‘InDepth Sound Design’ Teaches People to Hear Movies Better
Even if every film and show immediately halted the making of behind-the-scenes features and every entertainment media outlet crashed in the night (although we here at IndieWire would prefer if that didn’t happen), there still would be a staggering wealth of information out there about how movies get made.
DVD special features, academic lectures, and conference talks on YouTube, to say nothing of books and manuals and how-to guides, all speak to the incredible craft that goes into making the impossible feel real and the ordinary feel present onscreen. The trick, of course, is to know where to look — and fortunately for anyone interested in how sound is key to telling visual stories, InDepth Sound Design is creating an impressive library of behind-the-scenes looks into the art of sound on film.
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Sound designer Mike James Gallagher has been fascinated by the layers that add up to create great sound design; Gallagher told IndieWire that it was the “Terminator 2” DVD special features that sparked his interest in terms of how everything from a T-1000 to a shotgun can be made to sound more, from a collection of very surprising sources.
Given the dropoff in films packaged with that level of bonus content, Gallagher wanted to preserve the existing features and make them accessible in an easily searchable archive location. This led to the first iteration of InDepth Sound Design, where Gallagher converted DVD features into Instagram carousels so viewers could see exactly how layers built onto each other to create a finished, iconic key sound.
That, of course, led to some copyright strikes. But it also led to a lot of connections from the sound design community. “I started noticing in all my forum groups, people were like, ‘Hey, who is this? Who’s posting these?'” Gallagher told IndieWire. The interest connected Gallagher with Michael Coleman of the Soundworks Collection, the folks behind Pro Sound Effects, and, eventually, legendary sound designs like Mark Mangini and Richard King. Coleman and Gallagher even traded platform advice.
“Michael Coleman said, ‘Hey, you’ve got to start a YouTube channel. You should do that.’ Then I told him he had to start an Instagram, and I remember he got a 10 million hit video [on Instagram],” Gallagher said. “It’s cool how you kind of start working with all these other people, collaborating with them and feeding into their ideas, they feed into yours.”
Many popular InDepth Sound Design videos continue to approach iconic film moments in terms of how layers of sound design stack on top of each other, using (non-copyright) talks and interviews with designers paired with imagery from the films they worked on. In his popular video on the T-Rex roar in “Jurassic Park,” Gallagher has cute emojis denoting when different layers are emphasized, but the visual simplicity of the video completely elides how tricky it was to put together.
“That’s a talk that Gary Rydstrom did 10 years ago, and it was really bad sound quality. They didn’t have a board feed or a feed from his laptop or whatever he was doing; I’ve never seen a video of it. But I had to sync those by ear,” Gallagher said. “I had to figure out what the hell he’s doing, because he would loop a section and it wouldn’t play in real time. So once I got a sync on it, he would loop something, and I’d have to figure it out.”
But Gallagher has also evolved the format into something closer to the videos that music producer Warren Huart makes about how engineers and producers craft iconic tracks, going instrument by instrument, piece by piece. The latest videos from InDepth feature a combination of live interview at a sound board and picture from a finished film, helping viewers see how sound designers like Mangini, King, or Johnnie Burn got to the right sound for their projects.
Whether it’s a global view of how Burn approached sound on “The Zone of Interest” or how Mangini created the sandworm in “Dune 2,” the videos capture some of the best of those DVD extras and also the real pleasure of getting to sit down with a master of the craft.
“People still love watching regular people react to things and watching world-class people react to things, so I thought, ‘Let’s bring some of that to our community,’ because there’s just not a lot of that around sound design,” Gallagher said. So although he’s a sound designer in his own right, he adopts the position of the curious audience member, and lets folks like Mangini talk him through the thought process that goes into dropping a lav mic into your throat.
The fact that InDepth’s audience has proved much broader than sound technicians speaks to a curiosity about sound design. Gallagher hopes to continue to expand InDepth with more collaborators, or even sponsors, to keep that excitement to learn going, but at the end of the day, “I made InDepth for myself,” Gallagher said. “I feel like I’ve become a little bit of an encyclopedia of all these tricks and the wisdom and the advice that all these guys have passed down to me. It’s been very useful [in my own career] and I’ve met a lot of people in the community, which is its own value as well.”
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