AudioMedia - March 2009 - (Page 29) PRESENTED BY: Bringing Entertainment Alive! King offers the first main sequence of The Dark Knight – a scene in which Batman encounters drug dealers in a parking garage – as an instance in which he was able to prepare appropriate audio before he had seen any associated image from the film. “The script mentioned that they had big dogs, like Rottweilers,” King begins. “I thought it would be interesting to record dogs in a parking garage, getting a natural surround reverb, and I was able to do that without seeing the film. It’s all about collecting enough material so you can ultimately sculpt what you need to make out of it.” This sonic intuition also came in handy while gathering gun sounds for The Dark Knight. “In the same way, we did a gun session rather early,” tells King. “Unlike some movies, where you want to use the type of gun that is actually on film, we really just wanted big and beefy gun sounds. We went to an armory and selected what we thought would have the most powerful sounds, like 50-caliber handguns, Uzis, and machine guns – 10 to 12 different choices that represented a variety of big guns.” Collecting sounds for the vehicles of The Dark Knight was quite a bit different, as the sounds were closely matched to what was happening on screen. “When we got to the vehicles, we had to do that very precisely to picture,” offers King. “You have to choreograph what you want the vehicles do be doing at any given moment, hitting certain cuts and shots really hard. Cutting sounds for vehicles needs to be much more tailored to the picture. We made a very careful shot list from the picture, doing the vehicles late in the process. We had initially used temp-effects – things that I had in my library from other movies before that. Once I had the time to do the vehicles for real, we really studied the picture, made extensive notes, and did half-a-dozen takes to make sure we had the building blocks to do the chase sequences.” energy, and imagination. With something like The Dark Knight, you’re starting with a great movie, fantastic per formances, and exciting sequences. That pushes you further because you want to live up to the material. I definitely have a particular point of view but I try not to let that limit me, and I use that hackneyed phrase ‘think outside the box’, opening my mind up a little bit. Sound Designer/Supervising Sound Editor ‘What am I not thinkRichard King in his sound design suite at ing of here?’ Yet, you Warner Bros Studios. don’t want the sound to be the star, so it’s really about trying to find sounds that will add something yet won’t be a distraction in itself.” O n I nspiration, Technology, And Work For King, as with most intuitive and talented audio-based artists, inspiration still comes from the mind, not from the gear. While technological innovation has helped ease the productive process, it still doesn’t provide the muse. “In the old days, I would’ve still gone out and got the sound, but would’ve instead grabbed a Nagra and thread a roll of tape on it,” explains King of the inspired moment. “It was all a lot more cumbersome, but there wasn’t an alternative. I don’t think technology has changed the way I look at the work, but it has given us so many more tools to work with that you can practically accomplish anything that gets into your head. We seem to have accomplished these things before the advent of the newest technology. Using a musical analogy, look at what the Beatles did on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and the amazing things done in the 1960s with, by today’s standards, really crude equipment. I don’t think they would’ve done a better job if they’d had Pro Tools, digital recorders, and so on. If anything, our newest technology just gives you in-hand tools to do what’s already in your imagination. Again, the true inspiration comes from your imagination rather than from the technology; it comes back to people. But today, when you get the idea, you can try five different versions of it in a blink of an eye, which you couldn’t do before. “Personally speaking, I’m always looking for new stuff, but it’s usually because I have a sound in my head, and I can’t make it with the tools that I have. So, I go searching for some other tool that I may only use once; it’s some piece of software, some box, or whatever. But rather than bring the attention to the sound, I really just want to make soundtracks that contribute to the story and the characters. I’m always looking for new ways to accomplish that.” ∫ A M ad S cramble, A Creative Frenz y King admits that the art of sound design/edit isn’t at all based on a linear method – and he likes it that way. “All the way through, I would have ideas about what I wanted to use, and then I’d record it or find a way to get it,” he offers. “It’s a mad scramble. You never want to feel that you’re coasting along, checking things off the list. It’s much more of a creative frenzy. Yes, you have to be organised about some of it; the gun and vehicle shoots are complicated and expensive to set up, so they have to be pretty well thought out. Yet the vast majority of it is, ‘I have an idea! How do we get it?’ It’s much less organised than the shooting of a film is. We know how to work fast, have a lot of portable gear, and can record a lot of stuff in my studio. It’s never like you’re just coasting along, and this pace and approach actually makes it all fun.” This creative free-for-all was a major attraction for King to the field of sound-for-film in the first place. “It’s ‘the sky is the limit’ scenario, definitely – that’s what I loved about sound initially,” he explains. “In picture editing, you always think about how well the scene was covered, and how the performances are; you are limited by the material that you are given. With sound, you can always do a fantastic job, even on a bad movie; you’re only limited by time, Richard King collects his Academy Award for The Dark Knight Richard King – Sound Designer/ Supervising Sound Editor Michael Babcock, Hamilton Sterling, & Michael W. Mitchell– Sound Effects Editors Christopher Flick – Supervising Foley Editor Lora Hirschberg & Gary Rizzo – Sound Re-recording Mixers Ed Novick – Sound Mixer Hugo Weng ¶ Michael Magill – Dialogue Editors John P. Fasal ¶ Eric Potter – Sound Effects Recordists Linda Folk – ADR Supervisor Andrew Bock & Linda Yeaney – Assistants AUDIO MEDIA MARCH 2009 29
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