Are you nervous about starting a new project? Don’t worry; so is everyone else, including your sound design hero, Randy Thom. Spotting sessions are a chance to talk through the edit, scene by scene. These gatherings give the director, the composer and the rest of the editorial team a chance to sort out out technical issues and determine the direction and shape the soundtrack is going to take. Randy joins us to talk about about what kind of attitude, questions and objectives he brings to the spotting sessions for new movie projects. (This episode was originally released in March 2020)
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The Following is an AI generated transcript of this episode. Please excuse any typos or translation mistakes made by the algorithm .
**** This transcript is from the original release of this episode. A new intro was added for this version. So the times listed below are all off by 2 minutes and 10 seconds.******
Teresa Morrow 0:20
Hello, and welcome to Tonebenders. I’m Teresa Morrow, and with me today is Tim Muirhead. Howdy, Tim.
Timothy Muirhead 0:25
Hey Teresa. This is an awesome day. I’m really excited about our guest today.
Teresa Morrow 0:29
Yeah. On today’s episode, we’re in conversation with Randy Thom, a man who needs no introduction, but I’m going to do one anyways… Randy’s illustrious career in film sound began in 1978, recording sound effects for Apocalypse Now. Effects recording, re-recording mixer, supervising sound editor and sound designer are the roles he takes on in turns. He’s crafted soundtracks for many late 20th century classics from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, The Right Stuff, Forrest Gump, to name a few. And to some of Tim and my all time family favorites, I could say, like Iron Giant, – which is a perfect movie in my opinion -Mars Attacks, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and many many more great animated fantasy and dramatic films, in the course of an incredible career in moviemaking. Randy also inspires and instructs everyone else in the business through his blog posts, articles and master classes. And hopefully today he will agree to share a few more of his insights with us on the Tonebenders podcast. Hi, Randy, thank you so much for coming on the show. I am so glad we finally managed to make it happen.
Randy Thom 1:45
Hey, Teresa, and Tim. It’s wonderful to be with you.
Teresa Morrow 1:48
Now we’ve given you this exciting intro. But we’ve convinced you to come on the show to talk about something pretty specific, and that is spotting sessions, and really the whole process of spotting, which maybe I will ask you to define for us. What is spotting? What are you trying to achieve when you convene a spotting session?
Randy Thom 2:09
Okay, spotting is done, not only for sound, of course, but the visual effects designers spot a movie with the director. Often they spot it many times as they get more and more precise about what the film should look like. And the same thing needs to happen with sound. The easy thing to assume is that the director has in his or her head exactly what it should sound like. But in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve never worked with a director who knew from the beginning what the film should sound like. It’s always a process of discovery. Coincidentally, as we’re having this discussion, I’m going to be flying tomorrow down to Santa Barbara to spot the new Bob Zemeckis movie called The Witches. And I know very well that Bob has lots of ideas about what it might sound like. But I also know that he doesn’t know exactly what it’s going to sound like. And it’s up to all of us to figure out together. Every movie has a sound style, just like it has a visual style. And that’s something that you discover as you go along. I always say that people who don’t know much about art, assume that the artist has this grand vision and then what happens after that is just the kind of perfunctory series of tasks that the artist does using the skills that they’ve amassed to create the the final work, but, in fact, it almost never happens that way. It’s always about discovery and The most interesting stuff almost always happens when you’re in the process of doing it, it doesn’t come out of the so called grand vision. So, in a real sense, the spotting session is the very beginning of really figuring out the nuts and bolts of what the movie should sound like. And it consists of sitting in a room and looking at whatever exists of the visuals, and whatever temporary sounds have been put in at that point. And talking very specifically about what the director wants the audience to feel and to understand in each moment of the film. And it’s not always obvious.
Teresa Morrow 4:47
Something I’m curious about is, for example, with this meeting you’re going to have tomorrow, who’s going to be in the room, and in what shape is the picture that you’re going to be looking at? Like, what do you think you’re going to be seeing?
Randy Thom 5:00
In a typical spotting session, in my experience, the director is there, the picture editor is there. And it’s a funny term picture editor. Some people think that it means well, they’re concerned with editing the visuals, but in fact, it comes from the old days of Hollywood when the picture was the movie. So the picture editor is really the movie editor not the editor of the visuals. The sound supervisor will be there. Sometimes that person is a dialogue specialist, sometimes that person is a sound design specialist. In my experience, usually the the sound design or the sound effects and the dialogue are spotted at the same time, at least initially. So you can talk about what lines of dialogue or usable that were collected on the set when the scenes were being shot and which ones may not be usable, either for technical reasons or because the performance isn’t what the director wants. Obviously, we’re going to be talking about the sound effects in each sequence. Also, my first question, or at least my series of questions is aimed at getting a grasp of the style that the director is after, you know, you know, from reading the script and looking at the movie, what genre of film it is. But, you know, there are all kinds of science fiction films. And there are all kinds of mysteries and they’re all kinds of comedies. You know, in some comedies, you have the license to do all kinds of crazy stylized sounds and in some comedies you don’t. So in order to not waste a lot of time doing inappropriate sounds that the director is not interested in its best to get a grasp on what that style is pretty specifically very early.
Teresa Morrow 7:02
I don’t know if you can be so blunt as to say, okay, like referring to other movies or specific scenes and other movies like you’re trying to kind of put together some pretty big ideas into a few words in those moments, right?
Randy Thom 7:19
Yeah, one of the big challenges for sound people is that our vocabulary for describing sounds is so limited. The number of words that we have available to us to describe visual images is vast compared to the number of words available to describe sounds. So communicating about sound is is always tough. It’s always a challenge.
Teresa Morrow 7:44
Do you have any tricks?
Randy Thom 7:49
Well, sometimes I resort to making sound effects with my mouth. That helps occasionally, but you’re right when you suggest that it can be useful to Refer to existing films existing sequences and shots in films. One tricky thing about that is that the director, of course, never wants you to think that he or she wants to copy anything that already exists. So, you know, if you want to make a reference to some existing film, it’s usually best to say something like: “I’m guessing that it should be a little bit like so and so, but obviously not exactly, but you know, that’s the kind of feeling that you’re going for…” in order to not hurt the director’s feelings.
Timothy Muirhead 8:44
So how are you actually taking the notes or recording what is discussed at the spotting session?
Randy Thom 8:53
I know that some sound people are using software to take notes for spotting. I haven’t evolved in that direction yet. And neither have most of the people who I work with, we literally, you know, write things down on pieces of paper or at the most high tech just, you know, take notes into an iPad or laptop.
Timothy Muirhead 9:21
Have you ever recorded the actual spotting session like just brought in a portable recorder and recorded it?
Randy Thom 9:27
We do actually. We we record the audio for almost every spotting session and almost every telephone call that we make with the director or the editor, just so that we don’t, you know, mis-remember things that have been said and it’s often useful to go back to the, the recording and remind yourself exactly what the instructions that you got or the exact moment in the sequence that they were talking about, etc.
Timothy Muirhead 10:01
I found in the past that I’ve done a spotting session with someone, and then during the weeks after while I’m working on it, my memory of the actual spotting session starts morphing a little bit. And then if I go back and check my notes again, sometimes I’m like, Oh, yeah, I sent myself on a wild goose chase somehow. So I, I really liked the idea of actually recording the spotting session. And then someone I was talking to said, they record the spotting session and then like a week later on their commute in they just listened back to it on the way in and back out. And that kind of helps jog their memory and get back to the original intent.
Randy Thom 10:36
Yeah, I think that’s a great idea. Yeah, memory, you know, human memory is very unreliable. All of us are storytellers. And we we tend to make up little stories about what we experience and often the stories evolve in our memories and stray from what actually happened. So it’s always good to have a dependable reference to to the original.
Teresa Morrow 11:00
I’m thinking about when you go into that initial spotting session, and then subsequent meetings with the director, because, like, music sort of lives in its own domain, sometimes you can be seen as the ambassador of sound effects. When really, you know so much more about the whole entirety of the soundtrack and may have opinions about how the whole soundtrack is going to come together.
Randy Thom 11:29
I think it’s a great idea to have music and sound design and dialogue spotted at the same time. And we’ve done that on some of Bob Zemeckis’ movies. For instance, Alan Silvestri, and I have been there for the initial spotting. And one of the reasons that works with Alan and with Bob, is that Bob is great about making decisions pretty early about which sequences are going to be mainly music-driven sequences, which sequences are going to be dialogue sequences, which sequences are going to be sound effects sequences. And he understands very well that it’s silly to have, you know, all three guns firing at the same time very often. And so he’s very much a believer in passing the baton, you know, from one department to the other in the course of a sequence. So in those spotting sessions, where Alan Silvestri and I are both there, we can just talk absolutely freely about: “Do you think it’s going to be most powerful if sound effects kind of lays back in this sequence and plays a secondary role and does just enough to kind of support the action with but knows that it’s really going to be driven by music or the opposite, you know, as wonderful as the music might be in the sequence. Having music there is, is going to mediate it in a way that might not be useful.” So for instance, the the very long sequence over an hour in Castaway, where there was no music at all, and almost no dialogue, Zemeckis really wanted that whole sequence to play very much like a documentary, and to have had musical score, it would have on some level reminded you that you were watching a movie. And so it was always his intention that there was probably going to be no music there. So the three of us have the kind of relationship that allows that discussion to to happen. And you know, that’s not always the case. Sometimes a director isn’t so sure. And obviously, no director is absolutely sure how every sequence in the movie is going to play before it’s figured out in the end. But some directors are much less sure and much less secure about all those questions than others. And so as a fallback, basically, they very much want the score to be available with, you know, all guns firing in a given sequence and the sound of designed to be the same. And, you know, those are the kinds of sequences that make us sound people cringe both on the music side and the sound design side, because we know very well that in the end, you know, in the final mix, it’s going to be, you know, a rough several hours or several days, trying to make all of that sound coherent and meaningful and figure out how to change focus from this to that to that to that. So that it doesn’t sound like you’re standing next to Niagara Falls, it’s just a pink noise with everybody stepping on everybody else.
Teresa Morrow 15:13
I think that notion of insecurity is something I’ve heard other mixers talk about; that sometimes your director comes in with that sense of insecurity, that’s the dominant mode at which they arrive with at the sound department’s doorstep, it’s like: “Here’s the things that aren’t working, and that’s going to be your job to somehow fix it. You music you sound, go, you know, somehow make this better.”
Randy Thom 15:43
Yeah, absolutely. And you know, all of us are insecure. All of us are, you know, artists, trying to be better artists. And we all at least, you know, the ones of us that are any good at it, often battle the feeling that we’re fraud And you know, we’re not as good at it as everybody thinks we are and, and we’re going to fail the next time out. And you know, people hire me because they think that I know exactly how to do whatever it is they want me to do. But in fact, I never know exactly how to do what they want me to do in the beginning. I’ve been doing this… I’ve been working in, you know, professional sound for almost 50 years now. And every time, I get nervous, you know, I’m nervous about the, The Witches, you know, having watched it two or three times by myself in preparation for the spotting with the director. You know, I’m not at all sure I know how to accomplish what it seems to me needs to be accomplished in some of these sequences. But I also remind myself that I felt that way many times before and eventually did figure it out most of the time. So there’s a level of confidence that it’ll happen somehow. But I’m not sure how.
Timothy Muirhead 17:08
Do you demand to see the project on your own before you go to the spotting session,? Because I’ve had to do some spotting sessions where I’m going in just completely blind and watching it for the first time with everyone else in the room. And that can make you quite self-conscious at the same time, because suddenly you’re worrying about them looking at your reaction, rather than watching the screen and paying attention to for what sound needs kind of thing.
Randy Thom 17:31
Well, I don’t think I don’t ever think I’m in the position of being able to demand anything. But I certainly request that I be able to see the movie or the sequence or whatever it is before spotting just because it allows me to ask more intelligent questions. You know, in a spotting session, you’re always afraid that you’re going to ask a stupid question and everybody’s going to say: “What do you mean, you don’t understand?” Are you going to insult the director or insult the editor by saying: “Why does this happen?” And they think it should be obvious why that happens. So spotting sessions are always a little nerve-wracking. Obviously, they’re less nerve-wracking if you worked with somebody a long time, like I have with Zemeckis. Because we know pretty much what to expect of each other at this point. But yeah, if I were to go into a spotting session with somebody who I had never worked with before, and I never seen the material. I certainly wouldn’t be confident that the questions I would ask and the ideas that I would propose would be very well thought out. It would be a lot of shooting from the hip, which, you know, it’s certainly one way to begin, but not the ideal.
Teresa Morrow 18:57
I feel like you’re kind of, like, threading the needle in a spotting session sometimes, between stating the obvious and trying to get beyond stating the obvious. I feel like sometimes there’s a good use to stating the obvious because it kind of gets you to the next thing or causes you to question – maybe you’re wrong. Maybe what you thought is obvious is a misconception or something. But I think there’s kind of a virtue in that sometimes, like, just in playing the useful idiot like: I see this, I see this, I see this, am I right? Is that what you’re going for? What else do you want to see? Trying to push the conversation forward in that way.
Randy Thom 19:39
Yeah, being the kind of innocent, naive, you know, early observer can be really useful, I think, for the director and and for the editor, because, you know, at this point, they’ve probably been sitting with this thing for quite a while. And because you haven’t, your response to it, you know, gives them some useful information about what the audience… how the audience might respond. But of course, at this point, typically, in the spotting session, the initial spotting session at least, lots of the visuals are not there. You know, the score is not there. Some of the dialogue probably is going to be rewritten anyway. And so the fact that there are all those kind of question marks hanging in the air, I think gives you the freedom and the latitude to, you know, maybe ask a few dumb questions.
Timothy Muirhead 20:44
How much.. how confident are you about suggesting picture edits? Because what I found, I’ll just give you some background to what I’m trying to get at here. A lot of movies these days suffer from a pacing issue. Where you know, the end of the film, The big action scene, it’s 25 minutes long. And it’s relentless for 25 minutes. And I’ve found, there’s been lots of movies that after the big climax, my ears are just exhausted. And it feels like the better movies find ways within that 25 minute action sequence or whatever is at the end. For instance, Ford vs Ferrari, there’s a 25 minute speed race at the end of it, and it’s just car revving engines the entire time. But they find all these really nice, like 30 second, 45 second holes to pop in there so that your ears can have a moment of pause. Like, is that something that you discuss with the people when you’re doing the spotting sessions? Or are you feeling like it’s locked in and you just got to make work what you’re seeing?
Randy Thom 21:43
I think some things are locked in and some things are not I usually avoid making suggestions about things that I think probably can’t be changed. So you know, obviously would be a big mistake to go into a spotting session and saying, you know: “Why did you cast him?! Don’t ever do that, that would be very bad. So, you know, for anything where, you know, the ship has sailed and you know, there’s no chance that it can be improved upon. It would be silly to, you know, to make an alternative suggestion, but I think the best directors are always looking for good ideas. You know, in the end, the director is going to get the credit and the blame for almost everything. And so, any really good smart director, I think, wants ideas from everybody; it’s typically the inexperienced and insecure directors, who, you know, want you to think that they know it all and, and they don’t need any advice from you and I really I’ve run into very few of those in my career. Certainly not in a long time. And also because I’d been doing it for a long time, I think I get away probably with making suggestions that maybe some sound people might not get away with so easily if they hadn’t been doing it for as long as I have. But I always encourage my colleagues and my peers to be, you know, pretty bold about making creative suggestions. You know, just couch it by saying: “You know, I’m not sure if the ship has sailed on this, but it occurs to me that you know, it might be better if we had a few moments to absorb what just happened. And I know that I can do something with the sound in those moments that will help the audience understand what just happened. So, you know, I’m not sure how much coverage you have for this. But is it possible that we could open up, open that up and, you know, make that shot a little longer or cut away to something else?” As with all these kinds of discussions and interactions, I think it’s extremely important that you know, that you have a sense of who you’re working with and who’s in the room, and how much you can get away with with those people. Some picture editors, for instance, would feel threatened if I made a suggestion about picture editing. So I’d obviously be much less likely to do that if I were in a room with a picture editor who I’d never worked with. But I also know that some picture editors really welcome suggestions like that. And they’ll just, you know, matter of factly say: “Well, it’s an interesting idea and you know, we can experiment with that and And see if it works. And it may or may not. And you know, we’ll let you know.” I think both of you, because you’ve heard me before and read things that I written know that I’ve been an evangelist for a long time for sound people having…
Timothy Muirhead 25:19
- At the script stage…
Randy Thom 25:21
Yeah, sound people having input when, at least when rewriting of the script is happening or revisions of the scriptare happening. I think it’s crazy that the production designer and the director of photography get to have these discussions with the director very early, you know, having read an initial draft of a script, or a fairly early draft of the script, had these discussions in which they say: “Well, you know, it really helped me if we change the script a little bit in this way or that way. Or maybe they should enter through the back of the building instead of the front of the building, and that’ll allow me to do so and so visually.” I just think it’s crazy that sound people are not allowed and encouraged to have the same kinds of discussions in pre-production and during production, with directors. It would make better movies. And I was very lucky early in my career to basically be an apprentice to Walter Murch and Ben Burtt and watched how they worked with George Lucas and with Francis Coppola, and it was very much that kind of collegial, collaborative, you know, get you involved as early as possible approach. And so for the last, you know, 25 or 30 years, I’ve been saying to anybody who I thought would listen, you know, let’s do more of that. Let’s figure out how more of that can happen because it’ll make the movies better.
Teresa Morrow 27:05
And it’s not just a question of an aspiring sound designer or any sound effects editor like believing that they have something to offer. But I guess in teaching people how to make films to have them incorporate what is going to happen sound-wise in their imagination when they’re picturing their film, before they’ve even written a word, I guess.
Randy Thom 27:25
Yeah. You may have heard the story about Once Upon a Time in the West, that Sergio Leone film, he decided that he wanted Morricone to compose the whole score for the movie before they shot the film. And the idea was that they would play the score back on the set and it would help motivate the actors you know, get them in the right mood. They even in the end, they shot some of the sequences essentially to play back. B ut neither he nor Leone was happy with the first cue, the beginning of the movie. And for those who haven’t seen it, it’s the first scene is the title sequence is in the desert at a little waystation, where trains stop just to let off a passenger or to take on a passenger too and get water for the steam engine. And there are three bad guys. They’re waiting for somebody who’s going to get off the train, and they’re going to kill this guy. So Morricone wrote a music cue for that sequence, but they didn’t really like it for some reason, and they weren’t sure what they were going to do. But then Morricone happened to go to a musique concrete concert where a guy was playing a ladder, he was banging on a ladder and scraping the ladder and making music with sound effects, and the little light bulb went off in Morricone’s head and he called Sergio Leone and said there should be no conventional score in the beginning of the movie at all. The sequence should be shot based on the sounds that happen in that place. And that’s exactly what Leone did. He plannned the shooting of that whole rather long sequence very much around the sounds that happened there. There’s a windmill that’s squeaking regularly that you hear through the whole sequence. And, you know, where the windmill is sonically helps you navigate kind of the geography of the place, sometimes you’re close to it, sometimes you’re far away. There’s water dripping from this tank onto one of the bad guys’ heads and then his hat when he puts his hat on, and it’s all very musical. So that is, that’s the kind of thinking that I just wish to God that directors and screenwriters could do more of in terms of actually planning sequences and scenes based on the sonic possibilities, because those sounds can do such a good job of reflecting who the characters are, and how the characters are changing and feeling. So, as I’ve said before, it would make it a better movie.
Timothy Muirhead 30:44
So when you are doing the spotting session, what is the room that you’re doing it in? Are you going into the picture editors room or —
Randy Thom 30:52
In my experience of spotting usually does happen in the picture editing room. And as we all know, sometimes the audio playback in picture editing rooms is not as good as it should be. And so you just make your best guess. And sometimes you say:”Let me just make a note about this line or the series of lines, and we’ll go and you know, listen to the originals later, and then we’ll get back to you about whether we think we’re going to need to ADR those or not.”
Timothy Muirhead 31:25
And then how do you take the notes that you’re making in the spotting session with the director and the picture editor and the composer? And how do you get those notes out to your team of sound effects editors, dialogue editors and such?
Randy Thom 31:41
Tomorrow, for this The Witches spotting session, the sound team is me and Leff Lefferts, my longtime colleague, and Bjorn Schroeder, who’s a co-supervisor, and Jeremy Bowker, who’s another sound designer. And I think, very often in spotting sessions, you wouldn’t necessarily bring that many people from the sound department. Sometimes it would just be me, or maybe me and the dialogue supervisor. But Bob’s team is open to more of us coming. And my feeling is that the more of the sound team that gets to meet the people in the picture editing department and the people in the in the office in general there and the more they get to interact with them, the better it’s going to be for everybody. And it’s better for them to hear what the director and the picture editor have to say directly and to be able to ask them questions also, than to just only have a recording to listen to and you know, not being able to interact with them.
Teresa Morrow 33:01
Yeah, that idea of those people being involved in the expression of the top opinions about the thing seems like a good one to me, like just in terms of group dynamics or something like that, to have those people feel, like, invested and recognized.
Randy Thom 33:18
Oh, yeah, absolutely. I encourage the people who the sound people who I’m working with to not be shy about asking questions and, and I’ve probably said more dumb things in spotting sessions that were embarrassing than any of my co-workers ever have. Off the top of my head I can’t remember any disastrous utterances coming out of anybody in a spotting session. So yeah, I think it’s great for everybody to be able to ask questions, make comments, get a sense of who we all are personality-wise, and, you know, every sound team is different and the kind of chemistry between the sound people and the director’s team, the picture editor’s team is going to be different on every film. I think one of the reasons that we been successful at Skywalker is, from the very beginning, we’ve had the attitude that every film is different, every project is different. And you should make as few assumptions going into each project as possible. And definitely don’t assume that you’re going to be able to do this one exactly the way you did the previous one. And I think that that attitude, unfortunately, was prevalent when I got into the business. You know, in those days, the sound team often came on thinking: “Well, you know, all this stuff that the picture editors put together is kind of crappy and you know, we’re going to make it all better. And you know, we know about sound, they don’t know anything about sound.” And in those days very often, the director, and even the picture editor wouldn’t even hear most of the stuff that the sound editing team was doing until the first day of the final mix. It was crazy. And, of course, what would happen is that they would just reject huge amounts of it. They would say: “No, sorry, the stuff we did, you know, six months ago is we like it more than the stuff that you’ve spent the last several months putting together so throw all that away and just go back to what we had in the first place.” But now we have this kind of workflow that I think makes so much more sense which is that what becomes the final mix begins, basically, as soon as the sound editing starts, and it’s an iterative, cumulative process, where we’re feeding sounds to the picture department, and they make choices, obviously, about what they decide they want to include and not include and that gets played for the director and the director gives her or his feedback about it. So there’s much more, kind of, constant communication and feedback now than there used to be in the old days. Essentially, in a really kind of meaningful sense, we begin the final mix as soon as the sound editing starts.
Timothy Muirhead 36:42
So Randy, we had Midge Costin on for an episode, and obviously she was promoting the Making Waves movie which you are featured in and she described the Mount Rushmore of sound pros as Ben Burtt, yourself, Gary Rydstrom and Walter Murch. So what I want you to do is cast yourself back in time before you were on Mount Rushmore, a nd think about when you’re going, you used to go into spotting sessions and you didn’t have the reputation that you do now. Because a lot of a spotting session is a dance when you’re dealing with a new director or a ne w picture editor of proving yourself to them. They don’t know you, you don’t know them, you’re kind of trying to put a good impression through as well as getting all your spotting notes down. Have you found any tricks or best practices in these situations?
Randy Thom 37:34
I would certainly recommend watching all of the director’s previous movies. I would recommend, you know, reading everything that you can find that the director has said about their approach and what they think about their own films and other people’s films. I would certainly recommend, you know, watching the movie that you’re about to talk about with them, you know, at least once and if possible several times. And all of that obviously informs you about who that person is and tells you at least a little bit about what they’re probably trying to accomplish with the movie. And it allows you to ask more intelligent questions. Now, I have this big deep voice which unfairly inspires confidence in people. It makes me sound like I know more than than I do. So I’d also recommend that everybody, you know, have some kind of pitch controller on their voice to, you know, pitch it down an octave or two, that helps.
Teresa Morrow 38:50
I’ll work on that.
Timothy Muirhead 38:53
I don’t know if it’s a trick as much as something I accidentally stumbled upon, but I was spotting a movie once and I was going in blind. I had just jumped on to this film because someone else had dropped out of it. And I showed up 15 minutes early to the spotting session. And the picture editor was there, but the director wasn’t. And he said, here’s what you need to know, this is what he’s like. And the picture editor gave me 15 minutes of solid gold, just because I got there early enough and showed a bit of enthusiasm. And then when the director walked in, I said a couple things that I got from the picture editor, and immediately kind of we hit it off. So that’s the only thing that I found that works really well.
Randy Thom 39:32
Yeah, obviously anybody who you can talk to, and the picture editor is one of the one of the people who would be most valuable for you to have an initial conversation with before you met or talked with the director, but maybe one of the producers — you could learn something from the producers about the direction that you know the movie seems to be going in or what direction the director would like to take it in. Any kind A source of information you can find that would give you a vocabulary or a place to start or kind of attitude about the project and the director is going to be useful. I should say, you know, regarding the the Mount Rushmore comment, there are so many great sound people throughout the history of movie sound that had been based in London and New York and Los Angeles and France and Italy and all over the world that I’m in awe of and truly feel that I’ll never be as good as, and I just, you know, I wish more of them could have been focused on in the movie, but I think Making Waves is the best film ever about what we do. I think it should be required viewing for everybody in the Motion Picture Academy, for instance. I think if everybody in the Academy saw it, they would have so much better a grasp of what it is we do, and a better grasp also of how they could let us in to actually collaborate with all the other crafts more than we do.
Timothy Muirhead 41:23
So we should make a deal with all of the directors all watch all of your back catalogue of films if you watch Making Waves before the spotting session.
Randy Thom 41:31
Sounds like a good deal to me.
Teresa Morrow 41:34
One kind of nerdy question for you. I read a couple comments that you had made about the evolution of Dolby Surround and the different Dolby formats that have come out. And I was wondering at what point in the various spotting sessions that you might have currently that you are thinking about, what are you going to do with Dolby Atmos because I feel like everybody’s kind of scratching their heads a little bit on that topic.
Randy Thom 42:03
Well, I wish directors would design some sequences around Dolby Atmos, that’s what would really bring that tool to life in ways that it hasn’t yet. The use of immersive sound and multi-channel sound I think is something that should be talked about in pre-production instead of kind of being applied as you know a band-aid in post production sometimes it turns out to be a really nice beautiful useful band-aid and sometimes not so much. I think like any tool, Dolby Atmos can be overused. It can distract from the storytelling. You know, I’m an old codger. I think I’m more conservative about using it then many people are, but I think for certain kinds of situations, it’s a wonderful tool. And as I said, I go into each film making as few assumptions as I can about what it’s going to sound like. But certain films and certain sequences really lend themselves I think, to that kind of immersive sound…
Teresa Morrow 43:21
Sort of related to what you were saying about how you’re really manufacturing an environment with the sounds that you have, a lot of the films that you’ve been doing in recent years have been fantasy and animation, and I just wanted to ask you why you gravitate towards that type of film.
Randy Thom 43:40
One reason that I love working on animated films is because some of this early speculative, sound work and talk about sound happens naturally on animated films, in a way that it doesn’t happen naturally on live action films. Because animated films, at least the American style of animation, you begin the process of making an animated film by basically creating a radio play that plays against line-drawing storyboards. And so the filmmakers desperately need sounds and at least temporary music to help them figure out whether scenes are going to play whether they’re going to work. So it’s a natural for the kind of early discussions and producing of kind of crazy speculative sounds that I wish could also happen for live action films. So I’ve been trying to proselytize to some of my live action filmmakers that they should take a cue from some of the animators. On some of the animated films that I’ve worked on in recent years, I start working on the film two or three years before it’s finished. I don’t work full time, I’ll work for a day or two or a week or two and then go work on another film for a while then come back to it. But I’m producing these kind of concept sounds, speculative sounds that I send to the director and the animators, and they, you know, tell me which ones they find inspiring and which ones they don’t and, and it really helps the animators in terms of thinking about what the characters can look like, especially if they’re creatures, to hear these recordings of you know, walruses or elephants or whatever it is that I’ve used as a kind of starting point for vocalizations and breathing, that sort of thing. It helps the animator visualize what not only the mouth looks like as it opens and closes, but maybe what the throat looks like and what the breathing looks like, etc.
Timothy Muirhead 46:05
Animation is so much fun. It’s, it’s great to work on. Randy, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. It’s really great to have you on the show. And it took a little while to get you on, but we’re glad that it finally worked out.
Randy Thom 46:18
It’s been my pleasure. It’s wonderful to meet you too. And I don’t think I’ve ever been asked such intelligent questions.
Timothy Muirhead 46:28
Okay, there you go!
Teresa Morrow 46:32
That’s the kind of smooth talking that puts you in good stead with directors.
Randy Thom 46:37
I don’t know what you’re talking about. No, I’m being absolutely sincere. This was great. Thanks for inviting me.
Teresa Morrow 46:45
Thank you so much for your time. Maybe if we come up with another idea we can get you on again.
Randy Thom 46:50
I’d love to do it.
Announcer 47:00
Tonebenders is produced by Timothy Muirhead, Rene Coronado and Teresa Morrow. Theme music is by Marc Straight. Send your emails to info at tonebenderspodcast dot com. Follow us on Twitter via @thetonebenders and join Tonebenders Podcast on Facebook. Support this podcast. You can use our links when you shop with Amazon or B&H or leave us a tip. Just go to tone benders podcast dot com and click the support button. Thanks for listening.