Matt Wood and David Acord in studio talking about 'The Clone Wars'.
Test your knowledge and identify those sound effects from Star Wars movies (too easy)!

[watch it via cbs13.com]

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Unidentified Sound Object

Mark Berger, Francis Coppola, and Walter Murch mixing Godfather II (1974).

POP Sound in Santa Monica, Calif. recently completed audio restoration work and 5.1 surround sound mixing for Paramount Home Entertainment’s release of The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration DVD Collection on DVD and Blu-ray.

POP Sound spent nearly eight months on the project, working in concert with Walter Murch, the original re-recording mixer on The Godfather, Parts II & III. For the first two films, POP Sound worked from the films’ original mono stems, as well as the original multitrack recordings of their musical scores. POP Sound had access to the original stereo elements for The Godfather, Part III. The re-recording mixer on the project for POP Sound was the late Ted Hall. Much of Hall's attention was devoted to eliminating artifacts that had affected the soundtrack over the years and addressing audio issues that were impossible to address when the films were made.

“We had a lot of cleanup to do to make these films sound fluid in transitions—the original mono tracks were very rough, with hard transitions,” recalls POP Sound's Director of Home Theater, Moksha Bruno. “There was a massive amount of de-humming, de-clicking, as well as time alignment issues we had to deal with. The original laser disc mix had a constant hum that wasn’t apparent at the time, but with the better home theater systems of today you begin to hear things of that nature."

[read the full article - via mixonline.com]

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Unidentified Sound Object

It seems that, just like a real bat, the The Batman of The Dark Knight uses sound to visualize the world, and Hamilton Sterling is the man behind that sound. Sterling, who is listed in the credits as "Additional Sound Designer" but who also cut hours of sound FX for the film, was in the throes of editing when lead Sound Designer Richard King came into the studio and asked him for a temp sound to go with The Batman's sonar vision device before they sent it off to the picture department. Given fewer than two hours to come up with a unique sound for a crucial plot element, Sterling turned to a library of Kyma Sounds he had designed for his AI Opera (an ongoing composition project that he works on between film gigs). He found an appropriately swirly sonar-ific sound, cut it to the right length, added some additional processing in ProTools, and then he and King sent it off to the picture department. Everyone loved the sound and thus it survived to become the sound of The Batman's sonar vision in the final version of the film.

[via Kyma Tweaky]

[Real-World Counterparts - via wired.com]

[don't miss the post 'The Voice Amidst the Noise' - via aspectratio.wordpress.com]

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Unidentified Sound Object

Matthew Wood talks about creating the world of sound for Star Wars, his friend Ben Burtt , WALL-E and the upcoming Clone Wars feature film and series.

Supervising sound editor Matthew Wood, aka General Grievous (voice) and Dave Filoni (The Clone Wars), director.

[listen here - via theforce.net]

Walter looks back on how it used to be in the days when celluloid was cut and spliced [part 1].



[part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5]

[via macvideo.tv]

Ben Burtt is talking to Newsbeat entertainment reporter Natalie Jamieson.

I created the voice for E.T. out of many different things, about 18 different people and animals and sound effects. There are racoons in there, there are sea otters, there are some horses, there's a burp from my old cinema professor from USC (University of Southern California). There's my wife's laboured breathing asleep at night with a cold. I'll take sound from anywhere and use it if it'll get me the effect I want.

Is there any one sound of yours that's like a trademark that goes through most of the things you've done?

There are probably many little trademarks of sound. I don't think I consciously put things in. I used to put a scream in called the Wilhelm Scream which was in every movie I did but that was just a joke to impress another friend of mine named Richard Anderson. We were both students together and we both put that scream in all our movies to out do each other.

But then the public began to recognise that and there are cults now around the Wilhelm Scream. There's not a Wilhelm in WALL·E but there are other sounds. In every movie I think I've got bit of my grandfather's hand radio set. I recorded some electronic sounds, tuning stations, back 40 or 50 years ago. And I have used a bit of that Morse code, that side banding, short wave sound in some form in every film I've ever done.

[read the interview - via BBC]

'Another time I went to Alaska to record glaciers breaking apart. I was taken way out in the wilderness in a helicopter and left alone on this rocky promontory 50 miles from the nearest village. About a mile away was this glacier, breaking apart and falling into the ocean. Great sounds which I used for one of the spaceships in "The Phantom Menace" as it landed.

[read the full interview - via timeout.com]

[More robot vocalization via emusician.com]

Kurt Andersen talks to Burtt about the movie and the legendary sounds of his career.

[via studio360.org]