|
A Sound Man
Supervising sound editor Patrick Drummond remembers the digital revolution.
When ‘the talkies’ arrived in the 1920s, people were fascinated by the realism that film
now had. This sound innovation literally sold tickets. And all this scratchy sound was just fine
for decades, until a new innovation came along: TV. Suddenly the audience was quite content to sit at home and watch the little box squeak out stories into their living rooms. Producers had to do something. So they went about making the motion picture bigger, more colorful and louder than anything the public could get at home: Cinerama, Vista-Vision, Technicolor and stereo sound slowly did the trick – the audiences came back.
But then the kids in the ’60s and ’70s started buying home Stereo Hi-Fis to play their rock and roll, and when filmmakers realized that the sound those kids were playing in their bedrooms was better than the sound on their films, something had to be done. Enter Mr Dolby. He came up with a way of playing 4-track stereo in the theatres without the theatre owners having to throw out their old 35 mm projectors (which they would never do). In the early 1980s Dolby Stereo managed to encode 4-track information onto the old 2-track stereo optical track of the film, and a new age of film sound was born. I was supervising the mix of Larry Kasdan’s film The Big Chill at this point in time, and we could not convince the producers to release the film (with all that gorgeous music!) in Dolby 4-track because not many theatres had converted over to the new technology – they were afraid of losing that precious ticket sell. But the new technology had undeniable advantages (it was cheap and delivered a new experience in the cinema) so it was soon in almost every theatre in the world.
The full article is printed in Film Ireland 122.
|
