Behind-the-scenes movie glimpses
Oct. 22nd, 2003 09:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ealgyldenHave finally finished the 10/11 New Yorker ("Making Movies". neato), and one of the more interesting features of this issue was several short columns giving a peek at the jobs of some of the behind-the-scenes folks of movie-making, such as the best boy and the costume designer. Since none of these columns were part of the New Yorker's online content, and since some of you guys might be interested and not have seen them, I typed up the two columns pertaining to films that are interesting to me (yeah, selfish, sorry): Master and Commander (the sound designer, Richard King) and Return of the King (Howard Shore, the composer). No real spoilers in either (well, none from RotK unless you've never read the book, know nothing about it, are completely spoiler-virginal and have been living in a cave. But then you probably aren't reading this anyway, are you.)
"Wicked Wind"- Ben McGrath
If you want to re-create the auditory experience of being in a storm aboard a nineteenth-century British frigate, get yourself a pickup truck, some wood, a few acoustic blankets, and about a thousand feet of rope. Then drive out to the Mojave Desert and build a large wooden frame in the bed of the truck. String the rope back and forth around the frame, using a turnbuckle to make it good and taut, until all thousand feet have been spent. Face the truck head-on into a thirty-mile-an-hour wind, and lean hard on the gas pedal. Once you hit seventy, you're in business; the sound of the air meeting the lines of rope ought to approximate the shrieking of the wind in the frigate’s rigging-- a foretaste of what the novelist Patrick O'Brian might call "a coming dissolution of all natural bonds, an apocalyptic upheaval, a right dirty night." For added effect, try holding a barbecue grill out the window and turning it at various angles as you cruise. Muffle any peripheral truck noise, as needed, with the blankets.
This, at least, is the approach that Richard King came up with recently as the sound designer for Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, the forthcoming adaptation of O'Brian's nautical series, set aboard the Royal Navy's H.M.S. Surprise during the Napoleonic Wars. King, who is forty-nine years old and a lifelong sailor, was charged not only with the task of supervising the editing of the film's soundtrack (distinct from any musical score or accompaniment) but also with recording all the individual sounds-- musket fire, sloshing bilge, creaking wood-- that need to be incorporated. In some cases, this requires creating the sounds from scratch.
Thus the trip to the desert. "Nobody wants to take their ships out in a gale," King said. "I actually tried to get myself on a ship somewhere in the world that would put itself in that situation." The Mojave, it turns out, is a convenient substitute, because it gets very windy, and the wind patterns are predictable, typically blowing from the southwest. King didn't limit his Mojave recording sessions to truck work, either. "We got some sails off a big square-rigger and took them out to the desert and built a giant framework-- a mast, essentially-- and rigged the sails so we could get them to flap at various intensities," he said. "So we got discrete sail flaps without any sound of water in the background."
King and his crew of eight editors made it a point not to rely on "library" files, a standard collection of movie-ready sounds (car honks, airplanes taking off). Given that Master and Commander features extended battle scenes with plenty of cannon fire, forgoing the library necessitated still more ingenuity. "All the sounds I had heard in period movies of cannons going off were just big loud booms," King said. "But something O'Brian refers to a lot is the screaming of shot flying overhead." So he found a group of artillery collectors in northern Michigan who had cannons that were capable of firing vintage ammunition, and set to work re-creating the types of shot described in O'Brian's novels: round shot ("basically, their ship-to-ship-- when they wanted to punch a hole in the hull"), chain shot ("two cannonballs connected by a two-foot piece of chain, which would spin around and take out the rigging and sails and mast"), grapeshot ("canisters with a number of smaller balls inside-- anti-personnel weapons that would shoot across the deck to kill as many men as they could"). Then, in January, King and his crew set up a firing range at a National Guard base nearby that had all but closed for the winter. ("They had to snowplow the range for us to shoot.") They fired eighty rounds, recording both the initial explosions and, following another lead from O'Brian, the in-flight racket, which proved to be almost as loud as the booms themselves. "There was a concrete berm five hundred yards downrange which we could get behind and set up mikes and fire over," King said. "Nobody, as far as I know, had ever recorded any of this stuff. It sounded like nothing I’ve ever heard before." Imagine a cross between a piece of paper being ripped and a racecar speeding by.
Not all the work required of a sound designer is so elaborate. "The other day, I was trying to get a sound for a sail," King said. "It’s kind of a mysterious scene in the film, where we look up and we see a sail, kind of loose, very softly moving in the light breeze. And I'm thinking, What would be cool there? I have a microphone in my room, and I turned on the recorder and did a hawwwww-- a low breathing sound-- and added some reverb to it. It worked."
"Symphony in See"- Giles Smith
On a recent Tuesday, the composer Howard Shore left his hotel in London and climbed into a black Mercedes for the forty-five-minute drive to Watford, an unromantic suburb northwest of the city. There, in the Watford Colosseum, a municipal dance hall opposite a tanning salon, a sweetshop, and a pharmacy, Shore was working on the score for The Return of the King, the last movie in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, a project that has occupied him for the past three years and will soon be completed. "I knew of the acoustics of this Watford room," Shore explained. "It's been used on several classical records; the BBC uses it. Middle-earth is old. It's five to six thousand years preceding our own culture. So it needed an antique sound."
Shore, a meditative, unhurried man who studied at the Berklee College of Music, in Boston, and spent the early nineteen-seventies touring with a progressive-rock group, was wearing sunglasses, an untucked black shirt, and loose gray trousers. "I'm a little tired," he said. "When I did the score for The Silence of the Lambs, in 1991, it was written to the finished movie and we went to the studio and recorded it and that was that. It used to be an effort for a director to change a frame. You had to go back and clip it out manually, rebalance the reel. Now the digital technology is there to do these things quickly, and it allows much more fluctuation of the image. And if a frame it's a ripple effect. That's kind of what I'm in right now. The ripple. The big wave."
Peter Jackson, the film's director, was attending the session, but much of the Lord of the Rings cycle was created in a "virtual office" devised for the New Zealand-based production which enables the musical teams in London and in Tuxedo, New York, to upload their work onto a series of secure Web sites. "People sign in and sign out, and we chat and exchange things," Shore said. When he arrived at the Watford hall, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, which would be playing the score, was gathering on the wooden floor, amid arc lamps and a thicket of microphones. On the musicians' stands were sheets marked "rotk 912 921b. The Black Gate Opens." Shore smiled, said good morning, went to his podium, and without further preamble directed the players to their place in the score.
He raised his hands. The music began with a tremor of low strings, swelled with the entry of the violins, and crescendoed in a fanfare of brass. It lasted about two minutes. After several run-throughs, everybody put on headphones. A red bulb lit up on Shore's podium, and an engineer announced the number of the take: "6084 of 912 921b, from 277, beat 3." A filmed sequence now appeared on a small screen in from of Shore-- the actor Elijah Wood, as Frodo, silently battling a giant spider. The sequence was unfinished and flashed between live action and early-stage computer animation. A circle of white light pulsed at the center of the image, and Shore conducted the music in time with it, looking fixedly into the screen and using crisp, unflorid arm gestures.
After three takes, Shore left the podium. On the stairs leading up to the control room, he said, "If we can get three minutes of music successfully recorded in a three-hour session, then we’re doing O.K." Shore sat down at a table behind the mixing desk with a copy of the entire score open in front of him, and was entirely still as he watched a monitor and listened. Next to him, Peter Jackson, a bulky man with shaggy black hair and a straggly beard, lay almost horizontally in an office chair and intermittently dipped Chicken McNuggets in ketchup. "That lunge there should have more energy through it," Jackson said. "Go with the energy of the spider." At another point, he said, "This is about the scariest bit of the fight. I think it would be good if that change happened on the stab."
Shore nodded and then thoughtfully returned downstairs to the podium, where he began rapidly annotating his score while gently and calmly giving the orchestra instructions: "The trumpets should be muted at bar 29. We need a little more crescendo at 44. A little more accent in the low strings and bassoons at 47. The A at 62 is now on the downbeat and it's a half note. At 70, the accents should all be stresses. At 77, play the ink." The film rolled again. Afterward, Shore said, "Very good. Very nice. Very happy with that. Let's go to lunch."
"Wicked Wind"- Ben McGrath
If you want to re-create the auditory experience of being in a storm aboard a nineteenth-century British frigate, get yourself a pickup truck, some wood, a few acoustic blankets, and about a thousand feet of rope. Then drive out to the Mojave Desert and build a large wooden frame in the bed of the truck. String the rope back and forth around the frame, using a turnbuckle to make it good and taut, until all thousand feet have been spent. Face the truck head-on into a thirty-mile-an-hour wind, and lean hard on the gas pedal. Once you hit seventy, you're in business; the sound of the air meeting the lines of rope ought to approximate the shrieking of the wind in the frigate’s rigging-- a foretaste of what the novelist Patrick O'Brian might call "a coming dissolution of all natural bonds, an apocalyptic upheaval, a right dirty night." For added effect, try holding a barbecue grill out the window and turning it at various angles as you cruise. Muffle any peripheral truck noise, as needed, with the blankets.
This, at least, is the approach that Richard King came up with recently as the sound designer for Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, the forthcoming adaptation of O'Brian's nautical series, set aboard the Royal Navy's H.M.S. Surprise during the Napoleonic Wars. King, who is forty-nine years old and a lifelong sailor, was charged not only with the task of supervising the editing of the film's soundtrack (distinct from any musical score or accompaniment) but also with recording all the individual sounds-- musket fire, sloshing bilge, creaking wood-- that need to be incorporated. In some cases, this requires creating the sounds from scratch.
Thus the trip to the desert. "Nobody wants to take their ships out in a gale," King said. "I actually tried to get myself on a ship somewhere in the world that would put itself in that situation." The Mojave, it turns out, is a convenient substitute, because it gets very windy, and the wind patterns are predictable, typically blowing from the southwest. King didn't limit his Mojave recording sessions to truck work, either. "We got some sails off a big square-rigger and took them out to the desert and built a giant framework-- a mast, essentially-- and rigged the sails so we could get them to flap at various intensities," he said. "So we got discrete sail flaps without any sound of water in the background."
King and his crew of eight editors made it a point not to rely on "library" files, a standard collection of movie-ready sounds (car honks, airplanes taking off). Given that Master and Commander features extended battle scenes with plenty of cannon fire, forgoing the library necessitated still more ingenuity. "All the sounds I had heard in period movies of cannons going off were just big loud booms," King said. "But something O'Brian refers to a lot is the screaming of shot flying overhead." So he found a group of artillery collectors in northern Michigan who had cannons that were capable of firing vintage ammunition, and set to work re-creating the types of shot described in O'Brian's novels: round shot ("basically, their ship-to-ship-- when they wanted to punch a hole in the hull"), chain shot ("two cannonballs connected by a two-foot piece of chain, which would spin around and take out the rigging and sails and mast"), grapeshot ("canisters with a number of smaller balls inside-- anti-personnel weapons that would shoot across the deck to kill as many men as they could"). Then, in January, King and his crew set up a firing range at a National Guard base nearby that had all but closed for the winter. ("They had to snowplow the range for us to shoot.") They fired eighty rounds, recording both the initial explosions and, following another lead from O'Brian, the in-flight racket, which proved to be almost as loud as the booms themselves. "There was a concrete berm five hundred yards downrange which we could get behind and set up mikes and fire over," King said. "Nobody, as far as I know, had ever recorded any of this stuff. It sounded like nothing I’ve ever heard before." Imagine a cross between a piece of paper being ripped and a racecar speeding by.
Not all the work required of a sound designer is so elaborate. "The other day, I was trying to get a sound for a sail," King said. "It’s kind of a mysterious scene in the film, where we look up and we see a sail, kind of loose, very softly moving in the light breeze. And I'm thinking, What would be cool there? I have a microphone in my room, and I turned on the recorder and did a hawwwww-- a low breathing sound-- and added some reverb to it. It worked."
"Symphony in See"- Giles Smith
On a recent Tuesday, the composer Howard Shore left his hotel in London and climbed into a black Mercedes for the forty-five-minute drive to Watford, an unromantic suburb northwest of the city. There, in the Watford Colosseum, a municipal dance hall opposite a tanning salon, a sweetshop, and a pharmacy, Shore was working on the score for The Return of the King, the last movie in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, a project that has occupied him for the past three years and will soon be completed. "I knew of the acoustics of this Watford room," Shore explained. "It's been used on several classical records; the BBC uses it. Middle-earth is old. It's five to six thousand years preceding our own culture. So it needed an antique sound."
Shore, a meditative, unhurried man who studied at the Berklee College of Music, in Boston, and spent the early nineteen-seventies touring with a progressive-rock group, was wearing sunglasses, an untucked black shirt, and loose gray trousers. "I'm a little tired," he said. "When I did the score for The Silence of the Lambs, in 1991, it was written to the finished movie and we went to the studio and recorded it and that was that. It used to be an effort for a director to change a frame. You had to go back and clip it out manually, rebalance the reel. Now the digital technology is there to do these things quickly, and it allows much more fluctuation of the image. And if a frame it's a ripple effect. That's kind of what I'm in right now. The ripple. The big wave."
Peter Jackson, the film's director, was attending the session, but much of the Lord of the Rings cycle was created in a "virtual office" devised for the New Zealand-based production which enables the musical teams in London and in Tuxedo, New York, to upload their work onto a series of secure Web sites. "People sign in and sign out, and we chat and exchange things," Shore said. When he arrived at the Watford hall, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, which would be playing the score, was gathering on the wooden floor, amid arc lamps and a thicket of microphones. On the musicians' stands were sheets marked "rotk 912 921b. The Black Gate Opens." Shore smiled, said good morning, went to his podium, and without further preamble directed the players to their place in the score.
He raised his hands. The music began with a tremor of low strings, swelled with the entry of the violins, and crescendoed in a fanfare of brass. It lasted about two minutes. After several run-throughs, everybody put on headphones. A red bulb lit up on Shore's podium, and an engineer announced the number of the take: "6084 of 912 921b, from 277, beat 3." A filmed sequence now appeared on a small screen in from of Shore-- the actor Elijah Wood, as Frodo, silently battling a giant spider. The sequence was unfinished and flashed between live action and early-stage computer animation. A circle of white light pulsed at the center of the image, and Shore conducted the music in time with it, looking fixedly into the screen and using crisp, unflorid arm gestures.
After three takes, Shore left the podium. On the stairs leading up to the control room, he said, "If we can get three minutes of music successfully recorded in a three-hour session, then we’re doing O.K." Shore sat down at a table behind the mixing desk with a copy of the entire score open in front of him, and was entirely still as he watched a monitor and listened. Next to him, Peter Jackson, a bulky man with shaggy black hair and a straggly beard, lay almost horizontally in an office chair and intermittently dipped Chicken McNuggets in ketchup. "That lunge there should have more energy through it," Jackson said. "Go with the energy of the spider." At another point, he said, "This is about the scariest bit of the fight. I think it would be good if that change happened on the stab."
Shore nodded and then thoughtfully returned downstairs to the podium, where he began rapidly annotating his score while gently and calmly giving the orchestra instructions: "The trumpets should be muted at bar 29. We need a little more crescendo at 44. A little more accent in the low strings and bassoons at 47. The A at 62 is now on the downbeat and it's a half note. At 70, the accents should all be stresses. At 77, play the ink." The film rolled again. Afterward, Shore said, "Very good. Very nice. Very happy with that. Let's go to lunch."
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2003-10-23 03:02 am (UTC)The music article is cool, too. I'm not sure what "play the ink" means, though. I've been in music since I was a toddler, and I've never heard that one.
Thanks for typing these up!
(no subject)
Date: 2003-10-23 06:25 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-10-27 03:59 am (UTC)Maybe "play the stuff that I just finished writing and the ink isn't dry yet"?
Hey, that works for me :) No clue, here. Maybe it's his own personal slang term or something, the weirdo.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-10-23 03:09 am (UTC)You know, I doubt very much my obsession would have reached anything like its current proportions had the movies had lesser music.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-10-23 06:40 am (UTC)The music has played a large part in my obsession, too, I have to admit. Phrases and themes pop into my head when I'm least expecting it.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-10-23 08:25 am (UTC)There's something very touching about the Howard Shore piece, the way that Jackson and Shore interact - completely different in style, but both very focused on making the best possible movie.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-10-25 07:08 am (UTC)I agree, the interaction between Shore and Jackson was quite pleasant to see. There was something very comfortable about it, despite their different working styles. They mesh well. That's been one of the more interesting things about the whole LotR production, to my mind- everyone gets along so well, and that shows on the screen, I think.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-10-23 09:21 pm (UTC)Thanks so much for typing these up!
(no subject)
Date: 2003-10-25 07:14 am (UTC)Oh yeah, me too. I love seeing that the techies are so obsessive about the details. That seems like a good sign (assuming the script isn't a horror. But I have high hopes!)