Credits include: Avatar, Titanic, Iron Man, all Lord of the Rings, all Pirates of the Caribbean, The Weather Man, Jurassic Park II & III, Mission Impossible, Terminator 2. See the Appendix for Christopher Boyes’s full bio.

For Jurassic Park II, I flew down to Costa Rica, hired two guides for five days each, and went into jungles, both in the mountainous regions and down on the coastal areas. I recorded many hours’ worth of tropical ambiance and everything that you can imagine, including volcanoes and alligators. It was a good trip.

Whenever I go off recording on that kind of scale, I like to capture every time of the day. Audio-wise, Costa Rica is really graphic. There is something different happening at every time of the day and night. In the morning, you get these incredible crickets that sound like a burst of a shower nozzle, but with articulation and brightness. They come in right as the sun is coming up. Sometimes, you get them at sunset. You only get a three- or four-minute period where this happens. It is the most incredible sound, and anybody hearing it would feel like they are in the most prehistoric place on Earth.

To get a really clean, articulate ambiance is really difficult. It taxes you creatively and physically because you have to find a place that can give you a beautiful natural ambiance, you have to get there at a time when you are not going to be adulterated by either motor sounds on the ground or planes in the air, and you have to have absolutely superb equipment to get a clean ambiance. Everything comes to bear in that.

The second hardest thing would be animal vocalizations, because unlike humans, they do not perform well. Typically, if they see a microphone, they will think it is a gun. As a result, they clam up, so you must have an amazing amount of patience. Tame animals are worse than wild ones. At one point, I wanted to record a hippopotamus, and I think I sat there for four hours before it gave one vocalization, but it was worth the wait.

I have invested a lot of money in microphones and equipment. While I hate to slam a manufacturer, I bought a Neumann RSM 191. On the first night out in Costa Rica, we were trying to record owls, and we somehow managed to pull a little bit on the cables going into the mic, and it came apart. We took it apart, and it was like jewelry inside; you breathed on the cables, and it looked like they could come apart. Luckily, I was able to fix it with my Swiss army knife and gaffer’s tape. I think it sounds great, but I think it’s not robust enough for the kind of stuff that we do.

Granted, not everyone tromps into the jungle, like I do, but from my point of view, every film should have a significant amount of new, fresh sounds that nobody has ever heard before. If someone is doing major sound effects for major films and not doing things like that, then you have to wonder if they are recycling effects. I am a really strong advocate of recording effects for the purposes of sound design for each film that are fresh and new.

I don’t really like the idea of a broad mic for some ambiances. In the jungle, if you point in one direction, you are going to get a different sound than if you point the mic in another direction. I would rather get the ambiance in one location from two or three perspectives, as opposed to getting that whole ambiance from a 360-degree perspective. Then I can mix it as I like. For field recording, the most durable mic that I have used is the sister or brother mic to that Neumann RSM 191, which is the KMR 81.

In the jungle, it is amazing. You move you a mic 180 degrees, especially if it is a slightly directional mic, and the sound you hear is absolutely different than the sound you heard in the previous position.

This isn’t to say that I wouldn’t use a nice set of omnidirectionals for some ambiances. Certainly, some ambiances aren’t that directionally sensitive, in terms of the quality of the sound. But when you are deep in the jungle, there are all different sorts of wildlife.

Field recording always seems to have its surprises that end up expanding the sound library with fresh elements.

At one point in Costa Rica, while I was waiting around to record any given ambiance, I noticed that the mud I was standing in, which was around 6 to 12 inches deep, made a very powerful sound. I started recording that. That turned out great, and the sound I captured made its way into The Lost World and Volcano in separate entities, for things like dinosaurs eating and for lava glops. You can be anywhere in the world, and you can be looking for one thing out in the field, and you can stumble across something else—and you will never know what you’ll use it for.

Even though I love capturing great recordings of sounds out in the field, I also feel that mere documentary sound recording isn’t good enough when you are trying to assist in capturing the impact or tenor of a specific scene in a film.

If you and the effects editor and sound designer were hired to work on a scene, like taking a situation where someone is swimming, you would say, “What is happening in this scene? What is happening in the film?” That would affect how you would address the sound. You wouldn’t just say, “Okay, this is what she is doing. She is moving water.” Your sounds would reflect some emotional content that would read on their own, to some extent, to anybody, what was the mood of that part of the story. If it is a melancholy moment, you might find that the water moves heavily and more slowly than you would expect it to in real life. A good sound person automatically applies that sort of principle, and it comes out in their work.

Often, a number of these sounds that I capture get compiled with other sounds to create some of the unique, memorable sonic statements in movies.

Fire is a very difficult thing to capture in any film. I believe that it is one of the more difficult things. I find fire to be very difficult to sound like anything other than a snap, crackle, and pop. It takes a lot of work, a lot of patience, and a lot of recording to create anything other than a rumble or high end. For Backdraft, the approach was to make the fire live and breath and talk. We actually used a lot of human and animal vocalizations as well.

I have to say that every film has a very challenging element. For the film Volcano, the biggest challenge on that were these lava bombs, where the director [Mick Jackson] asked for the lava bombs to be a cross between a screaming banshee, a Dopplered train whistle, and a Stuka siren. Of course, I immediately started working with those very elements, but it was a little hard to define what the screaming banshee was. [Laughs]

Not so long ago, I debated the merits of field recording with a DAT recorder over a Nagra. That was back when I was an assistant sound designer to Gary Rydstrom on the film Jurassic Park. So many things have changed since then, and yet so many things have remained the same. The visual FX side of making movies has reinvented itself many times over, and I’ll bet anyone working in that field would say the same thing. We, as a group of people trying to be creative with tools of the trade, are constantly put in a place where we must chase the cutting edge of technology, while not forgetting the tried-and-true tools that still have value.

Years ago, the DAT machine was a real game changer for all of us working in audio. The tape was 1/8 the size of a roll of 1/4 tape. Also, as far as we knew, unlike 1/4, DAT wouldn’t flake its oxide off and render itself unusable unless it was placed in a Suzy Homemaker oven. Not to mention that one could get up to 120 minutes on this little guy, unlike the 15 minutes at 15 IPS we would get out of the 1/4 tape. If you were sharp, you could carefully renumber the IDs at the beginning of each DAT recording and then produce a document that helped navigate someone to each place of interest in the 120 minutes of recording. Personally, I didn’t trust such a small tape to 120 minutes and opted for the 60-minute DATs. If there was a section or two—and there always was—that I wanted Gary Rydstrom to avoid because the recording, for either technical or creative reasons, was unusable, I would label it NG for No Good. Gary, as a matter of course, would go there first and happily create a cool sound effect from the NG section.

As much as the DAT technology offered us, there was something we lost at the same time. First of all, the mic preamps built into these DAT machines, while usable, were vastly inferior to what was built into the analog Nagra machines. Also, digital sound itself was a bit of a strange world for those of us who grew up with analog. This 16-bit, 44.1-k signal had none of the hum and noise of analog, but it seemed to lose some of the sweetness as well. In a way, it felt as if this smooth, warm sound had been replaced with something very clean and precise in its image, but hard and shiny like a mirror. It was especially edgy sounding with loud sounds, like explosions. The DAT would hold the signal all the way to its technical limit, but then right at the peak, it would give way to a nasty “snat” that was unusable to anyone. The Nagra, of course, would sound great all the way through to the loud explosion. At that point, instead of providing unusable digital distortion at the peak, like the DAT, the Nagra gave you this amazing usable sound of apparent distortion, much akin to what the human ear itself will do when faced with such volume. This often provided us with a sound we could use in a way that conveyed loudness without actually having to be all that loud.

Randy Thom once said, “Distortion equals art,” and emotionally he’s right, although in the digital age, managing distortion for us as re-recording mixers is a whole different problem. As I pointed out, digital distortion is unusable, and creating pleasing analog distortion in a digital age is a challenge.

This is not intended as a treatise on analog versus digital; it’s more a reflection on how the world of creating, editing, and mixing sound for film has changed over the years and why we—any working professional—will find it necessary to continually adapt new ways of working, while losing some of the old tools that came before.

What is expected of a sound designer or editor on a film of today has changed simply because technology has forced it to. For instance, as a young sound designer, I would create sounds often in my Synclavier for a client like George Lucas and need to get them to him by the next morning. I’d lay the sounds off to 1/4 tape and write the description on the back. Beau Borders, my assistant at the time, would be waiting at the door with a FedEx package addressed and ready to go. We knew, partially due to Beau’s penchant for driving racecars, exactly how long it would take him to drive from Skywalker Ranch to San Rafael, where the main FedEx depot allowed us a 6:30 p.m. cut off. We almost always made it, but it was always too close. I would marvel to myself at how I finished this sound by 6:00 p.m., and George [Lucas] would have it in the morning! Contrast that to today, and it would be sent via the Internet in matter of minutes without the need for jet fuel. Years later, with the help of our producer, Barrie Osborne, I would print-master a reel of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers in Wellington and have NT Audio laying it back to film hours later in Santa Monica. Today, that has just become common practice.

When I say technology has forced us to change, it’s not, of course, only us. For any filmmaker these days, technology has opened new possibilities, and at the same time, it has increased the pressure on that filmmaker to manage many parts of his or her film all at once. Usually, for us in the “old” days, we knew that once we reached the final mix stage of our project, we had pretty much the undivided attention of our director. This isn’t true anymore. Now they are often working insane hours approving VFX or color timing, as well as trying to put their stamp on the final mix. I understand the stress a filmmaker must feel with all the major elements of the film coming together so late with a looming deadline. I, as a mixer, need to make their time on the stage as smooth and productive as possible. Several films I’ve worked on recently have really used new paradigms to give the filmmaker time during the post process to make decisions before they hit the final mix, thus enabling us to use the final mix for what it was intended to be—fine tuning of music, dialog, and sound effects.

One way we have done this is to insert a sound person in the picture department when possible, as we did on Pirates of the Caribbean. Craig Wood [picture editor on Pirates] is one of many people who have told me he will often use sound to make a picture cut. Well, that said, I wanted to make sure he used my sounds whenever possible, if it were going to determine where he would cut, because a sound used in that way, if successful, will never likely change.

Peter Jackson said essentially the same thing on The Lovely Bones. On that film, we basically maintained a 5.1 for Peter to hear as he cut the film. In the initial stages, I was up in California while Brent Burge, Chris Ward, and their crew worked down at Park Road in New Zealand. So, with their help, I was able to lock up my Pro Tools to Peter’s Avid via iChat. Since we had the same media on both sides of the planet, when they hit Play, we would both be looking at and listening to the same thing. I was able to see and hear Peter while he made comments as he watched the film. Once I got down to Wellington, New Zealand, Brent and Chris had the editors cutting in 5.1, and Brent maintained a 5.1 mix that was very similar to what we would start off with in the final mix. I’m not a fan of mixing in the box, but if used wisely, it has many plusses. In this case, Peter and Fran were able to comment and guide us so that when we reached the dub stage, many of the creative questions had been conquered, and we could focus on mixing.

On James Cameron’s Avatar, we were doing a similar thing. The difference there was that Jim [James] himself likes to cut sound, and he’s very good at it. At the outset, he really only wanted to hit a dub stage for four or five days. With the help of Steve Morris and Addison Teague up at Skywalker, we had built a platform that allowed me and my crew the ability to design, edit, and mix the track at Jim’s facility in Malibu. We also had that automation carry forth exactly as he heard it in Malibu to the dub stage for the final mix. In the studio we built in Malibu, I could access four or five Pro Tools systems, lock them together, and sync all that to HD picture. If I like, I could lock my Synclavier into the loop as well. Of course, there had been many iterations in between and for everything; pre-dubbing and final mixing sound would be pumped through and mixed on a traditional console. This is important to me, because I don’t believe any audio workstation can deliver the sonics of a traditional board. The main point, though, is that Jim was able to approve not just a sound or two, but a mix before it hit a dub stage, so when he arrived on that stage, his time was utilized as efficiently as possible.

There exists many ways an audio post team can choose to approach a picture, and no way is perfect. The challenge to me, however, is to use a method that supports your own creativity and gives the filmmaker the ability to make sonic decisions throughout the post process, rather than at the last minute.

Technology has indeed offered and forced new ways of working, but it’s only really dressing up a well-laid path, one that started in the first days of sound for film. In the end the goal remains the same: We use sound, music, and dialogue in an emotional way to help support a story.

Credits include: The Wire, The Royal Tenenbaums, Sleepy Hollow, O Brother Where Art Thou?, The Big Lebowski, Men In Black I and II, Get Shorty, Fargo, Adventureland, I’m Not There. See the Appendix for Ben Cheah’s full bio.

Part of making quality sound effects is recording the live, organic elements of those sounds. Without good original sounds, it is difficult to make original sound effects. It doesn’t matter how simple or complex the sound is going to be; it all relies on the source sound that you have.

It is important to have original and organic source material in every soundtrack and to make things sound like they don’t just come from commercial sound libraries. Otherwise, you find different sound editors from every sound house using the same sound effects libraries, and that really limits the amount of fresh material that is coming in.

Sometimes, when you are seeing a movie, it gets to the point to where you know which disc a sound effect comes from and the track number from which that certain sound originates. Believe me, it takes away from the movie. [Laughs] It happens all of the time.

When you are doing on-location recording, you are able to fine tune perspectives, whereas the people who are limited to just using commercial sound libraries are usually stuck to the one perspective that has been offered. When I record a sound effect, I’m really recording the space, and if moving, the object/person/vehicle’s movement through that space.

Our job is highlighting drama in a scene, be it a very subtle moment or a very violent moment. We are trying to create more interesting elements and dimension through the use of sound. You are often overacting the drama with sound, but that is the way that you can translate things into telling the story. It adds a whole extra dimension to the scene. The emphasis is on drama and recording it in the correct situation.

For instance, when you are recording vehicles, the real thing usually doesn’t sound big enough. If you find the right vehicle, and you drive it in and follow the action, it doesn’t sound dramatic enough, so you have got to screech the car in and out to make it sound right. We have been known to drive vehicles at speed in second gear in order to get enough drama in the sound effect. Otherwise, the difference between reality and filmmaking falls apart, and the soundtrack doesn’t live up to its job.

Credits include: Apocalypto, Nature Conservancy series. See the Appendix for Dennis Hysom’s full bio.

For environmental recordings, I have traveled from Alaska to Costa Rica and points in between to capture the desired ambiances. Most of the problems that you find in field recording can be solved if you are patient and persistent and if you plan carefully enough. If you have done your research, know where your species are, and have talked to all of the various park rangers involved in managing the wilderness areas, then you can pretty much locate what you want to record. So most of the problems can be avoided.

An extreme example of how a recording expedition can be interrupted concerns a recording trip I made in North Louisiana in a place called Kisatchie National Park. It happens to be near Fort Polk, I believe it is. The conservancy land where I was recording was nearby. I was trying to record this endangered species of woodpecker, called the Red-cockaded Woodpecker. This is a real fragile sound that this bird makes. All the trees are marked where the Red-cockaded Woodpecker has its nest.

The best times to record are very early in the morning or late at night. So I got there before dawn, and I was down in this culvert, and I waiting for the woodpeckers to start vocalizing. I heard this rumble, and it got louder and louder. I turned around, and there was this big tank from the fort, and there was a guy pounding on the top of the tank, screaming and yelling to the guy inside the tank, “Left, I said! Left!” I was over in the culvert, and I had my earphones on, and I had this microphone that had a windsock on it. It sort of looked like a gun. It had a pistol grip and everything. I was sitting there aiming it at this tree. The guys in the tank were 15 to 20 feet away, and they were oblivious to me. The gruff sound of the tank and the very quiet fragile sounds of the woodpecker were funny juxtaposition of sounds. I could probably use it, if I ever get to do a war movie or something like that. [Laughs] It was a very funny situation.

Sometimes what it takes to really capture a sound can place you in some pretty harrowing situations. While we were in Alaska, we went out for a couple of days to record Stellar sea lions. There were these small little islands all over the area where they gathered. The boat captain actually took me out on the bow of the boat, and he pulled up fairly close to the two colonies. Each colony of sea lions is looked after by an alpha bull, and both of them were warning me away with these really low belching sounds. I had this really great stereo recording of a bull on the right and a bull on the left warning me away from their harems.

We were floating in a rough sea, and the waves were making us move up and down extremely in the boat. I was up on the bow, trying to balance myself, holding the microphone, and it was frightening because the rail of the boat wasn’t very high. It would’ve been very easy to lose equipment or fall over into the freezing water. It would’ve also been all over for me because of the rocks, which were everywhere. We were within 12 to 15 feet from the rock outcroppings. The boat captain constantly had to backpedal, because the water was pushing the boat toward hitting the rocks. It was pretty wild.

It is getting to be a very crowded world, and it is very difficult to get truly natural sounds for any length of time at all. The sensitivity of the gear can pick up a lot of human sounds, like machines, boats, saws, and airplane noises, as well. Consequently, I have to do a lot of editing.

For every hour I record, I may hopefully come up with a minute of sound that is not only quiet, but also interesting. You can sit out there in the field for eight hours at a time and not get anything, until something special takes place. In North Dakota, for example, I sat out most of the night, trying to record coyotes. Then, finally, there may be two or three cries right near you.

I traveled to the Dakotas several times throughout the year to get the seasonal variety of sounds necessary for the Badlands CD. One night in the fall, in North Dakota’s Theodore Roosevelt National Park, I was with a park ranger and my assistant, recording elk. It was a moonless night, and all three of us had flashlights. We had been walking to areas where we heard elk, stopping to record, and then, of course, we’d hear the elk bugling where we’d just come from! They’d circled back around us. It was a good lesson for a field recordist. It’s almost better to sit and wait than to chase a sound.

Anyway, we were walking back to the road, and my flashlight began to fade and just died. My assistant, Steve, turned his on, and it died. “Well, that’s a little weird,” I thought. Maybe a bad batch of batteries. The park ranger turned her flashlight on, and it died. None of us could believe it. Too strange. She said, “No big deal”; she knew where the road was. We weren’t that far away, so we began slowly walking in absolute pitch-black darkness. We’d been walking about 10 minutes when I heard her whisper, “Wait.” She was quiet, and then she whispered, “Ohmygod, ohmygod, back up, back up. Bison. Bison.” I guess we had wandered into the middle of a herd of bison. I knew that bison can be dangerous if you get too close, and earlier she had expressed a fear of bison, mentioning that every year some fool gets too close and gets severely hurt by irritating a bison. I squinted and could barely make out these big black shapes all around me. We backed up and got clear, although I have no idea how. I think maybe it was a close call. She was shaken up.

I think my favorite place to record has been Central America. The variety of species and rich soundscapes is stunning. I was once contacted by a sound supervisor in L.A. looking for howler monkey sounds. I have some MP3 samples of howlers I recorded in Belize and Costa Rica on my website, and when Kami Asgar, the supervisor, did a Google search, he found the site and contacted me. It turns out it was for Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto film. In the end, many of my rainforest ambiences and animal vocalization recordings were used in Apocalypto.

My field recording setup is a Tascam DA-P1 DAT recorder with a Sonosax pre-amp. I use the Sanken CMS-7 mic for my ambient recording. It is a wonderfully versatile and durable microphone. I have had it in rainstorms, steamy hot weather, and I’ve never had it fail. While I’d like to check out some of the new Flash recorders, this rig suits my purposes fine. I’m also using a Sony MZ-RH1 minidisc recorder as a backup unit. It’s light and small, and I’m pleased with the quality of sound.

My favorite part of an entire production, from the concept planning stage to the final duplication mastering process, is scouting out a location and going in and recording. Even though it can get a little hairy once in a while, most of the time there is something very peaceful and serene about doing this.

All of the Nature Company projects I’ve done were created in co-partnership with The Nature Conservancy. The Conservancy received a percentage of the CD sales to promote further efforts to protect land. The overall concept was to record natural soundscapes on Conservany co-managed land, arrange each soundscape into an interesting ambient recording, and then compose music that, when mixed, would blend and become one interwoven fabric of music and natural sound. For example, one piece might be a morning at the La Selva Biological Station in Costa Rica. It might take several days recording from dawn to mid-morning to get enough audio to compile one perfect morning of sound. So, on the recording, after it’s put together, a listener gets the best possible situation, where they are hearing a beautiful dawn chorus in La Selva. And those mornings do happen. You just have to show up enough to record them.

Credits include: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The X Files, Pacific Heights, Red Heat, Rambo III, Apt Pupil, Flight of the Phoenix. See the Appendix for Rodger Pardee’s full bio.

I have recorded an awful lot of vehicles. It seems to be a kind of specialty. The first time I had to record cars was for To Live and Die in L.A. (1985). I filled up tape after tape, teaching myself how to do it. [Laughs]

There is no big trick to recording a car starting and driving away or a car driving by. The trick is for the shots where you are tracking alongside the car. It is not an interior sound. It is more of a mixture of the sound that comes from the engine compartment and also the exhaust and a little bit of tire work. That kind of sound doesn’t always play well in a movie.

Basically, what I ended up doing was putting a mic under the engine compartment and another mic back by the tailpipe and mixing the two together. I used the term “onboard” to distinguish that from an “interior” sound.

An interior sound is distinctive, too, but it is not real exciting, in terms of drama, if you are just driving along in a car with the windows rolled up. You don’t really hear a lot of engine, yet that is an element that you would like to have when you have got a shot of the good guy driving along inside the car.

So what I do is record a simultaneous onboard track and a stereo interior track using two synched recorders. That way, when you are inside of the car, you can play the interior and sweeten it with the onboard engine sound. We have used that technique with quite a bit of success.

For onboards, I tend to use stuff like dynamic mics, like RE15s, because they are very sturdy and can take a little bit of heat. You could put a condenser mic in the engine compartment, but it is not the best treatment for an expensive condenser mic.

Miking the engine compartment isn’t hard, but miking the tailpipe gets tricky because of the wind noise when the car is in motion. After some extensive R&D, we designed some special wind noise attenuators. It’s true that they look like old coffee cans lined with carpet, but that is only because we never got around to painting them. [Laughs] I tend to use an Electro-Voice RE15 or a Shure dynamic back by the tailpipe. We tend to have those pretty rigged.

I use Schoeps hypercardioid mics. For more rugged stuff, we have some EV RE15s that go back many years; they’re practically indestructible. And I have some other mics I’ve accumulated, but rattling off equipment lists isn’t that revealing. More important are decent mic placement and a sound source with character.

I’ve recorded some really nice effects using analog cassette decks and $40 mics; I just happened to be standing in a good spot during a good sound. You don’t have to be an audiophile connoisseur. After all, you can take Madonna’s voice and run it through some Art Deco preamp the size of a cinder block, but it’s still going to come out sounding like Madonna. Personally, I’d rather hear some lo-fi recording of Billie Holiday.

There are guys waxing enthusiastic over certain mic preamps now, like they are some kind of fine wine. The gimmick is to have huge knobs and dials on everything. It is like a fad. I am sure they sound fine, but it sometimes strikes me as absurd and trendy. It is like, “Here is my rack o’ gear.” Yeah, I’ve got a rack o’ gear, but how interesting is it to rattle on and on about what is in the rack? If having a rack full of the latest shiny gear gives you goose bumps, then go ahead. It’s harmless fun. But I’m not sure it’s that important. I’d rather hear sophisticated dialogue out of a crude sound system than the reverse.

When I teach intro film-sound classes, I like to reassure the students that they do not have to be engineering or computer wizards to do creative sound work. In a sense, you need to become just comfortable enough with the technology so that you can ignore it, because if you’re busy thinking about SCSI drives and file management, then you’re not thinking about the story and the feel of the sounds.

I like to start by playing a series of sound effects and getting people to discuss the feelings they evoke. Then you can start to analyze the causes of the feelings. Some sounds have subjective memories and associations linked to them—the click-ety whir of a Lionel train set can trigger intense nostalgia in some baby boomers. Or you can look at the objective character of the sound—maybe one reason that gentle surf is so soothing is because it’s analogous to the heavy regular breathing of someone sound asleep.

Once you start thinking in those terms, you begin to appreciate how even fairly mundane sounds like air conditioning can have character. In the end you ask yourself: Is the sound interesting? Is it involving? Does it do any good?