Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound

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combatentropy

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Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound is free right now on Amazon Prime.


It includes interviews with the greats like Walter Murch and Ben Burtt, as well as famous directors.

I thought it did a good job stepping through history in a coherent way (when it doubt, explain it in chronological order). It also went through practically all areas (location sound, dialog editing, foley, sound effects, music).
 
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;~) I know most of the people in the trailer... It worries me that you didn't capitalize Foley. But it's encouraging that the trailer doesn't mix up Foley with SFX and I see a number of people who the average non professional has never heard of. You may have managed to actually make a film that sound people would approve of? 99.9% of what is out there is basically puff pieces by folks who don't have a clue and are edited to reinforce this Hollywood hype that it's all magic and not a ton of dedicated artists working huge hours. Though the "classic" shot of plucking a guy wire with the implication that the raw recording was the sound used in StarWars and not just the starting point to make those sounds is maybe a worry.
 
The best advice I can give is study music and music theory. You don't have to get good at it but a good understanding will really help out, basically all sound design is composition, and while there is very little out there on the theory of sound, there is piles on the theory of music. And really they are a lot more similar than different.

And to put that in perspective I don't play any instrument well enough to say I "play" it. I can noodle around but that isn't playing. I can't off hand read music, though I have at times worked at it hard enough to muddle my way through. But I took some classes that were way over my head and read a ton of books on the pioneers in electronic music and got enough theory that at times I could sort of discuss it. But I did manage to get some fundamental "instincts" out of all that and it's a huge help because the way notes interact is pretty much exactly the way sounds inter act. A great sound design is a composition that will take you on the emotional journey of the story without the need of dialog or picture. With dialog you get the story and picture completes the "world". But if you can't get the emotional journey from the SFX tracks they are not doing their job.
 
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OK I gave some grief based on the trailer but really this is the best most "real" film I have seen on film sound. I was concerned at one point that you were leaving out Alan Splet, but you got him in and realistically there isn't a lot of footage about him and he died decades before you filmed so... You really didn't mess up the sound divisions as almost all films do. A small pick is that there is not definitive definition of ADR, you used one but there is no consensus as to what the initials actually stand for. And semi pick, Group ADR kind of correct but I have always heard it referred to as "Loop Group". There are actual "Loop Groups" that get called in to do this stuff.

The other asterisk I would put on here, that is kind of alluded to, is that this is mostly a northern California film sound doc. SoCal is more of that factory sound that gets mentioned. Part of why I know and worked with 99% of the folks in the film is because it's NoCal. I did hardly any work in SoCal.

But those are small issues. Great job. You talked to the right people. This is the revolution in film sound that changed everything. One maybe omission is Dan Duggan who was the first person to actually get a "sound designer" credit (though in theatre) and had a big impact on the Bay Area film sound that this film is mostly about. Second small ding is you do not have any of the Skywalker Foley Artists in the film. The Foley artists in the film are top notch but with all the focust on NorCal film sound you probably should have had some time with the Skywalker and Fantasy Foley artists.

But bottom line is I would use this to teach Film sound because it is the most "non fluff piece" film on sound I have seen.

I would actually recommend that it hets pined
 
I didn't make it, I just saw that it was free for Amazon Prime members, so I thought I would pass it along.

I like your recommendation about music theory, that's beautiful. I can't play any instruments besides the drum set, but it definitely helped my sense of rhythm.
 
In the same vein as studying music theory but from a different angle, a college course I took on "acoustic phonetics" - basically the physics and anatomy of sound production in the human vocal tract - helped me immensely over the years in recording and editing the spoken word. Highly recommended if you can find one, especially if they can include a lab component with real subjects and equipment to play with.
 
combatentropy said:
I didn't make it, I just saw that it was free for Amazon Prime members, so I thought I would pass it along.

I like your recommendation about music theory, that's beautiful. I can't play any instruments besides the drum set, but it definitely helped my sense of rhythm.
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Hey as a sound guy get it when you can!

But good catch this is a really pretty good talk about sound, or at least NorCal sound. Though I think East Coast has a similar take and a lot of the folks have drifted back to LA so maybe it's also LA now?
 
combatentropy said:
I didn't make it, I just saw that it was free for Amazon Prime members, so I thought I would pass it along.

I like your recommendation about music theory, that's beautiful. I can't play any instruments besides the drum set, but it definitely helped my sense of rhythm.
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DRums are a great help with fight scenes. An editor I learned a lot from would find drum tracks to match fight scenes and then cut the punches to match. The rhythm is actually almost as important as the pitch and way more important than the actual placement. We did a bunch of Jacki Chan rereleases and we worked to make all of the fights "musical". It works really well. If you have a choice of "musical" placement or visual placement, go with the musical 100% of the time.
 
Greg Smith said:
In the same vein as studying music theory but from a different angle, a college course I took on "acoustic phonetics" - basically the physics and anatomy of sound production in the human vocal tract - helped me immensely over the years in recording and editing the spoken word. Highly recommended if you can find one, especially if they can include a lab component with real subjects and equipment to play with.
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THat sounds fantastic. I took a deep dive into the early electronic and Musik Concrete folks and that and music theory (really mind numbing, but then my music major roommate pointed out that this "intro" class was using an upper division textbook so maybe I wasn't so dumb?) really paid off later.
A freebie that I learned in some early electronic music article (I have the first copies of Polyphony (later renamed Electronic Musician)) is that US car horns are two square waves a fifth apart. This I actually used in a film. Kind of saved the day because we couldn't get a clean recording of a specific bus horn.
 
He's an English eccentric but an amazingly talented many who because of his journalistic background is also great taking to camera. Search on YouTube for guy michelmore and just watch how he works. He was a tv reporter but then switched to composing for moving image, and he's very clever and easy to watch.
 
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