The Art Of Sound Design
Creating sound for picture is a challenging task, particularly when dealing with the fictional realms so often found in modern movies. Here we have three different angles on sound design from some of the most experienced heads in the business…
Randy Thom and The Last Airbender
Randy Thom is a cornerstone of the audio segment of the movie industry. He worked on Apocalypse Now (1979), Return of the Jedi (1983), Wild at Heart (1990), Backdraft (1991), Forrest Gump (1994), Cast Away (2000), Shrek 2 (2004), Ratatouille (2007)… the list goes on, and his work earned him 14 Oscar nominations and two wins.
This interview in editor’s guild magazine provides an insight into Randy’s work as as supervising sound designer, co-supervising sound editor (with Richard Hymns) and re-recording mixer (with Rick Kline) on the recent movie The Last Airbender.
One of the most cogent pieces of advice comes near the end – he advises that it is better for a sound designer to fail early, when it’s less costly to fix a mistake. So try grand experiments early on, rule out the stuff that doesn’t work at all, and make sure that when the production is well underway you won’t have to make any severe changes…
Music For Games – The Audio Of Metroid Prime
Original sound version is an interesting site which focuses on the area of audio for games, but which posted this interview with Kenji Yamamoto and Scott Petersen who worked on the music and sound effects for the game Metroid Prime 3: Corruption.
This is quite revealing of some of the depth and attention to detail that goes into creating the sonic experience for a modern computer game; it’s interesting to hear them describe how the music for particular rooms can change depending on what events had been triggered previously, and they commissioned Tesla coils to help create important sounds…
The Foley Of Tim Prebble
Anyone who has an interest in audio should regularly visit Tim Prebble’s site at the music of sound, but in this interview at the big idea site, Tim reveals a bit more about his workflow and the audio production environment in New Zealand.