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MillimeterWhat Sounds May Come: Soundeluxe Hears Heaven and Hell
Nov 1, 1998 12:00 PM, Michael Goldman
Although most technical acclaim for Vincent Ward's What Dreams May Come lauds the film's stunning visual depiction of heaven and hell, the sound design that accompanies those visuals was every bit as delicate and painstaking. In fact, it took sound designer Peter Michael Sullivan at Soundeluxe Vine Street Studios, Los Angeles, about nine months to design and mix all the sounds featured in the Polygram release.
The key challenge, according to David Kneupper, the film's supervising sound editor and president of Soundeluxe, was the fact that Ward wanted the film to depict a personal view of the afterlife as seen through the eyes of protagonist Chris Nielsen (Robin Williams). For example, from Nielsen's POV, heaven consists of both classical paintings and those paintings created by his wife, Annie (Annabella Sciorra). Therefore, early in the film, Nielsen's visit to heaven is a visit to a literal world of paint.
Director Ward says that required "a sound palette that, like the images, is tied to Chris' perceptions." Ward elaborates: "He perceives things through his incredible love of classic painting. It is a very subjective kind of storytelling, and sound played a crucial role in that." But, as Kneupper points out, it meant Soundeluxe had a very delicate sound design job on its hands. "It's not like anyone had the sounds of a painted world-stepping in paint, touching trees made of paint-in their sound effects library," he says.
To head the design job, Ward and Kneupper brought in Sullivan, a veteran sound designer, and the three collaborated to create a unique audio language for the movie. A key example is a sequence in the film in which a tree appears in Chris' paradise, essentially inside a painting Annie had been creating for Chris at the time of his death. The tree, however, was not part of the painting when Chris died, but shows up after his death when Annie, back on Earth, paints it.
Ward says, "The idea was to show that Chris and Annie are soulmates, connected even after death." Sullivan adds that the team designed the sounds associated with the tree to convey the couple's emotional stress of being apart and longing for each other. "We took library sounds of a tree being cut in the forest with lots of cracking and stressing," explains Sullivan. "Then, to convey the emotional aspects, we mixed in sounds of certain animals-monkeys, coyotes, whales-to reinforce the subtext of moaning, sad sounds. I then processed female sighs that we recorded to show that Annie is crying on her side of the canvas. So by the correct mixture of these types of sounds, we were able to convey the idea of connecting the two characters emotionally through this image of a tree."
Later in the film, Sullivan adopted a similar approach to the sounds of the ruined home Chris and Annie once shared, which becomes Annie's hell following her suicide. In a crucial scene, Chris confronts Annie there in an effort to re-establish their connection and, hopefully, to bring her from hell to his own paradise.
"Annie's particular corner of hell is a place familiar to the both of them, but ruined, destroyed," explains Sullivan. "We decided the house itself should be moaning, crying, sighing, suffering. But it had to be very subtle so as not to interfere with the dialogue of an important scene. So we recorded emotional sighs and then reversed them, putting a long reverb tail on it and then flipping it back again so that the sigh now plays forward, but with the reverb preceding it. Then, we put another, long reverb tail on the end of it, so that the sound comes out as reverb, sigh, reverb. I then treated the whole thing with a Doppler effect, to move those sighing sounds around in the house. The idea is that it is a constant reminder of Annie's torment and suffering."
Detailed Foley work helped create these "mental landscapes," says Sullivan, as did extensive use of Soundeluxe's large sound effects library. In addition, Sullivan used unique sounds that he had recorded in recent years. Among them: the sounds of bubbling lava and oatmeal, which were used to sweeten a key beginning scene in which Chris and his guide, Albert (played by Cuba Gooding, Jr.), walk on water made of paint.
"We needed something that could realistically sound like water lapping in a lake, yet have a more viscous character to it," says Sullivan. "Therefore, I used a technique called 'envelope following,' in which we combined sounds of water with bubbling lava, oatmeal, and other things. I took the original source-the lapping waves-and combined them with these sweetener elements. That way the main sound, of water, rises and falls surrounded by these other elements. It's then recognizable as an impressionistic wave of water, rather than any wave you would ever see in the real world."
Kneupper says that such subtle combinations of sounds would have been nearly impossible had Soundeluxe not been able to keep the same crew on the same stage for the entire project, which took 10 months. "Good sound companies always try to tailor the service to the requirements of the particular film, but it is often hard to keep the entire crew intact if the project is a long one, since these people are in very high demand," says Kneupper. "But Vincent Ward and Polygram really supported the sound work and were very sensitive to how important it was to making the movie work as a whole. That allowed us to keep the crew together, even if it meant changing schedules around. "
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
