AudioMedia - June 2008 - (Page 36)

> Skywalker Ranch in this little grove of apple trees. It had a nice exterior ‘studio’ feel to it and gave a little bit of soft reverberance from the trees, a certain sweetness.” Regarding time and pacing of his work on the film, Burtt offers that he did everything he could to work most efficiently. “You always use all the time you’re given,” he says with wisdom. Fro m Sk u l l s To N at i ve s “Especially in my work, you’re required to be inventive on the spot and at every moment. You’re also ‘kind-of-never-done’ until the film is to be delivered. So, I take a rather methodical approach to it; I write down all the sounds that I think I need to create, I see how many days or hours I have to work on it, and I’ll divide it up. I give myself a quota: ‘I need to do 20 sounds today,’ for instance. Then I have to move on. Sometimes the 20 sounds I make today aren’t the 20 I thought I was going to make. Quite often while you’re experimenting, you find something else that you were looking for; I start out in the morning trying to make a sound for a crystal skull, and I realise that this sound is better for the charging natives, or something. So I just take advantage of all the time I have and chart it out.” Finally, if time is short, it never hurts being able to call on the talents of your best peers in the business. For Crystal Skull, this is exactly what Burtt was able to do. “Because I was splitting my time between two movies, I couldn’t do absolutely everything,” he says. “Some of the sounds were created by Christopher Scarabosio [Sound Re-recording Mixer and Additional Sound Designer], who mixed sound effects on the film. I’ve worked with him a lot over the years, and he has become a very successful sound designer and mixer – he was nominated last year for There Will Be Blood. We’re friends. I’d say, ‘Chris, I don’t have time to do these trucks,’ and he would work on those, for instance. Richard Hymns – who I share the job Supervising Sound Editor with – has a specialty in vehicles; he loves recording trucks, motorcycles, and Jeeps. We needed a lot of Russian military vehicles in this film. He went to huge efforts to find the right vehicles, get them out in the desert, and record them thoroughly. So, in the end, it was divided up: Richard did the vehicles, Chris did some of the vehicles and crashes, and I was responsible for the rest of it.” Burtt intimately understands the Indiana Jones legacy, as he has worked on all of its versions: three previous feature films and the Young Indiana Jones television series. Thus, he insists that both desire and kinship led to his involvement in this, the long belated fourth installment of the Indy story. “When it was discussed that they would come back and do a new adventure, I had a job at Pixar,” Burtt explains. “I really wanted to be a part of it; it was very important to me that there was continuity in the sound design for the film. Back as far as the first film, Raiders of the Lost Ark, we tried very hard to establish a sound signature for the films in terms of the action/adventure sound vocabulary of the movie: the types of explosions, face punches, airplanes, and all of the topics that make up the usual kinds of adventures. We had established a style for Indy, one of the first big modern action films done with a customised soundtrack. We developed new sounds for old things; instead of pulling things out of a library that we could’ve used in the first film, we made everything anew, but it was based on what we loved about the old classic movies that Indiana Jones references.” ∫ Th e ‘ I n d y ’ Le g a c y 36 AUDIO MEDIA JUNE 2008 http://www.sonic-distribution.com http://www.sonic-distribution.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of AudioMedia - June 2008

AudioMedia - June 2008 Contents Recording Post Broadcast AES Review What's Up UK? Geofocus: Australia For the Record Special Report: Videosonics Newstalk: DPA New Microphones Novation SL Compact Allen & Heath IDR-8 Eastwest Quantum Leap SD2 & Goliath Final Cut: Indiana Jones Merging ADR Module Koolworld SSL Duende Good Product Sampler: Microphones Video Guide AMSR Meyer Sound The Blue Planet Live! Royer Labs Mics R-121 & R-122

AudioMedia - June 2008

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