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From Spare to Spectacular

Mar 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Blair Jackson

A look at the range of sound techniques used by this year’s Oscar nominees

This is a slightly unusual year in the two Academy Award categories devoted to sound (Achievement in Sound Editing and Achievement in Sound Mixing). Of the six nominated films, three contenders — No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, and 3:10 to Yuma — are most notable for their spare, almost minimalist, sound jobs, and the other three — The Bourne Ultimatum, Ratatouille, and Transformers — are flashier and louder, in a sense more like “traditional” sound nominees. Each of the six uses sound in effective and at times surprising ways, and each is emblematic of the broad range of the current state of the art.

When it comes to big-budget, big-action, popcorn entertainments, no one in Hollywood has the track record of mixers Greg Russell and Kevin O'Connell. They've been nominated as a team an unprecedented 12 times, with O'Connell nabbing another eight nominations for films without Russell. You might think they would have a “been-there, done-that” attitude after working on so many blockbusters, but that is far from the case — and the mega-hit Transformers was a recent favorite of theirs, for sure.

“I'm so thrilled to have been on this film,” Russell says from the Cary Grant Theatre stage on the Sony lot during the mixing of the film. “I've done just about every action-adventure kind of movie. I've done the space adventures, from Star Trek to the Stargates. And a ton that have standard guns and explosions and car chases and whatnot. But where else [but this film] do you have a car transform into a robot at 80 miles an hour on the freeway? It's something so absolutely out of the ordinary, and it opens the doors for endless opportunities with regards to sounds — and the sound editors and designers have gone out and recorded a ton of great material. This was the first time Michael [Bay, director] had worked with supervising sound editors Ethan Van der Ryn and Michael Hopkins [the Oscar-winning team behind The Lord of the Rings trilogy and King Kong, nominated in the sound-editing category for Transformers] and it was the first time we'd worked with them as supervisors, too — though Ethan's been a designer on many shows with us.” Also nominated with the Russell and O'Connell was Sound Mixer Peter Devlin; it's his second nod.

“Michael was really great on this film,” O'Connell says. “Over the years, he's really become a proponent of how much sound helps his movies because they're so visual-effects-oriented. He's matured into a fantastic filmmaker.”

The polar opposite of a film such as Transformers is the fine, relatively small-budget western 3:10 to Yuma, directed by James Mangold (Walk the Line) and mixed by Paul Massey (who earned his third Oscar nomination in row, sixth total, this year) and David Giammarco, with production sound supplied by Jim Stuebe (the latter two are first-time nominees).

“I love working with Jim Mangold,” Massey says from his usual haunt, the John Ford Theatre on the Fox lot. “He's always open to ideas about sound, and he doesn't like things to be locked down in predubs at all. He's very instinctive on the stage. He comes up with great ideas, and then we pursue them and he goes, ‘Yes,’ ‘No,’ ‘Yes,’ ‘No,’ and moves on. He makes decisions quickly, which is great.”

When asked about Mangold's approach to the sound for 3:10 to Yuma, Massey says, “He wanted a very western feel, obviously, and something that would pull you back into memories of old Western films, but brought into the modern era. He wanted it, to use an overused word, to sound organic, not synthetic — very natural and acoustic. He wanted it to sound fairly sparse and simple. With a lot of the gunshots, we didn't make them massively wide and deep and Hollywood-sounding. A lot of them were just the sound of the pistols they would be — maybe with a little reverb around them for canyon echo and such, but nothing too overblown. We were trying to keep it fairly gritty soundtrack-wise to go along with the look of the film.”

Paul Thomas Anderson's gripping drama There Will be Blood posed huge challenges to Sound Designer Christopher Scarabosio and Supervising Sound Editor Matthew Wood, both first-time nominees in the sound-editing category. The film is set in mostly desolate rural environments as the story traces the rise of the oil industry in California from its infancy to boom times through an obsessive miner-turned-oilman played by Daniel Day-Lewis.

“Paul's aesthetic is that things should not be over-produced, and they should sound raw and real,” Scarabosio says from Skywalker Sound, where he was working on the forthcoming Indiana Jones film. “One of the big concerns was with how the oil derricks were going to sound. He was interested in capturing the rhythm of these derricks and using that throughout the film. So that was my first big task: getting this rhythmic element that also felt ominous and dangerous. One derrick might be newly built, one might be in the initial stages of starting to drill, and another's fully drilling and producing oil. … We wanted to create an offscreen sound backdrop of those, which was quite a challenge because you don't always see them, but you want to hear that grinding, that churning — the creation of the modern economic boom.”

Scarabosio says the sound necessarily follows the development of Day-Lewis' character. “He starts out as a silver miner alone in a hole chipping away, scratching a living off the earth, and we kept that very simple and natural,” he says. “Then, as the story and his life get more complex, so does the sound, as we bring in the derricks and all. We were always trying to stay in step with the character.”

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.