Week of November 28 - December 4, 2004

Tuesday, November 30, 2004

I hope you guys had a wonderful Thanksgiving.

One quick, exciting note before I get started; at the end of this web log you will find a link to a series of trivia questions pertaining to the added value on the DVD that is being released today, November 30th. Answer all 10 correctly and you will be entered to win something that I promise will delight any Spider-Man fan. If I was eligible to win this prize, believe me, I would be all over it.

The idea for this entry came from questions that have been posed to me since my original web log appeared months ago. From the start, it was readily apparent that many of you were interested in the sound design of "Spider-Man 2." As a result, I asked "Spider-Man 2" supervising sound editor and sound designer Paul Ottosson if I could interview him about his approach to the film. He graciously agreed. However, finding time between my schedule and Paul's, who began immediately working on "The Grudge" after he completed "Spider-Man 2," was something that proved quite complicated.

After months of trying to get together, I am happy to say that Paul and I were able to sit down last week & what follows is a portion of our conversation (after a winner to the trivia questions is declared, I will post the winner's name, a picture of the prize as well as the conclusion to my interview with Paul). To prepare for our interview, I went back through the web logs and asked Paul many of the questions you posed pertaining to sound and, returning to my initial career goal of becoming a journalist, decided to pose a few questions of my own.

What films other than "Spider-Man 2" have you worked on? I worked on "The Grudge," "S.W.A.T.," "The Scorpion King," "Down with Love," "Honey," "Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius," "Rugrats in Paris: The Movie."

You have an accent that comes from outside the United States. Where are you from? I'm from Lönsboda, Sweden. The population now is about 2,500, but when I grew up it was about 2,000.

What first got you interested in doing sound design for movies? Was there a particular movie that inspired you as a young boy? I actually never set out to do sound for movies. I came from music. I worked in the music business for years. I played in bands, recorded bands and started producing music. And then one day a composer called me wanting someone to mix his score for a show he was working on. He needed help editing the music, mixing it and placing other music cues. After that he ended up scoring a commercial and I mixed it - the dialogue and the music that went with it. We did some more of these commercials and every once in a while he would need a sound effect, and this was just when Pro Tools was coming out in the early 90's, and one of the first sounds I ever cut was a basketball. He wanted a big basketball sound and I worked on it and gave him what he was looking for and I thought, wow, this is really kind of cool. Then someone asked him to score a short film and I was going to mix it, but he suggested that I should do the sound for it as well. He had a small studio at his house, a garage and another room he turned into a studio and a foley stage. After the short we started getting small movies which I would do everything for. I'd cut the dialogue, then the actors would come in and I'd record the ADR, I'd do all the foley myself, cut the sound effects and then I would mix it. We'd do everything from his home studio. It turned into a really good thing. People liked what I did over there and we started getting more clients. And so it was never anything I really aimed for - it just kind of happened and I liked it. Even though it wasn't music it was still creative. I wanted to be in some kind of creative field but I didn't know that that would take me to this.

What instruments do you play? In the bands I played with over here, I played bass, keyboard, some drums and guitar and of course, being from Sweden, the triola which is kind of like a keyboard that you blow into. I learned to play the triola because my dad really wanted me to play something and he handed it to me one day and said, "Here. Check this out."

What should a college student who wants to do sound design in film work on to prepare himself or herself for employment in this industry? That's a tough question. They should learn Pro Tools because it is the editing program and hardware that everybody uses at the studios when you work on a movie anymore. The key though is to have an interest for sound - that you listen and pay attention to what sound does. Not only the sounds you create/design, but the rest of the movie as well. After all, what you design should be part of the movie and compliment it; you need to be able to help the story. For me, I think about sound probably more than I should, but it is where my passion lies. It's a little bit like music. I don't think you can write a great song unless you like music - you want to do it. It's tough unless you have a passion for it. But, one thing that did help get me get going early on, that I would likewise recommend, is that I went to a recording school in the late 80's because I wanted to know why sound worked the way it did, because, up until that point, I didn't. I had been working in a studio, but I was just kind of winging it. From my studies, I now listen to a sound and I know what's wrong with it or what it needs. I know technically how to improve the sound by dealing with, among other things, the amount of frequencies. Everything has a fundamental frequency. If you can get this table to vibrate you will have a fixed frequency all the time. If you hit a glass in the same spot it will ring the same way every single time. If I want a sound to pop out more specifically I will find this fundamental frequency & then make the sound pop with the EQing. Or, if I want it to be a warmer sound, I will look at the harmonics of that frequency. I also learned the importance of recording the sounds in the best way. Since I learned how things work the way they do, I am able to deliver much cleaner sounding sounds which is something editor Bob Murawski really liked. Then, of course a lot of trial and error as you learn by trying. Something like "Spider-Man 2" is very complicated - so many things going on at the same time - & if you don't know what to specifically enhance, or if you don't take out stuff you don't need, for something like the train scene, you have a train wreck on your hands literally.

What do you consider your "break" that got you noticed and allowed you to start doing sound design on films you wanted to be a part of? It's tough to nail down one because I had so many great experiences early on. But there was a very involved documentary I won an Emmy for called "Rats," which I am quite proud of - but really I don't know. I was always just so excited to be working on movies.

When you take on a job like "Spider-Man 2," do you like to approach the sounds from more of an organic perspective or an inorganic perspective? I definitely like the organic approach because it sounds more real - even if I use it in a funky way it has some basis in reality. If it's too inorganic it doesn't marry as well with the picture. If it's a very sci-fi movie then of course you need to go way out there, but for "Spider-Man 2," the approach is very real - few of the sounds are not real. For instance, in the fusion sequence I brought in an opera singer, a friend of mine, Christine Seeber, and she was doing a lot of straight tones. One vibrato, one clean, one with the pitch up and down and she did this lots of times in different keys and even though she is a professional singer, there was a slight difference to all the takes. I like that about the organic stuff - it's not perfect.

TO BE CONTINUED...