So those moments need the help of what part I bring to make you believe they’re really on fire escapes or really in a gymnasium. They’re really walking through the streets in New York, and cocky walking through New York. So all that stuff was kind of what I could bring to it.
René Coronado 15:19
So you mentioned earlier about how a lot of the sounds were in sync and in rhythm with the music. And I imagine had to cheat that some with regards to what was happening visually. Can you talk about like how you approached musical sync versus, visual sync?
Gary Rydstrom 15:35
Oh, it was a big part of the job. And you know, really kudos goes to the way Spielberg shot it because he shot it they all had earwigs and things, a lot of times they could hear, pre recorded score and do action and sync in time with the music. It was beautifully shot. And then Michael Kahn and Sarah Broshar with the editors, obviously edited with that in mind, too. It was given to us, you know, the opening with the prologue, when they’re handing around the throwing paint cans around, it’s all in sync throwing the catching the paint cans, in sync with the music. But we went a little crazy in the Steve Bissinger, who is our lead sound effects editor on the show, we did all of our cutting to sync and listen to the music as we cut. When the very last step when we were on the final mix. Even after we had premixed sound effects and Foley and done our perfect sync job Steve, who was a musician himself, did a little micro sync pass. So he would shift you know, even sync can shift a fair amount and still look right. But he was synchronizing as closely as could everything to fit within the music. So the paint cans there, you know, the Gee Officer Krupke scene with all that kind of slapstick II kind of stuff in the cop station was just micro synchronized. I’ve never done anything like this before. But we thought, you know, it’s like you want to focus it perfectly. When all those things to really work with the music, you know how fast the music sometimes it’s so that synchronization becomes really important. So in the geeky geekiest possible way, we went an extra step to synchronize everything we possibly could. So it laid into the music as best as possible.
René Coronado 17:16
I remember as a young editor, like having that epiphany that you could pull something off sync visually to make it hit the music because I was largely self taught with regards to that. And so I had to figure that out on my own. And I just got a little dogmatic when I was 20 something, as you do. And I was sitting there going, it’s got to be in sync with the picture. And then when, you know, one of my colleagues who was a musician was like, “No, man, hit that thing to the beat and watch it lock in and watch your brain track it appropriately”. And it totally works. It was something that I had to get over this was years ago, but like it was it was a thing that was not obvious to me at the time.
Gary Rydstrom 17:48
I think I tell people distorting and sound at sync visual sync, sometimes people feel like you have to find, if you were crawling on the frame, you find the exact frame or that impact happens. Even without music, sometimes it’s the rhythm of the sound over time over context, that’s more important than absolute sync.
René Coronado 18:07
Yeah,
Gary Rydstrom 18:07
Sync is for sissies is sometimes things something. But yeah, sync in our case, we absolutely were beholden to the music, and you know, music changes. That’s why we did our final pass after the pre mixing was done and the final mix stage because that’s the real music now, that’s it, so we can make our final adjustments. So it makes and you know, how it is how people know it’s not a frame will make a radical amount of difference, a subframe will make a radical amount of difference,
René Coronado 18:39
Did you find any challenges like with the textures with regards to that, like, you know, so for like a weapon, you’re gonna lay, you know, three or four different sounds or more onto onto a gunshot to make it do a thing and sometimes just spread those out to make to make it you know, just more impactful over time. And if you’re locking all your transients in sync, like that, was that difficult to get the texture that you were looking for?
René Coronado 18:58
Well, luckily, this movie is not full of a lot of things that are layered sound effects are fairly, you know, straightforward, you know, we don’t didn’t have any equivalent of that kind of stuff. That the toughest thing reminded me it’s somewhat related, but the dancing sound because that there’s a complexity to the folding and to the way that they they move and of the footsteps and the movement and things like that. And that became there’s a lot of layers to that and you’re right you start pulling things out to try to make it work with the music. I think that’s where your brain was going which is absolutely right. Sometimes the complexity of those layers hurts the simplicity of what you want to make happen with the music a lot of my time and the final mix like the truth was not that the Foley was a problem the Foley was brilliant in this movie but was making it sit with the music so that you got the still the sense they were dancing, or moving or dresses were swirling and that kind of stuff, but it wasn’t so complex that it mushed the moment musically, you’re right that kind of overly layered, overly complex sound synchronizing with music becomes a problem and where it was the biggest issue was foley. Now, another sound geeky tidbit that I’m proud of. And again, I’m proud because it wasn’t my idea. Todd Maitland suggested that we do a pass on the set of the dancers dancing without the playback. Since they had ear pieces, they could hear it. And Spielberg graciously gave him time on the set to do a pass where he recorded and beautiful multitrack audio, the sound of the dancing, the actual dancing, we didn’t get to use it outside as much so America doesn’t get to use it. But the gymnasium when we did Mambo, a little bit of the cool scene on the docks. Some of that is a combination of the actual dancers in the sound they make with our Foley. So one of my fears going in is I wanted to honor the choreography. Because the choreography is brilliant in this movie the performances are brilliant, you don’t want them for a moment think they’re not really doing that. That sounds like a movie. If that sounds like a movie, to me, it takes away from the beauty of the dancing. So it had to sound natural. We did that partially by Todd recording the actual dancers,
René Coronado 21:14
You can’t fake what happened on the set.
Gary Rydstrom 21:15
No.
Timothy Muirhead 21:16
You mentioned Steve Bissinger was one of the sound effects editors. He’s an old friend of the podcast, we had him on one of our early episodes many years ago. So when I found out that we were going to be interviewing you, I reached out to him to ask him if he had any tips for stuff that we might want to talk about. And he gave me a phone call. And he told me a bunch of really interesting things. One of which, and I’m paraphrasing, so you’ll understand this may be able to elaborate this better. But that a lot of times the Foley team did the footsteps, dead sink of the visual footsteps. But a lot of times the dancers were actually sinking their arm movements or something to the beat and not necessarily their feet. And then once you put it all together, it started kind of falling apart a little bit. Is that something that you had difficult tackling? Or how do you even diagnose that?
Gary Rydstrom 22:00
You gotta wait for it’s all together and then you balance how much of the movement versus the footsteps like the mambo scene is one of my favorite sounds in the mambo scene is the dresses. The dresses are swirling. The gymnasium scene to me is one of two scenes in the movie “Cool” is the other where the dancing is like a fight without contact. And the dancing in Mambo was aggressive as hell. And the women are aggressive with their dresses, they’re swirling their dresses around, they do the same thing in America, it’s really kind of amazing. So that movement was really important to it. But yeah, the sync of that became really tricky. But what Steve did would make me think of one of the best things that Steve cut in the movie is “cool”, which is another scene which is a fight scene with no contact. But they’ve most of it is just brilliantly choreographed, Justin Peck, that’s combination of Foley and Steve being Steve because he’s a meticulous, crazy sound person, like all crazy sound people are, he cut a lot of the movement for arms and the twirling in the final mix that actually is more prevalent than the feet. And the reason it’s more prevalent is because that’s the fight that’s not really a fight. That’s the, that’s the arm swish without the punch, that’s the, you know, the the cloth movement and those jerky moves they do in that in that dance are covered by a combination of foley doing movement. And Steve being kind of nuts to the point he cut every little detail of that he was responsible for the sync for a lot of the movement in that scene where I think the the sound of the movement of the bodies was the most important element of our soundtrack.
Timothy Muirhead 23:37
He said that what he really enjoyed about this film was that there was a lot of time to be able to play with things and figure out where the sink was. And that he also was trying to use those cloth movements as part of the score almost like they were brushes on the snare and like a jazz song kind of thing and use the cloth movement to keep the rhythm that way. That’s super fun.
Gary Rydstrom 23:57
This is why Steve was so brilliant a choice to work on this movie. But it’s not only the sync of those sounds, but the choice of those sounds. Steve is great enough that he would record some of his own stuff he recorded a lot he did the opening prologue to with the and the jets song and the Jets walking through the streets in New York. And he recorded a lot of things for that. So it’s not just a sync, it’s the quality of the sound so and I knew that he would he thinks like a musician. And I made great use of my grade school piano lessons. But Steve is a real musician. And that’s why he did that. And that’s why it’s his job to do these micro sync through to the end of the of the film.
Timothy Muirhead 24:40
So speaking of syncing to the music, there’s another friend of our show named Peter Albrechtsen, who’s over in Denmark.
Gary Rydstrom 24:45
Of course.
Timothy Muirhead 24:46
And I was talkin g to him and told him that we were going to be talking to you and he sent me some questions to make sure….
Gary Rydstrom 24:51
Are they in English?
Timothy Muirhead 24:53
They’re not in English. No. But he commented about how the surround mix he found it to be extremely elegant and really utilizing the surrounding music to do a lot of panning, how free were you to mess around with the music and play with it or was it dictated ahead of time.
Gary Rydstrom 25:09
Andy Nelson was the recording mixer, did the music and the the natural space of the music is what the orchestra did, there was no tricky kind of panning things around. But it was recorded mostly in the Manhattan Center, which is a big facility in New York. So it has a large sound with the New York Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel conducting the way Sean Murphy recorded it. And making use of Atmos and surrounds to me the surround and even the ceilings and Atmos and all that are really to give you a sense of a theatrical sound, a concert hall sound. And that’s what comes across it feels, it envelops you but in a natural way, not an unnatural way. Andy does a trick, I’m sure he won’t mind me telling you have left and right on the main screens and uses the ATMOS pull them into the theater a little bit. So essentially, is widening the stereo image. And it’s always feel like you’re not really doing much. But when you go back and you’re making the seven, one or the five, one master from that, you know, I’m always slightly disappointed it feels just a little smaller. So that’s the only it’s not artificial, that’s the only trick is to is pull it a little wider than the screen, and that it fit the feel of this movie to do that. But the way the music envelops the space was pretty much the way it was performed and recorded.
Timothy Muirhead 26:36
The other thing that Steve said to me, he’s heard you tell stories. And then regularly you end the story with “at least that’s the way I think about sound design”. I don’t know if you’re aware that you’ve done that. Can you elaborate on that? What how would you describe sound design, what’s your thoughts on sound design as a whole as a practice?
Gary Rydstrom 26:55
I only think about it the way I think about it, but I think of sound design as is an emotional thing. And not as a technical thing. And I’m actually not a very technical, many people are more technical than I am and knowing the equipment and the apps and, the plugins and all that kind of stuff. I think of sound design as a way to to generate an emotion. Whenever possible in a scene even room tones or refrigerator hums or if it generates an emotion. That’s what I’m I think sounds capability is to do that. And I think that any sound, not just music can make you feel something. My job as a sound designer is sometimes when I’m making something or mixing something I’m trying to gauge my own emotional reaction to a scene or moment. Often it’s very subtle, and subtle is good. I think subtle is very good. That and storytelling, and I think I like clarity. And this is sometimes when I when I say that phrase it Steve quotes me saying sometimes I think what I’m doing is secretly criticizing other movies. Because sometimes what bothers me with sound is it feels like it’s a scattered approach, it’s got a lot of things happening, but I don’t know what to listen to. And then you both lose clarity of what it is you’re listening to. And you also lose….. When I was in film school, we learned about how to guide the eye so that Spielberg is a genius at this. So you know where the audience is supposed to look. I often use that as a guide for what the sound should do. Because if you know, Spielberg’s trying to tell me in the audience, that’s where the point of the scene is right there. He does it with staging, beautiful staging with the way the actors move everything, we should do the same, we should do something with the sound to make sure that the audience is hearing what you want to hear and focused on what you want them to be focused on.
René Coronado 28:41
Is he explicit with you about that? Is he like, hey, in this scene like this, is the important part over here? Or does he expect you to kind of figure that out based on what you’re looking at?
Gary Rydstrom 28:48
He’ll be explicit about it if I get a wrong!! It’s a constant. The whole movie is doing that every every moment in the movie is doing that. So you, you depend on the movie telling you that. In his movies, I think one of the strengths of his movies is they’re very clear about what they’re trying to do. And I can take that clarity and I try to emphasize it or do like with that we talked about with the demolition sounds, there’s a story to be told off screen. That’s another element that we can add that’s you know, a focus of the story that you don’t see that. And Spielberg is clever enough to know that doesn’t have to show everything that he knows the sound will handle later on. So anyway, my approach to sound design is to always, almost your first step when you’re talking about first steps is to get to know the movie just to feel the movie. And so this is what the movie is trying to do. And use these kind of give yourself over to the movie and say this is West Side Story had this interesting combination. It was both naturalistic. It’s grittier and more realistic than say the ’61 movie, which feels a little stager. So this feels like real 1957 New York real apartment Barnardos apartment feels like a real apartment. But it has a stylization to it as well. So that combination of tone that’s what’s interesting to me in the sound has to follow that tone. So in my case, the tone of the sound was realistic or real crank sirens and, and 50s horns and rough cars and shoes of the era and things like that. But also, the thing we talked about the synchronization kind of the artificiality, you know, when a car breaks in, in sync with the music, that’s not reality, that’s musical reality. So I try to find that tone. What’s the movie trying to do? In this case, it was really interesting combination of realistic and unrealistic and naturalistic and stylistic, you know, what kind of sounds and what kind of approach to sound helps that?
René Coronado 30:39
Do you have a ritual for your first screening of a film?
Gary Rydstrom 30:43
I always tell myself just to watch the movie and not take notes. And I ruined that. I have a pad and I just…….. You should I’m bad that way. I think I would recommend to anyone that the first thing to do if you’re going to work on a movie is watch it like an audience and learn about the movie and not go into the detail of oh, I need to get that sound of that sound.
René Coronado 31:02
Yeah, cuz you only get one first impression on the cut.
Gary Rydstrom 31:05
I know I do that wrong, but it’s just so anxious to you know. But yeah, the first thing is, we have a screening, we did it with West Side Story, we had the crew, we actually went we watched the ’61 movie, in our Stag Theater which is a beautiful theater. And we had a screening of the ’61 just to get in the mood, not to copy it. But just to understand that. And then we watched when we got our movie, we watch those a crew, so maybe that you’re watching it as an audience, even a small audience, maybe that keeps you from writing down the endless notes on a pad. And I do a lot of things different than I should do including take too many notes too early, you got it, you got to feel it, you got to, I think and it’s also one of Spielberg’s strengths is he’s able to be an audience to his own movie. And I think it’s one of the secrets to film work is to think like an audience when the time is right to think like an audience not just like the guy on the other side of the screen doing the details. Sometimes you have to forget the details and you go on the other side of the screen and feel like you’re sitting in an audience and seeing this for the first time. How is that going to work? You know? So that’s a trick that I’m still getting better at.
René Coronado 32:16
But when you’re taking notes, what kind of stuff are you writing down?
Gary Rydstrom 32:18
Early on I am writing simply a list of things we need to get. Or, or, or feelings. I mean, I try to write down what the what the feelings are, you know, the demolition sounds, you know, kind of New York this is this isn’t New York, you know, happy horns honking and you know, lively town, this is New York that’s falling apart. This is the wrong side of the of this is the poor side of New York. You know, the apartment buildings have a certain quality to them. That’s not uptown, it’s it’s a it’s a little down and dirty. So off screen activities and door closes and babies crying and, you know, that kind of thing. Yeah, I tend to write down, you know, feelings, but then also need to get 1958-56 Chevy, you know, that kind of thing. More boring.
Timothy Muirhead 33:07
And as a supervisor, when you’ve got your notes and you go to find those sounds, how do you distribute them to your editors? Or do they find the sounds themselves? How do you go about kind of defining a palette?
Gary Rydstrom 33:18
I like to make the library for the editors, people like Steve Bissinger will is so good at finding his own stuff. So, but we had Terry Eckton on this, who’s a classic editor and E.J. Holowicki and my job early on is I put together a library, we use Soundminer as a database, and I use that to kind of organized into categories for the show. So we both record, collect, find, take for my own library, and I collect them into categories and I write notes about all the sounds and that’s really one of the first things to do so when an editor starts I want them to have a library that’s really organized for the show, not for a library but for OUR show so categories that are specific to Westside story. For one thing, I find that when talking about tone the certain kinds of sounds work for certain kinds of tones and certain sounds don’t you kind of these even door closes there’s a door close that sounds right to me for this movie, and door closes that sound wrong. So I like to establish that palette and then that’s what they work from as much as possible. Early on I tried an approach to sound that was more of a Ben Burtt approach and Ben is Ben he can only Ben can do it this way but he would make you know a moment in Star Wars and make a sound for the carbon freezing chamber or something you had to do to get one perfect sound you just cut it in…. genius, you know, and out of both laziness and wish to make use of other people’s points of view. I came around to doing sound and more kind of elements of moments, you know, sort of bits and pieces and then give it I always thought of it like a toy box. I tell the editors. Here’s your toy box and you know, toys that I selected, but here, put them together somehow and see what you think. And then I always find that great editors and we had great editors on this show will do things you don’t expect. So that’s, that’s a lesson that I learned over a couple of decades. But that’s a good one.
René Coronado 35:15
How long does that process take for you to do all the initial sound gathering?
Oh weeks, you know, you know, and you keep going even once the editors start, but the gathering actually I do the looking through my existing library first. And you start to pull together a library from existing sounds try to use sounds maybe in interesting ways. Partly because it tells you what you need to get you don’t have and you start to feel the movie that’s the first thing is putting together a library based for the show based on library that I know that exists. Sometimes in parallel other people, very often not me, but other people start collecting and recording sounds that we have on a list and those things would get gathered into our into our movie, that to me that’s a very important step is to the library in some ways that I put together defines the sound of the movie even before we’ve cut anything,
do you hand that library to the picture editors as well, so they can start getting used to those sounds?
Gary Rydstrom 36:08
No, the mean the picture editors sometimes we will give sounds if they want to put something in as a tentpole or a guide, the Spielberg editor Michael Kahn, who I’ve worked with for many years, their way of working is not as guide track-y, he is some other editors these days who do want fairly full so called temporary sounds as they cut. Michael Kahn and Sarah Broshar, who works with them now, are okay kind of putting in some basic sounds, essentially, to communicate to us what they’re thinking. And then they leave it to us to do the, to do our full sounds, I’d much prefer that if I can have an opinion, much prefer that way of doing it for picture editing, then the give me a massive library, we’re going to cut a massive temporary track, and then we’re going to fall in love with it, and you’re not going to be able to do much down the road. So I don’t like that approach, which is probably most of the approaches that people take these days.
René Coronado 37:07
Yeah, I think that’s why a lot of supervisors will do what you do, which is to collect a bunch of sounds, you know, if they if they get temp-itis, it’s at least with sounds that they have pre approved.
Gary Rydstrom 37:17
But sound is context sound, I can read a book about what people get wrong about sound, including directors, and it’s not a piecemeal thing, it’s not a buffet, you don’t just you know, you put these, these you choose your sound individually, every sound is in context with sounds around it. It’s not a you know, pick it, pick it, pick it. And then by the end, you’ve picked 1400 sounds and you’re done with a movie, it’s seeing how things work together in a process, you kind of have to find it over time. It’s not a not a, it’s not a checklist of you know, I’ve seen that approach literally, you know, Excel spreadsheet of these are the sounds we need and just get, you know, check them off the list and we’re done. That sound might be great by itself, but in context not to be wrong. So I’ll write my book someday about everything we do wrong about sound. That’s one of them.
René Coronado 38:05
Can you say more about about that specific thing, though, about context about what’s the platonic ideal, I guess it’s like finding the right context. For a given soundtrack, we give it part of a soundtrack,
Gary Rydstrom 38:15
there’s, you know, the masking effect, which is really an interesting thing to kind of work against, in sound, which is, you know, certain frequencies, if you’re playing an ambience that has certain frequencies, you have a sound effect that has same frequencies that will get lost, a lot of it is is the context of placing sounds next to each other and within each other, so they still make sense. And they’re clear as to what they are, as opposed to mushy, sometimes sound when you put them together, you think it should work, but they turn into mush. And you don’t know you can’t discern what it’s supposed to be. It’s really about rhythm and pitch. So the sound takes place over time. So you have to clear things up over time. So I think a lot in terms of well, both rhythm and pitch. So a high frequency sound that works great as a contrast to a lot of low frequency sounds leading up to it, or a loud sound that works great in contrast to low dynamic sounds leading up to it. And that always changing contrast is important. But you know, thinking I mean, I think in terms of pitch. I’ve said many times before that I wished in school, I take an orchestration classes I think orchestration is probably one of the great skills to have and doing sound of any type because you think about niches and frequencies and how they work together and how the change of frequencies and pitch over time affects you if you stay down here and then you suddenly have a sharp high moment and back to a low frequency moment. Bernstein music does this really well. Good music does this really well. And I think all sound should do, should think in those same orchestration terms. It’s all context.
Timothy Muirhead 39:59
When I I was a teenager, I was a drummer in bands. And I was a drummer and a lot of bands because there’s a million guitarists and not enough drummers. And I found myself worn out by the drumming. But what I kept going back for was I became the arranger for the bands. And I’d be like, oh, you know what, we got to let the bass player shine here. And I didn’t know it. But when I went to film school, that skill that I’d built up in all these high school bands, playing pubs, and stuff, like that was what led me to doing sound for picture because I realized, Oh, this is what I want to do, like rearranging and pulling it and figuring out which is which to play were was what really got me going. And I love the idea of the way you just explained it. I’m wondering if maybe you can give us a quick case study of that. Earlier you described in the the battle scene, the fight scene in the salt shed, that you wanted to get whooshes that were scary and menacing,
Gary Rydstrom 40:50
Well the scary and menacing whooshing that went to me or that is the knife fight with your incredibly high pitched, I forget how I made them, but they’re really they’re high didn’t I’m sure knives wouldn’t really do that. But they’re, they’re scary, they sound literally sharp, right? So that the knife fight is full of these really high sharp switches that …. arm switches are deeper kind of coffee things and then they’re in there too. But my favorite is the knife fight the knife fight again, there’s no contact, there’s until the death it’s really just, it’s just with the scary sound has to be the swish. And it’s just high and you think about the high frequency what you then it’s a really basic thing, but you don’t have, say an ambience, if I wanted to have a sodium vapor buzz are something that was a high pitch, they would have hurt the swish of the knife. So you make the ambience sit down low. So that you know just like an orchestra, you know, guy arranging for a band, you’re having the the bass, sort of support, the flute, violin, whatever it is that you’re supporting. So yeah, thinking that way, I wish that I had been a band arranger, that would have helped me a lot.
René Coronado 41:55
It also seems like frequency and tempo are tied together in such a way that the faster you go, the more you’re not able to use low frequencies. Or I guess, the smaller things become, the faster you go. I work a lot in sports. And my sports editors, especially the new guys, they make the mistake of cutting too fast. And if they want a big moment, I’m always telling them hey, man, you got to slow down and set this moment up, so we can knock it down. Because otherwise if you blow through it, it’s not gonna sound huge, just gotta go slow, so I can make it sound big.
Gary Rydstrom 42:24
Yeah, you’re right, deep sounds low frequency sounds take time. It’s for obvious physics reasons. And the wavelength is long, so it takes longer for it to register. But cutting too fast if Michael Kahn, who’s been Spielberg’s editor for a very long time that you even look at things like Raiders, it is not cut too fast, but it’s effective. He gives it time. I think in some ways you have to, you have to be knowledgeable enough when you’re a film editor to know that the sound which you’re not hearing complete yet, is going to add impact to a moment and let it breathe enough to be able to hear ambiences and music. You know, the effects. And I do think yet another chapter of my book has yet to be written about how people get things wrong is exactly that if you cut too fast, the sound people just they curse the picture editor because nothing reads, right, it’s just you have to what you have to do is you have to, to chop sounds down to artificially short bits. And a lot of what we do in movies, especially action movies, today, a lot of it is so fast, both fast and visually complicated that all at once that what you end up doing is an extreme version, if you’re doing your job right of focusing the attention the audience because the visuals are not focusing your time visually. And if confusing, so I’ve worked on some movies where it’s so confusing visually that I feel like my job is to give the audience a handle. So you know, sometimes you ignore a thing that’s happening that you would normally cut a sound for because it’s no time and there’s no reason to focus on you just find the thing to hold on to. So yeah, cutting too fast and you got to you have to trust the sound process and the music process is going to do when you cut
René Coronado 44:12
it’s trust in its he had to trust the whole process and it’s got to come from the ground up that also comes back to I guess it was Walter March, who talks about the number of things that you can perceive at one time being three things?
Unknown Speaker 44:25
and he talks to you he said when I was in film school, he came and talked about Apocalypse Now and he cut the picture but he also cut the sound for the for this great helicopter attack and Apocalypse Now and he talked about the rule of threes so that there was only and sound you know which means you got these three things and if the helicopter is no longer important and and you have a fourth thing come in you drop the helicopter and then the fourth it’s it’s in he says it’s like the three ring circus there’s a reason for it. It’s the three ring circus it’s that’s as much as you can. There’s no four ring circus and no five ring circus. There’s a three ring circus. And as with almost everything Walter says, that’s absolutely correct.
Timothy Muirhead 45:05
Thank you so much for talking to us today, Gary. It’s been really great to meet you and speak with you. We really appreciate it. And congratulations on the film. As I said earlier, it gave me chills at one point and it made me cry like a child. I think. All the emotions, it was a roller coaster for me. Thank you very much, and hopefully we can have you on again one day.
Gary Rydstrom 45:27
Thank you. Thank you very much. It’s been my pleasure. Thank you guys.
Narrator 44:57
Tonebenders is produced by Timothy Muirhead, Rene Coronado and Teresa Morrow. Theme music is by Mark Straight. Send your emails to info at tonebenderspodcast.com. Follow us on Twitter via @thetonebenders and join “Tonebenders Podcast” on Facebook. Support this podcast. You can use our links when you shop at Amazon or b&h or leave us a tip. Just go to tonebenderspodcast.com and click the support button. Thanks for listening.
Timothy Muirhead 45:27
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