Last month in The Sampler, I was raving about the SFX work for the most recent film in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. At that time, I wrote that I was going to investigate further and report back on what I learned. Well, I did successfully track down the film’s sound designer, Oscar-winner (for The Incredibles) Randy Thom, and his co-supervising sound editor, Dennis Leonard (who was out on the road mixing front-of-house sound for former Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh’s band). You’ll be able to read about some of the major FX work on Potter 4 in the January issue of Millimeter, but as a special treat to our faithful Sampler readers, here are some of the “extras” that were left out of the main article for space reasons:

On the use of nearly inaudible sound elements to heighten tension:
Dennis Leonard: “There are a lot of subliminal sounds in the film. One thing I did that was interesting is I created a number of low frequency sweeteners—these really low frequency punctuations—using a program called Trilogy [by Spectrasonics]. What I ended up doing is an old analog synth trick: Turning the resonance of a filter all the way up—and I was using a string bass sample—and then sweeping the center frequency very close to the frequency of the actual fundamental note I was playing on a keyboard. What you end up with is these anomalies where nine out of ten of them are going to be distorted, but in one out of ten you get this tremendous amount of air movement. I was jokingly calling them barometric events, because they move so much air. I used those for some of the spells wand action. They’re inaudible, but you sense them through the subwoofers. It feels like a disturbance in the atmosphere. Anything below [listenable] audio people find very disturbing.” Leonard also developed subsonic information for the appearances of “The Dark Mark,” creating a 19hz pulse out of wind and other rumble samples played simultaneously on a keyboard.

On the magical maze in the Triwizard Tournament:
Randy Thom: The maze is one of my favorite sound sequences because it has so much dynamics. We get to be really quiet in certain sections. When Harry first goes into the maze, I said, ‘How about if we go to absolute silence there, like this hedge that’s between him and the people in the [stands] and the band is soundproof wall. So there’s no sound there for a moment or two, and I love that—going from lots of sound to no sound. I think it has enormous dramatic potential when you do that sort of thing in the right context.

“It was also fun doing whispering sounds for the maze. You never see what it is that’s whispering, but you assume it’s spirits of some sort. Some of that was done in ADR in loop group form, and some of it was various whisper recordings I’ve made over the last year or two.”

And how about those hedges in the maze that grab at people and crash into each other with no notice, closing off passages of possible escape?
Thom: “That kind of scene is fraught with danger in sound editing because if you started doing a sequence like that by treating it literally—and just finding big bushes and bashing them into each other—it wouldn’t sound interesting; it would be noise. Especially in mid-range and high frequencies, it can turn into pink noise. So we started on that scene with very little of that kind of stuff. Instead we made it more tonal and gave it as much character as we could. There’s a plant that grows at Skywalker Ranch that has a stalk that’s hollow and when you break it or crack it or slit it, it has an almost vocal quality to it, because it has this cavity that changes in shape as you smash it or twist or break it. So you twist and break enough of them that you get enough moments that are useful, and that was an important element in that hedge sequence also. Then you can add some of the other kind of more obvious [plant crashing sounds].

The sounds of underwater creatures in the second task:
Thom: “The Merpeople had two cries: One is a kind of mournful cry, which was a whale recording pitched up quite a bit, and the other was a kind of frightened or aggressive cry, which is a combination of human voices blended in an interesting way.

“One other specific sound I could mention is the vocal sound for the Grindylows—the little squid-like underwater creatures. Those came from a dog named Choochi. A guy named Tim Nillson here at the ranch recorded this dog, which had an incredible voice that was almost human sometimes. In fact I tried to use it in War of the Worlds, but [director Steven] Spielberg decided he didn’t want the martians to have voices. So I got to use some of that experimentation for Harry Potter. The voice has an almost whimsical or comical element to it, and I was a little afraid that Mike [Newell] and editor Mick might think it was too comical, but they actually liked it.

The mysterious Port-key, which magically transports wizards through space:
Leonard: “That’s something Randy built, and it is essentially winds that were manipulated with a plug-in called GRM Tools, which has an excellent Doppler program, and varying the speed of the repeats.”

And finally… making big crowds out of small groups:
Leonard: “One of the big issues we faced is that all of those scenes where there were big crowds, those were mostly CG scenes and we didn’t have the huge crowds you see onscreen. The Quidditch World Cup was almost all CG, so we had to come up with the chants and the general crowd sounds. And [in the Triwizard Tournament] where you saw a stand with kids, only about half that was kids, and the rest was CG’d-in kids, plus it was shot inside, so it wouldn’t have sounded the way we wanted for outdoor scenes.

“So we found a location two and half hours outside of London and took five adults and about 45 kids—including about a dozen ringers who were voice-talent kids from London; the rest were from a local school’s drama department—and went to this abandoned RAF base that was out in the wide open and spent an entire day recording all the crowd material in 5.0 [L-C-R plus rears; no sub] on a portable Pro Tools rig. We came up with a spacing of the left, center, and right mics, which is the average space behind the average screen in a multiplex, to try to capture all of the time domain image nuances that you would get. Randy recorded MS, and I recorded a shotgun walking through the crowd as we did each cue, and we had an eagle up there with a bird handler to chase away birds so we wouldn’t get any intrusion. It worked out really well; it was a great environment. I believe that the more you can do to capture natural sounds in a good environment, the more vibrant the soundtrack is.”

Remember back in the late 1960s, when the Mellotron was decried by some as the villainous box that was going to put orchestras out of business? That instrument, you’ll recall, contained actual tapes of string instruments that would play when a corresponding keyboard key was touched.

No one ever confused a Mellotron string section with the London Symphony Orchestra, of course, but the Mellotron was a nice textural element when used well. As far as we know, no string players went to the breadlines because of the Mellotron craze (such as it was). But 35 years later, string players have a reason to be afraid …very afraid. And ironically they are perhaps contributing to their own downfall.

Previously in this space we’ve reported on the tremendous technical strides that have been made in the last few years by the makers of orchestral sample libraries. With higher bit rates, improvements in every part of the digital recording signal chain, and the increased power and storage capabilities of home computers, musicians (and even non-musicians!) can now have at their fingertips incredibly faithful orchestral sounds unimaginable even 10 years ago.

One of the very best is the acclaimed EastWest/Quantum Leap Symphonic Orchestra, which the company promotes—accurately—as a virtual instrument that eliminates the need for a sampler. The EW/QL was produced by EastWest’s Doug Rogers and Quantum Leap’s Nick Phoenix, but the real genius behind the collection just may be the noted audiophile engineer and producer Keith O. Johnson, who recorded the samples. Johnson is a Grammy-winning engineer known for his crystalline orchestral recording work, often for his own Reference Recordings label, and for co-developing the HDCD format. For some contractual reason, neither the orchestra nor the hall it was recorded in is identified in the company’s literature.

One way that the EW/QL has distinguished itself is that Johnson recorded each of the hundreds of samples from three different perspectives in the hall: close, stage (with a standard Decca Tree setup), and hall. This offers greater sonic flexibility and, in the case of the “hall” recordings, a way to move easily from a stereo to a surround recording ambience. This is in keeping with the makers’ intention to create a sample library that will be useful to composers working on film and television scores, where surround has practically become de rigeur.

Predictably, there is a multitude of playing variations for every orchestral instrument—for the group of 10 cellos, for instance, parameters include expressive, straight and legato, sordino, crescendo, sforzando, pizzicato, half and whole step trill, tremolo, and more. Plus within many of those there are articulations such as fast and slow attack, upstroke and downstroke. Among the instrument groupings are 18 violins, 11 violins, 10 cellos, 10 violas, nine basses, solo violin, solo cello, harp, three flutes, C flute, piccolo flute, English horn, bassoon and contra-bassoon, three oboes, four trumpets, six French horns, and scads of more woodwind and brass instruments, as well as more than 20 percussion pieces and groups, ranging from timpani to glockenspiel to different-sized gongs. The EW/QL is broken out into the four main instrument categories; within each are multiple DVDs and an impressive operations manual.

Clearly not for beginners, EW/QL is a highly sophisticated and fairly complicated orchestration tool that just may eliminate the need of many composers to hire live players. In these budget-conscious times, that can be a huge plus, but one has to wonder if in 10 or 20 years, as these sorts of packages become even easier to use, whether the orchestra so brilliantly captured by Keith Johnson will be able to find any work at all.