American Cinematographer - September 1990 - 70

We're not just
Lions and

of the Dallas and again in other sub exte¬
rior shots was also created in Hall's

Tigers and Bears.

swimming pool. I did cannonballs off the
diving board which we captured from
various acoustic perspectives. I built one
mike by taping a pressure zone mike to
the inside of a 35mm film can. I filled it
with 40-weight oil, then sealed it with
epoxy and suspended it in the water. The
oil-can picked up the low-end sounds

which helped evoke the mass and size of
a nuclear submarine. We also used an aircan mike for a brighter sound along with
several studio mikes sealed with rubberbands. To capture an additional ambi¬

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positioned the Crown SASS
just above the water.
Water movement and kicking
created turbulence that proved effective.
At my studio, I slowed my diving board
cannonballs and triggered them rhythmi¬
cally on the Emulator III so that one be¬
came a "rev" of the propeller blades. This
"wooshing" sound was combined with
prop elements from Howarth, who says,
ence, we

mike

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"I recorded tankers from underwater
between Long Beach and Catalina
In his ocean recordings it was pointless
to do stereo underwater miking because
sound travels eight times faster underwa¬
ter and "where good stereo separation in
the air could be done at 10 feet apart,
underwater you'd have to get them 80
feet apart to get decent stereo. Creating
'fake' stereo in the studio by slipping the
mono sound 7 to 10 milliseconds turned
out to be the right way to do it."
The prop sounds were a big
issue because of one especially close
prop shot. A good element came from an
old steam paddleboat which helped to
make the prop even more convincing.

Watters explains that "we used the

water-churning sound from a paddle boat
get the slow 'chugging' that went with
the prop." This was especially useful
because the entirely submerged tanker
props made little or no sound related to
blade motion. An empty tanker was re¬
corded on its way into the harbor with the
to

of the water.
This became a key propeller
element in all the ships because it had the
prop one-quarter out

higher pitch sound of the screws and also
hammering effect. Using a real-time
recording of a tanker propeller was impor¬
tant, because relying on reduced playback
a

speed (either through sampler or tape)
achieves a bigger, more massive sound,
but at the cost of high-end frequencies
American Cinematographer - September 1990

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