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MillimeterThe Sampler
Mar 9, 2005 4:04 PM
SFX History #3: Giant Apes and Other Cool Stuff
Can the sequel to a sequel be better than the original? Almost never. Okay, Goldfinger was better than Dr. No and From Russia With Love. But Godfather III? Ouch! Now, we could’ve quit this series after our brilliant first installment, but we sensed you were hungering for more. So, tempting the fates, we are unleashing part three of our history of SFX, with the solemn vow that it will not star Sofia Coppola as the daughter of effects titan Murray Spivack! With the advent of sound in films at the end of the 1920s came the rise of sound technicians. Among the first films to use created sounds (as opposed to sounds created on the movie set) for dramatic purposes was the 1931 opus Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde, for which sound man Rouben Mamoulian used recordings of heartbeats, bells, and gongs (played backwards) to frightening effect. But it was the release of King Kong two years later that really changed the way the public viewed sound for films. For that pioneering work, RKO sound specialist Murray Spivack revolutionized the field of re-recording for film when he created Kong’s unearthly yowl by combining the roar of lion re-recorded at half speed mixed with a tiger’s roar played backwards. He also created all the other sounds of creatures on Kong Island, as well as the urban soundscapes once the action in the film shifted to New York. From the very beginnings of talkies, sound technicians would borrow effects recorded for one film for use in other films, which is one reason we, as viewers, associate certain environments with certain sounds. For instance, there is a deafening thunderclap (named Castle Thunder) that was created for the 1931 film Frankenstein that has been used in literally dozens of films since (and even as part of the Disneyland “Haunted Mansion” ride). Mark Mangini, a contemporary SFX designer, marveled a few years ago, “There are still guys doing it—when they do a modern day ghost story, they still use Castle Thunder [even though] it’s such a low fidelity recording. It was recorded on optical film, with all the crackles and pops, and transferred to mag, and they’ve got it fifteen generations away because they’ve copied it from somebody else who copied it from somebody else.” It wasn’t just Castle Thunder that made the rounds among SFX men in Hollywood. There came to be certain established ambience recordings that turned up in film after film—African jungle settings with the distinctive laughing call of the Australian kookaburra; the screeching of red-tailed hawks; baying hounds in pursuit of prisoners (or monsters or foxes); certain waterfalls and river sounds; the list goes on. It made lots of economic sense to reuse effects from one film to the next; the more creative sound mixers would at least alter the sounds somewhat by combining them with other sounds to appear fresh. And by the 1940s, some studios were compiling their own libraries of SFX, just as commercial ones started to appear on the market in greater numbers. In Britian, for instance, the BBC slowly accumulated what many regarded as the largest and broadest archive of effects in the world. More next time on the Hollywood and British film studios... A PML Market Report: Nashville Last month we looked at which production music and sound effects libraries were being used at a commercial house in San Francisco: Crescendo Studios. This time we turn our attention to Nashville, Tenn., and look at the PM and SFX offerings at two different facilities there. Spotland Productions is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year as one of Music City’s audio production companies specializing in radio and television commercials, original programs, industrials, and various other services. With hundreds of clients through the years spanning a huge range of spots—from sports to restaurants to social services—Spotland has been a vital member of the local audio community, and also a first-call facility when it comes to national accounts. Not surprisingly, the company has amassed a very impressive collection of production music on CD (and even some rare ones on vinyl) including: DeWolfe, Killer Tracks, OmniMusic, NJJ, Rouge, BMG, Morning, Hudson, Killer Edge, Gene Michael Productions, Flying Hands, CDM, River City, Robert Hall, Soper, and many others. Similarly, it offers a wide array of choices for SFX, such as Sound Ideas, Hollywood Edge, Warner Bros., Hanna-Barbera, Twentieth Century Fox, Valentino, Turner, Digiffects, H.E. Premiere, Rocky & Bullwinkle, DeWolfe, Major, LucasFilm, and Janus. We spoke with company president and engineer Ben Holland about how music libraries were used on a recent industrial: “We recently did a project for Pfizer Animal Health where we used a lot of music and sound effects. It was a 30-minute industrial that was being made as a tool for some of their salespeople, and they wanted to do a take-off on Guy Noir [a detective character] from the Prairie Home Companion radio show, so they needed someone who could do a voice like that and they also needed music that fit that sort of mood. I like these kind of specialty jobs where we’re trying to match a feel or an era, so we dug back and found a bunch of music from various libraries, including the DeWolfe library, which is one of my favorites. On this one project we also used Atmosphere’s Archive series [recordings made from the late ‘40s through the ‘60s in England and now administered through Killer Tracks], which is the old Paxton library. We also used some of DeWolfe’s archive stuff. Usually, these sort of projects are extremely dry, but this agency, KFS & Associates in Nashville, are really great at taking dry material and making it interesting. In this case, the producer, AmyLu Riley, had a lot of good ideas and we had a good time coming up with what she needed.” Holland notes that finding the right material for a project such as that one requires experience, memory, and databases. “You have to know what you have available, and in our case that even includes stuff on vinyl,” he says. “Like I’ll pull up the Robert Hall library from time to time. It’s sort of a forgotten library now, but it was very big for years, especially in broadcast.” When I profess my ignorance of Mr. Hall, Holland explains, “Robert Hall was a man up in New York and I believe he got a lot of his sound effects from Hollywood effects men; he would buy stuff they had lying around. When I got to Spotland in 1980 or '81 he drove them down to me. They were just loose in the trunk of some 1957 Buick. Now there’s practically no trace of his company ever having existed, and I’ve looked for them, but there’s some really good stuff on those discs.” Holland says he hopes to digitize the Hall collection somewhere down the road. Over at Audio Productions, commercial spots are just one of the many services offered by the ever-growing company, which was founded in 1982. The studio complex on Music Row has also produced live and taped music specials featuring many of country music’s biggest names, provided custom music for a variety of different media, worked on movie trailers for top Hollywood films and on scores of radio programs for commercial and satellite concerns, and much more. The company’s website boasts that Audio Productions has a collection of more than one million SFX and music beds from a multitude of providers, but when I reach Audio Productions president and owner Jim Reyland, he notes that the company’s most used PMLs these days are Killer Tracks and its many subsidiary libraries, while Sound Ideas is the major source for SFX.
“We have live streaming from our studios so clients can literally sit at their desktop and listen to the audio coming out of their sessions, whether its custom or library music,” Reyland notes. “They can pick the music; they can pick the talent; they can pick the sounds; they can listen to the session happen and listen to the final mix. “Our clients mostly fall into a couple of areas these days,” he continues. “There are young, start-up companies who look to us to help them look as professional as possible; help them get established, maybe look bigger than they are. It’s a leap of faith for them to work with us rather than doing [their spots] at the radio station, and we appreciate it. Then there are clients that work at a radio station or work at a one-man-band shop—a guy in his basement—that need the extra services we can provide, and in the area of libraries we have an awful lot to offer that client. And then there are the big agencies, which have the opportunity to come here and use the best we have to offer: the engineers, the talent, the libraries. So we’re marketing to people at both kinds of budgets, large and small.” The heart of Audio Productions’ PM and FX library collection is housed in a space known as The Listening Room, “which is currently filled with thousands of CDs,” Reyland says, “but eventually they’ll all go away and everything will be a click on a mouse. For that to happen, though, we’ve got to get the libraries to work with us. We’ve got to get them to put it on hard drives. I know Sound Ideas is working on that and there are independent ones you can buy that already have everything on it; there are subscriptions you can buy. But we’re not going to get into that right now. We’re going to wait, and when the people who provide us with the music provide it to us on hard drive instead of CD, we’ll integrate that into our process. That goes for sounds and music. It’s not that far away, and we’ll be right there providing it for our clients.” For info on Spotland go to spotlandproductions.com.
For more on Audio Prorductions, go to audioproductions.com. Ambient Tracks Is Looking for Its Niche Starting a new music library isn’t that difficult: With the ascension of the Internet as a vital marketing tool, it’s relatively simple to create an attractive and accessible vehicle for potential customers to find music being offered by a fledgling company. But succeeding is another matter altogether, and will often depend on whether new music providers can find a niche that separates them from the plethora of competitors. “We didn’t start out with the goal that we were going to take over the world with this thing,” says Ambient Tracks co-founder Jim Gosger. The recently formed library music company has just a handful of discs in its collection, but he says, “What we’ve got doesn’t sound like what anyone else is doing.” Based in Kansas City, Ambient Tracks was formed by a group of people with backgrounds in video, film, and music. “We all like the ambient sound and we realized that most of the time when we’d find a piece of ‘ambient’ library music, it would usually go into this big thing that was maybe too musical, with too much instrumentation for what we wanted," says Gosger. "We felt that the people who were making the libraries were trying to put on a big show, whereas we thought the music should be more subtle, more background. So we decided we wanted to build a whole library that’s nothing but ambient music. “It wasn’t part of some master plan we set out to do; it’s just something that happened,” he says. “We saw a need and decided to fill it.” Gosger sees the Ambient Tracks discs—DNA, Equinox, Missing Time, and Utopia—being valuable to producers of long-form videos primarily: “It could be corporate, it could be documentary, it could be film. It’s modern-sounding music and some of it has a little edge to it—I’m not sure it’s right for your wedding video,” he adds with a laugh. “We’re starting small: It’s only four CDs so far. What we don’t have at this point is a lot of warm, fuzzy stuff, but we hope to build that in over the next year.” The music for Ambient Tracks has been created in the computer-based home studios of its principals and so far has mostly been a sidelight for the busy professionals. “We all have careers beside this, and we’ll see how it goes,” Gosger says. “If people like it, and I think they will, we’ll keep building it. We have a lot of places we can go with it.” For more info and samples, go to ambienttracks.com.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
