Multimedia
Blogs
Forum
Affordable HD
Whitepapers
Newsletters
Events
Advertisers
Blogcast
MillimeterSounds Of A Magical World
Feb 1, 2002 12:00 PM, By Blair Jackson
 The sound team, led by Eddy Joseph, supervising sound
editor, captured sounds from natural sources and combined them in
unusual ways, thereby maintaining an organic feel more in tune with the
movie's magical environment. |
With a worldwide gross that seems likely to approach the half-billion mark by the time video and DVD sales are added in, the Harry Potter series is off to a high-flying start. Although reviews were not overwhelmingly positive, director Chris Columbus was obviously able to translate enough of the book's magic to the screen to wow the critics who really mattered: kids and parents who loved J.K. Rowling's beautifully imagined fantasy-adventure story about an orphan boy learning to become a great wizard.
In this first adventure, Harry enters the magical realm of Hogwarts for the first time and encounters a killer troll, a giant, a headless ghost, a blue-blooded unicorn, living chess pieces, a gargantuan three-headed dog, mail-carrying owls, murderous plants, paintings that come alive, moving staircases, and a very peculiar competitive team sport called Quidditch, which is played on flying broomsticks with balls that seem to be alive and bent on destruction.
All in all, it's quite a world, and, not surprisingly, it required tremendous creativity and effort to bring it plausibly to the screen, both visually and sonically. On the visual side Columbus brought together a team that included Oscar-winning production designer Stuart Craig (Gandhi, Dangerous Liasons, The English Patient) and director of photography John Seale (The English Patient, Gorillas in the Mist), along with visual effects supervisor Robert Legato and a talented crew of costume and set designers who really make Harry's world come alive. On the audio side, there is a booming, at points bombastic, John Williams score and, as you'd expect, lots of imaginative sound effects; after all, the sound team had to invent the world from scratch from their perspective, too, in coordination with the visual craftspeople. Heading the audio artisans was supervising sound editor Eddy Joseph, whose distinguished career has included work on such films as Evita, Interview With a Vampire, and Angela's Ashes. The movie was filmed at Leavesden Studios (where both Sleepy Hollow and The Phantom Menace were shot), and audio posted at Shepperton Studios, both in England.
In terms of the sound design, Eddy Joseph says that in his initial conversations with Chris Columbus they decided against anything that sounded electronic. “We didn't want anything that sounded too modern or futuristic Star Wars-y. It's a much-hackneyed word these days, but we wanted to keep things ‘organic,’ which we did. It was hard to do because it's very easy to take some electronic effect and treat it a little bit or have a normal effect and over-treat it so it becomes electronic-sounding.”
So instead of generating sounds on keyboards and the like, Joseph and sound effects editor Martin Cantwell used natural sources — mainly recorded on HHB Portadat and the new HHB Portadisc system — combined in interesting and unusual ways. For instance, during the Quidditch match, the sound of the Golden Snitch, a winged ball that is the ultimate prize of the sport, “we did partly from wind chimes and a handkerchief speeded up combined with other things,” Joseph says. “The Bludger [a ball that chases people] is partly voice. It has to have a sort of animal entity. Normally, of course, if you have a ball that flies through the air and it narrowly misses people, it would probably have mostly a wooshy sound. Well, that's not frightening at all, or even humorous, so by adding in the animal element you are aware of it much quicker. So when this thing roars past you — or past them, the players — it has a vocal element to it that is somewhat amusing and also menacing, because it really is dangerous — when it hits people it can really knock them out.”
 Extensive CGI work on the film meant that the sound
crew had to be completely in sync with the computer artists to
understand exactly what they were creating specific sounds
for. |
Cantwell did much of his work on an Avid AudioVision and in Pro Tools, and, Joseph notes, “the other half of the team worked on the DAR Storm [workstation], which is something I've had for years. It is Pro Tools compatible. What's great about the Storm is it's a workstation that was constructed for sound editors rather than just a computer that was designed for other things mostly, or a mainly musical system. It was built as a sound editor's workstation. I like that it's a touch screen, and it's a genuine 32 tracks you can play with and audition at any time. You can get to and from things very quickly; your directory is there with you with all the sound effects and reels, and you can move things around without having to open and close bins and move things across and drag things and everything. It really is instant access. The backup is on MO, which is also instant access.”
Because there was so much CGI work on the film, the sound crew was to a large degree at the mercy of the visual effects houses — they had to be in sync with the computer artists to understand exactly what they were creating sounds for, and often they had to wait for finished shots to come through their department to fine-tune the sounds and effects.
“It was difficult,” Joseph says, “and there were a number of situations where we were told vaguely what we were going to get, and then the results were rather different. We'd be working to an animation, say, on a flying sequence, and then you find that the next stage comes through and everything's in a different place, and the timing is different, and that can cause havoc. Also, no disrespect to visual effects houses, but they do like to do their own thing — as we do — and you suddenly find that your broom, for example, has got more twigs breaking off than was ever mentioned, or, in fact, it might not have mentioned at all that the broom had breaking twigs.”
Joseph came on board in February of 2001 and worked solidly until the film's premiere in early November. Between the layering of production dialogue, sound effects, score, the considerable amount of ADR that was required (in part because of noisy wind machines used in various scenes) and getting the “final” mix together four different times (necessitated because of picture changes), he and his team were working furiously up until the end. But even aside from the satisfaction of a job well done, the intense workload has another dividend. Because the other Harry Potter films will have some similar settings and characters, they have laid some of the groundwork for future work. Now we know what the Bludger sounds like. We know the ambience of the great dining hall. Production is currently ongoing in England on film two — Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets — with Shepperton slated to do the sound post work again.
And then there's what is sure to be a massively popular DVD. “It will be done separately,” Joseph says. “I believe there will also be extra scenes going into it. Hopefully we'll be involved in that, too. I don't think the DVD mix will be that different. We mixed in EX, as well. We did the SRD [Dolby Digital] with the extra surround. We did all the formats — the SDDS 8-track, the DTS, and the SR [Dolby analog].” Joseph notes that the rear speakers in the 5.1 mix will be used mostly for atmospherics and subtle sound effects like “brooms flying across, owls flying from back to front. There's a centaur who leaps front to back. There's [the evil] Voldemort — whose name we cannot mention — who does a bit of business in the rears; I shouldn't go into it,” he says with a conspiratorial laugh.
From a sound perspective, Joseph says the biggest challenge of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone was “to get all the elements in and give everything a chance [to be heard] and try to always be aware that you are in a world that no one's been before. And it's already in every child's imagination. I don't know how many millions of children — and adults — have read this book, but every one of them has a concept of what it looks and sounds like. So we're hoping to be true to that. It's a belief. We all had an idea of what we thought it should be like and when we saw the visuals they mostly confirmed what we were thinking — ‘Yes, that's about right.’”
And the same could be said of the sound. It sounds right. It sounds like magic.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
