{"id":6628,"date":"2019-10-29T18:58:56","date_gmt":"2019-10-29T18:58:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/moviesandshakers.com\/staging\/4428\/?p=6628"},"modified":"2019-10-29T19:24:39","modified_gmt":"2019-10-29T19:24:39","slug":"making-waves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/moviesandshakers.com\/staging\/4428\/making-waves\/","title":{"rendered":"Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound"},"content":{"rendered":"
[vc_section][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Director Midge Costin has taken a subject for technology wonks and crafted a mainstream audience pleaser laced with the importance of sound design by legendary actors and directors as well as technicians. This film could have easily become a techie nerd-fest, but Midge Costin, a long time sound editor, makes sure the main message is love for the craft. This documentary about film sound is as intriguing and entertaining as it is informative.<\/p>\n

This film boasts a roster of details about films by Steven Spielberg, David Lynch, Peter Weir, John Lasseter, Ann Lee, Ryan Coogler, Christopher Nolan, Robert Redford and Barbara Streisand. They all pay homage to how sound transports an audience to the exactly the right emotional place without any conscious effort. It\u2019s can often be subliminal.<\/p>\n

Making Waves <\/i>is also a history lesson, taking us back to the moment the Silent Era ended and ears were added to the movie sensory experience. You can almost hear the gasps coming from those theater audiences when they first heard legendary vaudevillian Al Jolson utter \u201cYou ain\u2019t heard nothing yet.\u201d But we\u2019re also shown the power of sound to add voices to musicals plus fear and terror in today\u2019s multi-channel audio universe, as well as in horror classics like Dracula<\/i> for the early 1930\u2019s.[\/vc_column_text][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1\/3″][vc_single_image image=”6636″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center” css_animation=”fadeInUp”][\/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1\/3″][vc_single_image image=”6620″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center” css_animation=”fadeInUp”][\/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1\/3″][vc_single_image image=”6638″][\/vc_column_inner][\/vc_row_inner][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner][vc_column_text]Director Costin uses historical footage to explain how the earliest filmmakers wanted to add sound to their art, but they could never figure out a way to sync the visual and the aural. Film sound until the 1960\u2019s was mostly using microphones to capture dialogue, sound effects made with props, and orchestras recording tracks separately in studios.<\/p>\n

Enter Walter Murch, a USC friend of George Lucas he introduced to another college pal, Francis Ford Coppola. Murch was taking quality audio into real life with the revolutionary Nagra Portable Audio Recorder. Walter Murch is lionized in this movie as the leader of advancing sound as a true movie art form. How he learned to record and physically splice audio tape as a kid in the 50\u2019s and then to appreciate the layers of sound on music from the Beatles all widened his audio world-view.<\/p>\n

Murch was just what Coppola needed to make his road movie The Rain People<\/i>. With portability Lucas, Coppola and Murch were able to break away from the control of Hollywood and head north to San Francisco to build a new empire at American Zeotrope. That movie was a box office flop, but the lessons learned live on today. Murch and Coppola, however, more than redeemed their reputations when they re-teamed to make The Godfather.<\/i><\/p>\n

The creative floodgates crashed open with a new generation of classics like Dog Day Afternoon, Mean Streets and The French Connection <\/i>made on location <\/i>with audio recording as crisp and clean as studio sound.[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column_inner][\/vc_row_inner][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1\/3″][vc_single_image image=”6619″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center” css_animation=”fadeInUp”][\/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1\/3″][vc_single_image image=”6626″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center” css_animation=”fadeInUp”][\/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1\/3″][vc_single_image image=”6623″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center” css_animation=”fadeInUp”][\/vc_column_inner][\/vc_row_inner][vc_column_text]This is all brought home in a sequence from Robert Altman\u2019s Nashville. <\/i>The scene at the airport is a jumble of people rushing in and out the frame with a mix of marching bands and majorettes twirling batons all while we\u2019re trying to keep track of the main characters navigating through the crowds. But what makes the scene really come to life is the layers of audio that follow the action. This is what sound design is all about.<\/p>\n

Some of the noteworthy moments in sound design go back to the original King Kong<\/i> in 1933 which employed some sound effects techniques for the very first time. Costin also puts Barbara Sreisand on a pedestal for insisting that her 1976 version of A Star Is Born<\/i> be heard in stereo which theaters were reluctant to invest in up to that time. Streisand also spent a million of her own dollars to get four more months of editing the enhance the sound for the film.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

There are tons of fascinating details. Another legendary giant of sound, Ben Nurtt, is introduced as the man who spent almost a year designing Chewbacca\u2019s voice for Star Wars.<\/i> You\u2019ll be surprised to hear how he found inspiration for the fighter jet engines in Top Gun<\/i> from animal sounds.<\/p>\n

If there\u2019s any aspect of this project that falls short of the mark, it\u2019s the over reliance on emphasizing action and war films as examples of what sound design can accomplish. Sometimes it\u2019s in spaces where the sound is muted and hushed that carry even more power. Why not include the film A Quiet Place <\/i>as a prime example. But that\u2019s minor compared to this finely crafted documentary clearly made with respect for the subject. See this finely tuned doc. And don\u2019t forget to bring your ears.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet Corp. \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 <\/span>1 Hour 34 Minutes \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 <\/span>NR[\/vc_column_text][vc_video link=”https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=WsIE4x3xU0Y” el_width=”80″ align=”center” css_animation=”fadeInUp”][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][\/vc_section]\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[vc_section][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Director Midge Costin has taken a subject for technology wonks and crafted a mainstream audience pleaser laced with the importance of sound design by legendary actors and directors as well as technicians. This film could have easily become a techie nerd-fest, but Midge Costin, a long time sound editor, makes sure the main message is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6627,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/moviesandshakers.com\/staging\/4428\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/moviesandshakers.com\/staging\/4428\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/moviesandshakers.com\/staging\/4428\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moviesandshakers.com\/staging\/4428\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moviesandshakers.com\/staging\/4428\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6628"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/moviesandshakers.com\/staging\/4428\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6628\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6642,"href":"https:\/\/moviesandshakers.com\/staging\/4428\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6628\/revisions\/6642"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moviesandshakers.com\/staging\/4428\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/moviesandshakers.com\/staging\/4428\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moviesandshakers.com\/staging\/4428\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moviesandshakers.com\/staging\/4428\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}